#instead it's 'judaism is great and all but actually the culture and religion at its core is all this terrible stuff'

[gorillawithautism]

zionist antisemitism makes me want to kill myself 🫶

[cassandraclare]

Hey Cassie! I love Cordelia and her connection to her Persian Middle Eastern roots. I was wondering if we would ever see something similar and have a Muslim character? Thank you for all the representation you put in you books it’s really nice to see yourself represented in a character. ❤️

I’m glad you like Cordelia! A great deal of love and research went into her and Alastair. :) 

I recognize it may be frustrating for some readers to encounter a Persian/Iranian character who isn’t Muslim. I’ve written about this before here. Unfortunately, Cordelia and her family can’t be Muslim, just as Cristina couldn’t be Catholic, Will can’t be Church of England, Jem can’t be Buddhist, etc. Shadowhunters have their own religion. It’s part of what binds them together, and it’s also necessary — both to the characters, and to the concept of Shadowhunters at all. They believe all the stories are true, because I realized early on in the creation of this world that they couldn’t participate in mundane/human religions. There was no way to have the Shadowhunters be of a religion that actually exists in our world; that shut too many people out of being Shadowhunters, and made the books essentially an embrace of one religion over others. Nor could they all follow different real-life religions, without a constant ugly argument over the source of their magic — i.e. what kind of angel is Raziel? What religion does he represent? What religion does all this power they have come from? What is heaven, what are angels, what’s after death — for the Shadowhunters to function as a demon-fighting group, they need to share core beliefs about what demons and angels are. I gave them a religion that didn’t correspond to a real-life religion because I wanted to forstall that kind of infighting, both on the page and off it.

Cordelia and Alastair do come from a Muslim-majority country. But they are not Muslim. They are Shadowhunters. Cristina comes from a majority-Catholic country, but is not Catholic. She is a Shadowhunter. (There are also, of course, many non-Muslim Iranians; I knew many growing up, as my parents retained a lot of the friends they had made in Iran. Some were Jewish, some Zoroastrian, some Baháʼí. Part of what I love about Iran is that it is a tapestry of incredible history and different cultures; it’s definitely not a monolith!) This is a fundamental part of the Shadowhunter books’ world-building that has existed since the first book.

Fundamentally, Shadowhunters hold beliefs that contradict those held by every real-world religion I’m aware of. They can’t be meshed in with existing religions without compromising the tenets of those religions and I believe it is more offensive to present a warped or halfway version of a real religion than simply to say that the characters you’re writing do not practice that religion at all. This is in part why I am writing Sword Catcher, because its magic system is based on Jewish mythology — something I can’t do in the Shadowhunter books, though Judaism is my own religion. 

Cordelia is a woman of color, she is biracial, she is Middle Eastern in her heritage. But she is not Muslim. I understand that Cordelia and Alastair not being Muslim means some readers will have trouble relating to them; but this was a world-building decision made long before Cordelia and Alastair were invented. I needed to present all religions, all mythology as equal, without any religion being the “only” one Shadowhunters can practice. If that means you don’t want to read about the Carstairs, I understand, and can recommend some wonderful books based on Islam-inflected fantasy instead, like Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon. However, this is not a new piece of information about Shadowhunters, or the way their world works. 

I believe Islam to be a beautiful, deeply felt and peaceful religion, and while I cannot write Muslim (or Jewish or Christian or Hindu) Shadowhunters, there certainly is nothing that says there cannot be Muslim Downworlders, sighted mundanes, etc. (I have written other Muslim characters, like the Reyjavis in Magisterium, who are observant.) 

I will say only one other thing, which is that I’ve received some pretty anti-Semitic asks about this specific issue of religion. I’m answering this ask because I won’t reply to asks that contain anti-Jewish content (and I will block the sender). Or asks that just say “you suck” or “Cordelia and Alastair are bad” because yeah. I mean, why bother. As a member of a minority religion myself, I can say I’ve grappled with how to respect and uplift my rarely-depicted-in-fantasy religion in these books while also making clear that all other religions are regarded equally as “all true.” (Simon, for instance, is Jewish while he is a mundane, and after he becomes a Shadowhunter, must struggle with how to reconcile his Judaism with his new beliefs which run contrary to the religion he was raised in. That is however unique to someone in Simon’s situation, and I wouldn’t feel qualified to write a character who must decide whether to discard their Muslim or Catholic heritage in order to be a Shadowhunter.)

I do not believe the people writing/and or sending me anti-Semitic comments represent my sincere Muslim readers. There are, however, kinds of anti-Semitism that are coded into certain language (especially discussing “greed”, “control of media”, “clannishness”, using the word “Zionist” instead of “Jewish”, and suggesting I must disrespect Islam or Christianity specifically because I am Jewish) that people may not always recognize for what it is. It is of course always fine to critique representation and how it’s done. (There is no such thing as perfect rep; it’s generally always going to be flawed, even if it’s something as small as a spelling error.) I would only urge not attacking the religion or ethnicity of a writer in doing so. 

[eretzyisrael]

Keeping the Jewish State

For the first time in its history, Israel’s government includes an Arab party.

Arabs have sat in the Knesset since Israel’s founding, both as members of primarily Jewish parties and as representatives of various Arab parties. From time to time Arab MKs have kept a government in office by supporting it from outside the coalition, as happened in 1993 when the Oslo Declaration of Principles was approved. But no Arab party has ever been member of the governing coalition until now.

Some people think this is wonderful. The Arabs are 20% of our population, so why shouldn’t they have a commensurate role in government? Mansour Abbas is a pragmatist who just wants the best for his constituents, they say. Others think it is a disaster. The Arab parties are all anti-Zionist and in some cases disloyal. What will happen when there is an operation against Hamas? Mansour Abbas represents an Islamist party that is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent of Hamas!

My view is that I honestly have no idea how this will work out, even assuming that the new government lasts more than a few weeks. But one thing is absolutely clear: putting an Arab party in the coalition brings the question of the relationship of the Jewish state to its Muslim Arab citizens front and center in a way that it heretofore hasn’t been.

Indeed, it’s one of those elephants in the room that we have been carefully ignoring for years. But since the formation of the new government that elephant has been tromping around and bumping into things. It can’t be ignored any longer.

Although the law requires that any candidate for the Knesset not “negate” the Jewish and democratic character of the state, the Supreme Court has required a very high standard of proof in order to disqualify an Arab candidate, and has several times overturned the decision of the Knesset’s Elections Committee to do so (the law also bans “incitement to racism,” and this has been invoked several times against Jewish candidates, including of course Meir Kahane’s Kach party).

This is in keeping with the extremely weak interpretation of “Jewish state” that was propounded by the influential former President of the Court, Aharon Barak, in whose opinion a “Jewish” state is little more than one whose values are “universal values common to members of democratic society, which grew from Jewish tradition and history.” The absurdity of this view is evident (it makes the US, for example, a Jewish state), but it is popular among those, Arabs and Jews alike, who are made uncomfortable by either Judaism or Jewish nationalism.

In 2006, a group of Israeli Arab intellectuals (I use this term although some prefer “Palestinian citizens of Israel”), under the auspices of the Arab heads of local authorities, produced a document called “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel” in which they declare themselves “the indigenous peoples, the residents of the States of Israel, and an integral part of the Palestinian People and the Arab and Muslim and human Nation,” and call for Israel to relinquish its Jewish character and become a binational state. It accuses the “Zionist-Jewish elite in Europe” of settler-colonial oppression of the indigenous “Palestinian People.” It calls for equal representation of Jews and Arabs in the government, and the recognition of the Arabs as an “indigenous cultural national group” with international protection. “[A]ll forms of ethnic superiority, be that executive, structural, legal or symbolic” must be removed. There is a great deal more, including the placing of all “Islamic holy sites” (which naturally include all the Jewish ones) in Arab hands.

If anything “negates” the Jewish character of the state, this does. And yet, several of the participants in the development of that document, including Ayman Oudeh, the head of the Joint List of Israeli Arab parties in the Knesset, Aida Touma-Sliman, and Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, currently serve in the Knesset.

One of the reasons that the Nation-State Law was passed was in response to this. It states that “the actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” and even specifies the flag, the national anthem, and the symbol of the state. The Basic Law (part of what serves Israel for a constitution), which was passed by a majority of Knesset members, is nevertheless controversial. The Jewish Left subjects itself to cognitive dissonance, insisting that it still believes in Zionism while wanting a “state of its citizens” (see the self-contradictory Meretz platform here) and opposing the Nation-State Law.

Jewish Israelis need to face this issue head-on and stop pretending that it does not exist. Our state – our state – was created explicitly as a Jewish state because the founders were Zionists who believed that Jewish survival depended upon the existence of a sovereign state of the Jewish people. The evidence of the past 73 years of Israel’s existence, especially the burgeoning of Jew-hatred in the 21st century, has only strengthened my belief that they were entirely correct.

Some think that all that’s necessary for Israel to be a Jewish state is that it have a Jewish majority and a Law of Return for Jews. This ignores the real connection that most Israeli Jews have to the ancient homeland of their people, without which there is no reason for a Jewish majority, and no justification for a Law of Return. Possibly “religious” people find this easier to grasp, but it’s not necessary to be observant to see yourself as part of a historic people, a people with a land, a language, a religion, and a culture.

If the Jews of Israel give up the idea of the connection of the people to the land, if they decide to emphasize democracy at the expense of Jewishness, if they stop believing that there is great value in having their capital in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv, if they give up their control of Jewish holy places (because, in the words of Moshe Dayan, “who needs all that Vatican?”), they will soon find that there is no longer a Jewish majority in the Land of Israel, and indeed that the Jewish people are again wanderers in foreign lands.

The Muslim Arabs understand this quite well, and the imperatives of their religion drive them to struggle relentlessly to get control back over the entire Land of Israel, which they consider a Muslim waqf, land that permanently and irrevocably must be under Muslim control. This is why they struggle to conquer not only the physical land and temporal assets in the hands of the Jews, but to obtain symbolic and spiritual control. This is why Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are often the focus of their violence. This is why they will never give up.

Mansour Abbas may be a pragmatist in the short term, but he is also an Islamist, which implies the longest of terms. If the Jews are to prevail in the struggle for this land, they too need to understand the limits of pragmatism. They need to learn how to draw lines and stick to them, to understand the importance of symbolism, everywhere in the country, from the Galilee to the Negev. But especially now, they need to wrest control of the Temple Mount and the Old City back from the Arabs, who have systematically undercut Jewish sovereignty there since June of 1967.

We have the power and the resources to do this. Do we also have the spiritual strength, the perseverance, and the ability to sacrifice that will be required?

Abu Yehuda

[serpentstole]

Luciferian Challenge: Day 12+13 (And 22)

A few of these prompts ended up being very similar in theme, so I’ve combined them into a bit of a long reply.

Dogma is something we throw about…that we reject it. Where do you think we may fall short as Luciferians/Satanists when it comes to dogma? Do you think dogma has a certain value?

I don’t think dogma has any value really, no, as I don’t like the idea of rules or ideas that cannot be questioned on principle. Even as a child, I took issue with blind obedience. My mother once called me downstairs, and I asked why, and my father got angry and said that I shouldn’t bother to ask why and just do it, and that even if one of them told me to jump out of a window they probably had a good reason for it.

That memory is seared into my brain and still irks me.

I do think rules themselves can be important, but when we speak of rejecting dogma it’s typically in the sense of it being some authoritative status quo that cannot be discussed or challenged. I think my example above is a good example of that, as petty as it may seem: that parents should be obeyed without question and with the assumption they have our best interests at heart.

I do not believe there’s room for that sort of attitude in an empathetic and respectful society, even towards children. Respecting their natural curiosity and teaching them about bodily autonomy is something I think can only be a net good. The only thing growing up in a strict household taught me, where there was little room for negotiation or challenging of the way things were, was how to be a decent liar.

It harmed me in far more ways than it helped instill any positive values, and while I would not want to belittle the experiences of anyone in a similar boat, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. There are some families where a dogmatic stance, whether based in politics or religion, can lead to the alienation or outright abandonment of LGBT youth, of young women who wish control over their own bodies, of those with views that differ from their parents’, or any other black sheep.

I feel like this question and my thoughts on it really go hand in hand with the next one, so I’m going to actually combine them into one post and make up the difference later.

Do you think it’s dogma or silly to say what Luciferianism/Satanism is not?

I do not think it’s dogmatic to say what Luciferianism or Satanism is or isn’t. The reason I’ve kept both labels in these two prompts, when I’ve removed them in every other post, is because I spent a lot of time in a mixed Luciferian and Satanist community during the beginning of my religious journey. Despite our differences, especially in the case of Atheist Satanism versus Theistic Luciferianism, I saw a great deal of overlap in a lot of the values/ideals, inspirations, and talking points. 

I think outlining those ideals and values is important to just… having a label. Words mean things. Religious affiliations and ideas mean things. Even saying you belong to or adhere to a school of thought typically has some manner of definition or parameters. While Luciferianism and Satanism can be incredibly diverse when it comes to the details of one’s ethics and morals, practices, views of the divinity or lack there of, and other suck points, there’s a good deal that does unite us that’s reflected in the archetypal figures our religions are named after. I also believe that certain aspects of what is seen as the Standard Luciferian should be weighed more or less heavily. For example, I don’t see my irritation with hostility towards Christianity as something that makes me less of a Luciferian.

However, I want to combine these two prompts with one more to round out my view of this topic. 

What do you disagree with Luciferians/Satanists most?

In the goddamn dogma they cling to and perpetuate while claiming to be adversarial to or enlightened above such ideas. It’s become almost a meaningless buzzword. It barely still looks like a real word to me anymore. This is honestly where my post goes completely off the rails into a mini essay, so it’s under the cut.

The idea that all “Abrahamic” religions should be treated as inherently harmful and oppressive is a bad take. 

That Christianity, Judaism, and Islam should even be lumped together when discussing such issues betrays a shallow understanding of these religions that’s been regurgitated from one person to another, typically through a culturally Christian lens.

The idea that “only LaVeyan Satanism should be called Satanism because nothing else that calls itself Satanism is actually Satanism” is exhausting, and I will fist fight Anton myself in hell.

The principles of Might Makes Right and Social Darwanism that some Satanists perpetuate is dumb and bad and wrong, sorry, that’s the only rebuttal I’m dignifying that school of thought with. Once again, I will be fist fighting Anton in hell.

And that’s to say nothing of the Satanists and Luciferians out there that regurgitate the same racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other assorted bigotries that they’ll condemn religions like Christanity for while perpetuating it with a coat of black paint. Because I have absolutely seen this first hand, both as an observer and as the target of it.

Like... I can’t speak on Islam at all, because I have very very limited experience with it from both a research and real life experience point of view, and thus I’m not comfortable making any claims. On the other hand, I do know that to list all the ways that Judaism is not a dogmatic religion would deserve its own post written by someone far more knowledgeable than me, and it somehow still gets lumped into the Problematic n’ Dogmatic category of AbRaHaMiC ReLiGiOnS. For that reason, in the case of Islam, I can’t help but wonder if the assumption that it’s also dogmatic comes from the harmful assumption that it’s a religion that’s strict to the point of harshness that a lot of people have.

Even in the case of Christianity, which I would argue (as someone who I’d say was raised within the church) is hands down the most seemingly dogmatic of the three (particularly in North America), this is just not universally true. If it was, there probably wouldn’t be so many branches and denominations, many of which cannot stand each other and think the rest are misguided at best and heretical at worst. This is something that’s even brought up in the Satanic Bible; I’ve read the miserable thing. Have you ever seen someone say “Christians and Catholics”? That’s a pretty loaded example of how much disagreement exists within the religion when an entire core branch of it is considered tangentially related.

Not to mention, I was raised Lutheran. That came about because a German Catholic got incredibly steamed at his own religion so he made a more boring different version of it. While the existence of dogma has led to these schisms, historically speaking, the end result has been a religion so varied that it’s hard to say what is and isn’t treated as inarguable law. If you don’t believe me, try talking to a Protestant pastor about the Seven Deadly Sins and see how far you get. I tried during confirmation class and got shut down immediately... but on the flip side, my church was pretty accepting of LGBT folks, which I think some people would claim Christianity is dogmatically against by default.

Is there dogmatic thinking within specific churches or branches or communities? Absolutely, I wouldn’t argue that. I think it can arise in any community, religious or not, but that some religious communities seem to be particularly vulnerable to it. But the harm those specific cases could do should be where our focus goes, not the condemnation of these religions or the concept of religion as a whole, which I touched on in a previous prompt. 

I’m not some glorious enlightened mind. I would not want to give the impression that I think I hold in my hands the One True Way to do Luciferianism, or that I think the majority of this religious community are uncritical edgelords. This is, after all, my answer to the thing I take issue with the most, not my thoughts on Luciferianism or Satanism as a whole. I just don’t think it should be a particularly hot take that Religious Discrimination Is Bad Actually, or that maybe you can be rebellious and adversarial and hedonistic and enlightened while still genuinely giving a shit about people. Because otherwise what’s the point?

If we are hostile and rebellious with no actual end goal, no greater cause or purpose, we are simply being contrarian for the sake of it. If we blame the idea of organized religion instead of those who manipulate and abuse faith and scripture for selfish and malicious ends, we’ve missed the point, as I said in the aforementioned previous post. Not all of us have the ability to become an activist, obviously, and I would not ask you to. But I think as those who would claim to reject dogmatic thinking and strive to embody either the ideals of enlightenment or the adversary would do well to be ever questioning their preconceptions of the world around them, of other religions, and of less obvious unjust structures of power.

I don’t know why a community that believes in illumination and free thinking sees the world in such black and white ways.

While I will always strive for a greater understanding of the world, and I hold the concept of enlightenment very dear to my heart, I think it’s something that one spends a lifetime working towards. Alongside my favourite quotes from Paradise Lost, I hold the Socratic Paradox of “I know that I know nothing” as a personal motto, and I wish more people who I share this label with would do the same.

[tuulikki]

I've yet to see a definition of "shamanism" as a global term that justifies its usage outside of its actual cultural context.

Most of the time, it's just a less overtly racist shorthand for "primitive religion."

For capturing specific practices, I have to ask why this term? I can't think of any one aspect of "shamanistic practice" in popular usage that isn't present in the modern or historical practices of larger global religions. I don't know what justifies taking a whole culture's religion and reducing it down to a list of practices, whose definitional importance is evaluated by outsiders. If the criteria is drumming, trance states, and spirit channeling... well, cue up the megachurch rock band, let's speak in tongues, and prepare to lay on hands by channeling Jesus. And if it's all shamanism, what do we need the term for?

And when it's just Plastic Shamans saying "we had a drum circle and did drugs and I had an Experience(tm)"... you can say "altered state" instead without having to reduce a whole culture to Mystic Noble Savage shit.

It really comes back to how Protestant Christianity invented the term "religion" as we use it today and judged the rest of the globe's religions based on how closely they resembled that definition. Other Christianities, Judaism, and Islam got counted as "religions" for more or less already being legible to Protestant Christianity and, in the case of Judaism, for being foundational to Christianity's legitimacy claims. But everybody else? The less you looked, organised, identified, and worshiped like Martin Luther, the less your faith counted as a "real" religion. European imperialism forced the rest of the world to reorganise faith traditions to resemble Protestantism so they could be recognised rather than written off as simple "superstition." The popular usage of "shamanism" lets us simplify a culture for our own colonial convenience. Not great.

Is Shamanism even closed? Specifically Chumash or any other Shamanistic practices that also involve poisoning via Datura and Opium?

I am not an expert on this topic but I know enough to tell you that no white person should be calling themselves a "shaman."

The word "shaman" is not just some generic term for "spirit worker" or whatever. It's been appropriated from certain groups of people in Asia.

@crazycatsiren, do you care to weigh in here?

[dickgreyson]

hey this has officially gone too far

this is now crazy. ive tried to resolve things quietly with the people involved. but whilst that’s been happening, the situation has really spun out of control (thanks to a loud and ignorant few people) and i havent had the opportunity to defend myself in all this.

first of all, my initial statements weren’t actually controversial. i, and a few other tumblr users (including @dykemas) made posts reminding christian, and atheist westerners, that depicting canon non-christian characters in christmas art was insensitive and offensive to people of those faiths. i made this post as a jewish woman, because it’s inappropriate, and sometimes even disallowed by our faiths. 

christmas is not a neutral holiday. it is religious. although american atheists want it to just be a fun holiday tradition, it isnt. and i didnt think it was appropriate to be drawing damian in a santa hat, considering this is old discourse that we went over last year. its alarming to me how quick everyone is to strip him of any religiosity. yes i am aware that arab =/= muslim, and i never said that. it’s pretty widely accepted that he’s a muslim character, considering that talia canonically is. if we want to say for arguments sake that he isn’t then, it’s still unlikely he would be celebrating christmas, and assimilating into christian tradition, when his wider family is jewish.

bruce wayne and dick grayson were created by jewish writers. they were crafted in the great tradition of jewish story telling, as allegories for biblical characters, with jewish speech patterns, and takes on morality and ethics, to subvert white supremacist overtones in wider american media. dc has even, as recently as a few months ago, confirmed that bruce wayne is a jew. this wasnt explicitly confirmed early on, due to the comics code authority being really antisemitic. by the time the authority was overturned, dc was uncomfortable with how overly jewish these characters were, since american society was still uncomfortable with judaism and it’s role in comics’ history, and they knew it would hurt sales. that’s why we see the batfamily in canon celebrating christmas. this is inappropriate.

martha wayne was a jewish woman. bruce’s wider family is jewish. the family is jewish. tim drake was created by a jewish writer, with the intention of being jewish. this family. is jewish.

there’s a reason that jews dont celebrate christmas: because we have our own faith and tradition. and it is insulting to have that brushed away by ignorant and rude people. no jews and muslims dont celebrate christmas. muslims are not allowed to celebrate christmas, since it has roots in paganism. jews arent allowed to celebrate christmas, since it celebrates jesus and we dont view him as a prophet. he’s akin to another g-d and we only. have. one. g-d.

and erasing a character’s non-christian religion is disgusting, especially in the case of judaism. after the shoah the catholic church rounded up jewish children from camps and refused to return them to their families. they instead continued the nazi’s genocide, by stripping them of their faith and language and forcing them to adopt catholicism. so by stripping a jew’s faith, and saying ‘oh he just culturally celebrates christmas’ is really disgusting. because there is a history here that christians just dont understand, and obviously refuse to learn. 

so yeah. i will continue to back my self and my convictions. it is inappropriate to dismiss my concerns about respecting the religiousity of these characters. and it is disgusting to watch you disrespect the intentions of these characters’ jewish creators. as christians/americans with christian backgrounds, you do not get to tell a jew how to view their holidays and traditions, and it is beyond disgusting the way this debate has been depicted. 

it is not hard to be respectful of non-christian people at this time of year, and it is really not hard to learn about comic history. it’s widely known that comics are a jewish art form. when making art around this time of year, there is no need to specifically offend jewish and muslim people. there is no excuse at this point. get informed.

[ayearinfaith]

𝗔 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗙𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗵, 𝗗𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟭: 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘀𝗺 Syncretism is a process by which two or more belief systems fuse into either an extension of one or both or into something entirely new. The practice was very common historically and is a crucial aspect of the development of almost all modern major world religions. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗲 Some of the most obvious examples we have of purposeful syncretism come from historical empires or kingdoms with a powerful central and ethnically aligned government. Nowadays most people consider Greek and Roman gods to be basically identical, but this is only true because the Romans identified every Greek god as one of theirs. Some gods were similar enough; Jupiter and Zeus are both storm kings with a troubled relationship to their father. Others barely line up; the Roman war god Mars is one of their most important and revered deities, whereas the Greek Aries was relatively minor and often viewed poorly. The Greeks themselves were keen to interpret Egyptian gods as their own, sometimes leading to syncretic figures like Hermanubis, a blending of Hermes and Anubis whose image is the title card of this entry. The impact of Roman syncretism can be seen in the English names for days of the week. Romans named the days after gods, and when the Roman week was adopted by Germanic peoples the names were chosen based on the Roman perceived equivalent deity. Thus Spanish “Martes, Miercoles, and Jueves”, named for Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter (Jove), respectively, become English “Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday”, named for Tyr, Odin (Wotan), and Thor. Though not always tied to a single government, Christianity and Buddhism utilized syncretism to expedite their expansion across Europe and Asia. Many local deities never had to be ousted in favor of Christianity, but could instead have their stories and traditions brought into the fold with one alteration: instead of a god they were a saint. Buddhism, similarly, has many Bodhisattvas (compassionate beings who purposefully forego Nirvana in order to help people reach enlightenment) who were once local gods. The power of Syncretism for both the Greek and Roman empires (as well as many more besides) and in the spread of Christianity and Buddhism is that it removes the need for direct subversion or conflict. Pagans do not need to be weeded out or be forcefully reeducated, they can simply be incorporated. 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼-𝗥𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗻, 𝗝𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗼-𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗻, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗟𝗶𝗲𝘀 It’s important to understand that the syncretism of the past should not be viewed through the modern lens. The modern concept of “cultural appropriation”, while perhaps having some relevance, is too far removed from the context and perception of ancient religion and trying to use it here should best be avoided. This is not to say that all historical syncretism was benign or without political motivation. As mentioned above, we now perceive the religions and even cultures of Greece and Rome as being so similar we have a word for it: Greco-Roman. However, they were actually quite different. During the early days of the Roman empire, Classical Greece was seen then, as it is still seen now, as the birthplace of western civilization. Romans were very aware of this and adored Greek culture to the extent that they basically took it as their own. The Roman national epic, the Aeneid, purposefully ties Roman heritage to Greeks via the battle of Troy. Roman syncretism was so fervent, it is sometimes difficult to determine what aspects of their mythology predate syncretism. For example, its possible Jupiter’s relationship to his father, Saturn, was not quite so stormy as Zeus’ relationship to Kronus, but it definitely became more similar as the Empire grew. The concept of “Greco-Romanism” is the result of a very successful propaganda campaign started over 2,000 years ago. A more modern syncretic term that is often used is “Judeo-Christian”, obviously blending Judaism and Christianity. This is not a stretch, as Christianity is literally a development of a messianic Jewish sect. However, there are many issues with this term. For one, Islam is notably excluded, despite the fact that most things that persist across the Jewish/Christian divide also exist in Islam. For another, despite common origins Christianity and Judaism are really quite different, with radically different ethic and moral philosophies, views on God and scripture, which stories are valued, etc. Like “Greco-Roman”, “Judeo-Christian” is a concept with a marketing campaign it, and its origins can be traced back to still extant movements among some Christians to perceive Jews a part of the Christian fold. 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗙𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗵𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵𝘀 Faiths are very much based on tradition, and when peoples merge so too can traditions. West African slaves in the American South and Caribbean found themselves mingling with other West Africans with similar but distinct traditions within a very Christian dominated society. From these, religions like Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo were born, both getting their names from Vodun, an indigenous religion of Benin. The introduction of Buddhism and Hinduism were incredibly influential in Japan, and the native Shinto faith incorporated much. Of the “7 Lucky Gods”, some of Japan’s most recognizable deities, only 1, Ebisu, is not a syncretized Buddhist or Hindu figure. Syncretism also is incredibly common, to the point of being arguably a defining shared feature, of Esoteric traditions. These more secretive faiths in both modern and historical times have often based themselves on the concept that there is a single truth that makes itself visible, if enshrouded, in all worldly beliefs. Ancient Roman mystery religions, such as the cults of Mithras, Orpheus, or Isis had such themes. The great Western Esoteric tradition of Hermeticism is explicitly based on this, and its Eponymous figure Hermes Trismegistus is a syncretic form of Hermes, Thoth, and Enoch. Image Credit: Marble Statue of Hermanubis in the Vatican Museum, carved in the 1st or 2nd century CE

[ruminativerabbi]

Chanukah 5781

Among President Lincoln’s most famous addresses is surely the one he gave in 1858 as part of his campaign to be elected to the Senate by the people of Illinois and in which he referred to the nation as a “house divided against itself” with respect to the slavery issue that at the time was, indeed, tearing the fabric of American nationhood asunder. Lincoln lost that election (Stephen A. Douglas was elected instead to a second term), but that image of the American republic as a house falling in on itself that cannot endure unless all of its walls and its foundation are somehow brought into alignment has become an enduring image, one cited over the years in countless contexts to describe situations as no less untenable than a house attempting somehow sturdily to exist while its walls go to war with each other.

Lincoln didn’t invent the image. It appears twice in the New Testament, once (in the Gospel of Mark) just as Lincoln used it and once (in the Gospel of Matthew) as a “kingdom divided against itself.” Augustine, bishop of Hippo, whose Confessions was once one of my favorite books, wrote about his conversion experience in similar terms, describing the state of his inner self in the years leading up to his embrace of Christianity as the psychic equivalent of a “house divided against itself.”  Whether Lincoln read the Confessions, I don’t know. (For more on Lincoln’s reading habits, click here.) But I can’t imagine he didn’t know Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, truly one of the most important documents in all American history, in which the author uses that exact phrase witheringly to describe the English Constitution the Colonials were about to reject as the law of their land.

Whether or not there were Jewish roots to the expression used by the authors of the Gospels mentioned above, I don’t know. (I haven’t found any exact parallels.) But the concept itself—that there is a line beyond which dissent (including the kind that engenders fiery, passionate debate) becomes not a healthy sign of intellectual vibrancy but a harbinger of impending disaster—that surely was widely understood in Jewish antiquity. Indeed, the Chanukah story—or at least its backstory—is specifically about that notion. Yes, the famous tale about the miracle jug of oil has surely won in the court of public opinion. I’ve written about that story in several places (click here for one example), but the more sober historical sources written in ancient times by contemporaries or near-contemporaries tell a different story. And, indeed, it is precisely the story of a house divided against itself.

For most moderns, the period in question—the centuries between the death of Alexander in 323 BCE and the rise of the Roman Empire towards the end of the first century BCE—is one of relative obscurity. (For a dismal account of the degree to which American high school students are shielded from learning anything of substance about ancient history, click here.) And that reality pertains for most Jewish moderns as well, even despite the fact that those centuries were precisely the ones that witnessed the transformation of old Israelite religion into the earliest versions of what we today would call Judaism.

There’s a natural tendency to imagine that kind of transformation as a kind of slow, ongoing metamorphosis that leads from Point A to Point B. But the reality was far more complicated. And the single part of that reality that was the most fraught with spiritual tension, internecine strife, and the real potential for internal schism was the great task laid at the feet of the Jewish people by Hellenism, the version of Greek culture that became—in the very centuries under consideration—a kind of world culture that no sophisticated individual would turn away from merely because he or she wasn’t personally of Greek origin. This was the culture that brought the masterpieces of Greek theater, the classics of Greek philosophy, the masterworks of Homer and Hesiod, and the whole concept of athletics to the world. Opting out was not an option—not for anyone who wished to be thought of as a citizen of the modern world.  (The ancients thought of themselves as modern people, of course—just as do we. And that thought will sound just as amusing to people living 2500 years in the future as it does to us with respect to people living 2500 years ago!)

And thus was the stage set for the internal schism that was the “real” background to the Chanukah story.

The Hellenists—eager to be modern, to embrace world culture, to eschew provincialism, and to take their place among the educated classes of their day—wished to embrace all of it. If the Greeks were repulsed by the idea of circumcision, then they were against it too. If the Greeks believed that Homer, Plato, and Euripides existed at the absolute apex of culture, then they wanted to spend their days immersed in the sagas, dialogues, and dramas associated with those individuals, and with dozens of other classic authors as well. If the absolute monotheism of traditional Jewish belief was deemed incompatible with the more sophisticated theological stance espoused by the greatest Greek philosophers, including Socrates himself, then they wished to see the masters of the Temple in Jerusalem reform the worship service there to reflect that stance. In other words, they wanted so desperately to be modern that they lost confidence in the value of their own traditions.

Their opponents, the traditionalists, were no less committed to the all-or-nothing approach: just as the reformers wanted all of it, they themselves wanted none of it. They were repulsed by the theater and by the gymnasium. They refused even to consider the possibility that Sophocles and Aeschylus might well have had something valuable and profound to say about the human condition. The dismissed the Homeric epics as mere storytelling hardly worth the time to consider at all, let alone to study seriously and thoughtfully.  And they were certainly not interested in altering the procedures in place for centuries in the Temple to suit a new set of standards imported from Greece. Or anywhere.

The ancient history books, the First and Second Books of the Maccabees primarily but others as well, tell this story in detail. The internal debate among Jewish people had reached the boiling point. And by the time King Antiochus IV finally decided to intervene, the schism had become not merely passionate but violent. The nation was wholly divided against itself. And, as Lincoln would have commented, the nation, now fully divided against itself, was not going to stand for long. Or at all!

After Alexander the Great died, his generals divided up his kingdom. One general, Seleucus, became master of most of the Middle East. Ptolemy became master of Egypt. Israel passed back and forth many times between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires, ending up finally as part of the former. And that is why King Antiochus, the Seleucid emperor, was involved in the first place. How, when, and why he intervened is a story unto itself. But that he sought to restore order to a province in his empire that had reached the boiling point is the underlying fact worth considering. Nor is it that difficult to imagine why he would have favored the reformers over the traditionalists: he too was a committed Hellenist who saw one side as aligned with his own beliefs and one side espousing views inimical to them. That he was unexpectedly defeated by a ragtag group of guerilla warriors under the leadership of the Maccabee brothers was, depending on who was telling the story, a miracle or a calamity. That we remember it as the former is an excellent example of how the victors win the right to tell the tale: the losers would have told it entirely differently…but those who survived were eventually swallowed up into a people eager to remember the story positively and in as satisfying a way possible. That’s what losers lose most of all, I suppose: the right to frame the narrative.

I love Chanukah. Even as a child, I liked it—primarily the gelt and the latkes, but also the whole nightly ceremony of lighting the menorah that belonged to my father’s parents before it belonged to my parents and which is at this very moment sitting on our dining room table on Reed Drive. As I’ve grown more sophisticated in my understanding of ancient Jewish history, however, the message underlying all that fun has become more serious in my mind, more monitory, more cautionary. The Jewish people was ultimately weakened, not strengthened by the Maccabees’ victory—which led first, and within a few decades, to the Maccabees’ descendants illegitimately proclaiming themselves kings of Israel, and eventually to the Roman invasion that ended Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel for millennia. Had the Jews of the time been able to compromise, they would perhaps have created a stronger, more inclusive kind of Judaism open to new ideas…and who knows where that would or could have led? We remember the Maccabees’ victory enthusiastically by framing the story as an “us against them” story featuring a harsh king and his innocent victims. But that’s only one way to tell the story. I understand perfectly well why we’ve always favored the story line that features brave Jewish warriors resisting the domination of a foreign tyrant. But I also see an alternate plot line hiding just behind the preferred narrative, one that features a house collapsing in on itself that needed outside intervention precisely because warring groups within the Jewish people couldn’t engage in meaningful dialogue and learn from each other. That doesn’t ruin Chanukah for me. Just the opposite, actually: it turns the holiday into a thought-provoking opportunity to consider the nature of Judaism in the context of history—and that is something I don’t ever pass up. Who would?

[cosmik-homo]

Jewish Alfred

I’ve been wanting to make this post for. a while now but I felt uncertain about it. So I decided that instead of trying to write a Big Expert Comprehensive Information Post about things i’m not actually sure of, I am going to write my thoughts on why I first started thinking of this headcanon and why I like it. Am i grasping for straws? maybe. you don’t have to accept my headcanon, or you can accept it but not all of the points. but I wanna write it down anyways. so here it is.

 1.    Belief in God is important to him:  First of all, from the moment he is introduced to it in Fire Sea and until the very end of Seventh Gate, Alfred latches to the idea of a god or god-like force of good- he refers to it mostly as a higher power- when few people around him believe that. In my opinion that belief and that search for god is an important part of his plotline- especially in serpent mage- and of his character. 

2.    Tikkun Olam, babey: The end scene about the relation between God and being good is a Jewish Theme with the idea of Good deeds we must do to help the stuff Fix itself into Harmony resonates with the jewish term called Tikkun Olam or generally translated, “fixing the world”.  basically, in the original prayer verse which this term comes from, Tikkun Olam is about bringing the world under god’s reign. I don’t want to say exactly enforcing god’s commands cause that makes it sound a bit too aggressive, but it’s definitely about obedience to enforced ideals of good from above. but in modern jewish philosophy the connotation of that term changed a lot and nowadays when people talk about Tikkun Olam it’s about working to make a better kinder world- something along the lines of “God is good and great but we can’t trust on him to fix all the problems in the world for us, we must each do our part to make a better world”. not only is this fitting with the whole We Are All A Drop In The Wave And We Are All Responsible thing, it also reminds me of moving from old self-righteous sartan values like Samah's, breaking the earth to “Bring light” to the mensch nations against their will, into this philosophy and into Radical Kindness, which is the most Alfred thing.  (this part was helped by @alyssumlovesthecosmere who's got more Judaism knowledge than me, thanks)

3. Arianus= assimilation: At the beginning of the story, when we meet him on Arianus, he is the only one left of his people, his community, trying to hide his identity and bland in to be like the rest of the mensch (hey look, that's German. It also has a different Yiddish meaning.). I find it a bit like jewish history of cultural assimilation and throught out the ages. I also want to site here the cultural disconnect he feels about his sartan heritage-

I really don't know how Universally Jewish this is. I just look and this and even as in Israeli jew living in the culture I can connect it to mu own experience about my heritage, about not asking enough and not remembering enough from what I was told about my grandparents and their culture. I am willing to risk generalizing and say I think this has a jewish vibe to it too.

4.   through the whole series he’s wandering from place to place, from world to world, trying to find a society where he will belong, always failing to fit in. that's again sort of, a historical jewish struggle (Until he finds people to be a home, a Found Family that loves him, but that’s more for Ruby’s post about Alfred and LGBT themes).

 5. In Abri: Speaking of ruby’s ( @deathgatesideblog ) post about Alfred and the lgbt experience, she talks there about how his experience in Abri is one of finding community, realizing he isn’t alone and that other people think and feel the way he does- Sartan who get along with the patryns, his dreams of peace made manifest.

(sidenote: wow, writing it down this way, he feels belonging to people who are the result of patryn/sartan relationships…. like, they literally wrote him in love with Haplo holy shit ok back on track).

The point is, what triggers this joyous feeling of belonging, what is the sign that makes him realize he’s Among People Like Him? If you don’t remeber, let me remind you: 

OK. ok, yes, a lot of other religions bless before food too. This could be a point towards painting him as a person with connection with religion in general, not necessarily Judaism. and I agree that by its own it’s ambiguous- the mention of the hand movement even sort of evokes Christian grace, but I don’t know many Christians who bless their food in an ancient musically-associated language unique to their group.

when he realizes he is not alone it happens through prayer, and as Deathgatesideblog wrote, that moment is a part of his Minority Identity.

6.  Cultural value of life and a fun (a word which here means, sad and not very fun) fact about suicide in Judaism: Judaism places an emphasis about the value of life, which you can see Alfred talk about a lot, especially in fire sea, as a part of sartan values. I have like 3 minutes to finish this so I am going to be brief: a fact that stems from this is Amongst the different sections of Judaism and through the eras, views of suicide ranges from either being frowned upon through taboo to an outright sin. From what Alfred talks about, sartan culture again dosen't seem so different.

7.    In the Dragon wing appendix, an ancient sartan name for god is Elihn. obviously comes from to the Hebrew word for god, Elohim.

Au points:

Listen. modern au jewish Alfred including “oy vey iz mir” in his stressed-out rambling is just, precious

Also jewish prayer and sartan magic both involve tune and movement in similar ways. Jewish prayers involve tunes and sung parts, and in a modern au Alfred finding solace in prayer is emotional and pretty and a good tool for Parallels to the series.

[dreamingflight]

I grew up with magic in a family (cultural?) context, though it was never labeled as anything but “this thing that my family does” (funny thing about how cultural transmission actually works). The magic in my Ashkenazi Jewish side of the family is a family cultus - it’s a fairly everyday thing and cannot be separated, contextually, from that same family’s specific experience of being “othered.” I can’t pry those two things apart. The magic 100% runs on ancestral ties and common stories and involves specific named ancestors. The magic does a specific thing for this part of my family: it helps them survive being othered. This is an issue I run into with a lot of the “get rich quick” or “gain extra privilege or advantage” mindset in a lot of magic. It’s the family members that did get rich, or joined Christianity and married into Christian families and bled out the Judaism, that no longer needed magic. It’s the very most othered (impoverished, marginalized, isolated) members of my family that did. 

If you took the magic out of that context, it probably wouldn’t work, or wouldn’t make sense. It’s very specific family ties that contextualize it. 

You can talk about this family-specific (cultural?) magic even less than you could ever talk about having New Age or Neopagan beliefs.

I don’t think a lot of people who accept the occult, accept it on the basis of the occult actually existing. When it’s from a minority cultural experience, there is the tendency for occultism to no longer be cool or enlightened, but instead it becomes evidence of scary foreignness. Believing in the occult, when you’re from a minority culture, becomes evidence that your family is ignorant/unassimilated.

And talking about this thing - in virtually any kind of setting - would result in children being taken away, and has resulted in my family members becoming victimized by the mental health system for what is basically a cultural mismatch.

Studying it from any outsider perspective, won’t help. A person could study “Ukrainian Jewish Shtetl Magic” and memorize every entry on mysticism from the Chabad website. They could even study what they think is the Kabbalah (which probably doesn’t have a lot to do with my family’s magic, which is very casual and informal and everyday). They could start wearing a Hamsa hand for protection from the Evil Eye (which my family believes in, though it took me a couple of decades to articulate that their specific belief was ay’in hara) but the Evil Eye may still on level only be an abstraction for them and not something that’s ever been an existential fear. (I am not talking about any sociopolitically based idea of cultural appropriation - all of this goes for most American Jews, in fact.) 

It still wouldn’t be my family’s magic, because my family’s magic is my family’s specific magic. In many culturally based magic traditions, that’s exactly the case. It’s not a lodge you can join, short of marrying into the tradition and internalizing it. “Tradition” just means something my family has always done and keeps doing because “we’ve always done this,” it’s not a pretty hat to wear or a class you can take. It grew from a very specific context, and the strains of it survived without being named or articulated even as so much of the Jewish religion was largely stamped out from my family. Superstitions and magic and unarticulated beliefs about “how things are” (without being able to identify their cultural origin) are what remained. There are few physical “actions” that can be passed down that don’t resemble everyday activities (such as cleaning rituals). Most of the magic seems to be learned by inference, by learning my family’s taboos. A lot revolves around “right speech.” There is a lot connected to Jewish cultural traditions that were never named in my family but things that are understood in context.

And in fact - there is a lot of my family’s magic I don’t use. I don’t want to. It by and large revolves around the intercessionary powers of the dead, and my family’s dead are an ornery lot. There is a lot of “darkness” in it. It’s survival magic, and not the nice, polite, semi-Calvinist magic of many middle class occultists. My family is deeply fucked up in a lot of ways, including cursing each other and reporting ghost gossip. We can’t disappear from each other or keep secrets from each other EVEN IF WE WANT TO because of the magic, because somebody will have a dream or visitation that ends up putting us in touch again. There are family taboos around putting a lot of things into speech and writing that are rooted in this magic, so it’s not like anything is ever articulated in any way that can be taught or explained to people outside of my family.

There is a lot of psi, actual “paranormal” activity, associated with this tradition, and a lot of modern neopagan/occultist work seems to function within a mind-only/folklore-only scientific materialist worldview. Their heads explode when faced with anything resembling actual spirit activity. Paganism is often treated as a “religious identity” and magic is rendered palatable to the culture by equating it with meditation or self-help. 

I’ve tried to talk about my family and its ghost magic to many, many neopagans and occultists and gotten every bit the hairy eyeball from them that I’d get from a skeptic (if anything, it’s the most deeply religious Christians and Jews that I’ve met, that actually give my family’s experience credence, because of actually believing in angels and demons and restless spirits). If I made a movie or wrote a book about my family, it would be taken as supernatural/horror fiction (or magical realism) because very few people would actually believe the story’s premise. There is a lot that “Hereditary” (the film) has in common with my family’s actual experience, aside from being part of a demonolatry cult.

I may not practice (a lot of) the family magic but I took up magic (outside of those traditions) to learn to ward against my mother and my other family members and even still, I am part of their invisible social network. I decided to learn to consciously draw boundaries via ritual work. Because of the family magic. I use that specific culture’s and the specific family’s traditions to ward it, but go outside of that tradition to do my *own* magic for myself, because tbh, I really don’t want to bring my great-great-grandmother into the house (again), let alone the rest of my ornery-ass family, and I’d really prefer to not owe them anything. 

[whenthisstoryendsarchive]

Meta #3: Water, Magic, & Healing

“Water is a part of me, I guess... Part of us all.” Poppy Drayton as Elizabeth, The Little Mermaid 2018

Obviously, when we look at The Little Mermaid, water plays a huge role in the film. Elizabeth is a creature of the sea. Elle has, as Thora calls it, ‘a spirit of the ocean’. Even Locke was a terrible under sea wizard before he became the circus ringleader. The tides play a huge part in the plot, and the very first time we even see Elizabeth, she is in her tank. Her hair is even wet or damp throughout most of the movie. Only one scene has it totally dry, if I remember correctly, and that’s when she comes across Elle and Cam in the woods. In this meta, we’re going to dive into- pun utterly intended- the basic elemental, magical, and healing properties of water to try and see how Elizabeth is more powerful in the sea with her healing versus in the tank. At least, consider this from the perspective of the water itself, and not factoring her mermaid abilities and her powers being drained into it.

Needless to say, we all know that water is made up of 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen; but as we’ll see, such a simple thing is actually quite complex both in its makeup, its influence, and its uses. So to start of with, science lesson. Then we can get to the fun stuff.

Water is, first an foremost, the essence of all life on our planet, and the major component of the biological makeup of all organisms. It’s also the only substance on the planet to be found as a solid, liquid, and gas. This means that, obviously, water can evaporate, freeze, melt, heat up, sublimate, and combine with other things. 

There are many ways water gives life to the earth. And in our case, especially to aquatic biomes. This is due to water’s thermal density, high specific heat, viscosity, and liquid-solid characteristics. These particular aspects are what prevent lakes from freezing completely and killing every trace of life inside them during the winter. They also allow bodies of water across the world to provide nutrients through mixing and stratifying. It can dissolve other substances like salt or sugar, transports nutrients and other objects through its natural currents, and is cohesive the best with non-metallic liquids. 

Strangely enough, unlike other compounds, water becomes denser when it’s cooled, thus expanding instead of contracting. It also boils at a higher temperature than other compounds of similar weight. Water is also known for packing and storing heat and energy, which has a sizable impact on the global climate, as it helps to moderate temperature. This is especially so in Great Lakes and the oceans. Another interesting fact stemming from this is that heat is absorbed and released more for every degree the temperature of the water is changed. 

Water also has a high surface tension due to the bonding to other water molecules. This is what allows heavier and denser objects to float, like icebergs. The wind and an energy transfer also work with water to create waves and give way to oxygen diffusion in lakes and the oceans. But water is also highly impacted by the environment around it, as magnetic shifts in the earth itself and explosions from the sun can influence it. It also intensifies the flow of frequencies which can lead to healing. But we’ll talk more about that later.

It is also interesting to note that every 90 minutes, the Gulf Stream releases as much energy into the air around us as we would burning a year’s worth of coal. We must also acknowledge that the direction in which water freezes is also very important. It has been noted that if ice sank and rivers and lakes froze in an upward manner instead of downward, no aquatic life would survive the winter months. 

Now, oceans are noted to cover roughly 71% of the earth. They’re usually 6 kilometers deep, and contain over 97% of our planet’s water. We should also note that the majority of fresh water is to be found in ice caps and glaciers, leaving only 0.6% in our rivers, lakes, and below the surface. 

But, of course, we can’t forget about how water impacts us on a more personal level biologically. Nearly 70% of our bodies are made up of water. Our brain and muscle tissues hold the most of it, while bone and fat tend to contain the least. Also within our every day lives, which we often don’t consider and take for granted, the water in our systems becomes both a solvent and a conductor that allows our metabolic functions to take place at all. Furthermore, without our ability to sweat and cool our bodies down, our temperatures would reach up to 26°C.

“Water Swallows up the earth, extinguishes the flame, ascends on high, and by stretching forth as clouds challenges the heavens for their own, and the same falling down, becomes the cause of all things that grow in the earth.” Pliny

Now we’re getting to the fun part. In this section, we’ll look into the magical properties of water, and it associations in both ancient and modern magic and folklore. 

Water has, of course, been connected to folklore around the world and has even crossed religious barriers because of its importance to life, thus making it crucial to both mono and polytheistic religions. In our modern era, water has been linked to feminine energy, aspects of ‘The Goddess’, and is used for healing, cleansing, and purifying. It’s also closely connected to the moon because of the tides. This is so much so that lunar tides during the full and new moons create very high and very low tides. 

One might assume that you would need to live near water if you were to be a practitioner of water magic. But this isn’t so. It can be practiced anywhere, because there is water everywhere, not just by the seas, rivers, lakes, and waterfalls. It is used in magic of all types, like scrying, collection, ritual baths and drinks, anointing, potions and healing elixirs, and is known to produce hag stones. Water holds the essence of whatever is placed into it, and is noted for its paradoxical nature; being that it both gives and takes life, and can be calming and beautiful but also unforgiving and vengeful.

“If there is magic on this planet it is contained in water.” Loren Eiseley

Water is heavily associated with the West, and is made up of a receptive energy; one that flows, purifies, heals, soothes, and loves. Water’s energy can be felt in many ways. The biggest include through consumption, swimming, touch, and within ourselves. In short, spiritual regeneration cannot take place without water.

Cultures and religions throughout the world have been noted, as we’ve said, to place a key importance on water. For example, Hindu beliefs and Sanskrit language link God to water. In Sanskrit, the word ‘Narayan’ is the name of God in the infinite and all-pervading way. It also means ‘the one who moves in infinite waters and is also the water itself’. Hindu sacred texts, on the other hand, name God as Vishnu Narayan, and call him a universal form beyond our human perception that sits in and is apart of water. Christianity uses water, especially holy water, to bless, cleanse, and baptize. Judaism also has the Mikvah, a ritual that includes an immersion bath in rain or spring water for purifying purposes.

At its core, water in magic is associated with and deeply connected to

Passion and emotion

The psychic, love, life, the subconscious, intuition, compassion, family, and the mysteries of the self

“I believe there’s magic in a lot of things. Water being one of them.” Poppy Drayton as Elizabeth, The Little Mermaid 2018

From all eras of human history, water has played a major part in healing and medicine. In Ancient Egypt, bathing rituals were used to try and cure ailments. The Old Testament tells of people soaking in mineral water to heal themselves. The Ancient Greeks used water in their medicine. Native Americans used sweat lodges to purify themselves. Then, in 19th century Europe, Hydrotherapy was used as a treatment for anxiety, pneumonia, and back pain.

Even today, we still see water-based treatments or therapies being used in conjunction with a more hands on approach, like physical therapy. This is especially helpful in certain situations like some cases of back pain, because the water makes the patient feel weightless but gives resistance to movement. This kind of treatment is used to tone muscles, increase range of motion, ease arthritic pain, improve flexibility in joints, relieve muscle spasms, lower inflammation, support weight loss in low impact aerobic exercise, and to help speed recovery from injuries.

But as we can see, even emotional or mental health can be aided by use of water, like swimming. Water here can improve mood, lower anxiety, and decrease depression. It can even be used to help ease mental and emotional burdens of pregnant women as well as be beneficial to their unborn babies.

Human beings, as a whole, can only survive about a week without water. But even milder cases of dehydration can have devastating effects on the body. This condition can lead to headaches, constipation, fatigue, muscle cramps, dry skin, irregular blood pressure, and kidney dysfunction. Humans face risk of death from dehydration when their levels drop to 20%, yet, most people wait until they feel thirsty to drink water. However, many do not realize that if they allow themselves to reach this stage, they are already 12% dehydrated.

But if we were to increase the amount of water we take in, we would find several benefits. These would include reduced fluid retention and bloating, aid in weight loss, decreased appetite, improved immune function and complexion, and diminished risk of bladder and colon cancer.  

Furthermore, most people feel comforted by water on some level. To these people, and surely, all of us, water not only cleanses, but relieves negativity, reduces stress, and clears and recharges chakras. This spiritual cleansing of the chakras can also help to ease negative energy left behind by trauma. We must also note that humans find relief in or near water because moving air and water release negative ions that have been shown to improve moods.

Though any form of water can give these benefits, even a shower, there can be no doubt that the deeper the water, the stronger the impacts. Saltwater is noted as being especially potent for healing; due to the combined healing powers of salt and water. Naturally, sea water is not meant to be consumed, but the favorite activity of many beach goers thankfully offers aid. Just a 20-minute swim in the ocean is said to cleanse, rejuvenate, and remove low level negative energy.

But even when it comes to the sea, some water is better than the rest. From a depth of 200 meters below and deeper, we find what is known as DSW, or Deep-Sea Water. This water’s healing properties have been the subject of several research studies, and results show it to have lower temperature, higher purity, and more nutrients than the salt water at the surface. The reason for these benefits stem from less photosynthesis of plankton, nutrient consumption, and organic decomposition. These studies have shown that DSW can aid with health problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and skin problems.

Due to its depth, the water’s exposure to solar radiation is diminished, thus leaving bacterial levels at a minimum and placing the levels of minerals higher than the water at the surface. This water, after being treated, can even be consumed; thus turning it into DSDW, or Deep-Sea Drinking water. DSDW has a noted lack of carbs, fat, protein, and many other components that can be found in the water we buy and find in our homes, and is higher in beneficial nutrients.

The studies done on DSW and DSDW have found many health benefits, including improved cholesterol, a better protected cardiovascular system, prevention of atherogenic plaque build up in arteries, reduced blood pressure, better protection from obesity, aid in treating diabetes and skin problems, hepatic system protection, aid in addressing fatigue, treatment for stomach ulcers, cancer prevention, improved activity of antibacterial elements, cataract treatment, and recovery from osteoporosis.

“Deep water is magic, just like her love. Whenever she can’t breathe, all she need do is swim.” Poppy Drayton as Elizabeth, The Little Mermaid 2018

So what does this all mean for Elizabeth and her powers?

We see in the movie that Locke is able to sell the water from her tank as a healing elixir, but the effects fade. Whether Locke knows about this or not is debatable. But I doubt he would care otherwise, since people would have to keep buying the water to keep the results they want, thus making him richer. Elizabeth also tells Cam that Locke’s water would not heal Elle. However, by the time they get to the ocean after defeating Locke and returning her soul, when Elle begins to cough again, Elizabeth takes her and brings her under the water, telling Cam the final quote above. 

Of course, the strength of her powers and having her soul vs not having it could play a major part in this all as well. As it seems that when Elizabeth is at her full potential and in the ideal circumstances, she is able to make effects last, even if there are things that have to be done to ensure it. 

We have to consider that the tank is barely big enough to even fit Elizabeth, so it is akin to a kiddie wading pool compared to an Olympic size pool where swim teams train and compete. On top of that, the water is not moving; so not only is she literally trapped and drowning due to lack current and oxygen distribution, but it is so shallow that it likely doesn’t contain any kind of healing elements like minerals. Rivers are better for her because they’re deeper and have that air flow that she needs to breathe. Then, naturally, the ocean is the ideal. 

It’s the difference between a band aid and surgery to fix a problem. 

And just to reiterate, this is a meta meant for my headcanons only. You should always talk to a professional before you try any kind of treatment like the ones I described. 

Sources: 

Section 1 (Paragraphs 3-7): https://themeaningofwater.com/2014/12/01/water-is-magic/

Section 2 (Paragraphs 8-10): https://newint.org/features/1990/05/05/simply

Section 3 (Paragraphs 13-): https://www.thoughtco.com/water-element-folklore-and-legends-2561689

Section 4 (Paragraph 14): https://www.patheos.com/blogs/waterwitch/2017/01/water-magic.html

Section 5 (Paragraph 16): http://www.thewhitegoddess.co.uk/the_elements/water.asp

Section 6 & Section 8 (Paragraph 17 & Paragraphs 20-22): https://www.sonima.com/fitness/healing-water/

Section 7 (The final sentence in the magic section/Paragraph 18): https://www.thoughtco.com/water-element-folklore-and-legends-2561689 & http://www.thewhitegoddess.co.uk/the_elements/water.asp

Section 9 (Paragraphs 23-24): https://anniesrx.com/health-news/the-healing-power-of-water

Section 10 (Paragraphs 25-26): https://deborahking.com/an-elemental-force-of-healing-3-ways-water-heals/

Section 11 (Paragraph 27-29): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5221345/

[hg47]

47 Reasons Why I Fear Islam - (Reason 26)

-26-I fear for the freedom of Muslim women locked away behind a veil, and I fear for the safety of non-Muslim women not behind a veil because Muslim men, who already view Infidels as inferior scum, are more likely to see Western women as whores, fair-game to be raped. Their own women cannot say NO to them, for that would be a sin, why should some Western whore say NO?  And if she said NO, so what? ++++------- http://www.amazon.com/Into-Infidels-Lynn-Editor-Copeland/dp/0882643452/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380152447&sr=1-2&keywords=INTO+THE+DEN+OF+INFIDELS One interesting story in the book INTO THE DEN OF INFIDELS Edited by Lynn Copeland is about LEILA, who was worried about her attraction to Christ.  Her sheik instructed her on how to avoid this evil.  Reading the Koran daily was a big part of it. Unfortunately, for the sheik, the more Leila studied the Koran the further it drove her away from Islam, because: 1) Women have no insight or religious commitment, so women inherit only half that of a man. 2) Due to the feeble intelligence of women, a woman’s testimony in court is worth only half that of a man. 3) Because women are so silly, they can never be philosophers or doctors or judges or [fill in the blank]. 4) Most of those banished to hell are women, used as hell’s firewood. 5) If a women does enter Paradise she will be a Jannah whose only purpose is to please men in paradise. 6) More.  INTO THE DEN OF INFIDELS is a great book.  Read it! ++++------- A Nonie Darwish quote: “How can we expect Muslims to assimilate in America when their religion tells them that Jews are monkeys and Christians are pigs who both should be killed?” ++++------- http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/islam_a_religion_custom_made_f.html Amil Imani on how Islam caters to the savage male: 1) 4 wives are allowed the Muslim man PLUS as many one-night stands or one-hour stands as the Muslim man can rent (@hg47: PLUS the Muslim man may rape any women he can get his hands on without fear of punishment under Sharia law.)  These rented-relationships are considered legal temporary marriages, under Islamic law. 2) If a woman is discovered in a love affair outside marriage she will be stoned or possibly thrown into prison for a long sentence. ++++------- tweet ~ Islam condones any and all means to achieve its goals. ++++------- http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Usual-Punishment-Terrifying-Implications/dp/1595551611/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380310980&sr=1-1&keywords=CRUEL+AND+USUAL+PUNISHMENT+by+Nonie+Darwish In CRUEL AND USUAL PUNISHMENT Nonie Darwish brings up the point that Muslim men are so used to seeing only completely covered up “good women” that they may “lose it” if they suddenly see a Western girl.  She tells the tragic story during the ’80s when seven Israeli girls were on the beach in Egypt and a Muslim Egyptian soldier murdered them all because when he saw them in T-shirts and shorts he lusted after them, which broke his Ramadan fast, possibly casting him into hell. @hg47 says – By the way, the soldier in this story, after a short prison term, was likely promoted for killing Jews; a true-to-the-faith hometown hero!  If he is alive today, he’s probably a General. ++++------- http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_closed_circle_of_the_arab.html Glenn Fairman on Islamic honor killings. ++++------- http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Usual-Punishment-Terrifying-Implications/dp/1595551611/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380310980&sr=1-1&keywords=CRUEL+AND+USUAL+PUNISHMENT+by+Nonie+Darwish In CRUEL AND USUAL PUNISHMENT Nonie Darwish states that in many hadiths the religiously sanctioned Arabic word for a woman is actually a comparable word to what in American culture is routinely only used on Twitter: the 4-letter word for a bitch starting with a C. In Arabic the word often used in hadiths to refer to a women is “awrah” the naughty word for “pudendum.” @hg47 says – American Islam-lovers not fluent in Arabic (and probably those fluent as well), will deny Nonie Darwish’s interpretation here, but they cannot deny the root meaning of “awrah” which means “defectiveness”, “imperfection”, “blemish” or “weakness”; usually politely translated as “naked” which supports Nonie’s point.  So, best case, using state-of-the-art Muslim-double-thinking, many holy Islamic hadiths refer not to “a man and a woman” but translate as “a man and a defect” or “a man and an imperfection” or “a man and a blemish”.  Go, Islam! ++++------- http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/20/world/meast/uae-norway-rape-controversy/index.html This article by Nicola Goulding and Phil O’Sullivan just gives more proof of how in an Islamic nation a male Muslim can NEVER be convicted of rape and is Almost Never charged of any crime, although here, due to the publicity, he was charged with minor non-rape-related crimes. ++++------- http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2013/05/26/is-radical-islam-normative-islam-n1606129 Michael Brown: Is “terrorism” Radical Islam or is it Normative Islam? ++++------- http://www.torontosun.com/2012/03/23/book-tells-muslim-men-how-to-beat-and-control-their-wives Terry Davidson writing about a new halal approved book explaining exactly how Muslims are to beat their wives according to Sharia law. @hg47 says – Most religions, such as Judaism and Christianity, often contain appeals toward some “ideal” and possibly unattainable behavior. Islam, falls into another category. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halal usually in Islam, every item and every behavior is allowed unless there is some injunction against it within Islamic holy texts.  (Even then, there are many Islamic loopholes.) ++++------- Internet Opinion Poll at http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/5263974/Passengers-covered-faces-threatening-says-driver Do you think maskophobia is a fair reason for refusing a passenger on public transport? Yes, it’s a genuine concern167 votes, 69.3% No, it’s just an excuse74 votes, 30.7% Total 241 votes Why not go to the above link and vote! ++++------- http://frontpagemag.com/2011/dgreenfield/five-reasons-to-ban-the-burqa/ Daniel Greenfield on reasons to ban the Burqa within the West.  One interesting argument is the empirical high number of sexual attacks on Non-Muslim women by Muslim men in Europe, and the idea that covered up gals are seen as “good girls” to Muslim boys, but all others are whores who deserve what they get. ++++------- http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-stifling-effect-of-muhammeds-life-and-teachings-on-muslim-society/ Hege Storhaug on how hadiths trash women, almost with every mention, with many examples. ++++------- tweet ~ I am suspicious of any religion which repeatedly calls for non-members to be killed, beheaded, dismembered, and instilled with terror. ++++------- http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.9165/pub_detail.asp Amil Imani on Islamic oppression of women and Islamic oppression of all other religions. ++++------- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/02/opinion-a-hellhole-for-protesters.html JOSH SHAHRYAR on the tragedy protestors face in Iran, and how female protestors in Iraq condemned to death are first raped so the theocracy will never execute a virgin.  Of course, this perfect religion, and perfect nation does not call it rape.  It’s marriage; consummation of marriage; execution. @hg47 says – From this and other articles I have read, many of them no longer online, I judge that Iran crushed the momentary Arab Spring rebellion that happened at Ahmadinejad’s stolen second election.  Their technique is to kill anyone who even might be a protestor. ++++------- tweet ~ I am suspicious of any religion whose holy words refer to the Jewish People as children of pigs and monkeys. ++++------- M. Zuhdi Jasser, M.D. projects the voice of moderate Islam. He talks the talk, and walks the walk; he reached the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy. He argues for reform-minded Islam. In my view, reform-minded Islam would mean reverse abrogation, where instead of cancelling out all the peaceful passages in the Koran concerning Infidels (as things officially stand now within Islam), the violent passages in the Koran on Infidels would be redacted instead. If this is what Zuhdi Jasser means, I wish him luck. @hg47 His article:http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/american_islamists_find_common.html Pamela Geller’s counter-argument:http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/02/where_are_all_the_jassers.html In the argument between Geller and Jasser the subject of Koran-approved wife-beating comes up.  Jasser argues that the translators are getting it wrong; that the meaning is more along the lines of take a time-out or step back.  Pamela Geller disproves him by quoting Robert Spencer and using 11 different translations of Koran verse 4:34 ++++------- tweet ~ Moderate Muslims who don’t believe in Sharia are seen by many Muslims as apostates, traitors to Islam who should be killed by the “faithful” ++++------- http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/islam_a_religion_custom_made_f.html Amil Imani on how Islam is customized for the savage male; and some Islamic loopholes which let the Muslim man cheat and avoid his own religious responsibilities. ++++------- http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/29679 Alan Caruba writes that Americans must be the least Islamophobic of peoples, using President Obama’s background and behavior as key arguments. @hg47 says – To go slightly on a tangent…personally, I don’t think Americans are Islamophobic enough.  What Alan Caruba states about President Obama is interesting.  I, myself, am a moderate Republican who voted Obama twice.  I believe the official term is R.I.N.O.  Locally, at the city, county, and State level, I usually follow the Republican mantra, and vote conservative.  Perhaps I am afraid of change.  At the Federal level, the Republican party has lost me.  Whatever “message” they’re sending is not getting delivered to my “address.” I don’t care if President Obama’s Dad is Muslim, and I don’t care if his Step-Dad is Muslim.  I usually like what The Prez is doing.  If The Prez is a disinformation specialist, he’s got me disinformed.  If The Prez is a long-range Muslim sleeper agent, he’s got me in a slumber.  Yes, The Prez is soft on Islam, and his advisors are worthless; but all of Europe is even softer on Islam, and the government advisors over there are hard-core Muslim-lovers. My record on President Obama is pretty clear.  I’ve lost count of the number of tweets I’ve slung at @hg47 that were positive about Obama over the years.  50?  100?  I set up a special Twitter account just to tweet the vertically-aligned word OBAMA in #twitterart and #140art and other hashtags.  I tweeted at least 1000 of them trying to help get The Prez re-elected.  I forget the old name of that account, but once Obama was re-elected I renamed it @Love140Art and now I just tweet Big LOVE a couple of hours a week.  You can find a few of my old OBAMA SuperTweets at http://favstar.fm/users/Love140Art although favstar has a narrow line width, so they break up more often when shown on the favstar site. Hope this doesn’t hurt my Islamophobe-street-cred.  Maybe they’ll call me an I.I.N.O.  Islamophobe In Name Only. ++++------- A quote from Ihsan Bagby, a board member of CAIR: “Muslims can never be full citizens of this country because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.” Keep in mind that CAIR is the voice of Moderate Muslims in America. ++++------- http://www.bikhodayan.com/Islamwoman/11.htm From the article: Examples of Muslim women punished or killed because they were raped. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +Go-To-27+ +Go-To-Beginning-Of-47-REASONS-WHY-I-FEAR-ISLAM+

[carolynjanai-blog]

Jesus Was Born In April Anyway

 Remember what I said about Thanksgiving being a sham? Wait till you get a load of Christmas hoo boy, what a mess. I discussed the “Happy Holidays” vs “Merry Christmas” discourse in a separate prompt about political correctness, so I’d like to instead talk about the supposed War on Christmas and what a crock of shit it is.

The season was originally a pagan festival for the solstice, but everyone knows that, let’s add to it with a few myths from the Nordic countries and how modern Christmas traditions would have been sued for copyright if they didn’t forcibly convert or similarly quash any resistance.

Odin was the basis of Jolly Old Santa Clause, not St. Nick he was a real guy. Santa Clause with the long white beard, decked out in furs and carrying a bindle.

Throw an eye patch on him and you got Odin.

Odin got his kicks in Norse mythology by wandering earth as a smelly hobo, his possessions in a sack, picking up bits and pieces of wisdom and magic wherever he found it, which is how he lost an eye by the way. He gouged it out and traded it for a drink from the Well o’ Wisdom.

If your curious, The Hermit card in a tarot deck is also based off Odin and another poignant fun fact; Christmas, actually most Christian holidays, are mostly a hodge-podge of pagan traditions and Christian arrogance.

Another example of Christmas ripping off Nordic myths is in the piney décor. Christmas Trees started in old pre-Christianized Scandinavia, pine trees were often thought of as a divine gift from the most beloved and beautiful Baldur, god of light and love. The use of pine wreaths and boughs were used to ward off evil spirits and rein in the new year. Strong, earthy scented plants were often used to ward off evil. (Fun aside: Burning sage is the most often described plant of choice for banishing dark spirits, a ritual practiced for centuries by indigenous people of America and Europe but recently revived into mainstream by paranormal nonsense and new age bullshit.)

Another plant commandeered by the season is mistletoe. I think this one is really well known too, but I am often wrong. This myth tells the story of Frigga, great prophetess, goddess of love and marriage and wife of Odin Clause, having a vision of the death of her most beloved son, Baldur. She’s horrified and casts a spell on Baldur to make him impervious to all materials except mistletoe. Baldur and his pals do exactly what anyone else would do if they found out they couldn’t be hurt: they began hurling axes and spears and shit at their most beloved buddy. Loki, who suffers from John Smith Syndrome that he was miscast as a British gentleman instead of the piece of shit goblin he is in myth, hears about throwing shit Baldur and is always down for murder, so he tricks the god of darkness (who is blind) into shooting Baldur with the Norse equivalent of a kryptonite bullet. He dies, Frigga flips shit, Loki is cast out of Asgard and Frigga declares that mistletoe will not be a symbol of her son’s death but of what he stood for: love and light and shit. “Any pair found under the mistletoe shall share in a kiss… Um, just don’t eat it, this stuff is still, like super poisonous.”

And that tradition lasts even today, people still kiss under mistletoe and it’s still super poisonous is you eat it.

So, as a recap, Santa is in fact Odin, a Christmas tree is actually a ripoff of a tribute from Baldur the Nordic sun god and that the murderer was Loki in the ballroom with the mistletoe arrow. I could go on and on about different ripped off pagan symbols that were re-purposed for Christian use, but here’s a question for ya: why have pagan traditions permeated so deeply into today’s society especially since Christianity is so very anti-pagan?

Here’s a comparable story that I either heard in a class at some point or on a podcast or something.

The storyteller says that his friend from childhood’s Spanish grandmother used to have her over for weekends, and on every Friday night she would light a candles and put it under the table. The girl asked why she did that and her grandmother told her that it was a tradition her parents did, and her grandparents did and so one. It was just an old tradition, but the when the girl grew up she did some research into her family history. It turns out, that her grandmother’s family were all born in Spain until they immigrated in the 1940’s. You might remember a time when Spain lost its shit and tried to take over the world and either exterminate other religions or forcibly convert them or drive them out. Now, her grandmother’s family was originally Jewish and in light of their options, they chose to convert to Christianity and remain in Spain. The reason her family lit a candle and hid it under the table every Friday night was because of the Jewish tradition of lighting candles to welcome the Sabbath, Saturday. If you’re secretly practicing a religion in a hostile country, you do it secretly, so her family would put the candles under the table to keep their neighbors and secret police from discovering that they were still practicing Judaism. They did this for centuries in secret and eventually the action lost meaning, but was still practiced.

Kind of the same deal with the pagan traditions. They were so strongly imbedded in the culture of the people, that they just added their ideals to those of the newcomers and went from there. Eventually, the pagan/Christian traditions spread through Europe, likely starting with Germany, and eventually we just weren’t taught why we do these things and just rolled with it because everyone else seemed cool with it.

So this war on Christmas shit is all the more ridiculous to me. It’s like if I followed you home, kicked in the door of your house, sat at your dinner table and complained that I don’t like mushrooms and that you shouldn’t either and that you should make something else. So fuck the cups, Christmas already monopolized ¼ of the year, what more could possibly be given?

[onceuponamirror]

(1/2) hi there!! I’ve followed you for a long time and im a writer and I’ve been toying with the idea of making one of the main characters (and her family) of an original story of mine Jewish. The story is very family oriented, and though her Jewish identity wouldnt be the center focus (the story is more about womanhood and queerness) it’s definitely important and will constantly come up. Since I know you’re jewish yourself, I was wondering if there’s anything about your Jewish identity you’d li

(2/2) like to be represented or touched on more!! Or if you had any recommendations for resources regarding Jewish identity for women and queer folks. I’ve researched quite a bit about Judaism in the past, so at this point I’m trying to find things to read about Jewish identity and maybe concepts people have a hard time reconciling with their faith, rather than just general information about Judaism. thank you for reading this at all!!

————

hi there! happy to help, but know i can only speak for my specific relationship to the culture. contextually: i was raised not with the religious elements as much as i was with the ethnic and cultural components, which in my experience is much more common for american jews. 

i think that as i’ve become more connected to my history and my culture, i’ve realized the really latent disparity that comes with diaspora. 

as in—in many ways, there’s a lot about american white culture that i don’t relate to or especially feel welcome within, but at the same time, many jews are also beneficiaries of white privilege. it would be wrong to say that i’ve experienced any negative profiling, especially as i personally am fair, green-eyed, and blonde. 

(certainly the discussion of white or white adjacent privilege in jews is not universal; i have a friend who is black and jewish and she’s talked to me about the struggle of having both feet in identities that sometimes feel far away from one another. but again—i can’t speak to her own personal relationship with that, nor do i want to try, as it’s not my identity)

but for askenazi american jews in particular, especially recently, there’s a real struggle in where exactly we fit in. the antisemitism is hypocritical and often unconscious on the liberal side, and vicious and veiled on the right wing side. 

for example—recently, in chicago dyke march, three jewish women were kicked out of the parade for having a rainbow flag with the star of david on it. this is a jewish symbol before it’s israeli, but they were kicked out because it made people think it was about zionism.

(zionism, for clarification, is the support of israel as a country—a very complicated subject, which i honestly don’t recommend you bringing up in your character if you’re not jewish)

there’s a trend in american liberalism that for jews to be welcome in safe spaces, they must not be “like other jews,” like the bad ones in israel. a progressive american jew must constantly defend themselves against the actions of a country which they possibly have never been to or have no personal relationship towards. here’s an excerpt from an article discussing this:

“By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.

Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians […] no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.”

[x] 

(i should note that i personally don’t support the actions and apartheid structure put in place by israel, but the fact that i feel compelled to make that delineation is kind of my point)

other related readings on the subject: 1, 2

and then of course, especially lately, there’s been an overt-but-coded rise of antisemitism on the right. if you ever hear the words “global power” or “global banks” or anything that alludes to some handful of people or families that control all the money in the world and are suppressing working class white people, it’s antisemitic conspiracy that jews somehow are puppeteering the world in domination.

what i fear, as a jewish woman, is not an individual attack on my safety, or profiling, etc—instead it’s about being a person whose entire cultural history is defined by being the scapegoat, or historically the boogeyman for everyone’s economic problems. 

throughout all recorded history, the jewish identity is tied to persecution and blame. in fact, one of the reasons why most american jews are eastern european (areas now russian, polish, ukranian, etc) is because although we migrated there and lived there for a long time, we were never considered citizens and thus fled to america as soon as we were able on a mass scale. 

similarly, the reason why so many german jews didn’t leave at the start of the holocaust was because they felt as though they were germans; they just didn’t think their neighbors and government would turn on them until it was too late.

so the lesson lingering there for a lot of young american jews is that no matter how comfortable and integrated you may be with the culture of your country, people en masse will still always turn on you and blame you, especially when there’s economic or political elements to it. 

it’s a cultural wariness, basically, and that’s what i mean about the disparity of diaspora. we often say never again, but there’s a imprint of don’t get too cozy. 

you are, but you aren’t. 

it’s not all so wrought, though.

there’s also a lot of warmth and humor and self-deprecation in the jewish identity—the kind of thing necessary to handle the burden of so much historical atonement and loss—and there is, at least in the jewish community in which i grew up, a lot of acceptance and love.

orthodox judaism can be as rigid and sexist and racist as any other orthodox religion, but reform judaism (which is progressive and much more the norm) is super accepting, especially of queerness, at least in my temple. 

again, i can’t speak so much to the faith of it, because i ended that relationship with the religion after my bat mitzvah. i can speak more to the themes of the holidays and cultural navigations if you want, though. 

a portrayal of jewish characters i loved that might help you: schmidt on new girl, norah from nick & norah’s infinite playlist, jonathan safran foer in everything is illuminated (basically autobiographical/writing himself), shoshana dreyfus in inglorious basterds---actually, the ENTIRE family in the show transparent is an amazing and unflinchingly accurate portrayal of a modern jewish family. 

tl;dr, all that being said though, honestly, if you’re not jewish, i don’t know if it’s really your place to speak to the specific current relationship towards diaspora. 

i think you can allude to it, certainly, especially if your character isn’t sure where to align themselves in terms of their relationship towards social justice, but it’s a very complicated identity that i personally am still figuring out how to navigate, and i can’t really speak to what narrative you want to explore more specifically than what you asked above.

honestly, a lot of jewish humor is making fun of the sometimes accurately stereotypical things we do, and i’m not sure you, if you’re not jewish, should be doing that. but i think self-deprecation, sarcasm, warmth, respect for contextual history, and adaptability are good cultural traits that would be alright for you to play with! 

if you want to send me specific examples, i’d be happy to tell give you a more specific opinion on things. and i think it’s great that you want to tell a story with representation!!!!

let me know if this was what you meant, hopefully this was helpful~

[evilwickedme]

i don't wanna start a fight but i just want to know your honest opinion. should we support all jews even the racist ones, just because they're jewish? like all the people from israel who think it's great to exterminate brown people to get their land in the name of zionism? i don't think i could ever forgive them, because i can't support bigots, no matter where they're from. again i don't want to fight but i would like to read an opposing opinion. have a good day.

“it’s me again; i looked up ‘zionism’ on your blog and i just wanted to let you know that i have no quarrel with jewish people, like really the people, living their everyday lives, even the ones who happen to agree with zionism. i’m angry towards the ones who order the bombing, and the soldiers who will shoot brown civilians. but the people are innocent to me, they just have an opinion. i think jewish culture is way more decent than christianity, but it doesn’t lack faults is all.

Can’t support oppressors because they’re oppressed too. Will support someone who is Jewish if they face antisemitism, won’t support their racism. One form of bigotry can’t cancel another.”

“Do you think we should support all Jewish people even if they’re racist” is such an invalid question I literally don’t know where to begin

do we support all muslims, even the antisemitic ones? - oh wait, that’s a question nobody fucking asks, ever, because it’s weird and incomprehensible

I’m answering your question to the best of my ability but like… tbh the fact that you felt the need to ask it in the first place? antisemitism

I don’t support anyone just because they’re Jewish just like I don’t support anyone just because they’re gay, I support Jewish people in the radical act of being Jewish in an antisemitic world. If somebody is being racist, I call them out (if it’s safe for me, which sadly, it isn’t always), but I don’t call them out despite them being Jewish? it’s got nothing to do with it. Judaism doesn’t have anything to do with racism, we all grow up in an inherently racist environment and have to unlearn things.

There’s this idea that Jews=white and that is just… literally, factually wrong. More than 50% of Jews in Israel are brown (Mizrahi) themselves. That isn’t to say that Mizrahi Jews don’t face discrimination, because they do, but the situation in Israel is just… incomparable to America. It’s not white vs. brown, it’s Jewish vs. non-Jewish Arabs, and that’s a very complex situation. Not to mention conflating Jewish people with white people, our oppressors for literally thousands of years, is fucking antisemitic. (Again: Jewish people can be pale, brown, black, or Asian and I personally went to school with Jews of every supposed “type”. In Israel.)

Aside from specific, isolated cases that are reprehensible in every way, nobody is going into Palestinian land and just killing people for no reason, nor are they bombing Palestinians for no reason. Historically, the IDF has been a defense army, and I will argue even in cases it technically attacked first it was still being defensive. It’s literally in the name: Israel Defense Forces.

I know this is surprising, but there’s a huge group of Jewish people and Israeli citizens who - gasp - don’t think that we should killing Palestinians at all, including myself. But the fact that we disagree with and even hate the way our country is run doesn’t mean we invalidate its entire existence in the first place. If Israel stopped existing, half the Jewish population of the entire world would very suddenly be in incredible danger, and with nowhere to fucking go.

Of course one form of bigotry doesn’t cancel another, but what antizionists are currently doing doesn’t actually fucking help. Instead of invalidating Israel - which just makes most Israelis take what they say with a cup full of salt - they should actively criticize it, work to change it. That’s what most Israelis do. We go to protests. We pay attention to laws. We vote. We get outraged. We try to make things better for everyone.

Most importantly, this whole thing should never have been about Israel in the first place. Because Jews deserve to exist as Jews and we shouldn’t be interrogated on our opinions about Zionism and Israel to make sure we’re good Jews. We should be allowed to exist, out in the open, shouting: “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re Jewish” without having to answer for the crimes of other people who just happen to share an ethnicity and/or religion with us.

And that’s my answer. I might have gone on a small tangent somewhere.

You have a good day, too, anon. And don’t forget to call out antisemitism everywhere you go.

[thethingsihavelearned]

What Is Truth?

We live in a culture that has devalued truth. Kantian philosophy has finally prevailed in the West. Mysticism has long dominated the East, and the crux of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his ilk is mystic in nature. I do not mean to be disrespectful because these people are great thinkers and highly intelligent, I am sure, but their concept of truth is absolutely irrational. Ask someone (perhaps even yourself) to define the word truth and how it applies to their life, and the majority will give you an answer that is subjective at its core. They may begin by saying that truth is “what’s real” or “reality.” These answers are close to accurate, but if you delve deeper, especially if you delve into matters of religion or philosophy, people will tell you that truth is subjective. They will give you the existential answer: truth is what you believe; or they will give you the pragmatic answer: truth is what works for you. If they are especially erudite and progressive, they may even tell you that truth is unknowable and not worth pursuing. My friends, all of those are lies, and a lie about truth is the worst kind of lie of all.

Truth is that which corresponds to its referent, that which corresponds to reality, and the nature of truth is the same whether we are discussing border walls, mathematics, history, or religion. Granted, truth can be difficult to determine when it comes to historical matters, but difficult is not impossible; and something is true whether a person knows or believes it or not. All other definitions of the word truth are self-defeating. Allow me to use an illustration to make my case. Say John and James are riding down the road in John’s new truck. James claims that the truck is a Chevrolet Silverado, and John corrects him by telling him that it is, in fact, a Dodge Ram 2500. The truck, which John bought new from Scott Evans Nissan and Dodge, is a Ram, not a Chevy, no matter how hard James believes it is a Chevy. They arrive at their destination and park, James gets out of the truck to look at it, and James admits to John that the truck is, indeed, a Ram, not a Chevy. This is an illustration of the correspondence theory of truth, proven by the law of noncontradiction. Truth is that which corresponds to its referent. In the case of the truck, the pronoun “that” is the predicate Ram 2500, and the referent is the truck. The truth is the truck is a Ram 2500. The truck cannot be both a Chevy and a Ram at the same time. That would be a contradiction in terms. An object is what it is and cannot be both itself and something that it is not at the same time. A is not non-A. I know this illustration seems silly and elementary, but when someone says that truth is subjective in any way, they are saying that John’s new truck is both a Chevy and a Ram at the same time, a position that is irrational, untenable, and frankly unworthy of discussion.

As I was saying before, the correspondence theory of truth applies to trucks, just as it applies to religion. Now, it can be harder to know what is true in matters of religion than in matters of trucks, but truth is not changed by knowledge or a lack thereof. In the illustration with the truck, it was a Ram the whole time James thought that it was a Chevrolet. James’ search for the truth about John’s truck in no way affected the truth that the truck was a Ram 2500. The point to understand is this: often when a truth is difficult to substantiate, it actually becomes vitally important that we set forth to do so, and that premise is never more critical than it is in discussing religion. Religion is a life-shaping philosophy, and everyone alive actually has a religion by which they live. Some are obvious, what people are used to calling religions, like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the rest. Others are less likely to be typified as religions but still govern how people choose to live their lives, like pragmatism, atheism, agnosticism, humanism, existentialism, nihilism, and others. How does a person decide by which they should live their life? I would posit that they should live by the one that is true, the religion the ideas of which correspond to reality. 

Ideas have consequences. In a world where any idea can be true, and the more irrational the better, anything goes. Morality goes out the window, and genocide comes crawling in. Do you think I am exaggerating? How many mass shootings has the United States seen this millenia? Why is suicide the second-leading cause of death in Americans aged 15-34? Why do Islamic extremists seek to annihilate people who disagree with their beliefs? Not because they are living as Jesus Christ commanded. Next time, I intend to share my thoughts on why it is important that we know the truth about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection 2000 years ago. Then, I will elucidate why I believe the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life are accurate.

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth...” II Timothy 4:3-4