the-devils-library

[the-devils-library]

What Native people say about the use of sage: you can use sage, but you cannot smudge as nothing you are doing (waving sage around) is actually smudging. Smudging is a ceremony and you are, we promise, not smudging. Please buy sage from either us, or someone who sources the sage from us. White sage may not be considered endangered by the US government but corperate sourcing is making it difficult for us to source sage for our own religious purposes. Let alone to sell it.

What white people hear: never use sage ever, don’t ever buy it, don’t own it, don’t even look at it.

Look, y’all. There’s a couple of facets to my talk today.

1) Yes! You can buy sage! You really, truly can! Buy it from either native sellers (go to a powwow! Eat our food, buy our stuff, watch some dancing!) Or buy it from a seller who sources the sage from native people. Pick one. And no, buying it from 5 Below doesn’t count.

2) you CANNOT smudge. This isn’t just you “shouldn’t”— this is a YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF SMUDGING. Waving a sage stick around your doorways IS NOT SMUDGING. It is smoke clensing. Smudging, depending on the tradition and tribe, could easily have dancing and drums involved. You, as a white person, do not have the cultural BACKGROUND to even know how it works. At all. Period.

3) please, for FUCKS SAKE, stop making posts here on tumblr where you tell other white people about cultural appropriation and what they can and cannot do. Please stop, your license has been revoked because none of you bother to get the facts right. We native people are FULLY CAPABLE OF DOING IT OURSELVES. Consider instead: a) reblogging our posts where we talk about it! We’re here! We have made posts!! b) Making a post that states what we said and then LINKS BACK TO US. Screenshot with a link if you must. Stop centering your own voices in these conversations. You are already centered in everything, stop centering yourselves in a native space.

I’m tired of this nonsense, y’all.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk ™

——

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Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/jnwampler

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[the-devils-library]

As an addendum: I talked to my therapist about spiritual psychosis, because I've had visions, and I have a therapist, and she had some thoughts.

If you are noodling over what kinds of spiritual experiences are psychologically healthy and not, Abraham Maslow wrote a book called _Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences_ that you should probably read.

Psychosis comes with compulsions. If you have an experience and still feel free to choose for yourself what you do and do not do, religiously speaking, it's not spiritual psychosis. Spiritual psychosis is psychosis with spiritual window dressing. It is spiritually themed, but not actually spiritual in nature, if that makes any sense. If your visions are threatening, and you feel like you can't say no to them, that is spiritual psychosis. If Hekate appears and tells you everything is going to be ok, but you should probably work on being nicer to people (and you think about that, and tell her maybe, but that's really hard, and you don't know if you can do that) that isn't.

Another problem, also with spiritual window dressing, but far more common, is spiritual bypassing. This is when you use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. So, if you take a theological position that the gods hate everyone who does X because it triggers your trauma, that is spiritual by-passing. If the gods comfort you when you are hurting, that is not.

Edit: If you want to know what causes psychosis, here is an article. Funky religious and spiritual practices aren't on the list.

[the-devils-library]

I’m working on some beginner materials to put out…eventually. But I think my advice is pretty much summed up with: 

give thanks/offerings to your ancestors - even if you didn’t like the ones you knew, I promise you’d like someone back there; doesn’t have to be daily but regularly and water counts

give thanks/offerings to the land - I don’t care where you are or if you like where you are, you’re only there because the land allows it; doesn’t have to be daily but regularly and water counts

pick a divination tool and use it - ideally pick 2; it’s very fashionable to study things in witchblr but expertise rests on a solid foundation of use; tarot, geomancy, dice, bibliomancy, and scrying are all great

pick a guiding philosophy/source of wisdom - a lot of paganism consists of practices which do not in of themselves guide how you should move through the world or make decisions; can be a philosophy, motto, or other religion

these are to me is what I’d consider the bare minimum but here’s the bonus round:

on each planet’s day, give thanks/offer to that planet - moon on monday, mars on tuesday, mercury on wednesday, jupiter on thursday, venus on friday, saturn on saturday, sun on sunday - water counts but they do love frankincense

track the moon - a lot of people are big into phases, I prefer tracking what sign she’s in; each month she will conjunct with every planet in the sky so tracking her a good way to stay aware of those influences

learn a method of cleansing self + space - fav instructions here; physical cleansing should always be a part of it if at all possible; smoke (incense, bound herbs), sound (clapping, snapping, singing, ringing), and energetic scraping are all good options

learn a method of warding self + space - go beyond visualization; witches bottle, salting, symbols of protection above a door, creating or appeasing a guarding spirit are all good options

learn a basic method of petition or spellcasting - a simple way to start is asking the spirits you’ve already been working with like your ancestors and the land and giving them a little extra back

decide on a small tradition for holidays - as you add in holidays, pick one small tradition to try to replicate next year; eating apples at Mabon, leaving an extra plate out at Samhain, lighting a candle on the stove for Imbolc, etc

doing these sorts of things for a year will honestly get you a lot further than most in my experience. these are a solid foundation from which to build in basically whatever direction you want. earnest practice beats passive theorizing and consumption any day. 

[the-devils-library]

I feel like when people get into deity work, deity worship or anything deity related we all kinda think that we NEED to communicate with them, we NEED to do tarot cards with them, we NEED to reach out and actively work with them. But I feel like that's not it. Yes, you can communicate with them if you and them want to. Yes, you can do tarot cards with them. Yes, you can actively work with them, but you don't HAVE to. I think you can also just light their candle, give them an offering and just spend 20 minutes or however long you want listening to music with them and just chatting to them about whatever is on your mind and they won't mind it. Because you are putting in the effort and your time to be with them even if it's not doing any of the things you see a lot of pagans and witches do on tiktok.

[the-devils-library]

Tfw you've been doing this for ages and somebody's like wow you're so knowledgeable / cool / interesting / etc

and you're just like

my darlings i am not up on any kind of pedestal, not even so much as a stepstool, i am down here in the dirt with you and my hands are filthy

i have no laurels to rest on, i still make mistakes, i am still learning too

[the-devils-library]

How to understand neoplatonism without your brain turning into a mush?

Don't tell me that Hinduism is even more complicated or something, I can't even get how the triad works!

Be forewarned, if you're having trouble getting your head around the Trinity, neoplatonism is gonna take some serious work to get your brain around. But! We encourage intellectual endeavors here! So let's start with the basics.

To vastly oversummarize: Plato and Aristotle had conflicting ideas on how divinity worked. Neoplatonism is what happens when you try to combine them.

If you're gonna give neoplatonism a stab, you need to familiarize yourself with Platonist and Aristotelian philosophy. Once you've done that, you can dip in.

Neoplatonism is basically three guys: Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, but you wanna focus on two works in particular.

The Enneads, by Plotinus

De Mystiis (On The Mysteries), by Iamblichus

As for how do this, understand that there is no shame in starting where you are. When I approach a topic I'm unfamiliar with, I have a process:

1 - Give the primary text a skim. This gives me an idea of how tough the ideas are gonna be for me.

2 - Dig around for YouTube videos and recorded lectures. This is a good way to prepare yourself for a serious read.

3 - Give the primary text a proper shot. Highlight areas where you don't really understand. Keep track of where the text loses you, and where it finds you again.

4 - Seek expert assistance. Armed with that list of questions from step 3, find someone smarter than you, and ask them questions. Im lucky enough to be friends with a cast of academics, but you can literally just shoot most professors an email. 9/10 times they're happy to discuss things things with an interested party!

5 - Repeat steps 3 and 4 forever, as there is always more to learn.

[the-devils-library]

The vampire of Toledo Cathedral (or Cain's bite). Late 14th Century.

A rare representation of Cain and Abel's biblical story in which Cain kills Abel by biting him, instead of hitting him with a rock.

[the-devils-library]

Leviathan originates in the Bible, so I'd start there. I'd also peruse the Talmud, as Leviathan is of Jewish origin and he makes appearances in the Talmud that don't appear in any Christian bible you'll read. He appears in several old grimoires, including the Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses and The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Both can be read for free on esotericarchives.com.

Unfortunately I don't know of any modern books that focus on Leviathan in particular, but I'm sure a general understanding of demon work combined with some research will give you a solid idea of how to move forward.

Links and sources good for researching Leviathan?

to my knowledge, leviathan doesn't have many books written about him specifically. additionally, as i've said in the past, i'm not the best person to ask for resources as i have memory issues and general high-level distractability and reading is very difficult for me (so thus, i do not read a lot of books). what i have learned has (mostly) been learned through personal experience.

@the-devils-library do you have any recommendations? :) no pressure to reply, also.

[the-devils-library]

For every claim about Pagan survivals in European / North American folk traditions and holidays, it's important to remember that there are at least three layers of cruft on top:

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants trying to discredit Catholicism by claiming that it was secretly Pagan

Nineteenth-century Romanticists and Nationalists trying to construct an "authentic" volkisch identity by connecting everything to a remote pre-Christian (pre-Jewish) antiquity, and

Contemporary Neopagans and New Agers who want to maintain these traditions.

[the-devils-library]

Gonna add this meme to my list of 'homophobes unintentionally making us look cooler'

[the-devils-library]

How did magicians back in the day make seals? Was there a science behind it or was it intuitive?

That's a really good question! The answer is extremely complicated!

When most people these days think of seals they think of goetic seals. But the terminology of "seals" actually comes from the idea of sealing a letter. Specifically, it refers to one of the many apocryphal versions of the story of Solomon and Ashmedai, in which king Solomon uses a signet ring with a special magical symbol on it to command demons.

Now, this is one of those biblical stories that people went absolutely nuts for. Jews, Christians, Muslims, damn near every abrahamic faith has their own take on the story, because let's be honest here it's cool as fuck.

But! The original story from the Tanakh doesn't refer to the seal at all, and focuses much more on controlling the sheyd with manacles inscribed with a secret name of God. The inherent magical power of names of God is a common trope in Jewish literature, but later versions of the tale also include greco-egyptian ideas about the inherent magical properties of language, forms, and mathematics.

So when we look at a contemporary English version of a goetic seal, we are looking at something with literally thousands of years of compiled knowledge behind it. I wouldn't necessarily call it science, or intuition, I would describe it as systematic, and narrative. Closer to how campfire stories are improved over generations as people tell and retell them.

Look at this seal of Belial:

The idea of the seal itself? That goes back to Babylonian Jewish ideas about written text having power to control supernatural entities. (Google Babylonian curse bowls if you haven't already.)

See how the letters are spaced? That's important. That goes back to neopythagorean ideas about regular polygons being fundamental building blocks of the universe.

The little crosses? Those are probably cruciforms! That's how you can tell Christians were involved at some point.

See how some of the lines of the seal end in little loops? That goes back to ptolmaic Egyptian ideas about magic. If the crosses are cruciforms, these are probably ankh-forms! You see shapes like that all over magical texts from the 2nd-6th century Mediterranean!

These symbols are the result of dozens of cultures and people and languages collectively yes-anding each other for literally thousands of years. They are DENSE with meaning.

[the-devils-library]

Feel free to direct them to me, if you want.

a lot of people have been coming to me asking for books and whatnot on different things and i just want to politely state i'm probably the one person who will not give you the answers your looking for. i struggle to read large chunks of unformatted text and properly digest large bits of information, like what's in books, because of my adhd, memory issues, and overall disability.

as a result, 99% of my learning has been learned firsthand, through fucking around and finding out. if you want to ask me about my experiences or want me to think of something original, go ahead! i'll probably have a much more satisfying answer. but when it comes to books i generally fall pretty flat on recs because, alas, i genuinely find it incredibly hard to read.

[the-devils-library]

Lucifer’s Fall by Ludwig Fahrenkrog

[the-devils-library]

liberte egalite fratricide

[the-devils-library]

the serpent deceived me, and I ate

[the-devils-library]

Dark photography by elsaaime on ig.

[the-devils-library]

Simon Marmion, Vision of Hell

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