The Crafts: Wixes, Spells, and the Weaponized Placebo Effect

What do you mean by patron? If you mean like real deal Hellenic style patron for your job and shit then you find a god that deals with your particular work or craft. Like let's say you work in law enforcement then your patron god would be Ares. If you mean like "this is the god that I primarily deal with" then in my experience it just kind of happens. Manannán and Lugh both just kind of crashed into my existence. I did choose to specifically worship Guanyin though without any prior contact from her just because I really respect her and I happen to be Buddhist. She fit everything I want to be so I went yeap you are getting devotion and you primarily. Though I don't view any of these three as my patron, really. I'm kind of uncomfortable with the term because I feel it makes me out to be more important than I actually am. I'm not Cú Chulainn. I'm not an unworthy ant either, but I am definitely not Cú Chulainn tier. That's a personal thing for me though.

 

Yeah, Freyja just basically grabbed me and said "You're Mine" and I was all "Sure!" and it just basically went from there.

 

Ok. So I spent some time making divination dice. Given the size of my d6's I've had to create simplified versions of the aspect symbols. I made a set with the aspects and a set with the zodiac symbols. Haven't made one for the kids or the cherubs due to not knowing how to simplify those. Anyway...behold. Pictures. Four of which have my weird face in them!



Simplified aspect symbols: http://imgur.com/ysnyFeN
The dice: http://imgur.com/a/DWYHP


As for how the dice will be used...Not entirely sure yet! Which is always the best thing to hear. I'll play with the dumb things and try to get something working. I'll start like I did with tarot, which is to say I used them less as divination tools and more as...thinking helping tools? Basically a new way of looking at a situation based on the cards drawn. Though in this case it will be things associated with particular aspects and trolls. Not sure how they'll work out with the gods and such though, as that is how I get my divination working. Basically the tools are just a middle man between myself and them. They're the ones that can predict the future and see things from a god's point of view!

 

For a moment there I thought, hey, maybe if I like this alchemy stuff with all its planetary correspondences, maybe I should try being less judgy about this zodiac stuff.

Nope.

For something that's supposedly vague enough that anyone can see themself in any of it, it sure is amazing how hilariously wrong astrology always is about me.

 

Also I guess I should ping @chaoticArbiter again just to make sure they see this. Whooo.

As for zodiac shit...I've never really taken it seriously. Though I find it amusing to read shit about it at times. But it's not really a thing that I actively use in my practice or anything. Closest I would is putting offerings in my birthday Buddha's bowl at wat. And on the subject of me being a shitty Hamsteak I find the aspect system a lot more apt for classifying people by vague bullshit.

 

Yeah but not enough alchemy ;)

 

I know basically nothing about alchemy. I've never had a real interest in it beyond FMA. And even then I didn't really...look into it much. Just "wow it's magical chemistry with circles and shit that's so cool". Also if you want to ramble about it some please do. I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT IT.

 

i am also up for rambling about alchemy sometime, although my interests in it tend to be alchemy-as-a-science (or natural philosophy, at least) back in the day. ~metaphysical~ alchemy and jungian shit annoys the hell out of me.

 

...there is Jungian alchemy?

 

I don't want to say I do know something about it, tbh- they were a secretive bunch, and a lot of my research is just turning up a bunch of contradictions- but I do really like the layers of metaphor and how there's a certain... concreteness? not sure of the right word.

Anyway, there's this page you might check out, if you care. Not to say it should be taken seriously, mind you, but there's so much there that it makes for a decent starting point.

Highlights include "the section header 'Healing with Lead' does not fill me with confidence", "MERCURY IS EVEN WORSE", "wait, we're slut-shaming copper now?" and "did aluminum kill this guy's puppy or something"!

(Oh, and yeah, Jung was super into alchemical imagery.)

 

Well copper should be slut-shamed I mean really now

 

eh, ish. Jung appropriated a bunch of alchemical symbolism for his ~great work of self actualization~ shit or whatever (disclaimer: i don't know the ins and outs of jung so much because he kinda annoys me) but translated it all into purely cognitive metaphysical stuff because bluh bluh cartesian dualism and also because alchemy had pretty much been replaced with chemical (i.e. elemental rather than transmutation-based) theories in terms of scientific understanding of the world, so you couldn't really apply all the old alchemical theories or imagery to that anymore, but you can do [history of japan voice] ~whatever the fuck you want~ in the mind, so.

And then that backcrossed into the spiritual alchemy tradition that had kinda not been touched by the paradigm shift to chemistry because afaik the concepts of the religious/secular binary and the physical reality/religious or spiritual world split were things that were going down at about the same time (and there'd been a division in alchemy for a while between the experimentalists/early scientists like Boyle and Newton and the Paracelcans/iatrochemists doing all sorts of weird shit with blood and spirits and whatever. i don't think it's accurate to categorize that as a science/religion split, though, at least not at first) So you've got this orphaned strand of alchemical tradition that's kinda dying out, a bunch of Spiritualists/occultists and later New Age types running around making grabby hands at everything, a bunch of symbolism just lying around not getting used and Jung doing ~whatever the fuck you want~ in the mind. Thus you get this god-of-the-gaps kind of ~spiritual~ alchemy that's totally divorced from the, you know, actual physical materials the actual alchemists were mucking around with and the fact that most of them lived and died before the idea of spirituality being some nebulous individual thing divorced from physical reality really got it's legs on. Which frankly reads to me as "well we can't actually say this is how things work in the real world anymore, so we're gonna map everything onto bullshit pop-psych and play pretend in our minds now."
/editorializing

That said, there's still some honest-to-god alchemists out there trying to purify mercury and make the philosopher's stone. They are a bunch of crazy motherfuckers, sometimes literally (fun facts: you cannot actually remove the poison from elemental mercury!) but I do have a kind of arms-length kind of respect for them because at least they're doing it right.

 

I see. That's rather interesting. Though I'll still probably just stand over here in my non-alchemy corner. I've got enough trouble with the birds and dice!

 

Methinks you need to work a bit more on that last bit, friend.

 

also, more fun alchemy facts: Boyle got totally taken in like a sucker by a bunch of Secret Alchemical Order conmen and bitched about it for literally years, which is I think where a lot of people nowadays got the impression that he was pro-chemistry/science and anti-alchemy/superstition when that was a totally nonsensical distinction to make at the time and also he's got reams of notes on trying to put together a standardized synthesis of a lesser transmuting agent as a proof-of-concept and potential precursor to the Philosopher's Stone.

 

Huh

 

I am also deeply amused by the thought that Secret Alchemical Order was the 17th century version of Nigerian Prince.

 

...omfg

 

I just have to riff some more on that aluminum bullshit, it's so hilarious-

Remember that "Like iron", because iron may not be happyfluffy but he sure didn't go the "PURE EVIL" route on it. With iron we had to combine them and be all holistic and shit. But heaven forfend we try that with aluminum.

Nice elitism. The anti-tech stuff always rolls around to that eventually, doesn't it?

I googled the Alzheimer's thing, and unsurprisingly there's no particular evidence of it.

But also, dude. Dude. You're comparing this stuff unfavorably to mercury. Is "it does bad things to your brain!" the conversation you want to have? Because mercury is not going to come out ahead on that.

 

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa the dice are so cool
okay that's all I wanted to say