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

Lovers is Runaway Five with Venus? otherwise I'm down with all of this, imagine. *o*

edit: though a bit iffy on the Hanged Man, upon further thought. I can't think of anything that would fit better, but not sold on Photographer Guy

eta x2: maybe Carpainter? mehhhh

 

Hmm. How about Oddly Talkative Rock from the Lost Underworld?

 

hunches over the existing earthbound oracle protectively

 

Finally making my intro over here. I wouldn't call myself a witch, and I don't have any sort of altar, but I do participate in divination, incense, meditation, and some other private rituals. I'm not really sure what it's called when a deity is both a creator/caretaker force permeating everything and sometimes deities with other names represent and caretake distinct aspects but still related to the everything-diety? But that's my general deity/religion experience.

Edit: oh, and I've been collecting cool rocks for aaaages, but that's entirely because I think rocks are cool and it has nothing to do with what "properties" other people say they do or don't have.

 

Monistic panentheism, if you want to be fancy, I think. Pantheism will generally get the idea across.

'Gods appear to be separate entities, but they're actually just aspects of one godly force' sounds like a kind of substance monism. Panentheism is 'god is within everything', whereas pantheism is 'everything is god'. Like the difference between 'this cake has eggs in it' and 'this cake is made of eggs'.

Hi! Hope you're having a good time. :)

I don't have an altar either, and I'm a pantheistic agnostic, so... there's a wide variety of folks about, nothing to worry about.

 

I will come down from on high and fight anyone who says you need an altar to be a witch because bite my secular ass.

 

yeah obviously you need an alter to be a witch. only multiples allowed.

[/bad puns]

 

My altar is literally my computer table. It doesn't have anything special on it, I just have my Bastet plush mom gave me tucked up under my monitor stand, a pile of my jewelry on the monitor stand, the perfume oils I wear most frequently, and a handful of lipsticks I wear a lot and forgot to put back. But... I think of it like Instruments from Metanoia. I spent all my time at my computer. The table in my room is covered in crap as to be completely unusable and sis still has stuff in there even though she has her own room so it's not 100% mine. But my computer is. It's my space, where I dedicate most of my energy. The non-computery things just make it more me, and if it's clutter fuck it I'm a clutter witch. Everyone who knows me knows that.

 

#unpleasant ghost stuff #crossing the metaphysical/physical line #violence

Don't know if this is still relevant, but I thought I'd throw my 2 cents of experience in.

Spoiler

Definitely yell at it if/when it misbehaves. Cats are also good at herding ghosts to specific rooms, if you can't get it to leave entirely and/or permanently. Sometimes the ghost just wants to be noticed, or to watch you, but if it's causing a problem or making you uncomfortable, you have to be STRICT with it. I'm not joking in the slightest. I once dealt with a particularly aggressive entity (confirmed by my cousins living in the house at the time) who was at least 7ft tall, on and off over the course of about a year. I had to chastise it and to confine it to certain rooms of the house, repeatedly, or it would act out again (I unfortunately couldn't get it to Leave Forever because it... Knew certain things about me I'm not gonna go into detail on, for obvious reasons). Most of the time it was light switches/temp/noises/etc, but there were three times where it tried to make physical contact with me (one of those times the cat scared it off, and it was always more docile when the cat was around). The first was my initial encounter, and it got pretty damn close, but I yelled it away once I realized what was going on and what it's shape was. The one time it made actual contact, I had to mentally smack it away (not "banish" but go in the time-out land, or something) HARD because I had physical bruising on my body for almost a week after that. I think that finally got through to it because after that, it was content to mostly observe, stuck to the areas of the house I designated for it, and all light flickering changed to the helpful "turn the lights on just before the living people enter the room". After that, my cousins moved, and I think it went away to someplace else because the interesting people were leaving. Maybe in hindsight, I gave it too much attention, but I'm still glad I was able to keep it away from my cousins because they could not even begin to deal with it.

If the ghost is a deceased relative, then it probably is there to watch you, usually out of a desire to protect you from other, more harmful spirits. I've experienced this since a young age, and at least two family members have confirmed this (different ones than the ones from the above story), though it's tapered off since I got into my twenties, and I imagine they've moved on to younger relatives by now (if they're still visiting).

On the other side of that, I also had a relative visit me the night before doctors confirmed him deceased, though he went a bit unstable about five or six years after he died. Not sure if it was because of the violence done to him that led to his death, or if people still need to take ghost meds when they're in ghost form, but either way kinda sucks cause he was really nice when he was alive :T

 

/feels slightly less bad about having repurposed their wooden junk/paperwork chest covered in jewellery, glass paperweights, incense, tealight holders, and a tealight teawarmer to an altar

 

This is super helpful! Pantheism is a good word I had not heard before. When deities are in aspects, they usually take the form of the Greek pantheon (kind of as A Form You Are Comfortable With), and there are different ways to pay respect to different aspects, but sometimes it's more like "hey God is especially visible to humans in these trees for a couple hours so sit down and feel the atmosphere around for a little bit". On a more humorous note, Everything-God doesn't send signals back as oftentimes the aspects, but one time I did something basically as a way of asking "so what's up with that Jesus dude I'm feeling really conflicted about it" and the message I got back was along the lines of "I honestly don't care what you call me as long as you do good things".

 

@unaccustomedSyncretist how do u make ur own deck?

 

Just Polytheism Things: Praying to Brighid and promising the next batch of beer I make to be brewed in her honor, if she helped me get a fire lit under my ass and that presentation finished.

Yesterday night at class: I'm officially scheduled to present, professor totally forgets to call on me, my name is absent from the day's slides showing who is supposed to present that day, I get another week to polish this up.

I owe her some beer. :D

 

i finally have a new bastet necklace
all is well

 

Dad sent me a link to this article about witches coming together to magically bind 45.

 

Yesssss. Good. More of us doing shit like that. I personally wrote a satire about him. Which is basically an attempt to curse him and destroy his everything. There's others doing that I know. Cursing that is. Not necessarily through satire. Then there's like the dumb tumblr post that circles around that is like like to charge and reblog to cast. Which some might laugh at but honestly it's as good a method of magic as any. The same words and ideas are being spread about and reinforced again and again.

 

So an update on the Trump witch cursing event. A group of Christians caught wind of it and are scheduling a counter pray-off to stop the witches. Witches have already begun protective counter-measures.

All out magical warfare y'all.

 

I'm not personally comfortable with curses, but I'm more okay with binding and glad that opinion was considered.

That said, I think it's pretty funny that both sides are reciting the same psalm. Makes it easier to convert the energy back to the original purpose :3

 

Unrelated to this might add Allomancy symbols to my shit that I doodle for Reasons. I need to come up with something like that for Kencyrath. We need Kencyrath magic beyond my prayers and praises to the Tyr-ridan.

Also pleased that cursing in that series can involve poetry. Just suddenly sick verses about how you will never, ever have a home. All the best cursing involves poetry.

 

disagree. the best curses are blood curses on your relatives.