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

I hope it helps! Bad dreams are such a pain to deal with.

For purifying the hagstones without salt or smoke, I'd just use some clean water and maybe a touch of something with purifying properties, myself. Maybe let soak with a reed in the water with it to absorb impurities, or rinse it with water + juniper berry juice are the first examples that come to mind, but variations on that theme with other ingredients if you can't get those easily can certainly be done. I'm happy to help brainstorm if you like!

 

I just use water myself. Water which I specifically set aside for this purpose and ask my gods to like bless for the purpose of cleansing/protecting things. I do this in like sets of three. So if I were blessing like, I dunno, a knife or something I want to use in my magic I would like flick water at it in sets of three and repeat some form of chant or prayer in sets of three while I do this or before doing it.

The exact method doesn't have to be this obviously but I'm another voice for 'use water'.

 

I purify delicate stuff with sound sometimes too. Set item directly in front of speaker with loud music that feels right, sing or yell at the thing, etc.

 

could some of ya'll folks point me to some beyond the binary witchery sources? i'm realizing that what I'm cobbling together for myself needs More Queer than my current sources have and it's frustrating to not be able to find a good source very easily that isn't a dead link.

 

@PotteryWalrus i'm always a big advocate for cobbling things together from whatever you've got around and also the power of Making Stuff

 

Upthewitchypunks on Tumblr will probably be a good place to start! They carry a lot of queer magic stuff in their shop, but if you wanted to find the titles elsewhere I'm sure you could. Here's a catalogue link that looked likely!

 

Also like there's always the power of 'I do what I want' like myself I'm a transdude but fine with the term witchery or witchcraft because for me the term witch isn't inheirently Gendered but like

Maybe it's just because I can't think of (for example) the phrase 'I'm a lil bitch when it comes to needles' as gendered and maybe it's because those words sound similar idk

EDIT: Also about purifying crap with sound and water my goblin brain has realised that chanting 'I DONT GET NO SLEEP CUZ A YALL NOW YOU DON'T GET NO SLEEP CUZ A ME' at the bad dream bogeys might actually be effective

I'm deeply tempted to purify my hagstones by shaking them in a bucket while yelling vine references

 

Honestly yeah that method should work just fine. Also you're right, witch isn't actually a gendered term, but there is an unfortunate proportion of people writing books on magic that are full of gender essentialist bullshit if not outright Burning Times + Wombe Magycke terfs, so requesting resources that are queer friendly does make sense. It's better now than it has been, but still not uncommon to find that stuff

 

I'm going to throw random links up about queer or gender experimental witchcraft / theology, no idea if it'll help but maybe! I hope so.

The Minoan Brotherhood and Minoan sisterhood are some of the original gay witchcraft groups, as such might be a little bit old school. But they were hosting gay witchcraft right back in the 70s and I think that's cool. Their symbol, the labyrs (double-headed ax) is an old school symbol of lesbianism, taken from the 'matriarchal' (this is reconstructive history and we have no proof) cretian Minoan culture. Sadly they haven't thrown up much info about theirselves online! What I can tell you is that Carol Bulzone herself, one of the founding members, is still active and very happy to talk to young folks about queer wiccan history.

Being norse, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about gender transgressive witchcraft is seithr and shamanism. Seidr/seithr/seethe/seidh (fuck eth as a letter) is a sort of fortune telling practice, sort of meditation practice, sort of magical practice. It was, we believe, traditionally a practice that people, mostly biowomen, did to tell the future by going into a trance and symbolically journeying the nine worlds. Mythologically, goddess Freya taught seithr to god Odhinn because he so desired to have wisdom and magic that he stepped past the gender barrier of magic to learn 'male' and 'female' magic and be a total practicioner. His jumping over of this barrier could be seen as another extreme he goes to for knowledge and magical power, it can be seen as myth-history about how the advanced magician needed to break down even their conception of gender identity and identity in general to be truly powerful, I like seeing the Freya-Odhinn parallel as anothing meaningful example of how they both inhabit this nebulous, exciting mid-gender magician-warrior space. Freya gets half of the dead warriors and leads the valkyrie, after all.

ANYWAY. There was, many extrapolate, a tradition of both-gender magic practices in old scandinavia that were respected and feared for having above-gender, above-human power. Obviously the hyper-masculine culture that developed saw seidhmen, biomale practitioners, as unmasculine and a threat, but we know better. Some are reviving seithr as a practice though I don't see this done commonly yet! Most of these links here are dead tbh but some are alive and they point in good directions.

Crawford's video is as always probably the best summary of the academic side, the actual facts we have. He's unflinching about how homophobia played a role in which men who did seidh were sometimes hated or feared. But that's why seidh would be just awesome to reclaim.

I mention shamanism because Seidr heavily has its roots in pre-viking shamanistic practice, much evidence points to it coming from from Sami people than the sort of more southerly nordic viking most people have in their heads. Shamanism IN GENERAL is much about stepping out of the bonds your physical body has put on you and seeing through other eyes. And many people have some pretty involved theories about how shamanism was always a place for people to go above gender in that sense of touching male and female sides/needing male and female '''powers''' to be a full practitioner. THIS IS SOMETHING I DON'T HAVE THE HARD SCIENCE ON. Just as many people find the theory of third-gender shamanism speculative and assumptive as not, especially when these theories involve unsourced 'facts' about native americans that have been appropriated however. I don't have any chops to be discussing native american shamanism and typically don't.

BUT! It was absolutely a thing to norse people, I can tell you that : P There seemed to be a concept that, just as a person of great magic powers transcended human limitations in the mind, they did in body as well and since they could do what men and women could do they were put into that ancient category of 'other,' which could be 'better,' 'worse,' 'extra,' 'just different' depending on your time period and personal prejudices.

Also ha ha ha look at some of these ancient websites, damn

Also along the Norse line, a lot of genderfluid people get attached to Loki fast because anyone who doesn't describe Loki as genderfluid is kind of kidding themselves. I've never been a huge Loki person but most people today recognize their role as a father and mother and like how their role as an insider-outsider, sometimes accepted at the table and sometimes not, fits with their subversive gender.

....I had way more in my head this morning to say but it all fell out when i allowed myself to linkdump about seidh for five hundred words. Damn. Where did it all go.

I'll come abck if I remember anything I guess - u -

 

People are fond of Dionysus for much the same reason as Loki, that's another thing. I sadly don't have the links on that as I haven't done the same reasearch on my Greek sources but uh I have a really fun transgender Dion in a webcomic???

EDIT: Wow that website no longer has the full comic anymore, but smackjeeves still does

 

So like I was gonna put all the big hagstones I have up in my window after the above ritual but one fucking EXPLODED* so now there's three but

I can't help but feel an exploding hagstone is an omen of some kind but I can't read it

(*not like exploded like a bomb but shattered suddenly as I was taking it out of the bucket after the ritual and shattered so completely there was no way to put it back together afterwards)

Also both my cats including the black one supervised so I feel like that enhanced the juju somehow

 

I got a copy of the "Beauty of Horror" Tarot Deck for Xmas just because it's a colour-it-yourself one, but I'm reading the booklet and it's really interesting. I'd kind of like to learn how to read the cards properly, even if only as a thought experiment (I'm fairly sure that if magic exists I'm anathema to it). Also, I now really want one of these too.

 

There's plenty of guides out there for doing the proper spreads but you can also just do it like i do it: keep a question in your mind, shuffle the cards, then either wait for one to drop out on you (my decks do this a lot) or stop when you feel it's the right time and pull the top card.
pays to get to know your decks too, just shuffling them a bunch and asking 'do you have anything to tell me' or 'show me how you think' or something like that. all my decks have different personalities lmao.

 

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but can anyone here do out of body experiences? I wanna try.

 

"If you can't make your own disassociation, store bought is fine!"

The only times I've personally managed any OBEs was when I was dying or like, on all the drugs, but if you haven't got ADHD and can actually meditate without exploding from your own hubris, that's probably your best bet.

Or, idk, set aside a few days to just not sleep, that also works pretty well. It's never been a particularly enjoyable experience for me, just like 'oh jeez I'm out of my body and I'm Still Me, and also I think I possessed my cat for a while there'.

Lupin definitely didn't mind having me along for the ride, but last time I accidentally rode Cinders and she fucking bolted if she saw me for the next few days. It's okay, baby, I don't really like being me either.