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

Put them under spoiler tags? =P One for each story?
Or if I really am being horribly unhelpful here I'll pick one, though honestly I'd like to hear all of them.

 

Well, how about we start with the scaring of baby Satanist and go on from that every time you have time/urge/spoons to tell more?

 

Seconding the starting with scaring of a baby Satanist.

 

Do tell.

I want to see if this is weirder than my mom's seer stuff. Which is fucking weird.

Also I am glad your mom got out, sheesh.

 

Baby satanist it is then!

So my parents used to go to parties with the various weirdies out in Arkansas while we lived there, because it's really hostile to people like us so we kind of have to stick together. My parents had an open relationship at the time and there was this one guy who was hitting on my mom. He knew she was a witch, talked about his interest in Satanism and magic connected to it. Mom plays along, he invites her into one of the back rooms. They go and once they're alone he starts manifesting, shadows around his head and dark eyes and such.

Then he meets my mom's eyes, the dark goes FWOOSH back inside him and he squeaks "I'm sorry I didn't know you were spoken for!" and BOLTS out of the room, tripping over himself the whole time.

 

Ahhh, young Satanists. So convinced they're the scariest person in the room.

 

@hoarmurath Seer stuff? That sounds interesting, if you feel like sharing.

 

lmao wow.

I don't really have any interesting stories except That's Not Wicca You Idiots internet arguments, so.

 

My stories mostly involve The Weird Injuries My Family's Prone To. =_= There are many.

 

Someone remind me to talk about some of the young and dumb types sent my way during my otherkin recovery.

Summary version: 14 year old dabbles in summoning "demons" gets a dark spirit riding him he doesn't see. He brags about it the a former Angelkin, positive energy worker with a white knight streak.

 

I had a 'phase' of being very interested in a lot of magicky stuff when I was fairly young (like, middle school aged), mostly to do with faeries and some magic in regards to that. I kind of just lost interest in it after a while, though I always have had a general interest in occult stuff, read tarot some, and got into things like palm reading for a while.

It's been a while since then, but honestly I'm sort of interested in getting back into it? I'm just worried that a) I'm too skeptical for a lot of stuff, which would make it not really work for me, b) I actually just have a weird fear that I am just some weird awful thing that magical stuff 'avoids' if that makes sense, and c) A lot of my interest is in things like animism, totemism, and possibly shamanism, and all that sort of stuff can get really appropriative really quickly. I'm just some Whitey McWhiterson with vague mixed European roots, I don't want to do anything disrespectful.

It's interesting to see talk in here about people believing in fictional things and such though. It would probably feel a lot less appropriative to give my own names and meanings to the things I see/feel, but at the same time I'm still not sure how 'legitimate' that really is.

 

I'm an animist and have been for...A few years now? Though I've been kind of moving towards that since I was a kid so. Yeah. My animism thing is largely just working on my gut. The ocean is a sentient living thing with a soul and what not because it just really, really seems like it is. I can't go to the ocean and not think the ocean is alive and thinking. It just kind of is.

As for what I do with this...Mostly just leaving offerings. I leave offerings while I'm out. The trees or rocks or land or Fair Folk (which may be those things) deserve their due. It's just hospitable. So I'll pour out a bit of whatever I'm drinking, and sometimes give bits of my lunch. Have to have a good relationship with things, yes. This bit of things meanwhile is based on research I've done for Irish polytheism.

Though I guess that isn't actually doing magic. Just part of a long list of superstitions and rituals to try and keep things as peaceful and good as possible.

 

Well, the seer stuff basically works like that that she gets information about people into her head. Sometimes when she looks, sometimes when she doesn't. She can also see why people are sick, or where they are, and says that sometimes dead relatives of the person come to help her, if they think she needs to see it. She does not get to see everything at all times, since there are other forces deciding whether she needs to.


It's actually caused some strife as she predicted some stuff and told me, and it was about me. She does say it is not set in stone, and I have learned to sort of treat it as a possible future instead of a fixed one, because treating it as a fixed one made me go into a bad place for a time and I did not like it there at all.

I don't have 100% proof this is legit just yet, I am waiting for some world events to happen that she could not have known before, and then I will be entirely sure.

Definitely don't want to be her, though. It can't be good seeing this stuff all the time. It also involves seeing previous lives and so forth too. She does some work for people, because even "average normal" people are quite superstitious here, and I hope it helps, but it can be quite rough. I don't think people should know these things, it can warp their sense of self a lot.

So I do recommend not to go see seers or if anyone you know gets a "ooh I am seeing stuff about you", please ask them not to tell you. Even if it will not come true, it can mess with you a lot. The only time I do recommend is when someone's having odd stuff going on, so when there might be a spirit hanging around making a mess of things.

I am not sure if I personally have any abilities, but I do have some sort of sense to tell whether people are legit or not. If I get a bad/odd vibe from someone, I am usually right, so I tend to trust it. And I've been told I do have a sort of ripping the cobwebs and crap off an issue sort of insight, but that's not magic, that's just me generally being done with the shit people get up to.

Hope this made sense.

 

@Lazarae What a good story. I like it. I approve of stories like that. xP

On a personal level I swing between 'I have the psychic sensitivity of a brick', 'I can feel something, sometimes' and 'I have a really overactive imagination'. I would desperately like to, like @Aondeug said, look at the ocean and feel that it can't be anything but a living thing, but I don't. I get creeping bad feelings in various places, and once I was walking somewhere and very suddenly felt my back go warm and prickly and a buzzing in my ears that startled me so much I jumped and turned round, but saw nothing, and was heartily worried by this until quite recently when I went back the same way and mumbled words of respect and wasn't bothered. There's a few trees that it could have been connected to. But I have sort of been trained to think that these things are just me having a really overactive imagination.

 

Yeah, that's how I feel about trees. Interesting.

Actually, that's the main reason I don't want to move out of my general region; it's distressing to go to different biomes. I need my proper oak grove/savanna, guys. This is possibly slightly silly, but... a thing.

 

I don't know how to say it without sounding twee, but some people are just really in tune with things around them. I sometimes can tell when meeting someone if they're toxic even if I don't know how I can tell. Most of my irl friends are people I felt right off we could be friends. Some of them were even people I approached first because of that feeling, and I'm skittish as hell so it's kind of notable. I think it's partly learned instinct from putting up with shit, but also part of a natural insight especially since sometimes I just know, even when there hasn't been time for impressions of either kind.

I usually only leave offerings for the fae (pls stop rearranging my jewelry boxes thank), but I do thank plants and the ocean whenever I take things, or take shade under a tree, or I apologize when I have to walk through a bush or hedge. It's only polite. I also talk to animals like people, especially wild ones and bugs/spiders. I should maybe leave offerings at the Scary Place, see if that calms whatever lives there, but the only way I can get there is with my moirail and she's too scared to get near it.

@albedo, I had that when I swapped coasts. I felt the ocean coming from the wrong side! It was very distressing at first, and even after I got used to it where I was whenever I went closer to the coast I would get the wrongness again. Even though I really didn't want to move back to my hometown there was a bit of a relief when I did because my... iunno, awareness of the ocean? was coming from the right direction again.

 

That's what I felt for fifteen years in Southern California. And then I moved to Seattle, whose climate is very like my native Britain (as can be noted by all the invasive species from that part of the world that got brought here and grow like crazy) and it is such a relief.

I'm pretty OK on ocean direction but there has to be a large body of water within at max a few hours' drive, preferably much less.

 

English ivy.

#get this shit out of my parks #and out of my rainforest #angry Washington native sounds

 

Oh, this might explain my resistance to the Atlantic Ocean.

I grew up in the Inland Empire, which means I lived in a desert in a bowl of mountains close enough to the ocean that the combination of the three SCREAMS home in my brain. To the point that for years I've said I don't miss California and when I went to LA for a con, my brain just went "This is home" as soon as I got outside.

Besides the fact that the Pacific and Atlantic oceans just. . . feel different.

 

I seem to have some kind of attachment to the city where I was born, come to think. I stayed with my cousins for six months about five years ago, and they live in the US, so I got sort of homesick every so often, but I didn't seem to get homesick the most thinking about my house. I was thinking about the city where I was born instead, which I still frequently visit. It is perhaps not the closest big town to me, but it's the one I'm most comfortable in, though idk how much of that is just me being much more familiar with it than anywhere else. And I'm not as comfortable in the bits I don't know as well.