AmaraDarkmoon

You are pregnant. You are glad to be pregnant. You have bought all the baby clothes and toys and a crib. You are ready to be a mother.

And you have a miscarriage. The absolute worst thing has happened and you no longer are pregnant. So you go to your doctor.

And they report you to the police. And they decide that you did something - your fall wasn’t an accident, you exercised too much, you shouldn’t have eaten that food or gone out that day or gotten sick - and you gave yourself an abortion. It doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter that you wanted a child more than anything because there is no way to differentiate between a spontaneous abortion - what you have just experienced - and an induced one.

And now, experiencing a pain you never elected to feel, you are being imprisoned for the crime of something suspecting you might have caused your miscarriage.

Maps! Maps! MAPS! If you're a death witch, get one for the cemeteries you visit and mark gravestones/areas you've practiced in! Garden witches! Map out your gardens! Green witches! Map where you find specific herbs in your area! Lunar witches! Mark the best spots to go look at the sky! Make a key! Take notes!

Recipes for COMPONENTS! Write down how to make the mixtures you use in spells often- A special salt mixed with herbs and put under the moon, a mixture of oils for protection, the herb mixes sachets you keep making to add to sachets, whatever!

For green witches- press samples of stuff and glue them in! Go to an arboretum and ask for permission to take leaves to press, they'll usually let you take some- add them in with your notes about trees

Cool ways to make spells! I make spells in envelopes and on empty spools, what are some ways you do?

The local plants in your area and what they do. You're not going to be likely to find chrysanthemums to forage in Missouri, but you will find creeping charlie and prairie plants. What can you do with a thistle?

When you celebrate a sabbat, write down what you did and include samples! Ribbons from your Beltane altar, a pressed sample of your lemmas harvest, a scrap of your Yule decorations. Maybe do a spell and tape the remnants into your grimoire in a plastic baggie

Learn how to make an envelope out of paper just by folding it, how to string seeds, how to dry plants, how to macrame rocks and hang them from your window. Find those little witchy skills and write them down.

How to incorporate your hobby into your magic. Sigiling origami paper, weaving knot magick into your crochet, making blessed bookmarks, etc

Substitutes! Rosemary, rose and clear quartz are good for most things, but there are more substitutes to be used that are more powerful. Roanoke bells are good substitutes for bluebells, apparently.

Correspondences of odd things. Turns out different kinds of cats have different correspondences, huh.

Superstitions and such from where you're from.

For kitchen witches: easy to alter recipes. An egg noodle recipe that takes herbs really well, a simple bread recipe that can be dressed up for spells or rituals, how to make a good pie crust that you can sprinkle nutmeg in or whatever you desire.

You told them, “There are plenty friends to have fun together, and there’s one who let me sleep and rest.”

"The only way you're not welcome here is if you're here to trash and/or oppress somebody just for existing. So if you've got some BS phobia of LGBTQ pride flags, or if you don't think people who look different from you, or if you think dont think people who are [insert label here] can be 'real witches' (heavy air quotes), or if you're just a xenophobic jerk, this is not going to be the place for you.

Those sort of people still have a seat. It's just in the refuse bin. Outside. Where they belong."

Hi everyone. Native communities are particularly vulnerable in this time of crisis and if you’re able to, please consider making and sending masks or donating money.

Mask Donations: 

Zuni Pueblo Covid 19 Relief: Send PPE, food, and hygiene products to this address.

Zuni Relief House #81, Silt Road Zuni, 87327 

Mask Drive through Seeding Sovereignty

Rosebud Sioux Disaster Relief Fund (taking both money and physical donations)

Monetary Donations: 

Havasupai Tribe Covid19 Relief Fund

Kinalani/Flagstaff Mutual Aid

Southern AZ Urban Native Relief fund

Protect Native Elders

Northern Cheyenne Covid Relief

Navajo/Hopi Covid Relief

Pueblo Relief Fund

Please let me know if there’s any more places to donate, and I will add them to the list! 

Don’t forget the Navajo.  

We made a promise that we would provide them with health care.  We made a treaty.

A lot of them don’t even have electricity or running water.  We are the richest country in the world.

They have a higher death total than ten entire states.   

https://www.gofundme.com/f/NHFC19Relief

“Don’t walk alone in Transylvania/no vampires remain in Romania”

i’m tired. i’m scared a lot of the time. i want community & inspiration to help keep me going, so i reach for something like a zine that bills itself as an inclusive mix of queer & trans voices on witchcraft, resistance, activism - because it’s a group of marginalized folks, i (maybe foolishly) have this expectation of seeing myself in it, or of the editors being conscious of the many forms of cultural appropriation that happen in these spaces & working to educate about them

but what i’m finding, over and over, is two things: the first is that despite the fact that we exist in greater numbers than i’d ever have expected, there are no Jewish voices in any of the witchcraft-focused publications (indie or otherwise) i’ve ever encountered. the second thing, that cultural appropriation of Judaism & other forms of pervasive anti-semitism DO exist in these publications, just makes the lack of Jewish perspectives more glaring

so in the interest of being direct, here are a few things the queer & trans witchcraft community (i’d like to ask the ENTIRE witchcraft community, but i am speaking to people with whom i share something right now) can do & think about to help:

include us. if you didn’t think that any Jewish folks were involved in witchy communities, ask yourself why! is it because you thought Judaism was a religion only? or incompatible with ideas about magic? Judaism is an ethnicity & a culture - or more truthfully, a group of ethnicities & cultures - with long & complex histories of magic, mysticism & folklore. some of it is considered traditionally “kosher” & some of it isn’t! our relationships to that are individual, fascinating, & worth being shared!

stop throwing around the words “Abrahamic” & “Judeo-Christian” - especially when you want to talk about cultural values or historical oppression. 9 times out of 10, you just mean Christianity. yes, we share some text, but we have VERY different relationships to it. plus, if you’re talking specifically about the persecution of people believed to be witches, that’s the history of Jews being murdered by Christians. honestly just do us a favor & remove “Judeo-Christian” from your vocabulary, there’s almost no context where it’s an accurate description of anything.

educate yourself about appropriation. i should never have to see someone mention “practicing Kabbalah” in a zine that includes no Jewish people. our mysticism is connected to our culture, our history, our faith - not only do you have no business taking it, what could it possibly mean to you without its context? 

understand that anti-semitism runs deeper than current appropriation - if you engage at all with any Western occultist or “ceremonial magic” literature or practice, you need to learn its history. what does it mean that the 15th century grimoire you’re drawing inspiration from contains Hebrew & calls itself Solomonic, but has no actual connection to Jewish people? what does it mean that the person who created the most iconic image of Baphomet, something beloved by a lot of queer & trans witches for being androgynous, gave himself a fake Hebrew name? i’m not asking you to throw all of these concepts & traditions out entirely - i have something of a love/hate relationship with ceremonial occultism myself, i collect vintage & antique things related to it & some of it is really interesting - but please at the very least educate yourself about it. specifically, educate yourself about how medieval Jews were treated while non-Jewish occultists were incorporating (often misunderstood or mangled) Jewish mysticism, language & folk practices into their frameworks. 

if you’ve stayed with me this far, i appreciate it - i know this post is long & that confronting this stuff can be difficult, but i urge you to do some reading & listening before you push back. i’m writing this because i want to see things change - i want to see communities where people connect meaningfully to their own heritages & participate in actual cultural exchange & learning based in equity & mutual support. 

i’m speaking to my own experience, but all of this goes for ANY marginalized culture/tradition being “drawn from” in witchcraft communities without actually including members of said culture. 

‘I don’t see us mentioned anywhere’

‘But when I do you’re using the wrong language’

‘But I’m going to assume the people writing about Jewish mysticism are not Jewish’

‘But I’m not going to confront these people directly instead I’m going to try and lecture everyone on Tumblr’

Make up your damned mind. 

Oh and Judeo-Christian does mean things. 

Abrahamic does mean things.

Dislike does not make things meaningless. Disagreeing with a word does not take away its power.

I don’t disagree with the OP on principle but don’t let yourself get in knots over things like this. I don’t know what place it is they’re operating from but it’s too murky and confused.

Let me try to help here.  “Witchy things” are absolutely not a monolith, but as more and more people with like minds interact with each other, a community forms. By having this blog and interacting with other witchy posts you are contributing to the formation of a witch community. Obviously no trait will ever be 100% but trends can absolutely still form and we can still talk about them without going #NotAllWitches. Now to the specific points: 

- I’ve almost never seen Judaism talked about in witchcraft as a living thing. The mysticism is discussed as this ancient, influential thing, but it’s hard to find posts that discuss diversity within the craft that remember Judaism and Jewish people. The few times we are (often innacurately, oversimplified, or misleading) does not negate the overall infrequency of it. 

-So many people writing about Jewish mysticism are not Jewish, to the point that when researching my own culture I have to go out of my way to actually find Jewish authors. Especially when I don’t have access to my Rabbi right now. Judaism has struck a weird medium where it’s different enough to feel foreign/exotic to the outsider, but “close enough” that people still think they totally understand it even if they miss big points. 

-This post was obviously not directed to the most obtuse of the antisemites, but the well-meaning gentiles who want to be more inclusive but maybe never learned how to be a good ally to Jewish people (because again, people don’t really talk about it.)  

- Yes, “Abrahamic” has a dictionary definition, and people are using it incorrectly. There is no unified “Abrahamic” belief in the nature of the divine, magic work, sin, Hell, prayer, diet, dress, ritual practice, etc. Saying something is the “Abrahamic” way of doing/believing something has about the same functional power of saying it’s the “Pagan” way. Aka not much. “Judeo-Christian” has the same problem except with the bonus effect of othering Islam and erasing Christianity’s historical oppression of Jews.

Making my physical grimoire

I found this one at a thrift store, it's called the Cruel Sea. Perfect for a sea witch so maybe I'll try to make it more ocean-oriented...who knows. Anyway I'm a bastard who cut out all the pages and re-bound it with stuff I had on hand, which means watercolor paper and hemp cord. Not ideal but not bad either.