an eclectic Witch that was sorted into Ravenclaw

This post is about the misappropriation of dreamcatchers and the ways that they’ve been removed from their context and turned into something they’re not, which is the direct fault of them becoming popular outside of Native communities. They may not be some huge, sacred, ceremonial thing but they are still an important part of Ojibwe culture that has been stolen from us and used as a way for settlers to profit off of bastardized Native traditions.

Stop buying them from non-Native creators. Stop making your own if you’re not Native. Stop tattooing them on your body. Stop making jewelry with them. Stop printing them on clothes or home decor. Just fucking stop.

If you do buy one from a Native creator (preferably an Ojibwe person), don’t have it on a wall. A dreamcatcher should traditionally hang over the crib or bed with both sides uncovered, or in a window. It should be positioned so that the light of the rising sun touches it to burn away what it’s caught. If that’s not possible, just try to put it somewhere that the sun will hit at any point in the day.

If the child you’re buying it for is prone to bad dreams or nightmares, buy a dreamcatcher with a bead in the web, representing a spider, as extra protection. Some people will add more than one bead, so if you feel like it’s necessary, ask if that’s an option. Try to buy one with at least feather hanging from it because that’s how the good dreams are released from the web, by dripping down the feathers.

Some traditionally made dreamcatchers fall apart or collapse in on themselves after a year or so. It’s not because they’re badly designed or whatever, it’s because they’re something that children are meant to grow out of needing so they aren’t built to last.

Aesthetic: green parking lots

You might…start caring about cultures other than your own. And then… really bad & scary things can and will happen like:

improved research skills 

self-reliance when it comes to getting information about your own beliefs

very long reading lists

examining your beliefs through different lenses (scary shit, no joke)

wanting to #decolonize shit

learning & caring about cultural appropriation

….learning to meditate or even… be mindful. (sorry I know that one’s distasteful to even mention!!)

all that shit can happen to you even if you just google it out of curiosity but don’t actually practice anything……and the very second you try 1 thing you found bc it resonates with you? You’re swiftly punished with:

rocks in ur pockets (what if you drown!!!)

there are also rocks on your windowsill and on your floor and in your bag and they are going to kill you in your sleep! (Amethysts are murderous!!)

It’s a dark path, guys. 

• become medusa

• dance naked around a fire in the woods w other ladies

• eat men

• let their eyes roll back in their head and speak in tongues

Oh my god this is so evil. 

I took this from Twitter because it's no joke. A lot of witches tend to keep these lamps so I felt it would be worth bringing up. Please be careful and safe! Nobody wants to lose a fur baby.

EXCEPT for basically….one myth. Where Loki’s instrumental in the death of Baldur and the gods are all WHOA TOO FUCKING FAR DUDE and send him to Hel to be tormented for all eternity, leading to his ultimate escape/release in Ragnarok to end all things and lead the army of the damned and his monstrous children to pretty much…eat all the gods, destroy Asgard, and burn the World Tree all to the ground so it can all start over.

Here’s the thing though. Norse mythology spanned centuries. The tales of Loki as the mischievous trickster god were told for centuries.

However, for most of that time, the myths were told as part of oral traditions passed down generation to generation, until they were finally compiled in manuscript form in the 13th century, roughly. This is when pretty much all the sagas, as Norse myth compilations were called, are considered to have been written down for the first time, and so they included thousands of stories that had been told over hundreds of years.

They were also regional, though there was a lot of overlap, given that the Vikings traveled widely and regularly across the various parts of Scandinavia. Still, different parts of Scandinavia had their own sagas. Norway had different sagas than Denmark who had different sagas than Iceland, etc. Even though all of them featured primarily the same figures, they each had their own unique stories featuring the gods. However, very rarely did they have radically different takes on those gods.

Now what’s significant about the fact that pretty much every saga we have, where these myths were all finally written down and preserved, is from the 13th century….

Is that pretty much all of Scandinavia had converted to Christianity by the early 12th century, with active worship of the Norse gods being scattered and mostly underground from that point on.

Why is this significant?

Because it means every Norse myth we have a written recording of was not written by people who still actively worshiped those gods. Nor were they intended to be read as such at the time. 

They were written down by Christian scholars who wrote them AS stories. They were intended as collections of their regions’ cultural histories, but not by or for people who still actively believed in these stories or the figures they featured. They weren’t like….TRYING to be super accurate, is the thing. The scholars who wrote these sagas were writing down the stories that had been passed down for generations, but through the lens of people who saw them as stories their ancestors once believed, not ones that pertained to their own current worldview.

And they were writing these sagas for an audience of people who similarly believed as they believed.

Which means that inevitably, some things got ‘adjusted’ to fit the current world view, the zeitgeist of the scholars writing down the stories and that of the people who would read or have the stories read to them from thereon. Because again, they weren’t aiming for being 100% faithful to the tales as they’d been told to them. They were just treating them as stories. And what do you do when the story you’re writing down has elements that don’t make that much sense to you because they were born of and aimed a worldview that doesn’t match yours?

Well, if you’re the Christian scholars writing the Norse sagas, you ‘tweak’ those elements until they make a story that fits your worldview.

So remember how I said the various sagas were regional and had a lot of overlap but some stories were distinct to some regions and didn’t show up elsewhere?

Yeah, Ragnarok is one of those.

Thousands of sagas encompassing centuries of Norse mythology and oral traditions were written down all over the various regions of Scandinavia in the 13th century.

Ragnarok only showed up in one.

The most famous, granted, but still. Everything we’re told in Norse myths about the death of Baldur and Loki’s role in it, leading to his punishment and torment in Hel and his ultimate release and bringing forth the armies of Hel to slay the gods and end the world?

Comes from the Prose Edda and the later Poetic Edda, from Iceland.

Which had primarily converted to Christianity as far back as 1000.

Now, the Vikings? Were actually surprisingly not a big doom and gloom people. Pretty much every assumption of them as such comes from how synonymous we regard Ragnarok with their culture.

It is after all, the ultimate Judgment Day myth, isn’t it? Right up there with Christianity’s Book of Revelations. An apocalyptic end of the world scenario, a war between heaven and hell, where everything is destroyed so that the world can basically start fresh with a clean slate. Nothing old ‘deserves’ to survive, pretty much the only way for a world free of sin and evil to arise is from the ashes of the old, after everything has been cleansed with fire.

Now contrast this ‘myth’ with pretty much every other Norse myth that’s survived. Larger than life tales of grand adventures, noble quests, gods walking among mortals in disguise and heroes fighting giants and stealing from dragons.

Where the closest thing the Norse pantheon has to a devil figure is Loki, the god of mischief….not even evil, but MISCHIEF, because a far more accurate representation of the Vikings’ world view is that sometimes shit happens, because Loki the god of chaos likes to make a mess of things. And what do you do when that happens? If you’re the Vikings, you basically just shrug, go “well, that’s Loki” for you, and drink some more mead.

Loki isn’t vilified in a single myth until Ragnarok, because the Vikings didn’t hate him. And they certainly didn’t fear him. They LAUGHED at him. In nine out of ten myths, Loki ends up the subject of ridicule himself, as he has the tables turned on him or outsmarts himself

Until Ragnarok.

Which, granted, could very well be another Norse myth that was passed down generation to generation in Iceland, land of frequent volcanic eruptions and likely inspiration for Musplheim, the land of the fire giants.

BUT. Which could equally likely, and far more plausibly given the overall context of Norse mythology, simply be a story the scholar who wrote the Prose Edda made up to ‘finish off’ his saga of the world according to the Vikings, from beginning to end.

An ending his Christian audience of the times would understand and identify with a lot better than they would understand the concept of a devil-figure that existed to be LAUGHED at, to show how little the Vikings feared some mythical figure with the power to lie and deceive them….the complete opposite of the way Christians feared Satan.

Basically put….Ragnarok, for all that we think of it as the ultimate Norse myth….DOES NOT MAKE SENSE in the context of almost EVERY single other Norse myth AND in the context of how Norse society viewed the world and their place in it, or their gods and their relationship with them.

Same with Loki’s depiction in Ragnarok.

What both Ragnarok and Loki’s role in Ragnarok DO make sense in the context of, however, is in a bastardization of Christianity’s own doomsday tales of a Judgment Day, stylized to fit the trappings of Norse mythology and feature their gods instead of Christian figures.

With Loki recast in the role of the Devil, as he was the closest fit they could find to that.

And with Baldur, god of light (a Norse god who is at best a footnote in Norse myths other than Ragnarok, and certainly was never the major pantheon figure he’s assumed to be), recast in the role of the Christ figure. Whose death starts the ball rolling for Judgment Day and who is destined to return for it, to triumph over Loki/Satan and preside over the new, purified world once it’s reborn from the ashes of the old one.

Snorri did write some interesting things, but he was still a christian man and edited the myths, even adding new gods and goddesses that were not previously there, when he was writing them in order to suit the society he was living in. Take his stories with a grain of salt when reading them, as they are not wholly accurate to the original myths that were passed down through time.