Chaos Viking

you know how far you can get into eurasia and africa by sailing up rivers from the baltic and mediterranean seas? pretty fucking far, and that’s what vikings liked to do to trade

then, you know, people are people, so love happens, business happens, and so ppl get married and take spouses back home to the frozen hellscape that is scandinavia (upon which i’m guessing the horrorstruck new spouses went “WHAT THE FUCK??? FUCKING GIVE ME YOUR JACKET???????”)

and sometimes vikings bought thralls and brought them home as well, and i mean, when your indentured service is up after however many years and you’re a free person again, maaaaaaaaaaaaybe it’s a bit hard to get all the way home across the continent, so you make the best out of the situation and you probably get married and raise a gaggle kids

so yeah

Why?

Check that out: the goods Vikings and Scandinavians were getting from their trade with the rest of the world was so important they buried themselves with it, as part of their treasure hordes.

We KNOW this.

Vikings in Persia

Black Vikings

Vikings in North Africa

Buddha statue in Viking hoard

Vikings brought Native American woman to Europe

Unflattering texts in Arabic about Vikings

Original text by Ahmad ibn-Fadlan

More about the Islamic World and Vikings (some Vikings converted to Islam! sort of sketchy site tho)

Viking technology came from Afghanistan

More on trade route determination via metallurgy

–and I hate how the entire subculture has been so thoroughly co-opted by white supremacists. To the point where I, a person who likes viking stuff, am deeply and immediately suspect of anyone else who likes viking stuff, guilty until proven innocent, cuz that’s what the odds are these days.

Anyway.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone can be a viking, and thus I am so, so pleased to find that the historical record backs me up.

Hekate is not a triple goddess, she appears in triple form to represent the three-way crossroads and is depicted as a young woman. The Morrighan is not a triple goddess as she actually has four aspects (Badb, Macha, Némain, Féa) and none represent the stages of a person's life, but the Morrighan may choose to appear elderly as a death omen. Kali is not a crone goddess just because she's associated with death and you shouldn't be touching Hinduism unless you wish to convert. The Arabian goddesses Al-Uzza, Al-Lat, and Manat are sisters and none of them are described as being elderly or as a maiden.

i wrote this for a dear friend who is being troubled by people who are downright cruel. this curse is what id like to call a “last resort”. it is meant to torture your target(s) with the presence of death. it can be pretty severe, so if you use it - choose your target wisely.

You Will Need:

• 1 Black Candle - justice, sorrow

• Red Ink - a marker, pen, or actual ink

• Paper

• Chili Powder - discord, misery, strife

• Black Salt - distress

• Your saliva

• Nails

• Vinegar

• A toothpick/knife/sharp object

Instructions:

1. Get your candle. Carve cursing sigils into the wax that are in sync with your intent.

2. Anoint your candle with vinegar, then sprinkle it with black salt and chili powder.

3. Take a piece of paper and write your target’s name on it with red ink. As you finish, say aloud:

“May your days of peace come to an end with the lighting of this candle, a curse I send.

My face will forever haunt your days and nights, the pain I shall cause will slice you like a knife.

Death will linger, making you its slave. But you will not be satisfied with a physical grave.

Bones and nails, blood and blades, the debt of your sins shall be paid.”

4. When you finish, spit on the paper and crumple it up. Stab the candle with the nails. Light the candle and using the flame, burn the paper. Let the candle burn for a while, then store it in a dark place. Bury the ashes/what is left of the paper. Done!

Energy parasites are nasty little beings that infest anywhere a lot of energy passes through. This could be the places you practice your craft, do energy work or magic, or anywhere lots of people pass through, and even inside your energy body.

There are many different varieties of energy parasites that work differently. The shared qualities among all energy parasites I’ve encountered is that they are excellent at energy work, they breed through asexual reproduction, and they are all sustained by feeding o the energies of other beings.

Energy Leeches:

I’ve encountered more energy leeches than any other type of parasite. They are everywhere, constantly feeding on the energy we exude as we move through our daily lives. Most leeches are very small and stick to high traffic areas like subways, busy streets, and packed buildings.

If you practice any type of magick or psychic arts you are likely to attract energy leeches to where ever you are working/practicing. These types of activities create a lot of energy for a leech to feed on, and if it can get enough energy, it will grow and become a larger issue.

I use to do all my rituals, spells, and energy work practice in my room so this lead to my space having a lot of built energy that I was lazy about clearing out. After about a month, I noticed things were becoming much less effective and the energy in my space was very slow. It was then, when I went out of body, that I noticed a giant energy leech on the wall of my room. It started out a tiny little thing, but since I kept filling my room with energy it grew until it needed to suck it straight from my workings to be satisfied.

You don’t want to get a leech get that big in your space. It took far too long to get rid of, and I had to wait until the sucker was gone before I could do anything high-energy in my room.

If you go out of body, specifically on the astral and other places from there, you are likely to eventually bring home an energy leech with you. It’ll likely be a tiny one who lodges their way into your energy body and hides tightly between the energy pathways/veins or right on an energy center. If you are lucky, it’ll be so hungry you feel it start to suck up your energy.

More often though, they like to stay dormant and only take what they need until your energy body is weakened for some other reason. They see this weakened state as a cover for them to go to town on your energy systems. So as you’re dealing with the issue that is causing you to be in a weakened state (such as being sick, clogs/blockages in your energy body, ect) they are sucking you dry so you have a harder time healing and don’t know they are there.

Energy leeches are not just a problem for anyone working with foreign energies. I’ve known people who are extremely mundane who have had big leeches inside them feeding for what must have been a while. One person was a swim instructor where I work. When sitting there bored at work I was scanning people’s energies and I noticed a foreign body insider her. Upon further inspection I learned it was a big leech. So big in fact that she likely passed on a few baby leeches onto others given the size of the one inside her energy body.

Noticing energy leeches:

Skilled spirit workers and healers are likely able to help identify an energy parasite like a leech, but if you are sensitive to energies it’s something you can learn to do too. You need know how your energy body works in it’s natural resting state and what that feels like before you can try looking for leeches in your system. This will take some time, but it’s a very important thing to know for any energy worker/witch/spirit worker. When you know what your energy body’s resting state is like you can go through your body bit by bit checking your energy centers and pathways for any abnormalities, in this case specifically looking for leeches latching onto and draining energy.

It will often look like a serpent-like creature with no eyes. If it’s from our plane/world it will often have a small mouth with teeth, but leeches from other planes that you pick up while astral traveling more commonly have an energy center from which they drain your energy, instead of a mouth (though this will depend on where you are traveling).

Energy leeches have a tight and dense energy. Their energy alignment will depend heavily on where they are from, but leeches from our plane tend to be aligned to elemental energies, most common being Earth energy. Energy leeches most often have three dominant energies in their system, the only shared energy I’ve noticed between all leeches is Void energy. I suspect this is is what makes them very good at taking in and neutralizing most energies into their system. Since Void energy in my experience moving through Void energy can act like a going through corrosive filter for non-Void energies.

Their energy bodies are almost entirely made of energy pathways with a few energy centers (1-3). Larger leeches might grow more centers to have a larger surface area for absorption. For having such simple systems, they are extremely skilled at energy work. They are experts at camouflaging themselves and changing the flow of energy. This makes them very good at making themselves almost invisible if you don’t know what you’re looking for. They can make a blockage form in your system and drain the pooling energy from that side by shifting the flow of your pathways to draw it in. So if you keep fixing problems in your system and more keep coming, you might have an energy leech.

Removing energy leeches:

A single energy leech can do a lot of damage to a person’s system. It’s best to remove the leech from your body before you work on the damage it causes. There are dozens of ways to deal with energy parasites, but I’m just going to cover a few methods of removing them through energy work/healing. 

Reiki is a great tool for removing energy parasites. It floods your system with healing/life energy, making your energy body a very hostile environment for low-vibration energies and beings. The only draw back is that reiki is a very passive healing method so it will often take a lot of time to flush out a leech if it had grown a lot.

Any type of high-vibrational healing is good for getting rid of small leeches. Crystal that have been charged are excellent for this. If you have a leech in your room a tight crystal grid can do the job. You just want to make sure the grid doesn’t give off too much excess energy because the leech will just snack on it. I would recommend using clear quartz, rose quart, citrine, and fluorite. Smoking cleansing and singing bowls are also good methods of removing energy leeches from a psychical space.

Asking the spirits with whom you work (if you work with any) to remove an energy leech is a good idea too. Most spirits skilled in energy work can see parasites in your systems right away and know just how to remove them. Do not trust unfamiliar spirits with such a task, that is how you end up getting energy parasites.

If the leech(es) inside you aren’t too big, you might be able to just starve it out. This would mean you would have to go inside your energy body and cut off energy flow to it in the hopes it shrinks down to making removing it easier. This only works if it’s on an energy pathway and you know how to cut off that pathways flow and how to pull the leech out.

The best way to deal with leeches in my experience is through psychic surgery. If you know a healer or spirit who can preform psychic surgery, they are your best bet to handle it’s removal.

Removing a leech can be a very unpleasant experience. I would not recommend doing it yourself unless you have advanced knowledge of how our energy body works. I’m going to share one of my methods of energy leech removal that don’t involve psychic surgery for those who want to learn how.

AstralCatalyst’s energy leech removal method:  

To start you need to figure out where exactly the leech is in the individuals energy body. Do a scan of the whole body for any abnormalities or damages. Go through each system until you find the leech.

If it’s on an energy pathway:

If the leech is on a pathway you will need to temporally cut off energy to where the leech is by rerouting the energy on the pathway to others. Do this by taking another energy vein and making a small bridge between them by pushing the energy from the leech vein to the healthy vein. You will notice that eventually it will take less work to move the energy from one pathway to the other, this is when you can stop.

The leech will soon no longer have any energy coming down the vein for it to feed on. Move your hands down to where the leech is in the person’s body and start pushing some high-vibrational energy between the leech and the vein. DO NOT PUSH ENERGY DOWN THE VEIN. PUSH IT BETWEEN THE VEIN AND THE LEECH. This energy passing by will draw the leech’s attention off the vein since it’s no longer receiving energy from it and hopefully loosen the leech’s grasp on the vein. 

Now carefully grab a hold of the leech in a manner that keeps your hands away from it’s energy centers and pull it off the pathway. It might hold on very tightly so pull had hard as you need too. The removal process might cause a tightening, tense, or pulling sensation in the individual being worked on.

Repeat until all leeches are out of your system.

Then work on healing and fixing the flow of the energy in your body. This can be a lengthy process of redirecting energy and fixing any tears, blockages, and overworked pathways. If you removed the leeches without cutting off energy flow to it you are likely to be hemorrhaging energy, and the tears in your system will be harder to patch up and heal.

If it’s on an energy center:

If a leech has warped it’s self around one of your bodies energy centers removing it becomes a much harder process on the body. This means the leach has be depriving your system of energy it needs so you don’t have a healthy system to properly fight it. You will need to redirect all the energy in your body around this center. Which means changing the entire way your energy centers flow temporarily and cutting this center off from all of the others in your body.

Once you have the leech affected center isolated watch what the leech does. Sometimes, completely isolating the center is enough to drive a leech to just let go since it’s so use to being constantly fed by the energy center. If it doesn’t let go you need to be extra careful about removing it from the energy center. Any damage to an energy center, damages the way your body takes in energy, and it is often permanent due to how slowly energy centers heal.

If the leech does not let go on it’s own, you will need to flood the leech with opposing energies to it’s natural energy alignment. This means you will need to have scanned the leeches system beforehand, or you have to do it now. If the leech is well warded/protected, using healing/high-vibrational/reiki/life energy is a safe bet for weakening it since energy leeches seem to be somewhat void aligned. Some leeches have very little void energy to them though, so life/healing energy is not necessarily always going to work every time. Drown the leech in opposing energies to it’s natural energy alignment until it lets go. Sometimes, with larger leeches you might have to do the do this several times overall a few sessions until it shrinks down small enough to pluck off or until it falls off.

When the leech has fallen off you can grab it carefully to avoid touching it’s energy centers and pull it out of the individual’s body. If the leech just won’t let go of the center after 2-3 sessions, go through this processes again isolating and drowning it until it’s lose and then pull it off the energy center. Make sure to tend to any damage to the center right away with energy that matches it’s function.

Once you have removed the leeches or have finished this session fix the flow of energy in their body and tend to any damages caused by the leech. In this case you will likely need to give the body back the energy the leech has been taking from it. Send a strong current of energy through the whole system letting it get it’s fill so it can heal. If you are finishing a session without removing a leech, connect the paths in a manner that gives that energy center enough energy to remain functional while depriving the leech of the ability to drain from other energy centers. Meaning, hook paths up to the center but do not have any pathways moving directly between the healthy centers and the leech affected one(s).

Hi there! If you’re here, that means you most likely don’t know how to read tea leaves, or perhaps you could use some more tips? Regardless, you’ll find all of that here! This guide will be pretty all-encompassing, so bear with me!

What is tea leaf reading?

Tasseography, better known as reading tea leaves, is the process of divination using tea leaves. When done properly, the tea leaves will show an image (even if vague) that will symbolize the answer to a question the reader asked. The image can tell the future or just give advice; depending on the question.

How does one read tea leaves?

This is definitely a more involved question, but here’s how I do it; step by step.

1. First, brew your cup of tea. It can be any flavor. But if you are reading for someone else, you may want to let them choose the flavor (I like to do this). However, if you can’t choose a flavor, black tea is pretty standard as the dark color of the tea makes it easier to read.

2. Now, drink your tea. If it is a loose leaf tea, try to drink as little of the leaves as possible. If it is a bag, leave the bag steeping in there and drink. Don’t drink it all, though, leave a little liquid in (not very much at all.)

3. At this point, if you used a tea bag, you’re going to want to open the bag and let the leaves pour into the little amount of liquid there is left.

4. Now, at this point I like to rotate the cup clockwise three times. You can rotate it any direction and as many times you want. You don’t even have to rotate it at all if you don’t want to.

5. Now, you’re going to place a saucer or plate over the top of the cup. Tip the cup over so that most of the liquid and leaves spill onto the plate/saucer.

6. Now, you will see some leaves left in the cup. These should make an image. Although it may be abstract, it’ll be there, even though it might take a while for you to see it.

7. Now it’s time for you to interpret your image. You can either look up the symbology of the image you saw or do your own interpretation based on your own personal associations.

8. Now focus on where the image is. Is it at the top, bottom, left, right, right by the handle? The placement shows what time the interpretation will happen. I will attach an infographic to give a better idea of what I’m talking about here.

And there you have it!! This is how I do my tea leaf readings. It does take some practice, but once you get a hang of it, you’ll only get better.

~Aster-Monroe

Before you can ask a good divination question, you have to know what divination is. 

Back in the day, the purpose of divination was to discern the will of the gods: Will you drop a plague of locusts on my people if I cross this river with a band of five hundred armed warriors? If I sail with the next tide, will one of your one-eyed children stomp my boat to splinters? Is that my bloody armor you’re washing in the river, Morrigan, or Bobby’s?

Life was short and bloody, and when the odds were a coin toss between you getting the sweating sickness or someone else, it was really easy to believe that fate was all-powerful and that choice didn’t really have anything to do with how your life went.*

This enshrined a sort of divination question that makes it sound like whether or not you get married is entirely up to Cupid.

But this type of god-cam future prediction isn’t, fundamentally, what divination is for. 

Divination is a problem-solving tool.

There’s a common saying in the magic(k)al communities that you should do what you can to solve your problems at the mundane level before you turn to magic. If you put your resume on the internet, your sigil spell will have a much easier time finding you a job. Brushing your teeth is an essential element of every charm spell.  

Divination is magic(k), so the same rules apply. It is a tool to help you figure out what actions you should take to solve your problems. 

Even if the divination method you’re using is (like astrology) one that is deeply concerned with understanding yourself, that understanding isn’t just so that you can type people in coffeeshops who annoy you and smilie smugly to yourself. As fun as that is.

The picture divination tools gives you of yourself is fundamentally pessimistic because it’s focused on your problems.

So you can fix them.

That’s why everyone knows that Taurus is lazy and Aquarius is weird and Gemini won’t stop talking and Pisces is so serenely spiritual it wanders out into traffic. 

It’s so that Taurus can get off its ass and Aquarius can learn how to tie a tie (before it sets it on fire) and Gemini can learn to listen before someone remembers where the duct tape is and Pisces can learn to take its headphones out of its ears before it crosses train tracks. 

Even evolutionary astrology, which emphasizes that each of the signs and planets is a collection of good and bad qualities, focuses on the “karmic predicament.” 

Every good divination question asks, “What do I do?”

This is why “When am I getting married?” is a bad question and “Should I propose with the ethically sourced diamond or my beloved’s favorite crystal?” is a good one. 

This is why my past life readings aren’t just a funny little story about what you were up to before you were dead last time and always contain a bit of advice. 

The fundamental assumption in a divination reading is that life sucks, and you want to know why, and you want to make it suck less if possible.

A good question is one that asks what the current situation is, why it is the way it is, and what you can do to make it better.

Construct your questions that way, and you’ll be shocked how long your to-do list gets.

Source: u/Rimblesah on r/witchcraft

Frequently, whenever someone describes a magickal practice and they talk about a step involving direct energy work, someone else will ask how they can learn to do energy work themselves. Here is a complete set of exercises designed to bring anyone into full mastery of energy work.

What do I consider full mastery? The ability to move large amounts of energy from one moment to the next, over prodigious periods of time, with exceptional and fine-tuned control, coupled with the ability to sense energy in the environment with enough clarity to not only feel the energy but (in the case of enchantments, etc.) sense what the energy has been programmed to do. If I’ve just described you, you can stop reading; there’s nothing in the following for you. Finally, what follows is almost certainly not the only way to develop mastery. Keep that in mind if you hit a wall.

101: Freshman

The following is for those who have never felt energy.

Spend 2-3 seconds focusing your mind so that there isn’t anything on your mind except how you’re focusing your mind.

Hold your hands in front of your waist close together, like you’re holding a small ball not much bigger than your hands.

Visualize white light emerging from your body and flowing down your arms into the space between your hands, forming a ball. Start with imagination, but kick it up a level, projecting onto it a heightened level of reality, where you are mentally making that light energy more and more real, more and more substantial, with substance.

See that substantial light energy accumulating between your hands, becoming thicker and more intense as you continue to pump more light energy into it. Every ounce of light energy you cause to flow into that ball of light is captured, none drifts off or gets absorbed back into your hands. It’s just getting thicker and thicker, more and more real.

If you’re doing this with your eyes closed, build the intensity of your visualization so high that you practically feel like if you peeked you would see glowing energy in your hands. If you’re doing this with your eyes open, put so much intensity into it that you feel like you’re on the verge of seeing the same type of flickering distortion that you see with a heat mirage.

Spend several minutes pumping more and more real light energy into the ball between your hands. Feel it grow as the intensely packed energy struggles to expand. Let it grow a bit bigger without moving your hands, so that the energy ball encompasses your hands.

Let it grow thicker and thicker, more and more intense, more and more dense, more and more real.

Eventually, your hands will feel a physical sensation. About 85% of people will perceive a feeling akin to static electricity. About 15% of people will perceive heat. I’ve met one person who felt a different sensation that she could only describe as “spikey” but not painful. Whatever sensation you feel, this will NOT be something you imagine or project; it is not part of the visualization exercise. It is a side effect of the visualization exercise. It is the nerves in your hands responding to the magick energy surrounding them. Magick energy is just as objectively real as wind or radiation, and your nerves can feel it. Triggering that physical sensation is the goal of this exercise. It indicates success. If someone else is around and they place their hand between your hands, they too will feel the energy. They might feel static whereas you feel heat, because different people’s nerves get triggered in different ways, but it’s objectively real, and you are controlling it.

Whether you get energy dense enough to physically feel or not, when you are done, bring your hands to your chest and visualize absorbing the light energy back into your body. Feel it diffuse effortlessly and easily back through your body.

If at first you don’t have success, keep at it. If you do have success, keep at it–trying to build up a ball of energy that triggers physical sensation more quickly with further practice.

201: Sophomore

The following is for those who can move energy but have never done anything with it.

Build a tangible ball of energy in your hands.

Next, put an idea of happiness in your head, like the giddy overwhelming happiness of a little girl who just got a pony from her daddy.

Project that flavor of happiness into the energy in your hands. Feel the energy morph into the essence of that happiness. This isn’t hard; energy responds to mental control, that’s how you got the energy into your hands in the first place. It is even easier to imprint and resonate with a state of being that you assign it than it is to move into your hands.

Next, lift the giddy-happy ball of energy to your forehead and push it into your head, not naturally absorbing it back into yourself but rather infusing your head with the giddy happy energy. Note what happens with your emotions.

The next time you decide to make a ball of energy, do the same thing, except this time infuse the ball of energy with the type of deep satisfaction happiness that the father experiences upon seeing her little girl so happy with the pony. Note the difference in the resulting emotions.

Next time, only put about half the amount of energy into your hands that you need to trigger physical sensation. Infuse it with happiness (whichever flavor you want) and put it into your head. Note the differences that only using half the energy creates.

Next time, supercharge your ball of energy, putting more energy into it than you’ve ever done before. Give it a happiness flavor of your choosing and put it into your head. Note how the effect is different from previous exercises.

Next time, put the standard amount of energy into your hands, but instead of thoroughly attuning each and every ounce of energy with happiness energy, spend just a second or two aligning the energy, so that it’s nowhere near as clear of an imprint as before. Put it into your head, see the difference.

The next time, attune the energy as it’s flowing down your arms, rather than waiting to attune it after it’s gathered. Practice this until it’s second-nature.

Experiment. Explore. Try different emotions. Try different variables with what you’re doing. See what happens if you try two emotions simultaneously. Have fun with it. Learn. If you have a partner to work with (or a spouse who doesn’t mind being a guinea pig), try putting the energy ball into their head and ask them to describe the change in emotion they feel. (Don’t do this if they’re a skeptic; their belief will affect the energy just as certainly as yours will; and if they don’t believe in this stuff they could subconsciously neutralize the emotion in the energy in order to preserve their world view.)

ONCE YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY ALTERED YOUR OWN EMOTIONS USING THIS TECHNIQUE, YOU SHOULD BE COMBINING ENERGY WORK WITH RITUAL–any time you need to charge up a candle or oil or piece of paper or sigil or “put your intent” into something or whatever, either pump it full of pre-attuned energy or pump it full of neutral energy and then attune it, depending on where you are in your development. The attunement, of course, should be whatever role that item is supposed to play in the ritual. If you’re charging a candle to bring peace into a troubled relationship, imprint the energy with “peace in the relationship”.

301: Junior

The following is for those who have used energy to effect change but want to enhance control.

The following are ideas to enhance your ability to work with energy. Once you’ve got the gist of the exercises presented here, feel free to come up with your own.

3-D Geometry: Instead of making a ball of energy, make a cube. Or a cylinder. Or a pyramid. Or… whatever. You get the idea. Don’t worry about attuning it. Focus on giving it sharply-defined edges and smooth surfaces. This is about precision. The more precise you can control energy, the more impact your magick will have, ounce per ounce.

Bouncing Ball: Make a ball of energy. Then make it rubber. Then throw it at a wall, and see what happens. Ricochet it off the floor into a wall, or off a wall into the ceiling. This is ridiculously fun. Remember, no matter how crazy the trajectory of the ball, it’s still under your mental control so you should be able to catch it no matter what crazy trajectory it starts off with.

Permanency: Create a ball of energy. Put it on the table. Tell it to stay. Then stop focusing on it. A minute or so later, find it and pick it up. Stick it to a wall and tell it to stay. Go into the other room and then come back again. Find it. Stick it under the table and come back an hour later and find it. Then stick it on the ceiling, go to sleep and find it the next day.The purpose is to learn to feel energy that isn’t under your direct control.

Environmental Energy: After doing the Permanency exercise above, branch out. It’s a little easier to feel energy that’s being/been used for magickal purposes, but the fact is, you’re surrounded by energy, each with its own vibe. Reach into the earth and draw up energy into your hand. Notice how it feels different than the neutral energy you create. Attune it to match your personal energy’s vibe (essentially making it your energy) and then absorb it into yourself. Pull energy out of the air, out of a fire or body of water. Pull it out of plants and trees. Try pulling it out of a pet or wild animal. Notice the difference. Pull it out of a wall, the tires of a car….

Environmental Energy During Ritual: Once you’ve played around a bit with the Environmental Energy exercise above, the next time you’re doing ritual, try setting up two energy flows: one drawing energy into you from the earth (or air or whatever you find easiest) and the other pushing attuned energy out into whatever purpose you want. Notice how you can become mentally fatigued if you do this for an extended period of time but the energy level in your body doesn’t deplete from having done magick. Use this whenever you’re doing rituals requiring a lot of energy.

3-D Geometry, Bounding Ball and Permanency with a Partner: If you’re learning magick with a partner, get them involved in these exercises. For example, one person makes a shape and the other tell them what shape they sense.

401: Senior

This is for people that want to become badass with magick.

Energy work has three facets: strength/power (being able to handle larger and larger amounts of energy in any given moment), endurance (being able to handle energy flow for longer and longer periods of time before mental fatigue sets in) and precision (developing an ever-increasing degree of precise control with the energy).

Increase your strength/power by practicing moving an increased volume of energy. Attune it to something like “world peace” or “community happiness” or something along those lines–it doesn’t help to be able to move massive amounts of energy if you can’t attune it, but the point isn’t really to effect change, it’s to increase skill. Push the envelope whenever you do this type of exercise–maximum volume of attuned energy for 20-30 seconds. Get bigger and bigger.

Increase your endurance by practicing moving an easily managed amount of energy as long as you can. You’ll obviously want to draw energy into you while you push energy out. Again, attune it so something that would do the world some good but not something you specifically need in your life, because you should be focused less on the attunement and more on holding the energy flow steady. Go longer and longer.

Increase precision by doing the 3-D Geometry exercise with more challenging objects, for example a star or cross or (later) snowflake. Also practice precision by using highly detailed imprinting on the energy you create. The difference in happiness between the little girl and the father with the pony from the earlier exercise is an example, but make the changes more subtle–an 8 year old’s reaction versus a 13 year olds, or an 8 year old boy’s versus an 8 year old girl’s, things like that.

Also, start doing ritual magick without the ritual. Start out with more simple and straight-forward rituals, for example instead of doing a ritual with candles and oil or whatever to make your boss like you, just create a large pool of “like me, boss” energy sitting over your boss’ head that will flow down into him/her whenever they think about you. Reserve ritual for times when you’re doing more complex workings or just want to enjoy the occulty nature of ritual, but at least occasionally, do real magick that you care about simply by sending out a bunch of energy that you’ve attuned to your purpose.

501: Post-Graduate

This is for people who want to be able to tell what others’ energy is supposed to accomplish.

I can’t think of a way to pursue this level of energy mastery without a partner, so get a partner.

Create a pool of energy to go do something important to you, but instead of just sending it out into the world, place it in a temporary holding field in the air above you. Then have the other person sense the energy and try to identify, with increasing precision, exactly what the energy is supposed to do. Once they’re done, release the energy to go do what it’s supposed to do. If you don’t have things important to you, do “make the world a better place” spells or silly things like, “make my wife snort the next time she laughs”. But whatever it is, make it as real of a spell as though you were doing really important magick. The point is to make it a serious spell with serious and clear energy imprinting so that the other person can learn on real spells how to tell what energy has been programmed to do.

With this level of mastery, for example, if a witch gives you a pendant as a gift, you can tell if the stone in the pendant has been enchanted and if so, what the purpose is.

So in the last couple of days I have been thinking a lot about my personal experiences of spiritual manipulation/abuse after discovering a fandom blogger I followed has a long history of running cults [I kid ye not, the story is amazingly complex and off-the-scale horrible].

Consider this a PSA that these people are out there. There are people who will use spiritual beliefs and/or practices as a tool of manipulation and abuse against others. There are people who will undermine your sense of reality and your mental health for their own ends.

Some red flags from my own experience: NB: a red flag is not saying this person IS abusive, it is just a potential warning sign to be aware of. Not an exhaustive list. Abbey Stone’s blog, linked in the post about the cult stuff above talks about similar tactics to some of these in detail.

Under a cut for length. Content warning for discussion of abusive and manipulative tactics, my personal examples of same, brief mentions of self-harm and suicide, mentions of ableism.

Fair warning, this is probably going to be one of those posts that pisses a number of people off. It’s also long and rambly.

So many asks I’ve gotten on here have been about how people think XYZ kind of magic is dumb because it’s something new. Emoji magic, cleansing spray bottles, and even the infamous wet-wipe magic. I’ve made it clear multiple times that I won’t look down on someone else’s magic just because I didn’t think of it.

But elitism in Witchcraft goes through so many of these sub-communities. If you’re not “academic” enough or you use words a certain way, your not taken seriously- which ties directly into classism. The entire reason I write is to put out information that either isn’t out there, isn’t talked about, or isn’t celebrated and make it accessible and reader friendly. I recently got a series of strange responses on a post that boiled down to “you don’t know how semantics work and this makes me angry!” They said I was ignorant of my own culture because of a wording choice. Toting that you are an “academic”, an initiate of a certain tradition, or follower of a certain path does not make you better than anyone else.

Our words, meanings, and Magic’s are different. That has always been true and always will be true. I see so many creative uses for everyday things on here all the time that I would have never thought of. It falls under “new age” or pop-culture magic and gets shit on immediately. Stifling someone else’s creativity or expression because you personally don’t like it doesn’t make you elevated, it makes you an asshole.

So use Pokémon cards as tarot if it works (it probably fucking will) and cast curses with windex, and always experiment with what works and what doesn’t. Be bold. Look to whatever you can to adapt to. And if you find yourself getting hot and bothered because someone is using cleaning supplies in magic, or uses the wrong possessive pronoun, take a deep breath and use that energy somewhere else instead of hollering at people.

Last year on the first anniversary of the Pulse Massacre, I performed a ritual in remeberance of those murdered. I read their names and reflected on what it means to be Queer (my personal identification) and a member of the LGBTQA+ community. I prayed for the souls of the dead, for their peace, their power, and their guidance. Last night, I repeated that ritual this year, praying for the souls of those Family members who’ve been lost in the last year and praying for the guidance of our LGBTQA+ Ancestors again. This is a ritual I really want to continue and hopefully one day I’ll stop having souls to add to the list. I chose last night for the fact that in Gaelic Polytheism, days start at sunset as well as the fact that the only reason the date of the massacre was June 12 was because it happened after midnight.

Last year I used assorted prayer candles to make the rainbow, but time got away from me this year. I randomly found some children’s picninc cups in a rainbow assorted pack and they worked really well with votive candles! So that’s also an option if anyone else ever wants to try somethin similar. That said, I do prefer the prayer candles, so I’ll be stockin up before next year. But here’s a pic for the idea. The leaves are the leaves that feel off my jade plant recently and I decided the symbolism was appropriate.

Yes, I definitely do!

Seiðr is very much a large framework within both my personal and spiritual/religious practices. Because of my devotion to it, I have thus collected a myriad of books and websites as resources to develop my own dogma on the subject and for reference. 

A lot of what we know about the practice is basically reconstruction from archaeology, historian research, Edda, many other primary allusions and today’s Heathens who have written collective-gnostic/ adherent works on seiðr-craft. 

This, along with various other constructs and rites that pertain to Norsk “sending” and trance work. 

My Personal Seiðr Sources:

Books:

Poetic Edda by Snorri Sturluson 

Seidr: The Gate is Open by Katie Gerrard

Seidways by Jan Fries

Hyge-Crft:Working with the Soul in the Northern Tradition by Diana L. Paxson

Spae-craft, Seidr and Shamanism by Kveldulfr Gundarsson

Northern Mysteries and Magick: Runes & Feminine Powers by Freya Aswynn

The Norse Shaman: Ancient Spiritual Practices of the Northern Tradition by Evelyn C. Rysdyk

Websites & Articles:

http://www.freyja.org/seidr.htm

http://seidh.org/articles/seidh/

http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/seidhr.shtml

http://www.northernshamanism.org/altered-state.html

http://freya.theladyofthelabyrinth.com/?page_id=255

http://bonekindred.weebly.com/seidhr.html

https://hubpages.com/religion-philosophy/Seidhr-Battle-Magic-of-the-Norse

You’re already aware that you can’t visualize things in your head. Either that or it’s very hard for you. I feel you. I’m right there with you. Because of this I’ve been unable to understand energy work for the longest time. So I thought I’d try to go into some other ways we “imagine” things in our minds eye if we have no concept of visuals in our heads. These are just ideas to get you started and to hopefully come up with some methods of imagining that work for you. ✋Touch: Think about what your energy work feels like. Does it flow? Drip? Does it feel like smoke or liquid or a solid? Does your energy feel hot or cool? Or is it warm and fuzzy? Does it feel like floating in the ocean with the cold waves around you and the hot sun beating down on your skin? What about a waterfall, icey cold and beating down upon your head and shoulders? How about a warm fuzzy blanket, wrapped around your whole body so you’re nice and comfy?