exploring the craft

They say once one is a witch, they’ll always be a witch, but I think that’s silly and it’s more that people miss that connection to the strange and unusual.

Why are you pulling away? From what are you pulling away? What brings you back?

This is Miss Nicole. Her hobbies include being an immense asshole.

This is Beatrice, who likes to help me by sitting on my notebook.

This was Dolce as a baby. He was an alien. Now he’s just fabulous. 

This is Patches and she gives the best hugs.

This is Allegra. She is a geriatric sweetheart, and has been my faithful companion for over 15 years.

Virtual candles (seriously, I have a free candle app on my android phone and it’s amazing. You can change the colour of the candle/smoke/background, blow or “pinch” out the flame, change the height of the flame… It’s amazing.) (There’s also the witch school virtual candles page - if you can stand it!)

I’m frustrated with people who want “their” cultural symbols handed to them on a silver platter. They want to “reclaim” things that were never anything except Nazi symbols, like the 12-spoked black sun or the symbol of a Nazi volunteer militia, yet they can’t be bothered to figure out what runes Vikings used. Nazis say “here are the symbols of our ancestral heritage (that are a bunch of crap we made up) and you all go “give it back!” When it comes to the runes they took 1,500 years of tradition and steamrolled it. It could never have been any other way. Nationalism is the enemy of culture. They cannot coexist in harmony. Nationalism is piss on the graves of our ancestors.

I keep seeing people say that they want to reclaim the runes, but you can’t reclaim something that was never yours. And if your conception of the runes is coterminous with Nazi use of them, then it is shallow, superficial, not worth saving, the death of tradition with a few half-rotten specimens preserved pinned under glass.

I know it’s hard when you don’t know who you can trust. We wouldn’t be in this situation without wolves in sheep’s clothing sneaking lies between a handful of facts to distract you (Thorsson/Flowers). We have a lot of work to do uprooting the deceit that lies at the core of modern heathen reception of the runes. Now’s a good time to start. Since the part of the problem that’s most active on everyone’s mind regards visual perception of symbols of Norse and Germanic culture this is gonna focus on that, with lots of pictures.

~ Get excited, kids, it’s runology time ~

Nazis didn’t take “runes,” they took an aesthetic more or less from the Gallehus horn.

This one particular object has runes that happen to appeal to their sense of aesthetics and as a result became “the” runes, and all of you people fell for it. They’re into straight lines because there were Nazi philologists who thought runes were the original writing system that the Mediterranean alphabets ripped off (echoing Johan Bure in the 16th century). The straight lines reminded of their origin in ancient rock carvings (rather than the truth, that their origin is in the (Semitic) Phoenician alphabet via something else like Latin, Greek, another Italic alphabet, or perhaps even with direct influence from a Semitic source). They were considered a symbolic mystical system first, that later achieved some utility as a writing system. The pristine geometric shapes reflect their archetypal mystical nature (specifically within the “Ariosophical” (racist) Armanen system of runes based on a “hexagonal crystal structure”). And I guess these blocky slabs are “manly” or something.

So yeah, it relates to an actual inscription but it’s just an aesthetic. I know this because I can do this:

These are Latin letters that “look like runes.” The only problem is, they don’t. They look like one inscription that reads “I, Hlewagastiʀ Holtijaʀ, am a huge fucking bigshot who drinks out of gold.” The non-runologist part of me is glad his shit got stolen and melted down.

Most of this goes for the other widely-visible variant – the same thing but with thin lines (like tawido at the end above). Those are somewhat better represented in the runic corpus but it’s not because that’s what runes “are,” it’s because it’s easier and not everyone is a professional. I’m still gonna attack the idea that these are in any way prototypical. In fact I believe that for most (but not all) rune-carvers rounded runes were the prototype, and when this wasn’t adhered to it was for stylistic or utilitarian reasons.

Runes that don’t follow this aesthetic – which is most actual runes – will not even be recognized as runes by most people.

The rest is long and full of images so I will save your dash but the punchline is that if you want to save the runes from Nazis the first step is knowing them – not as the Nazis conceived of them but as they exist in the wild, because then you realize that what was taken was nothing compared to what we rob ourselves of by falling for imposter “tradition.”

I get similar questions a lot. My best advice is that you should strengthen your own means of magical self defense. I don’t know your skill level, so please forgive me if this is too obvious.

Learn a banishing ritual and practice it daily. At least until you feel the presence is gone.

Learn goetia. Seriously, learn to deal with these entities on your terms. You may find out they aren’t all that scary. 

Even if you don’t feel all that powerful, don’t let them know that. Speak from a place of authority. If you really suspect a malevolent spirit is influencing you, find out what you can about it and then tell it to fuck off.

If you ever see a spell from someone on here and they say to “blow out the candle” avoid them

You are NOT supposed to blow a candle out because it’s like blowing what you’re asking for away.

So I planned to actually scan this and make it cleaner but honestly if I waited any longer it may never get done haha. This method of making sigils is really really versatile, and really great if you’re trying to keep your craft lowkey since you can easily pass them off as just doodles! :)

Some things to keep in mind:

• Any alphabet/lettering system will work, as well as any orientation! Make it a circle, make it with only vowels, make it with more than one of each letter. Its up to you!

• The steps of connecting the dots & drawing in stars are interchangeable. You can connect first just as well as you can make the stars first, whichever you prefer!

• You don’t NEED to make them stars. Make them hearts, just dots, something that appeals to you personally & fits your needs. I sometimes make the stars colored on letters only used once, and open on ones used multiple times.

So, I hope I haven’t missed anything and maybe I’ll put forth a larger effort to make a more coherent guide at some point!

Have fun & thank you for reading! xoxo

Buy from a rock store. Their prices will be more fair than going to a metaphysical shop and most of the time a rock store’s rocks are coming from mines in the area or other rock stores that have local mines.

Prime example of metaphysical shop inflation would be my black moonstones.

The whip (and the whistle) are traditional tools to call Petwo spirits, directly related to how colonial overseers used to draw the attention of enslaved Haitians working in sugarcane or tobacco. The cracking of the whip and the whistle call the lwa to work and to pay, as well as bring the heat.

The linked elbows is really about how those lwa work–the lwa that do that tend to be lwa that are concerned with strength, heat, resiliency, and backbone. That’s all the Petwo lwa, and sometimes Ogou will do that, as well as some Rada lwa (like Bossou–in that video, that was a Rada Bossou). They very much want to see how tough you are, if you can stand tall, and if you are resilient. Sometimes they want to show how tough they are, since the lwa are much stronger than we are when we are in our bodies. Sometimes they will swing a person around by the elbow and that will induce possession or moments when we otherwise end up out of our bodies.

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you). 

But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.

I just…yes. This. All of this. And then some.

You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to believe in it.

It’s a 50/50 chance it’s the government testing something, too. I swear to you China Lake is a lot more fucked than Area 51. They test shit on you. Chemtrails that are sunset-red all day, makes your skin crawl the next day.