Bitchcraft

I’ve been in a flareup all week and mudane efforts have barely helped so spells and sigils it is.

Migraine relief

Ease my neck pain

My back is relaxed and free of pain

My headache goes away

My pain is manageable

Every witch or herb grower (of approtiate age) should give a go at making their own gin! A delicious spirit (liquor) infused with Juniper Berries and a personal blend of botanicals. A perfect activity for the three days of the Full Moon phase. Especially since gin is a Moon spirit.

Two must have ingredients are

Neutral spirits (like vodka, or grain alcohol diluted to 40%abv)

Juniper Berries

Crafting your botanical blend:

Here’s where the fun part comes in. There are hundreds of different herbs, flowers, barks, seeds and roots that can be used to add flavor and magic to your gin. While the possibilities are endless the notes you are trying to hit are: Citrus, Green/Earthy, Floral, Spicy, (sometimes Fruity). Consider botanicals with these terpenes: camphor, pinene, b-caryophyllene, limonene, linalool

Most popular Gin Botanicals are: Corriander, Angelica, Orris Root, Cardamom, Licorice, Cinnamon, Citrus Peel (various).

Adding witchery, and what herbs, to your gin depends on your intent.

Making a libation: Add the bontanicals favored by your Deity.

An ode to the Moon: Juniper heavy, Anise, Orris Root, Thistle, Hibiscus, Borage

For a night cap: Lavender, Chamomile, Passionflower, Yarrow, Catnip, Rosemary

“Gin Kit” Blend: Cardamom, Rosemary, Lavender, Rose Hip, Allspice, Fennel Seed, Lemon Peel, Coriander, Black Pepper, Bay

Hub’s Blend: Juniper heavy, Orange Zest, Anise Seed, Black Pepper, Holy Basil

Personally when I drink alcohol I do it to feel good, so my botanical blend incudles “feel good” herbs. My personal blend below:

Garden Gin: Holy Basil, Chamomile, Lemon Balm, Lemon Verbena, Fennel, Coriander

And in the honor of our good freinds of Caledonia Spirits we add just a touch of Raw Honey to our gin.

How much or many botanicals you add is an experiment and personal preference. You can use fresh or dried, but dried herbs are more potent and so use less. And remeber gin is defined by its flavor of Junpier so keep that in mind when adding stronger flavors.

Method:

On the first night of the full moon, pour 750 ml of a neutral spirit over 2 Tbs of dried Juniper berries and let sit for a day. (adjust amounts in appropriate ratio for more or less)

During the peak of the full moon add botanical blend and again let sit for a day and out in the moonlight to charge. Let the full moon draw out all of the botanical oils to infuse the gin along with lunar energies.

On the Waining end of the full moon, after your botanicals have macerated for twenty four hours, strain the infused spirit into a clean bottle. Let this spirit charge once more under the full moon before consumption.

Then Enjoy!

**can be done over any 36-72 hour period but done with the moon for extra effect**

Reference: Decoding Gin Botanicals

I think there should be fewer stunts in films. I think extremely dangerous and complex feats of superhuman physical exertion should be reserved for animation. I think there are some things that stunt crews should just...not be made to do anymore.

Imagine a world where "no cast or crew were harmed in the making of this film" was considered a basic standard, and any production that couldn't meet it got investigated and held accountable if it proved necessary.

and also if we can just:

Hello all!

So my university is offering a 3-hour credit course which involves taking a two week trip to Ireland in January! Incredible! Amazing! What an opportunity! ... For people who can afford airline travel.

I am not one of those people!

I am hoping to raise about $2200 ($800 needed over the course of the next month) with the goal of covering all expenses posed by the school-organized portion of the trip along with some extra funds to allow me to make a trip to several of the holy sites associated with my deities!

For that purpose I am opening commissions of varying types! The prices listed are suggestions, I am (always) open to pay-what-you can! Send me a DM with what you have in mind and what your budget is and I'm sure we can figure something out!

Traditional Art

Watercolor Paintings: No background/Simple - $30 Detailed Portrait (bust) - $40 Detailed Portrait (full body) - $50 Involved Backgrounds/Complex - $60 +$20 per character +s/h and $5 for physical copy

Acrylic Paintings: No background/Simple - $40 Detailed Portrait (bust) - $50 Detailed Portrait (full body) - $70 Involved Backgrounds/Complex - $80 +$30 per character +s/h and $10 for physical copy

Woodwork Burned Sigil - $15 + s/h Full Size Ogham Set - $40 + s/h Mini Ogham Set - $20 + s/h Burned Art - (Price dependent on project)

Magic

Ogham Reading (3 tiles) - $5 Detailed/Complex Ogham Reading - $10 Custom Sigil - $5 Custom Seal - $10

DM me for details! I can also be emailed at [email protected]

As for the Imposter Syndrome:

I’m gunna make some Pop culture references so hang tight with me okay?

Tarot cards and memorization is a lot like when we were young and trying to learn about all 150 Pokemon from the anime. There’s a LOT OF THEM! One thing the Anime did to try and make it easier to learn them all was make a fun Rap about it that aired at the end of each episode. They would do 10-15 each episode and then instructed you to put all the rest of the days together to know each one. 

Repetition is easy. It gets you acquainted with them on a base level. So you can see and recognize each at face value when they show up in an episode. 

Seeing and knowing the Pokemon is great! Doesn’t make you a master but its still a start! Travelling around the world to catch them all means Researching where you can find them, What their weaknesses are, And the final part: Catching them and getting them logged in your pokedex where you can ALWAYS refer back to for all of that information. 

NOW: Does it make you a bad trainer to now have every single route’s pokemon memorized? No! It’s a REFERENCE! It’s there to help fill in those gaps so you’re not wasting your time trying to re-go through the information on your own when there’s 150 of them. Like Ash with his pokedex, even if he’s seen a pokemon before he STILL pulls out his pokedex to get tidbits of trivia and information about the pokemon! 

That’s you! You’re Ash Ketchum! Your Tarot Cards are your Pokemon! Sure you can have them all memorized on sight, but when it comes to the nitty gritty it’s not feasible to expect everyone and their mom to know the intimate details of every single card! Hence why you need the Tarot Equivalent of a Pokedex. That might be the Book that came with the cards, That might be your Grimoire you’ve written them all in yourself. 

I have read many poems and posts that try to subvert the original myth of the Rape of Persephone by giving her agency in her choice to stay with Hades and constructing a Persephone that is freed from the bonds of her mother and earthly society by coming into her own as a Queen of the Underworld. And it’s fine to reinterpret the myth that way, although it puts Hades in this position of savior, which is personally weird to me. But I was just reading this passage on the “Women of Archaic Greece: Talk in Praise and Blame” and it was mentioning how women were defined by their roles as marriage partners and how most homeric women were required to move out of their natal homes upon marriage and lose connections to their families and friends, to start over.

These women, like Persephone, were never consulted on whom they would be married to and when it would happen. In the myth, Zeus arranges her marriage without her and her mother Demeter’s knowledge or consent. The myth focuses largely on the fear and devastation that Demeter feels to have her daughter ripped away from her. I feel like by reinterpreting the myth so that Hades is this hot underworld god that sexily whisks Persephone away like à la Phantom of the Opera style, it is taking away from the fact that this myth is one of the only ones in a corpus of very misogynistic and sexist mythologies that actually addresses the pain and suffering women feel when they are forced away from each other as a result of marriage. 

And by the way, there are significant parallels in ancient Greek culture between marriage rituals and death rituals. The death of a young girl, in particular, carried echoes of marriage– the sense of wedding preparations turned into a funeral after Hades snatched the girl away. Epitaphs for virginal girls often referred to them as “brides of Hades”.

Both the wedding and funeral processions contained similar elements: a girl ritually washed and dressed, before boarding a chariot to take her from the home of her father to her new home (the house of her husband, or the house of Hades). The journey would be accompanied by song and burning torches (usually carried by the mother, in the case of the bride; and by the mourners, in the case of the dead girl).

The Rape of Persephone confronts these parallels: the lord of the dead himself takes Demeter’s daughter for a bride and Demeter grieves much as she might for a daughter killed. As she searches for Persephone, bearing a flaming torch, she unknowingly echoes the mother of the bride’s role in the wedding procession. (You can also see aspects of the wedding ritual in other elements of the myth – Hades giving Persephone the pomegranate seed, for instance, parallels the ritual of giving the bride fruit and nuts to eat upon arriving at her husband’s home.)

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter in particular dwells long on Demeter’s pain at the loss of her daughter, and her eventual coming to terms with Persephone’s new status as a married woman. We see her grief, her anger, her attempt to exact revenge by bestowing immortality on Demophoön (snatching a child away from Death, just as Death took her child from her). There’s another truncated retelling in Euripides' Helen that doesn’t mention Hades and Persephone’s marriage at all– it deals solely with the mountain mother (Demeter)’s raw grief at the snatching away of her child.

Alternate title: How Can I Be Confident My Readings Don’t Suck?

This is mostly written with tarot in mind, but I think the sentiment can apply to any type of in-depth divination or metaphysical readings. Here’s some things to look for in readings, and if you are charging a set price for your own readings, things to demand from yourself. 

The information provided in a reading should be…

Relevant to the querents’ needs. If somebody comes to you asking about a specific question or topic, the reading should be designed to reflect that. This may mean using a different spread or focusing on details of meaning more relevant to the question than the traditional baseline meaning. (Example, if a querent is asking about money and I’m picking up signs of a new romantic relationship coming soon, it shouldn’t turn into a love reading. Rather, how might entering a new relationship affect ones’ finances?)

Abundant. Anybody can go online and find a random tarot card picker with a general description or some key words. If you’re providing a compensated service, your interpretation should have more meat than that. Allow yourself to explain your thought process or speculate on a deeper meaning, instead of regurgitating key words. After all, that speculation and personal insight is what they’re paying you for, otherwise they’d just find the bot! (For reference, I’m trying to give each of these points about the same amount of depth I would want to see in a really good tarot reading for each card.)

Nuanced. A lot of us are afraid to get into the details and specifics of an answer because we’re afraid of being wrong, so we just stick to being vague. Throw that out the window. Right now. Being specific HELPS your reading be more accurate, believable, and helpful, because if we’re too conservative with our details it gives the querent nothing to grab onto. Go for the specifics, the details, the things that make the querent say, “okay, I know exactly what that’s talking about.” (Example, what sounds better: “There’s conflict in the future” or “There’s conflict here, my gut says probably butting heads with an authority figure you’ve known for a while. Neither of you is right or wrong, but you’ll just keep wasting your time if you don’t compromise.”)

Understandable. Keep in mind that most of your querents will probably not practice the service you’re providing, or if they do they may just be beginners. Don’t shroud your reading in convoluted, arcane talk. If you can, explain some of how you’re getting the answers you getting. That doesn’t mean divulging secrets to your practice, but something like, “These runes are so close together, which to me means they’re working together, and the synthesis of their meanings could mean X.” Really helps a querent feel involved and more confident in your skills as their interpreter. 

Applicable. Give the querent knowledge they can walk away with. If you’re doing all of the above steps this is probably happening anyway, but it’s important to keep in mind. You should always be able to answer the question: “What is the best next step for the querent to achieve their goals, once they leave this reading?”  What can they do right now to develop themselves, prepare for success, repair that relationship, etc? Do they have a game plan? Basically, they should be able to take the insight you have provided them with and apply it to their life in a productive way.  

NA MORRÍGNA

Alas, Elen of the Ways, a horned goddess who's usually depicted like this:

is entirely neopagan nonsense of the absolute highest, most stratospheric degree.

A fair marker for neopagan wankery is that if anything starts talking about Celtic horned gods / goddesses, it's almost certainly modern and completely inaccurate piffle. The idea of a horned deity / horned deities is attested in the historical record; there's a handful of iconographic depictions of such deities, but none are specifically named except for one, Cernunnos, who is named a grand total of once. Nowadays, a lot of neopagans witter on about how Cernunnos was a horned god of fertility who encompassed the whole quote-unquote Celtic world, but alas, Cernunnos may be the name of a very specific local deity, but he's certainly not a pan-Celtic fertility god.

This is a Danish example of a horned deity figure from the Gundestrup cauldron, but Cernunnos it ain't, although try telling that to the uwu Celtic crowd.

Although we tend to speak of 'Celtic culture' nowadays, that's a bit of a misnomer. For a start, it tends to encompass primarily Welsh and Irish myth, and sometimes Gaulish, which are absolutely not the same thing, nor are they interchangeable versions of each other. Even within those more discrete groups, deities were usually highly localised and linked to specific areas. So, like Cernunnos, the idea that there's a pan-Celtic / pan-British horned goddess called Elen is, alas, complete and utter shite.

Elen of the Ways is the name of a deity invented by Caroline Wise, a white neopagan 'priestess of the Fellowship of Isis,' who says she had a series of visions about a 'long-forgotten British goddess' and eventually 'found', presumably through pseudo-shamanism and definitely-real-deity-email-correspondence, that her name was Elen of the Ways. She also believes that Elen of the Ways is deeply linked to Celtic 'shamanic practices', which are vehemently not a real thing, and the flow of 'kundalini currents', which sound quite a lot like what happens when I eat too many lentils. Honestly, I would suggest that Caroline Wise needs to eat less cheese before bed, or at the very least stop ascribing complete bullshit to other people's cultures.

She attests that, because an Elen appears in the Mabinogi, she must therefore be a goddess. I've debunked that notion previously here, but in a nutshell, attempting to reconstruct Welsh religion based on the Mabinogi is a bit like trying to reconstruct a seven tier cake from a piece of one of the eggshells. Add that to the fact that apparently Elen is a horned goddess because 'female reindeer have antlers, just like male reindeer', and you have a whole extra level of arsery, because reindeer are not native to Wales.

It's also worth noting that the notion of 'the Ways' is not attested in actual Celtic myth, narrative or culture. There's a vague concept of the Otherworld as a realm which exists outside of our own, and which may also be a sort of Underworld or realm of the dead; in Welsh myth, for example, it's Annwn. The Otherworld is a sort of nebulous land which can only be accessed at certain times or via liminal spaces, such as the mouths of caves or bodies of water, and using specific ritual practices. If you try and access it without invitation from those who actually dwell there, then you're asking for a world of trouble, and you're likely to end up displaced in time or just good ol' dead. 'The Ways' as a series of ancient soul-paths, however, is not one of these Otherworld highways. The Otherworld isn't the sort of place you can access if you just learn the way there. In fact, one of the defining features of almost all depictions of the Otherworld is that you can't just rock up there of your own volition, no matter how well you might know the way.

Similarly, the Green Lady is almost entirely neopagan. Another good notifier of pseudo-Celtic sources is if they bleat on about nature and fertility and whatnot. Actual Celtic myth isn't like that at all. I say 'almost' for the Green Lady because there's some folklore, primarily Scottish but also very occasionally Welsh, which attests to a ghostly spirit which some refer to as the Green Lady (in Gaelic, she's the Glaistig.) However, it's folklore and not myth; it mostly dates from ghost stories of the 1800s at its earliest. There are multiple folk tales of 'Green Ladies' as a kind of riff on the Fairy folk, but any notion of the Green Lady as a goddess figure is, for most of the reasons described above, a load of old poo.

The reason this rankles so much for me is because there's such a fucking plethora of horse shite (and not just the 'Rhiannon was a horse goddess!' fuckery) out there about Celtic culture that it's almost impossible to learn about the real thing, without the colonial veneer of romanticised bumf and pseudo-theology. I absolutely hate the fact that most of what people 'know' about Celtic culture is reconstructed from the work of a couple of English dudes in the early to mid 1900s, and that most of it was gleaned through the genuinely offensive practice of mapping the few shreds of extant 'Celtic' culture onto the much more extensive existing record of Greco-Roman myth or other cultural corpuses. This idea that you can reconstruct a whole culture and mythos by just comparing what remains of it to other cultures and filling in the blanks is colonialism at its most infuriating; it's cultural erasure through revisionism, and I have absolutely no time for any of it.

Other dogwhistles for rooting out neopagan bullshittery from actual reliable sources:

if it mentions 'shamanism', it's wank. Shamanism is not an attested Celtic practice, and honestly, in most neopagan contexts it's an entirely offensive and homogenised representation of multiple appropriated and colonised cultures. The idea that modern neopagans can just do 'shamanism' and not bother to learn how it differs from culture to culture is white fuckery.

if it talks about mysticism or psychic practices, then it's absolutely wank.

if the only source is something like 'feministgoddessland', 'celticforestsprites' or 'ancientgoddesstribe' (not actual examples, but you get the gist) then it's absolute wank. If you can't find a single source for something beyond those neopagan sites, then it's because it originates in neopagan practice and doesn't have any historicity to it at all.

if it relies on Marija Gimbutas as a source, it's wank. Gimbutas' Mother Goddess / matriarchy theory is complete and utter anti-intellectual shite which I've debunked previously, but it's so fucking pervasive and it makes me want to throw things out of a window.

on a similar note, if it mentions Robert Graves and the White Goddess, it's unadulterated wank. If it mentions Druantia, it's wank. If it mentions the Celtic calendar / the tree calendar, it's wank. Any mention of Graves and his 'work' (I use the word very loosely) should set your alarm bells ringing so loudly that you fall off your chair.

if it talks about uwu fertility / nature / empowerment / female divine energy, it's modern girl-boss shite, and thus wank. Ancient Britain wasn't a matriarchy. Soz, all.

if it tries to homogenise all Celtic culture into one flat affect, then it's wank. Welsh =/= Irish =/= Gaulish, and so on and so forth. There's no such thing as pan-Celtic deities, and any source which speaks about deities as though they were worshipped throughout the entire perceived 'Celtic world' is talking through its arsehole.

if it has weird 'indigenous white people' undertones, then it's wank. Alas, a lot of Celtic myth, much like Norse myth, has been co-opted by white nationalists and supremacists, often to talk about an Ancient Britain ('Britannica', they like to call it) and how our little island should really only be inhabited by their descendants. In order to bolster their claim, they like to make up a load of shit, including myths about how Celtic people can, like, feel the land in their blood, or how the land calls us all back via our super Celtic nature deities. It's racist, and it's wank.

I've previously compiled a list of actual sources here.