DumbVulture

It was an experiment with seaweed.

Hello! Here’s another installment of my huge #annobib series of book recommendations. 

This article focuses on books about spirit work in particular! If you’re at all interested in working with spirits, do peruse these works - you may find something you like!

Spirit Conjuring for Witches, by Frater Barrabbas. Frater B. is a very learned and rather famous magician and witch. This book is mostly geared towards Wicca, but even if you’re not Wiccan, his techniques are innovative and interesting, many utterly unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere! 

Familiar Spirits, by Donald Tyson. Though geared towards ceremonialists, any practitioner can likely learn a thing or two from Tyson’s interesting stroll through the whys and wherefores of spirit work and thoughtform creation. This is by far the best book I’ve seen on the topic of familiar spirits.

Egregores, by Mark Stavish. The only book I’m aware of that focuses specifically on egregores, or human-crafted spirits that form from our endeavors and organizations. This book is not without it’s problems, though - it often takes a sensationalist tone, and can be a bit conspiracy-mongering. Still a good read!

The Witch’s Book of Spirits, by Devin Hunter. Mr. Hunter is always a treat, and does not disappoint here, with his easily-understood explanations of various spirit phenomenon and entities, how to contact and manage relationships with them. Best for beginners!

Spirit Speak, by Ivo Dominguez. An extremely dense and detailed book. Not recommended for beginners, but excellent for intermediate or advanced spiritworkers interested in taking their magick to the next level. Mr. Dominguez clearly has a great deal of experience to share.

Demons and Spirits of the Land, by Claude Lecouteux. This is another more advanced book, offering historical perspectives on land-spirits (also known as genius loci). It reads like a history textbook, not going to lie! But, it’s worth picking up!

Fairies: A Guide to the Celtic Fair Folk, by Morgan Daimler. Hands down, this is the best book I’ve found about the Gentry, and will get you started towards understanding Them. Daimler, as the title suggests, writes from a Celtic perspective, though.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll have a glance at some of these excellent books! Spiritwork is important to many of us, and if it interests you, why not explore more?

Please check out the rest of my huge series of book recommendation lists here on my blog - they’re all tagged #annobib! 

Tumblr keeps compressing this image to make the text look awful, so feel free to download the original here. Please credit back to me if you share outside of tumblr!

(Text description below)

Color Symbolism in Tarot

Red: vitality, strength, power, determination, passion, desire

Brown: stability, wholesomeness, earthiness

Orange: enthusiasm, encouragement, success

Gold: prestige, illumination, prosperity, consciousness

Yellow: joy, intellect, enlightenment (dull = sickness, jealousy)

Green: growth, harmony, freshness, fertility, hope, inexperience

Teal: inner nature, spiritual grounding, emotional balance

Blue: trust, loyalty, truth, knowledge, spirituality, serenity

Purple: wisdom, luxury, nobility, dignity, creativity

White: light, the unconscious, new beginning, wholeness

Black: the unknown, inner fears, unexpressed potential

Grey: neutrality, impartiality, apathy, indifference

Absolutely! I was never really naturally good at drawing, and I don’t think anyone really is, it just all comes with practice. And a lot of the time it doesn’t feel like you’re moving forward very fast, either. 

want it

see years ago my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, and as happens with progressing cancer her mobility was drastically reduced. To help combat this and allow her to retain independence at home Papa (my grandfather) got a shower chair. This is about as self-descriptive as it can get, it is a chair made of metal and plastic that sits in your shower or bathtub. I’m sure those with physical disabilities are already quite familiar with them, for those of you that aren’t just google it.

Eventually my grandmother passed. A couple years after my dad had to stay at Papa’s house for a couple weeks, for his own medical reasons. While there he discovered that Papa had kept the chair. And while Papa was old he was hardly infirm, he didn’t use a cane or have any severe mobility issues. Certainly none that would have affected his ability to stand in the shower. The conversation went more or less as such:

Dad: Why they hell did you keep the shower chair, dad? You don’t need it

Papa: Kevin, you wait until you use it. Then you’ll know why I kept it.

My dad was disbelieving tbh, to him chairs in showers when you don’t need them was a thing that like. Lazy rich people had. wtf could be so great about being able to sit in the shower? Why would an able-bodied person even need to? it’s a fucking shower? wash urself and then get out. Then he used the chair, and according to him it was like he’d had a proper religious revelation. Shortly after his return home (tbh the amount of time it took for him to take a shower sans chair) my dad went out and bought a shower chair.

The ensuing conversation with my mother went as such:

Mom: Kevin why did you buy that? We don’t need it!

Dad: Just use it once, this will change your life.

And it did. After using the chair for the first time my mom straight up wanted to know why they had never thought to get a chair for the shower before. Ever since we have had a chair in the shower.

It has proven itself invaluable.

Exhausted but covered in grime from yardwork so you HAVE to wash before doing anything else? shower chair

Don’t have the spoons to stand in the shower? shower chair

Leg/hip/back injury slowly getting worse over time making standing for long periods a difficult matter? shower chair

Home from work and just want to shower but your feet are killing you? shower chair

can’t keep your balance when masturbating in the shower? shower chair

want to write fic in ur head without your feet starting to hurt because you maybe spent a little too long standing there in spray? shower chair

disassociating? shower chair

gotta shave your legs? shower chair

crying because you’ve now realized how much easier being able to sit down and prop up a leg makes shaving while in the shower? shower chair

I have no current mobility issues, and yet if I had to move house tomorrow a shower chair of my own would be one of the first things I purchase for my own home.

You all know how big a rabbit is.  Jack Rabbits and hares are much bigger. they’re the size of large cats or small dogs or just-walking-age children.

They also like to hang out in gangs of a hlf dozen to over 30.

and in the middle of backcountry dirt roads.

perhaps they’re dustbathing

or blood sacrifce

I don’t know because when you come up the road at night because your dog has a tiny bladder and needs to go out at midnight and you have no yard so you’re walking him on the dirt road around your neighborhod because you might aw well get some stargazing in, and you come just over the ridge to see a coven of twenty jackrabbits in the middle of the road

and

they

all

stand

up

not just onto all fours like a proper prey animal

No they get up on thier hind legs and don’t just sit but STAND like tiny rabbit-skinned toddlers, wobbing slightly as they stare directly at you eyes shining in your flashlight’s glow

…Blood Red.

And a chill goes through you on that warm july night because while they’re a puntable size and allegedly herbivores they’re standing and watching you just like people and you are vastly outnumbered.

everyone freezes

you’re considering your odds aganst roughly 200lbs of Suspiciously Humanoid Hare

and they’re considering their odds against you

the only sound in the never-ending high desert wind 

somewhere in your peripheral vision you can see the streetlights but they seem awfully far away

The nearest Jack Rabbit

Blinks

and takes a single shuffling step

forward

You area an overdevloped monkey and your prefrontal cortex is capable of some amazing feats but it runs very slowly compared to the reflexes of a rabbit and you’re frozen as you desperately scramble for the appropriate course of action, hands feeling thick and useless, mouth dry and feet imeasurably heavy there’s no way you’d outrun THESE, god there’s a rabies outbreak going around that shit’s not curable-

The Dog

L U N G E S

It’s only the briefest of movements but the animal you’d picked out for his gangly legs and floppy ears and goofy smile is suddenly a dark shape of muscle and teeth and had flung himself at the horrible goblin rabbits faster than mere physics should dictate, appearing in the circle of the flashlight for only the briefest of moments before the jolt from the leash makes you stumble and the light falters

The Jack Rabbits

Scatter

Vanishing into the faintly starlit sagebrush in as so many faint gray shapes that might be mistaken for the dustclouds they kick up

Later, you sit on the couch disquieted

and you wonder

If the sight of the Jack Rabbits standing and studying you was frightening enough to make you yearn for the safety of the yellowed streetlights

what must it be like from thier end?

what terrifying creature 

deliberately ties itself

to something so horrible