Magic in Her Eyes

Yeeeeaaaah, it's an ongoing problem. Her books were wildly popular for over a decade and they're were widely marketed as THE Book To Have for beginner witches by Llewellyn, which was the heaviest of the heavy hitters in occult literature at the time.

The problem with Silver Ravenwolf is largely that she is wildly out of touch in a very New Age White Woman kind of way. Her books tout loads of misinformation, appropriation, and historical revisionism that are simply not acceptable (i.e. claiming victims of witch trials were actual pagan witches, citing a fictional ancient matriarchal goddess religion that never existed was the basis for Wicca, leaning into the hereditary superpowers / indigo child / starseed narrative, etc). Besides which, the theories she posits contradict each other from page to page and chapter to chapter, claims a Gardnerian lineage which can’t possibly exist, and trumpets Buckland’s personal theories on the Burning Times and interpretation of the Threefold Law as if they were fact.

And thanks to her runaway popularity, those of us who instruct and answer questions from newer witches have to UNTEACH all of this nonsense.

If it were simply a matter of being a product of her time, I could forgive some of the nonsense. But she’s still selling mammy dolls on her website, though she labels them as “primitive” and equates them to “positive voodoo dolls.” Yes, she's been confronted about this, and yes she doubled down. I don’t think I need to explain how gross and racist this is on SEVERAL levels. She's been given opportunities to show growth and self-work with regards to her work and simply refuses to believe that she was ever wrong about anything.

So, her books aren't entirely worthless by any means, but they require a LOT of critical reading and a strong understanding of actual history and science. Furthermore, she leans rather hard into a borderline cult mentality that boils down to, "Nobody understands you, but because you're drawn to witchcraft, you're SPECIAL, probably because of some ancient hereditary superpower, so don't worry - Mama Silver understands you. Also, there's no need to read further into anything, just take my word for it."

I would not recommend them for beginners, which is a problem because that's exactly the demographic her work is marketed toward. (Personally, I would not recommend them for anybody, but that's just my opinion.) They require so much effort to fact-check and unpack that it's almost not even worth the time and energy for whatever ideas and information you might actually find useful.

For more details, I suggest the following articles:

Continuing Anger Over Silver Ravenwolf

The Problem With Silver Ravenwolf

Making a supreme goddess figure part of your spirituality? Great! Worshiping a mother goddess? Wonderful! If that brings joy and meaning into your life, excellent!

Current books read more like compiled lists without any info on why a thing is (or was) done a certain way. Often I wonder - does the author really not know the origin of this practice or the theory behind it? Or are they simply avoiding any depth because they know what lies behind it but it's easier not to tell the reader?

This results in interesting debates on some subjects in the current environment because it soon becomes obvious that no one on either side of the debate really knows the origin of the practice being debated. But finding and comprehending that information is going to require looking in uncomfortable places.

Okay so i said i haven’t drawn hualian yet for the end of season 2, and thought “what stops me from drawing them right now?”

I was in a class with Danielle when she suffered a sudden health crisis and a diagnosis that changed her life. Since then she's been working with her local community to adapt her magical practice to meet her changing needs. The book is still on preorder so I haven't read it, but I expect it to go deeper than the "stir your tea clockwise for good vibes" advice I see so often.

Here's the situation.

Our refrigerator stopped working last week. We thought it was just the freezer at first but it turned out to be the whole unit. The repair guy said it was useless to try and fix it since they've stopped making the replacement part for this particular model.

The good news is, our home warranty will give us the money for a new fridge. The bad news is, for some INCREDIBLY stupid reason, they don't do direct deposit, so we have to wait about two weeks for the check to come by mail. And in the meantime, we have no cold food storage, so it's going to be takeaway or hitting up the market every day. And to make matters worse, the day before the damned infernal machine stopped working, I'd just done our monthly food shopping and two weeks of meal prep. We used what we could, but nearly all of it had to be thrown away.

If you're wondering whether I've invented any new swears lately, the answer is a resounding yes.

SO.

The replacement will hopefully be installed by the end of month, but we've still got to eat until then. To that end, I'm offering the following:

Simple Dream Interpretations (posted or private) for $5.00

3-card Tarot Reading (from The Golden Tarot) for $7.00

15% off your order from the Willow Wings Witch Shop with code FREEZE

All of this will be active until the replacement fridge is installed or the end of the month of November, whichever comes first. I may not get to all requests quickly, but I WILL respond to all paid requests.

For readings, please send payment via Paypal or Ko-Fi. Then message me by email or here on tumblr with your request! (Either of these is fine if you'd like to tip me for any previous work as well.)

When placing your order in the shop, be sure to include the coupon code FREEZE in the box with your items to get the discount.

Any and all help is deeply appreciated, including simple signal boosts. I'll be working a market in the meantime and hopefully that will help as well.

So syncretism is when cultural or religious traditions get merged into another religion, usually by customs getting carried over post conversion or colonization.

Like imagine a religion like Christianity comes into an area and mass converts people. And the people say "Oh yeah, we're Christian now -- for sure" but keep doing all of their cultural traditions. What happens over time is that those traditions get recontextualized into the new religion's framework.

It's not Christianity "stealing" them -- it's the cultures that were converted holding onto their traditions in spite of Christianity. The church wasn't deliberately trying to take them -- they just kind of got stuck with them. You get that with a bunch of Yule stuff with Norse and Germanic areas and Christmas.

So that's part of it.

The rest is that a lot of things modern folks claim are "Pagan" just... aren't? Like take the Christmas tree. Like we have clear documentation of its origin going back to German Protestants. Like we know when it started. Yet you'll see countless folks online (and badly written witchcraft books) claiming it's some ancient tradition to decorate a tree in your house. It just... isn't tho?

Something important to remember about a good deal of "classic" modern witchcraft literature is that it was written by people with an Agenda, and that agenda included trying to give modern pagan traditions a veneer of antiquity in order to make them seem more legitimate. In many cases, this means that historical records were cherry-picked, wildly (sometimes willfully) misinterpreted, or just ignored altogether if they didn't support the Ye Olde Ways narrative.

Some of the biggest talking points in this narrative revolve around Christians "stealing pagan traditions" and reworking them into their own calendar and canon. This completely ignores not only the entire concept of syncretism and the unreliability of the sources which make claims about ancient European (mostly Celtic) paganism, but also the known and documented origins of many holidays and their associated festivities. Christmas trees, the Easter bunny, Halloween jack o'lanterns, and any number of 19th-20th century traditions have been painted as "stolen" pagan rites, when in fact we know exactly when, where, and how they originated....and it wasn't in paganism.

(Also the "stolen from paganism" argument rarely seems to specify WHICH group of pagans these traditions were allegedly stolen from, instead seeming to indicate that paganism itself was some sort of specific religion or tradition rather than an umbrella term, and that sort of generalization is a pretty big red flag.)

If anyone is looking for a good resources on the topic, respected historian Ronald Hutton has written a number of books on the subject. They're a bit weighty, but they are excellent resources. In particular, I recommend the following:

Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain

Pagan Britain

The Stations of the Sun

I don't like the term "black magic" for like a ton of cultural reasons and implications, but we'll put that aside for the moment.

Magic, like a hammer, has no implicit morality. Destruction or creation makes no difference to the hammer. It's still just a hammer. Hammers don't judge because hammers don't care. They're hammers.

The only moral reckoning that's going to happen is from yourself.

@calesleftboobie Yep.

So the original idea of the law of return came from Gerald Gardner's fiction novel High Magic's Aid. In it, it's not some universal rule or misinterpretation of karma. It's just that if you do something to a Witch the Witch is supposed to do it back to you threefold.

Like as in "You hit me? Imma hit you three time!"

Now this is pre-invention of the rede and, again, in a work of fiction. And living like that would probably be exhausting. But, y'know, since it's just the witch doing a thing, it at least doesn't invent a mechanism in how the universe works.

Now after Gardner's death, Monique Wilson inherited his stuff. She was a Big Name Wiccan TM at the time, and she takes that idea from High Magic's Aid and turns it on its head. She starts telling people that the universe will return to you whatever you do many times over.

Raymond Buckland sees this, and goes "Aw shit, I'm telling EVERYONE," and it goes everywhere. Suddenly Gwen Thompson's inserting it into her shitty poem everyone mistakes for the rede. It's going out in books that end up in every beginner's hands. It's fucking everywhere.

But, like, it's never justified or explained. Wilson never tells anyone how she supposedly figured it out. And if you think about how the world works it doesn't make a damned bit of sense.

Reasoning why is just speculation, but the obvious seems to be PR. If we tack on this Western misinterpretation of karma to Wicca, it can seem more socially acceptable. "Oh, we don't hurt people because it would hurt US." But, like, it also disempowers the witch, right? Like a Wiccan witch then is following the rede not because they chose to, but because they're afraid of being spanked?

Fuck that.

Magic's a hammer. Hammers don't give a shit.

But sometimes, even I have to stop and remind myself: you belong to the here, and you belong to the now.

Where you currently are is where you have been designated by something celestial or, at the very least, circumstantial to do your workings. The small woods outside your house might not be whatever forest from which your ancestors originally hailed. The river that cuts through the land might not be the waters where they once waded.

It's not that the spirits they once knew aren't living within the dappled shadows beneath the trees- they brought those with them. More so, that those dappled shadows hold their own spirits. Ones unique to your geographical area and the people that reside there. Whether it be for the past thousand, or past hundred years.

I wonder if it's something that crosses their minds or if they reflect on the broader implications of the idea that an unwarded home is automatically going to attract spirits and whatnot. Or maybe they don't think about the concept outside of witchcraft-related applications, I don't know.

Moreover, I wonder where they're getting these ideas and whether it's all just influenced by ghost shows and the plethora of Warren Bullshit that floats about the community.