i can't believe Jesus just called me a dick!

Ohhh the number one thing I wish I could drill into the head of every aspiring occultist and magical practitioner is that CRITICAL THINKING IS YOUR FRIEND.

Study magic but keep fact-checking! If there's a claim in a book on witchcraft that should be able to be backed up by mundane sources, look for those sources. If they're not cited in the book, that's a red flag. If the sources you do find don't support the claim, that's another, bigger red flag. This is especially true with claims about history, science, medicine, psychology, anthropology, and religion.

Also, be wary of anything New Age. There's a pipeline to anti-science, eugenics, and racism there that runs directly through portions of the modern pagan and witchcraft communities and it's brightly painted with New Age buzzwords.

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. If something seems geared to appeal to your emotions, especially that which seems formulated to make you feel special or "chosen" or to fire up some kind of righteous anger or feelings of superiority, you should immediately be suspicious of it.

If a source tells you to disregard science, modern medicine, or recorded history, or tries to tell you that some people are inherently more special or magical or deserving of power than others, discard it immediately. That is a bad source.

Don't believe everything you see or hear online. Too many witches roll their eyes at their parents and grandparents believing everything they read on Facebook, then turn around and insist that everything they've seen on TikTok or Tumblr or YouTube is Absolute Truth.

" I'll go anywhere you want,

Anywhere you want me. "

I also got a suggestion to draw Hermes Psychopompos, my favorite aspect of Hermes.

So much of my practice centers around death, dying, and caring for the spirits of the dead. I can't imagine not using the actual words and instead using "d3ad" or "🎲-ing". If a topic is important, powerful, vast, etc. enough to be a central tenant of your spiritual or magical practice then it deserves to be spoken with the real words.

Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851

Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later

Kid survives

1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family

Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair

This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies

Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence

Bologna falls the next year, 1859

Kingdom of Italy forms 1861

By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more

(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)

The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”

What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.

Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.

I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.