Only Wombxxn Are Witches

This is a comprehensive and descriptive list of yonic symbols.

My favourite is The Fish, a variation on the letter Omega, which you may also know as a symbol widely used in Christianity to represent Christ. It is also connected with the tradition of eating fish on Friday, a tradition associated with Aphrodite/Venus on a day sacred to her and named after another female fertility goddess, Freya.

Just another sacred symbol co-opted by Christianity from earlier, less patriarchal cultures of belief to try and cement its legitimacy.  All hail the glorious history of patriarchal cultural appropriation.

Today we celebrate the Holy Virgins Menodora, Nymphodora, and Metrodora. These saints were sisters from Bithynia and chose a solitary place for themselves in the wilderness and spent their lives in deeds of fasting and prayer.

Reports of the holy life of the virgins soon spread, since healings of the sick began to occur through their prayers. The Governor of Bithynia, Frontonus, ordered that the sisters be arrested and brought before him.

At first he tried to persuade them to renounce Christ, promising great honors and rewards. But they steadfastly confessed their faith before him, rejecting all his suggestions. They told him that they did not value the temporal things of this world, and that they were prepared to die for their Heavenly Bridegroom, for death would be their gateway to eternal life.

Flying into a rage, the governor took out his wrath on Menodora, the eldest sister. She was stripped of her clothes and beaten by four men, while a herald urged her to offer sacrifice to the gods. The saint bravely endured the torments and cried out, “Sacrifice? Can’t you see that I am offering myself as a sacrifice to my God?” Then they renewed their torments with even greater severity. Then the martyr cried out, “ Lord Jesus Christ, joy of my heart, my hope, receive my soul in peace.” With these words she gave up her soul to God, and went to her Heavenly Bridegroom.

Four days later, they brought the two younger sisters Metrodora and Nymphodora to the court. They showed them the battered body of their older sister to frighten them. The virgins wept over her, but remained steadfast.

Then Metrodora was tortured. She died, crying out to her beloved Lord Jesus Christ with her last breath. Then they turned to the third sister, Nymphodora. Before her lay the bruised bodies of her sisters. Frontonus hoped that this sight would intimidate the young virgin.

Shakti Yantra. Tantric Painting, Rajasthan. 1600s. 

Headdresses and Headbands

2. It’s a watered down Mary Daly analysis

Behold:

Children’s books provide chilling evidence of mind-control through dismembering myth. Fairy tales are particularly gruesome examples. An apparently genteel contemporary type of disguised mind-dismembering myth for children is exemplified in The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. It is the story of a tree—consistently referred to by the pronoun she—who gives absolutely everything she has to a boy. This begins innocently enough, with her shade, leaves, and fruit. But, the boy grows up and cuts off her branches and then her trunk. Finally, in his old age, he uses her stump as a seat. As a result of all this nonreciprocated giving, the tree is “happy.” The jacket blurb of this book, published in 1964 but still a big seller, describes it as “a tender story…a moving parable for readers of all ages.” The story, in fact, is one of female rape and dismemberment. It draws upon sources in the Background of female identity, taking the Tree of Life—who is the Goddess—and making her a willing participant in her own mutilation, which makes her “happy.” Her degradation is total, for the “Giving Tree” wallows in such self-destruction. here is a model of masochism for female readers of all ages, and of sadism for boys of all ages. This chilling children’s tale is an extension of christian myth. It is a superrefined, invasive, and deceptive offspring of self-satisfied secularists secure in their superiority to christian crudity. The saccharine sweet story of a little boy who “loves” a tree—a young Apollo who crowns himself with her leaves—has “healthier” appeal than overt S and M biblical tales of a dead godman crowned with thorns. Thus the postchristian (that is prechristian) parable has deceptive acceptability, extending its tentacles into unaware minds, guiding them to a more primal Fatherland, inhabited by paradigms of patriarchal matricide. It thus brings its parental purchasers and readers into unwitting compliance with primary programming for gynocide.

Whether or not the authors, illustrators, and promoters of such books “understand” that they are communicating gynocidal messages is beside the point. Since self-deception is of the essence of doublethink, they undoubtedly would respond with incredulity/amusement/indignation to such an analysis. For they themselves have been programmed not to recognize gynocidal reversals. Within the massive public relations business of patriarchy, the promotion of rape and dismemberment has top priority, and it is essential that the promoters make this face invisible to everyone, especially to themselves. As George Orwell wrote of his character, Winston Smith, in 1984: “For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.”

ugh so iconic of u .. 💛 here are my all time favs: 

on being ill, virginia woolf

on self respect, joan didion

why is our quest for validation online becoming so desperate?, emily reynolds

illness as a metaphor, susan sontag

regarding the pain of others, susan sontag

laugh of medusa, hélène cixous

uncensored sylvia plath, joyce carol oates

myth of romantic suffering, kathy acker

women and honour: some notes on lying, adrienne rich

am i a bad feminist?, margaret atwood

looking for zora, alice walker

how it feels to be colored me, zora neale hurston

the affective politics of fear, sara ahmed

someday, i wanna wear a starry crown, jasmine ledesma

frankenstin’s mother, darcey steinke

what are master-pieces and why are there so few of them, gertrude stein

the figure a poem makes, robert frost

notes of a native son, james baldwin

they all just went away, joyce carol oates

grand unified theory of female pain, leslie jamison

It is really annoying to me that people (especially a lot of white witches that I’m seeing atm) think just grinding up eggshells is all you need to make cascarilla powder

Newsflash: it’s not

And I really wish you those of who don’t even practice brujeria or hoodoo or anything of the sort would stop using the damn word and just say “eggshell powder” or something else instead bc what your making is NOT cascarilla powder

It just annoys me alot like can you fucking not if you don’t even know how to properly make it because your powder isn’t going to do jack shit

it’s like the blind leading the damn blind Jesus fucking Christ

If you can’t even do the research to learn how to properly make it why even bother touching it it’d be better suited for your damn house plants then for magical use

At that point it’s not cascarilla powder

I’m not Latina but there’s enough overlap between brujeria and hoodoo sometimes that I’m not always sure about where the line is. I just want to make sure whatever it is, I don’t cross over and I’m respecting it!

My only issue is that I’ve also seen rootworkers online spread misinformation about Cascarilla as well, saying it’s just simply crushed eggshell powder when that’s not all there is to it or that it’s only used for protection. It’s not. We use it for cleansings as well. In Sanse (not as traditional) it’s used to draw veves from what I understand from online Sancistas. We use it on ourselves, in our baths, to make chalk, around the house etc.

You’re supposed to clean the eggs (WHITE only), dry them, grind them up, add Holy Water and let it dry and it should be easy to break in the hands, white and soft. You bless and consecrate it with prayers and songs, if everything isn’t blessed and consecrated it’s not pure. Some ppl will open a circle and consecrate it there, others use prayers and psalms, some use prayer songs, a lot will leave the powder with their Santos so they can bless it, etc. That’s all it is, but there’s a ritual to making it and ppl seem to not realize that. You just have to consecrate it for your purpose. If the ingrediants are all consecrated (bc this is what is adding the power) and your powder comes out fine and soft, you got urself powerful ass cascarilla powder. You can use it around the home for peace, you can use it on yourself as protection or as a powerful cleanser, you can use it near the front door and windows so negative energies can’t get in, etc. It goes awesome in spiritual cleansing baths with Florida Water. It can be used to draw circles or sacred imagery as well.

I had seen it mentioned in Santería contexts before too, but it’s really helpful to know that you’ve also seen it used in Ifá, and that doesn’t surprise me at all. Like yes, all the ATRs and hoodoo and brujeria and obeah - they are all different, but they also all influence each other and have overlap. It sounds like cascarilla powder is broadly used across so many of the Africana and Afro-Latine religions and magic traditions.

“The scene takes no more than five minutes of the movie, and the tension between colonial history and race only escalates from that point on. However, we as museum professionals need to talk about the inclusion of this scene, especially regarding its function in a film that was cut from nearly four hours long in its first iteration to a solid two, a film that so many young people will see and one that is poised to become a cultural touchstone. The museum is presented as an illegal mechanism of colonialism, and along with that, a space which does not even welcome those whose culture it displays.

And is there anything incorrect about that?

If you’ve ever spent time in a history/culture museum, you may have noticed that the rooms with Native or African artifacts tend to be very dimly lit compared to other parts of the museum. You probably thought (as I did) that it’s because the artifacts are old and light sensitive. Sometimes that’s the case. Lots of times, though, it’s not.

Museums often display *contemporary* African and Native artifacts in rooms with dim lighting because they’re trying to construct a mythology around these artifacts. The lighting subconciously suggests to us these are relics from the past, from “dead” cultures, even when they’re not.

Furniture and silverware from 1750s Europe? Bright lighting, placed on a lower museum floor that gets lots of foot traffic. Shields made by members of an African tribe in the *1930s*? Dim lighting, placed on a quiet upper level of the museum that feels like a mausoleum.

This is completely intentional. Museums play into our Western notions of whose culture is “alive” and whose is “dead.” They give us what they think we want to see. They’re also doing real political harm, because if they can convince us that African and Native cultures are relics of the past, that means we don’t have to think about what we’re doing to the (very much still alive) peoples that they represent.

I learned about Native cultures in school.  I was fascinated and admiring, I read all kinds of books and went to museums; if you’d asked I’d say I loved and respected these beautiful people and their varied beliefs.  But the way I was taught about Native Americans wasn’t the way I was taught about US history, or about Europeans.  The curricula taught about Native cultures and beliefs the same way they taught about Sumerians and ancient Egyptians, and so I learned the implied lesson: Native cultures were past, they were gone, they were dead.  None of the museums I went to challenged that, just as the writer above explains.  (Moreover, nobody taught us kids about modern Native people, their sociopolitical issues, or their cultures- as far as we knew, Native people were quaint historical footnotes, and any of their descendants still alive had the same lives and concerns as us white suburbanites.)

When I first went to NMAI I was confused, because it felt different than I expected and I couldn’t figure out why.  Eventually I realized it was because I went expecting a temple to sadly dead mythologies and ways of life, and what I saw instead was a cultural history lovingly curated and cared for by its inheritors, just as any other modern ethnicity or nationality remembers and teaches its history.  I recognize it’s not exactly the same as say, remembering Italian-American history, because of the weight of the genocide committed against Native people, and the sometimes all-too-successful attempts to wipe out their cultures.  But my point is that in NMAI, I learned that Native cultures are alive, and it made me realize just how badly wrong my thought process had been to that point.

I am certainly not an expert in museums or in anything related to NMAI, but I can’t help thinking that the difference is in large part because Native people are so deeply involved in creating the exhibits and maintaining the collections.  The exhibits feature Native voices and commentary, and they talk about Native life and culture today, making it clear that these communities haven’t simply vanished into the past.  Just another example of how critically important representation is- it may be that ALL museums that handle Native or African objects/art need to have staff of African or Native descent, or it may be that they simply need to consult and take advice from modern representatives of the culture in question.  I’m sure this would lead to the usual cries of “political correctness run amok” that always arise from certain quarters; but really, it’s the idea that white people alone get to decide how best to select and display artifacts from other culture (cultures which still exist, and have plenty of living representatives) that’s exceptionally weird. 

That’s about like one of my ancestors. We learned about him in school. And then they went “and then he quietly retired…” Uh no. His white wife found out about his native wife and their kids, and her family threatened him and them… And then he left power and quietly got a divorce… The teacher was like… How do you know all this?

My family lived it. We came from his native wife. So yeah, there is more to that story, and then you have people who write text books deciding what is and isn’t true for generations.

Makes me think of that scene in interstellar when hiss daughter is suspended for bringing propaganda to school when it was an old text book with pictures of the lunar landing and they were teaching the kids we never left this planet and the space program was a hoax. That’s the kind of willful ignorance we create when we hand over the full education of our children.

DIY: Make New Candles out of Scrap Wax

Candle Making 101  

How to Make a Candle with Soy Wax and a Mason Jar 

Recycling Old Candle Wax 

Selecting the Right Candle Wax 

Homemade Beeswax Candles 

All Natural Beeswax Sheet Candles  

Make Your Own Aromatic Beeswax Candles

11/13/19

'Warrior Queen of Jhansi' brings a legendary Indian royal to the big screen

Lakshmibai, the queen of the princely state of Jhansi, was still in her early 20s when she led a rebellion against the East India Company in 1857 — an event now known as the first Indian War of Independence.