I'm Xan or Adras (they/them), Treaty 7 territory (western Canada), background in archaeology/anthropology, sometime museum exhibit designer, MA history of science, urban wildlife educator & restoration ecologist, environmental health researcher doing community engagement & design work.
I mainly post art, nature, history, science, and religion; reblogs generally run on queue.
this is primarily a space dedicated to my household practice and personal experiences as an agnostic revivalist pagan, as well as my research into ancient cultus and syncretic deity worship. I may also talk about Abrahamic theology and demonolatry; I'm a lapsed Catholic and still retain some of my cultural and occult traditions, including veneration of the saints on behalf of my ancestors.
I've been a practising polytheist, diviner (tarot, bibliomancy, cleromancy), and bioregional spiritworker for over ten years. I'm primarily a syncretic Mediterranen polytheist working within the Greco-Egyptian, Greco-Bactrian, Canaanite, Phoenician, and Indo-Greek traditions of late classical antiquity. I'm really interested in chthonic worship and ancient mystery cults, particularly Orphism, Mithraism, and the Samothracian rites.
I am currently constructing a revealed mystery tradition dedicated to the Bronze Bull, an unidentified deity who shares features with many ancient storm gods across the eastern and southern Mediterranean. I believe he originates from a Chalcolothic-era Anatolian divinity, though he seems to deliberately appear in a confusing and multifaceted way. for me he is an apatropaic and chthonian figure similar to Ba'al Hadad, Zeus-Aidoneus, or Saturnus-Hammon. I am also exploring possible connections with the pre-Roman Endovelicus and Voltumna.
my daily practice is highly syncretic, largrly inspired by the religions of ancient Cyprus, Phoenicia, and Ugarit. I am a hierophoros of Nemesis-Tykhe-Fortuna, a nekromantis of Enodia-Nephthys-Libitina, and a devotee of Meretseger-Salus, Astarte-Aphrodite-Hathor, and Demeter-Renenutet. my household gods are Herakles-Melqart, Twtw, Wadjet-Leto, Aristaios-Nefertem, Hermes-Khonsu, Duamutef, and Sobek-Ares. most cherished of all are the triune of Resheph-Apollon, Montu-Ra, and Shezmu-Dionysos.
I heavily utilize trancework and meditation in my practice, and I also include elements of goêteic magic such as the Greek Magical Papyri in ritual and prayer. I additionally have some experience in Heathenry/Rokkatru, primarily with Freyr, Fenrisúlfr, Níðhöggr, and Jörmundgandr, but this is a separate and mostly peripheral part of my practice.
I take research requests and am always happy to answer questions about any of the above!
common tags in no particular order:
Religious:
personal practice (orphism, hellenistic, divination, death work, bioregional, fenrir)
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It actually kind of pisses me off how mainstream consumerist predominantly-white culture ate the vague concept of ~witchy~ spirituality the more I think about it but we don't have to do this right now
Like the most crazymaking thing is I'm a ~spiritual~ person myself but watching people who would have called me delusional and/or possessed by the devil when we were kids get into all the crystals and the tarot cards and whatever feels ........ odd. Lol. Lmao. Not even in a hipstery "I did it before it was cool" way this is about racism. It's racism. It's appropriation and commodification in the most classical sense. It's weird that it's only acceptable for me to practice these things now that it's cool to white people. Can anyone fucking hear me
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There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.
“You don’t know whether people relate to the breakfast program, because you’ve never fed anybody. You don’t know anything about the free health clinic because you never asked anybody. You don’t know anything about the good that a gun does you, because you never tried one. And we say that if you was born and if you said you didn’t like pears and you never tasted pears, you’d have to be a liar. You don’t know whether you like pears, but you can’t claim that you don’t like pears. The only way that anybody can tell you the taste of a pear is if he himself has tasted it. That’s the only way. That’s the objective reality. That’s what the Black Panther Party deals with. We’re not metaphysicians, we’re not idealists, we’re dialectical materialists. And we deal with what reality is, whether we like it or not.”
— Fred Hampton speaking about how you must practice your theory, or else it’s irrelevant, 1969.
The fact that the trafficking of enslaved Africans underpins so much of western European culture is so severely underacknowledged by white western Europeans that it boggles the mind to think of it. I've posted here before about how pitiful have been the attempts of white institutions to account for the crimes of their past, how they will at best acknowledge only the most blatant and undeniable parts of their history while laundering responsibility for the great majority of it. One particularly striking aspect of that is how little museum space in western Europe is dedicated to discussing slavery.
The British Museum in London was formed from the private collection of Hans Sloane whose collection was funded by profits from Caribbean plantations inherited by his wife. The original museum building was bought by the British government from the children of John Montagu, a man who was literally granted ownership of the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent by the British state. The current museum building was constructed starting in the 1820s (when slavery was still legal in the British Empire) funded directly by the British government, around 20% of whose tax income at that time came in the form of customs on imported products, such as sugar and cotton from the Caribbean.
Yet the extent of the museum's engagement with its total historic dependence on slavery is merely to have moved a bust of Hans Sloane's head to a new location with some comments on his slavery connection. There is an ongoing campaign to have merely one permanent exhibit about the slave trade at the musem. (And this is not even getting into the famous legacy of that museum as a repository of looted colonial plunder such as the Benin bronzes.)
It's not just big museums either. A tiny museum like Jane Austen's house in Chawton, UK, has a notice on its website regarding mentions of slavery that actually reassures guests that they won't go too far in doing so, "We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea." An admission that's rather telling about what they expect the views of museum visitors to be. But why not interrogate her or her characters? That is exactly what they should be doing!
It is quite well-known among Austen fans than Mansfield Park is her book that deals with slavery: the protagonist lives in the house of a man who owns slave plantations in Antigua. Many fans are keen to find evidence in the text that the protagonist objects to this, but she ultimately marries the son of the plantation owner and lives on the land of the plantation owner and her husband's income is paid by the plantation owner, so her objections (if they exist) cannot be worth much.
In Persuasion, the protagonist's love interest is a naval officer who fought in the Battle of Santo Domingo, a battle that was explicitly about protecting British interests in the Caribbean (i.e. sugar plantations) from being captured by the French.
In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley has no land and his huge income is derived from investment in government bonds, which is to say that he pays for British military campaigns (such as the same Battle of Santo Domingo) and in return he is paid by the British government out of tax income, of which a big chunk is customs levied on slave-produced products.
And that's without even getting into the question of where the cotton comes from that makes up the dresses which are a frequent subject of discussion for many Austen characters.
For that matter, what about the dresses worn by Austen herself when writing her novels? The sugar in the tea she drank? The very house she lived in was owned by her brother, who inherited it (and all his considerable wealth) from Thomas Knight, a Tory MP (which is to say, a politican from the British political wing which most heavily supported slavery). The world of Austen's novels is entirely about slavery, it is the very thing which makes the lifestyles of the characters possible. The whole museum is about slavery whether the curators like it or not, anything less than mentioning it constantly is a deliberate hiding of the truth. And when I visited it a couple of years ago, I do not recall seeing slavery mentioned even once (maybe I missed one sign in a corner of one room or something idk).
As well as the severe underreporting of slavery at museums, the lack of slavery-specific museums in western Europe is also really remarkable. The Mercado de Escravos in Lagos, Portgual and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, are the only two that I am aware of, albeit the latter is closed until 2029. A slavery museum in Amsterdam has been proposed and is supposed to open in 2030, but given that a French slavery museum was proposed by Francois Hollande a decade ago and never built I will not get my hopes too high about it.
The London Museum Docklands has a permanent exhibit on London's connection to slavery, which is pretty good as far as it goes, but is utterly pathetic in the context that it is the only permanent exhibit about the slave trade in the whole city. The best I have seen by far is the Suriname Museum in Amsterdam, which dedicates a huge portion of its space to covering the slave trade in great detail. The fact that the museum was founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who were trafficked to Suriname is surely why this particular museum is so good.
The contrast between that and white institutions like the British Museum is really stark. Do you treat the slave trade with the gravity it deserves, which is to say that you mention it at every opportunity and do not shy away from saying, "The slave trade is why this museum, this city, this country, this continent, why all of it is the way it is"? Or do you move one statue to a new location, put a little sign up about how one man's wife's family owned slaves a long time ago, and say "That's enough, we've dealt with the slavery issue now"?
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Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”
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sometimes the "collaborative, non-hierarchical workplace" is really funny bc a coworker will be like hey do you have a minute? can I run something by you? and then they'll sit down and be like sooo I was thinking of putting a sign on the fridge telling people to throw away their expired food. like okay girl I actually think you could have just unilaterally made that decision. I know we looooove our committees here but not every single little thing needs to be approved by committee