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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"crochet can't be made by machines" went from being a cool fun fact to being a call to action of "so if you see mass manufactured crochet in Target, that was made by a person and they were underpaid and you should boycott it" which is true, it was made by a person, but EVERY item of clothing you own (that you did not purchase from a company using ethical labor) was made by a person being underpaid (at *best*.)
Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".
Higher awareness of fast fashion, and the true human labor and abuse behind it, is GREAT, but let's not pretend that the crochet hat in target is THE problem. Every article of clothing in target is the problem. "All clothes are made by people" is the jumping off point here into understanding this issue it's not just crochet it's the whole thing ahhhhHHHHHHHHHH
‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.
It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”
This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.
Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’
Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.
I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.
It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.
That being saidddd..... I don't think I know enough people to do this currently BUT.... would anyone else tired of benevolent sexism/biossentialism/colonizer shit/etc be interested in an explicitly transfeminist & decolonial witchy people server. IF there's demand for this we might be able to just make our own oasis
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there's so many times when I want to write at length and in detail about an experience I've had within my practice, but the things I felt or intuited in those moments are often so transcendent, fleeting, and overwhelming that I struggle to articulate them, and every turn of phrase seems inadequate so I just default to "wow I love the gods" and call it a day. I'm trying to improve upon this bc I want to keep a better/more consistent personal written record, especially now that I'm on a pretty regular schedule wrt offerings & getting more seriously into trancework, katadesmoi, and ritual preparation, but man it can sure be hard to find the words!
I’m reading The Deviants War: The Homosexual vs The United States of America and the entire point of gay pride as a concept comes from police raids on bars, clubs, public restrooms, etc where gays were humiliated and outed in the newspapers (sometimes with their addresses!) and had careers ruined and lives upended by being associated with perversion and vice squads and all that and they responded by going “no I’m proud” and took that pride to the streets in defiance of the huge mechanism of shame that existed to oppress the gay community into obscurity and so the fact that people are now trying to apply conservative dogma to pride parades to make them “safe for children” or in other words “safe for people with oppressive conservative values” is simply insane
To phrase this more clearly: “public indecency” laws were the primary tool for brutally enforcing gender and sexual conformity, so applying a “public indecency” lens to pride parades of all things is a slap in the face of everyone who ever suffered under gender & sexual oppression and took their anger (and yes their pride!) to the streets. If it makes you uneasy or uncomfortable maybe you’re not on the side you think you are!
Soil Mother Fed By Her Vultures (Çatalhöyük) | Therese Doherty
“This is my imaginative rendering of the Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük (found in modern day Turkey), combining two motifs: a headless Mother Goddess figurine, who, to me, represents the fertility of the soil (the original found here; one of many such figures found at the site); and vultures, as depicted in the famous ‘vulture shrine’ mural, which portrays the ‘excarnation’ (de-fleshing) of bodies prior to burial (a common Neolithic practice).”
something I've been thinking about lately is the false dichotomy we've created between "natural" versus "synthetic" (or "man-made"); how it rhetorically categorizes human actions, presence, and existence itself as "unnatural" and encourages us to see ourselves as somehow outside of or different from that which is "natural".
of course these terms have utility in some contexts (textile fibres, materials science, etc.) but we should be mindful of applying them elsewhere. generally speaking I think we ought to discourage the use of language that positions us as inherently oppositional to or in conflict with nature and the natural - we ARE nature!! we do not and cannot exist apart from it or without it, and everything we do is in some sense "natural" because we are merely one of countless organisms with an evolutionary history like anything else alive on this planet!
colloquially, we tend to invoke "natural" as synonymous with good, or healthy, or beneficial, but it's not any of these things - just like "man-made" isn't synonymous with bad, or harmful. ecological restoration projects are man-made. species conservation work is man-made. nature is morally neutral; it simply exists, and though we unequivocally have a far greater influence on it than any other species, it will continue to exist in some form with or without us. we belong to nature, it does not belong to us.
recall that all life shares a common origin; understand that "species" is a continuous trait if you zoom out enough. there is nothing separating you from the sparrow, or the orchid, or the termite, except time. conceptualizing humans as uniquely apart from, unbeholden to, and/or exempt from nature serves nothing, and no one, except perhaps those who wish to further damage and degrade it (and us) for their own brief, temporary benefit. we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap of believing otherwise.
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do you have any book recommendations about geography/ecology?
hello. hmm, sure. thanks for trusting me enough to ask; don’t trust me too much, though. i'm always learning and criticizing my past/previous perspectives, but there are still some "classic" books that i'd recommend. something i say often, though: i actually spend much more time reading essays and journal articles, rather than full-length books (especially since so much of the best decolonial viewpoints, Indigenous and non-Western perspectives, and newer/fresher geographical thought and "critical geography" takes are being actively revised/discussed in these newer forums without having to appease popular or profit-oriented press/publishing companies).
the subjects that i read about: human relationships with other-than-human creatures; extinction; environmental history of empires, imperialism, colonization; traditional ecological knowledge; resistance, fugitivity, and carceral geography; eerie, weird, and uncanny ecology; regional geography, specific microhabitats, endemic species; Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene; ruins, ruination, haunting, trauma, and emotional geography; reptiles/amphibians; temperate rainforest and deserts; Pleistocene fauna and Paleolithic/ancient anthropogenic environmental change; islands, the sea, Oceanic worldviews, archipelagic thinking, solidarity across islands/regions; frontiers, borderlands, hinterlands, sacrifice zones, wastelanding, social abandonment, and extraction zones; Indigenous geography/ontology; decolonization
generally, i don't distinguish much of a difference between the subjects of geography/ecology -- or human and other-than-human environments -- since lifeforms and places and (cosmo)politics are all so entangled. anyway, here are some books involving a bit more geography and human ecology (the last time i was asked for recommendations, i focused a bit more on ecology and other-than-human environments, which i'll also re-post below these newer recs):
and then, i'll say again that essays and journal articles are often a great source for some of my favorite authors (though of course none of them are perfect; they can be problematique in their own ways): Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert; Elizabeth DeLoughrey; Paulo Tavares; Anna Boswell; Achille Mbembe; Hugo Reinert; Tim Edensor; Anna Tsing; Frantz Fanon; Robin Wall Kimmerer; Kyle Whyte; Kathryn Yusoff; Iyko Day; Audra Simpson; Ann Laura Stoler; Pedro Neves Marques
so here are the books i've previously recommended:
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One thing im uncomfortably woke about is bugs. And im actively trying to get more uncomfortably woke. By this i mean i DO believe the normalised fear of bugs stems from both government and business propaganda. The start of household pesticide sales coinciding with the boom in insect related horror movies. The promotion of anti intellectualism and anti enviromentalism. If you're scared of bugs, you wont care about saving them. If you dont care about saving them, you wont care about saving our home, since without bugs it cannot be saved. If you dont care about saving our home, the rich can do whatever they want with the chunks of it they continue to destroy.
I WILL calmly and kindly try to help anyone who is afraid of bugs. I will show them my finds, i will explain their importance, i will tell them just how sweet and gentle and friendly they are. And I WILL shoot down any immature loser who believes senseless killing is the only possible response to not liking something.
