Sarahmouse Thoughts

ALTAR 101 🔮✨

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Here is a guide to setting up your altar based on common traditions for those new to Wicca or interested in beginning or even those practicing wiccans just looking to shake up your current set up!

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The most important step in setting up your altar is choosing its location; finding a spot where you are comfortable and feel positive energy is SO important! Even small things such as choosing directionality of your altar is important - if you will be using a round table/stand, directionality may not be as important, but if you are using a square set up or intend to always face the same direction when using your altar, choose the directionality which you feel closest to (you can also change directionality with certain spells if you like):

• North: Earth 🌏

• South: Fire🔥

• East: Air 💨

• West: Water💧

It is optimal to purify and cleanse the area you intend to use for your altar as well as the table/stand you choose to use.

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What you choose to set up your altar on is 110% a personal choice. If you don’t want to spend money looking for a specific altar table or building something special to use, simply using something you have laying around already is absolutely fine! For instance, I used an old coffee table that I had laying around not in use. As long as you purify the item with your intent, it can be anything you need. Another consideration is storage - some altars I’ve seen online have drawers and storage beneath which is a great option if space is limited! You will need someplace to store candles, herbs, stones, etc. Also important is deciding how mobile you need your altar to be - if you are a closet witch, mobility is important and a formal set up may not be plausible. Here are some beautiful altar table examples:

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Items of the Altar Include;

⭐️ Athame: A ceremonial blade; primarily this is used as a tool to channel energy through - this is not traditionally used as a cutting tool. Can be used to cast your circle as well as to invoke the elements of the four directions.

⭐️ Bell: Used to open and close rituals - typically associated with banishing of negative influences and energies.

⭐️ Boline: Traditionally used as a cutting tool for herbs, ribbon, flowers, etc.

⭐️ Cauldron: Used for burning of herbs, mixing of herbs, burning of symbols / paper. This should typically be cast iron since it will contain fire often times.

⭐️ Chalice: Used to hold blessed wine or water during rituals or spells.

⭐️ God Candle: Can be yellow or gold in coloration; Used to invoke masculine energies

⭐️ Goddess Candle: Can be white or silver in coloration; Used to invoke feminine energies

⭐️ Pentacle: Used to invoke positive energies into a circle; often times items can be “charged” upon a pentacle

⭐️ Wand: Another tool of invokation used to invoke the gods and sacred energies. Like the athame, this too can be used to cast a circle.

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One option for setting up the altar is a more “traditional” set up dividing the table into feminine and masculine energies. The left side is traditionally meant for femininity with items such as your goddess statue, goddess candle, chalice, bowl of water, cauldron, pentacle, crystals, and bell. The masculine right side includes your god statue, god candle, incense, wand, salt, athame, boline, and matches. The center of the altar is dedicated to ritual and magic set up.

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Another common style is an elemental set up with items representative of water (chalice, bowl of water, cauldron) being set to the west, air (bell, wand, incense) to the east, earth (pentacle, salt, stones) to north, and fire (athame, boline, matches / oils) to the south.

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Other items you could consider adding to your altar representative of each element:

💧 Water: Seashells, Ace of Cups (Tarot), Rainwater, Mirrors, Driftwood, Seaweed, Crystal Ball, Goblet

🔥 Fire: Cactus, Volcanic Stone, Ash, Ace of Wands (Tarot), Lantern, Dragon Statue, Cinnamon Sticks, Incense

🍃 Earth: Ceramics, Coin, Stones, Soil, Salt, Ace of Pentacles, Seeds, Herbs, Flowers, Bone

💨 Air: Diffuser, Ribbons, Wind Instruments, Fans, Butterfly Imagry, Feathers, Ace of Swords (Tarot)

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Animals of Yule

Deer

Owls

Stags

Wrens + Ravens

Bears

Snow Geese

Foods of Yule

Cinnamon cakes

Dried fruits

Apple cider

Mulled wine

Gingerbread

Roasted/Spiced meats

Goddess Correspondences

Aphrodite (Greek)

Brigid (Celtic)

Demeter (Greek)

Holle (Norse)

Isis (Egyptian)

Fortuna (Roman)

Gods Correspondences

Dagda (Celtic)

Apollo (Greek)

Lugh (Celtic)

Balder (Norse)

Horus (Egyptian)

Sol (Roman)

Essence of Yule

Rebirth

Light out of darkness

Inner renewal

Honor

Transformation

Oils of Yule

Cinnamon

Ginger

Orange

Pine

Wintergreen

Cedar 

i wrote and illustrated my own kitchen witchcraft book! potioncraft is an original written + hand-illustrated collection of recipes and rituals for beverages of all kinds. it features recipes for spiced hot cocoa, mulled cider, harvest sangria, and basil lemonade; it also features information on the magick of smoothies, teas, coffee and more. throughout the booklet are beautiful stippled illustrations that create a rustic witch-of-the-woods aesthetic.

A simple spell to light a fire under your ass when you have a lot of things to do in a short amount of time, and need something extra to kick you into gear! Hope it helps you.

What You Need

Yellow or Orange Candle

Cayenne Pepper

Ginger

A small dish to hold the candle

Cinnamon (optional bonus)

Kit Harington and Toothless’ Lost Audition Tapes | HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD

A little oatcake and amethyst offering to the faeries this morning since they’ve been bugging me for my attention. Hope they’re willing to share with the ants hehe.

For the cake:

1/3 cup of oatmeal

½ cup of milk

1 teaspoon rosewater

3 teaspoons sugar

Microwave in a bowl until it’s sticky enough to pry out with a knife and stay together, I topped it with a dried apricot and flowers

Sweet treats offered to you fae

So you may help my on my way

Look over my flowers and my trees

Ensure they bring an abundance of bees

Enjoy this food that I have made

So our friendship will not fade

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

And also pigeon poop was a very valuable fertilizer before we had other options, people would hire guards to stop thieves from stealing their flock’s poop.

We never intended to train her for educational programs. It was a job reserved for our raptors. It was our pigeon who decided she would be a part of what we were doing. One day, when we entered her enclosure to change water and food, she decided to fly to my hand and perch like our raptors do. 

No training, no treats, just the reward of being with us. 

What we hadn’t noticed for the couple months prior was her watching us. This brilliant little bird had been watching us every day as we trained and worked with our raptors. Finally she decided she didn’t want to be left out any longer. She made her place on our hands.

This occurred several times before we finally put her on a glove and brought her into the public. Needless to say, she was right at home. She fluffed up and preened the entire evening while people gawked and asked us why we had a pigeon on one glove and a hawk on another. 

Since then, we’ve added 5 more rescued pigeons to our growing flock. And our pigeon (Tybalt) has become a mainstay ambassador for our programs. Each of our pigeons are incredibly fun to watch and interact with. Pigeons simply don’t get enough love. They are marvelous creatures incredibly suited to life alongside people both physically and mentally. 

Photo by .jocelyn.

They have a complex and fascinating social structure, both within a flock and with other individuals:

Photo by Ingrid Taylar

AND THEY ARE JUST SUPER CUTE, HONESTLY:

Most wild animals all look alike within a species, with TINY, RARE individual variations in terms of rare color morphs, unusually big or small animals, different facial markings and other subtleties. But there is no evolutionary benefit to having species where everyone looks slightly different, and in fact, it’s beneficial for species to be similar and consistent, with a distinctive aesthetic. Especially if you’re trying to blend into the environment - a black wolf is all very well, but it looks positively silly in the summer tundra, where its grey/brown/brindley cousins blend in. A white deer has a great aesthetic - and a very short lifespan in the forest. Distinctive Protagonist looks are rare in the wild, simply because natural selection usually comes down heavily on them.

To humans, most wild animals are visually indistinguishable from each other.

As a result, most wild animals are like

“Oh it’s obvious - you can tell the twins apart because Kara has a big nose.”

Wild animals usually have a pretty consistent aesthetic within their species. It’s important to them!

SO WHAT IS GOING ON WITH PIGEONS?

Look, in one small picture you’ve got a red color morph in the center, several melanistic dark morphs, a few solid black birds, a few variations on the wildtype wing pattern, a PIEBALD, a piebald copper color morph…

Like, there are LAYERS UPON LAYERS of pigeon diversity in most flocks you see. Pure white ones with black wingtips. Solid brown ones with pink iridescent patches. Pale pinkish pigeons.

WHY IS THAT? When other wild animals consider “being slightly fluffier than my brother” to be dangerously distinctive in most circumstances? BECAUSE CITY PIGEONS AREN’T TRULY WILD.

MANY OF THEM (POSSIBLY MOST OR ALL) ARE FERAL MIXES.

THEY WERE ONCE BELOVED PETS, SPECIAL MESSENGERS, EXQUISITE SHOW-WINNERS, AND PRIZED LIVESTOCK.

THEIR PRETTY COLORS WERE DELIBERATELY INTRODUCED BY HUMANS.

AND NOW THEIR HUMANS DON’T LOVE THEM ANY MORE.

See, pigeon fanciers bred (and still breed!) a huge array of pigeons. And the resulting swarms of released/discarded/escaped/phased out “fancy” pigeons stayed around humans. What else were they going to do? They interbred with wildtype pigeons.

Lots of the pigeons you see in public are feral. They’re not wild animals. They’re citizen animals. They’re genetically engineered. And now that’s what “city” pigeons are.

These “wild” horses are all different colors because they’re actually feral. Mustangs in the American West are the descendants of imported European horses - they’re an invasive domestic species that colonized an ecological niche, but they are domestic animals. Their distinctive patterns were deliberately bred by humans. A few generations of running around on the prairie isn’t going to erase that and turn them back into wildtypes. If you catch an adult mustang and train it for a short period, you can ride it and have it do tricks and make it love you. It’s a domestic animal. You can’t really do that with an adult zebra.

No matter how many generations these dogs stay on the street and interbreed with one another, they won’t turn back into wolves. They can’t. They’re deliberately genetically engineered. If you catch one (even after generations of rough living, even as an adult) you can make it stare at your face, care about your body language, and love you.

City pigeons? Well, you don’t have to like them, but they’re in the same boat. They’re tamed animals, bred on purpose, living in a human community. Their very bodies are marked with their former ownership and allegiance; they cannot really return to what they once were; if you caught one, you could make it love you (in a limited pigeon-y way.) They have gone to “the wild,” but not very far from us, and they’d be happy to come back.

So next time you see a flock of city pigeons, spare a moment to note their diversity. The wing patterns. The pied, mottled and brindled. The color types.

All of it was once meant to please you.

The Song of the Sea, 2014 (dir. Tomm Moore)

backstory: I have been afraid of dogs since I was in first grade and two of my classmates both independently got hospitalized for dog bite injuries within a week of each other. ever since, I have been attempting to get over this fear. it’s going pretty solid lately. it helps that at my bus stop, there’s a large and fenced in property with a dog that is afraid of humans. he’s a gorgeous german shepherd?? who I have taken a few sneaky photos of and always manages to look angelic.

so this pup is scared of humans and I’m scared of dogs. but for months we see each other every day. and we nudge closer and closer. and one day I’m feeling brave and pick up a stick and hold it out to the fence and this good good doggo gennnntly takes it between his teeth and runs off with it. since then it’s been a game we play every day and this buddy’s tail starts wagging when I come down the street towards the bus stop and frankly it adds life to these brittle old bones of mine.

today however was the reckoning… I was a bit distracted by school stress when I came down the street, and so I take a moment for myself and when I look back up, the puppy is GONE. I look around the yard, seeing if he’s behind a tree, then see him leaving the yard and merrily skipping down the sidewalk, where he suddenly stops. I ask my group chat for advice.

trick question by the time the answer comes I’m already walkin towards him. he’s sitting still, tail wagging. right in front of him on the ground, with no one in sight? a $20 bill. 

I slooowly bend down and pick up the money and a nearby stick. put the money in my pocket. put the stick out to my doggo friend who gently takes it as always. and then awkwardly I kinda “well, thanks for the money! you should get home now, my bus is coming and your person won’t like you being out of the yard.” and just like that. the dog just trots back to the yard happy as a clam and slips in through the gaping wide bars of the fence. meanwhile, three high schoolers on the way to school are staring at me and laughing but like. okay what am I supposed to do, not thank this blessing dog. I actually tell him thanks once again for good measure before the bus comes.

I walk in and it’s as good as dead. there’s two people in line in front of me, four people behind the counter, and two employees wandering the store. it’s gorgeous. clean as anything. a fireplace with a burning fire (nice as it’s the dead of winter in pennsylvania at this point), and smooth jazz playing softly on the speakers. it’s huge. there are armchairs. the windows have curtains and a lovely view of downtown. it’s immediately the kind of place you could stay forever but I have a bus to catch in like half an hour so I walk up and get in line.

as I do, I see the first two behind the counter employees. one looks dead. one looks angry. the dead one… and I call her this because she literally looks zombified. not normal min wage worker dead but like her brain was removed dead… asks what she can get for me and I place my normal order. it begins to go down the line. it gets to the second person, the angry one, who says with the most INTENSE STARE to Dead Eyed Girl, “if we all had to come in and we don’t get busy, I’m burning down the city.”

Dead Eyed Girl, eyes still dead, says “Except for this store, of course.”

“Of course not, we can’t burn down this store.”

Dead Eyed Girl literally echoes “We can’t burn down this store.”

this is when I start to go from curious to a little freaked out. angry one takes my subs out of the toaster and begins to put veggies on it, then shoves it over to the person at the register who is, according to the logs I looked up to make sure I remember this accurately, remarkable for one reason…  I was paying attention to EVERYTHING and yet I can’t remember what they looked like at all. I pay and I get my sandwiches and my drink cup and go to fill my drink up.

standing near the drink machine at this point are two more terrified looking employees who are talking quietly to themselves. I fill my cup up with sprite and am about to put a lid on it when one says “oh. that machine… doesn’t work.” note: at this point I have the drink already and it looks and smells right. “here, let me go replace that for you. don’t drink that! one second!”

he looks TERRIFIED as he goes to the cooler and pulls out three bottles of sprite and looks TERRIFIED as he holds them out to me asking, terrified, “here, is that enough?”

and so I just “yeah… thank you?” as he takes my cup and gives me the bottles. it’s more sprite than I paid for.

I sit down as far from the counter as I can and begin to eat. my first toasted sandwich? cold. according to my phone I’ve been in here for five minutes only. I didn’t see the customers who were in here when I entered leave. nobody else has come in. I’d planned to get out my laptop and wait here out of the cold for the bus, but even as I eat the sandwich time seems slow so I just devour it and leave. it’s not even been ten minutes since I came in. just take my second (cold) sandwich and my bottles of sprite and book it.

and I ask around about this subway. everyone I know says it’s perfectly normal and they’ve been there several times and it’s fine! and sure enough when I work up the courage to go back in two weeks later, the fireplace is not operational (in fact it’s blocked off), the music is staticky and pop, there’s no armchairs, and it’s not very clean at all. is there a possibility they cleaned it up for the event and redecorated in two weeks? yes. is it more likely that I wandered into the fey realm for a bit? perhaps.

Had a thing like that happen with a hobby shop once.

I had thought the place was closed and gutted, but saw to my delight that it was open and occupied while driving by one day. Of course, I had to stop in.

This place is immaculate, although something about some of the displays seemed slightly off.

A guy there was making custom dice. I commissioned one from him and he made it on the spot. Damn beautiful thing, and the luckiest die I own (not weighted, just super lucky… for me… and basically cursed for anyone else).

We had a very in-depth conversation about the presentation of fey in various contemporary novels while he made the die. I paid him (plus extra, cause I loved the work he was doing), browsed, bought some MTG cards, and left a couple of dollars in a donation box as I walked out the door (I think it was for supplying dice and other ttrpg stuff to local schools or something and I thought it was a very worthy cause).

One of the employees said something like “pretty decent for a person” to dice guy, and he replied something like, “yeah, I gave him a good one.”

I realized after I got home that the displays for the current set hadn’t had any letters on them that I could recognize, but my ADHD brain had parsed something on them as writing that said “Magic the Gathering” anyway and moved on (and I don’t mean, like, it was Arabic or Chinese or something. I mean nothing, in hindsight, even resembled writing).

The cards practically show up at the top of my deck when I call them, and the die is, again, fabulously lucky, but only for me.

Tried to bring a friend to the shop literally two days later and it was back to being abandoned and gutted. My friend didnt believe that there had really been a store there, although he has since admitted that those cards and that custom d20 are weirdly good for me… and only for me.

Honestly, I’m super glad not to be the only one to have had such a word experience, and glad to have a better explanation for it than “that time i lost my mind and somehow came out of it with physical items that appear to be more or less +1 ebchanted.”

Apothecary- Lee Bradford on Redbubble. 

Full Moon Dates.

🌕 Full moon : Jan 21

🌕 Full moon : Feb 19

🌕 Full moon : Mar 20

🌕 Full moon : Apr 19

🌕 Full moon : May 18

🌕 Full moon : Jun 17

🌕 Full moon : Jul 16

🌕 Full moon : Aug 15

🌕 Full moon : Sep 14

🌕 Full moon : Oct 13

🌕 Full moon : Nov 12

🌕 Full moon : Dec 12

Sabbat Festivals.

🕯 Imbolc - Candlemas : Feb 1

🌸 Ostara - Vernal Equinox : Mar 20

🔥 Beltane - Mid Spring : May 1

☀️ Litha - Summer Solstice : Jun 24

🌾 Lammas - Harvest Festival : Aug 1

🍁 Mabon - Autumnal Equinox : Sep 21

🎃 Samhain - All Hallows’ Eve : Oct 31

❄️ Yule - Winter Solstice : Dec 21

Celestial Signs.

♑️ Capricorn : Dec 22 - Jan 19

♒️ Aquarius : Jan 20 - Feb 18

♓️ Pisces : Feb 19 - Mar 20

♈️ Aries : Mar 21 - Apr 19

♉️ Taurus : Apr 20 - May 20

♊️ Gemini : May 21 - Jun 20

♋️ Cancer : Jun 21 - Jul 22

♌️ Leo : Jul 23 - Aug 22

♍️ Virgo : Aug 23 - Sep 22

♎️ Libra : Sep 23 - Oct 22

♏️ Scorpio : Oct 23 - Nov 21

Tina: Mercy Lewis what is that?

The Scamander children: Mama we found a baby dragon!

Dragon: *sets fire to the drapes*

Tina: *putting out the fire with her wand* Newt!

Newt: *comes into the room* What?

Tina: Your children found an infant dragon and brought it into the kitchen.

Newt: *turning to the children* Did you really? Where did you find it? Is it—?

Tina: Newt!

Newt: Er, yes, right. You—shouldn’t?

Tina: *nods*

Newt: —bring those into the house. Not without getting me first.

Hey lovely witches, Yule is almost upon us so here are just a few things about Yule that I would consider useful for everyone

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Also known as Solstice Night, or the longest night of the year, the sun’s “rebirth” was celebrated with much joy. On this night, our ancestors celebrated the rebirth of the Oak King, the Sun King, the Giver of Life that warmed the frozen Earth. From this day forward, the days would become longer.

Symbols of Yule:

Yule log, or small Yule log with 3 candles, evergreen boughs or wreaths, holly, mistletoe hung in doorways, gold pillar candles, baskets of clove studded fruit, a simmering pot of wassail, poinsettias, christmas cactus.

Herbs of Yule:

Bayberry, blessed thistle, evergreen, frankincense holly, laurel, mistletoe, oak, pine, sage, yellow cedar.

Foods of Yule:

Cookies and caraway cakes soaked in cider, fruits, nuts, pork dishes, turkey, eggnog, ginger tea, spiced cider, wassail, or lamb’s wool (ale, sugar, nutmeg, roasted apples).

Incense of Yule:

Pine, cedar, bayberry, cinnamon.

Colors of Yule:

Red, green, gold, white, silver, yellow, orange.

Stones of Yule:

Rubies, bloodstones, garnets, emeralds, diamonds.

Activities of Yule:

Caroling, burning the Yule log, decorating the Yule tree, exchanging of presents, kissing under the mistletoe

Best spells during Yule:

Peace, harmony, love, and increased happiness.

Deities of Yule:

Goddesses-Brighid, Isis, Demeter, Gaea, Diana, The Great Mother. Gods-Apollo, Ra, Odin, Lugh, The Oak King, The Horned One, The Green Man, The Divine Child, Mabon.