Slapdash Witchery

Here's a recent piece from the guardian on wellness communities and Qanon, so don't take my word for it.

"Wellness" is not just alternative medicine, it is essentially a theory of the body which posits if something makes you feel better, you are better in some meaningful way. I would argue it one of the most commonly held nonreligious magical beliefs in the modern world.

Wellness as a concept has its genesis in the 1950s with "workplace wellness" programs, a sort of budget alternative to offering employee healthcare benefits. This was an era soaked in itinerant business preachers offering classes on things like "hypnosis at a management level" and "yoga to improve leadership abilities". I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much.

The capitalist medical system regularly abandons people. We've all heard stories of profit driven pharmaceudical companies holding the ill hostage for extreme markup on life-saving medicines. People have real, legitimate, reasons to mistrust medical professionals.

Let's say you have chronic pain, and everything your doctor offers you is either ineffective, expensive, or addictive. You are desperate for literally any release, so you start looking into other solutions. You will find an OCEAN of snake-oil salesmen willing to sell you "the secrets doctors don't want you to know."

What is frustrating, is that pain is actually partially psychological. Some wellness techniques may have an actual, medical, benefit on some patients. The worst thing a conspiracy theorist can have is a point. So now you actually do kinda feel better, and you have a sense of loyalty to the grifter selling you 300$ Sumerian Cock Oil Pills. These people are the core of the wellness industry. They are the examples that everyone else points to and says "Well it worked for them!"

Reactionary thought blooms in environments like this. If the medical industry can't be trusted, what else can't be trusted? At any given time, you are two clicks away from "vaccines cause autism." Three clicks away from "Cavemen were 15 feet tall because they only ate meat." And four clicks away from "The medical industry is controlled by The Jews to drain our wallets and keep us sick." Echoes of Nazi attitudes towards German-Jewish doctors are a common backbeat.

Wellness itself is relatively harmless, (compared to the things it is adjacent to) but it acts as a sort of idealogical airport that exposes the curious to a deluge of potentially radicalizing communities. The longer you spend in communities like this, the higher the chance you'll come across something that meshes perfectly with your own biases.

Try opening your windows and airing the place out alongside a modicum of cleaning anything dusty or stinky (high-traffic areas, seating, kitchen sink, trash bins, bathrooms, pet enclosures and potties) and see if things don’t feel better. Not saying the place has to be spotless, but it will probably feel better with fresh air and the removal of allergens, sewage, and perishable garbage. (If it’s too hot to open the windows, at least clean up the pet messes, wash the dishes, and take out the garbage. Anything that can rot and stink, get it out. And run some fans to get the air moving.)

Also, if the Bad Feeling is an ongoing problem, check your home for mold, gas leaks, bad wiring, pests, and carbon monoxide. You’d be SHOCKED how many symptoms of “hauntings” are just homes in need of practical repairs and pest control.

Last year I got it in my head to create my own oracle deck. A few months later, the prototype was in my hands, and I was beside myself. It was almost too easy, and so much fun!

There are hundreds (probably thousands, actually) of tarot and oracle decks out there, many of them independently created and self-published. It’s a good thing, too. Some of my favorite decks come from indie-artists.

If you’ve got the itch, a vision, and some spare time on your hands, I’ve compiled five tips to help you get started.

1. Pick the Format and Printer First

If you plan to get your deck printed, then choosing a format (tarot vs. playing card size vs. other size) and printer first thing is essential in my book. Whatever printer you pick will likely have a template you can follow, allowing you to approach your artwork with the  appropriate dimensions, and DPI in mind. This will save you a lot of time with scanning and formatting your work if you only have to do it once! Make Playing Cards is the printer that I used for the Faerie’s Nature Oracle deck.

2. Study Other Decks

Assuming that you already have your concept, you will have to get into the nitty gritty of what the cards will actually be. You can take a seat-of-your-pants approach,  or plot out the structure of the deck ahead of time. By structure I mean how many cards, whether there will be a theme, groupings (like Minor and Major Arcana), and progression. To get ideas for structure it can be helpful to look at existing decks for ideas. When I was working on my deck, I referenced Brian Froud’s Faeries’ Oracle because I recalled that it had very unique groupings of cards.

3. Share Your Progress

If you aim to make a deck to sell, share it with your friends and social networks as you work on it. This will help build up interest and momentum, and seeing people’s responses to the in-progress work can make for some mighty fine motivation.

4. Test Your Deck

It’s really hard to screw up in the creation of a divination tool, but ordering a prototype and taking your own deck for a spin is still a good idea. In reading with your deck you’ll quickly learn if the meanings you’ve ascribed are too similar, or don’t cover wide enough a range of topics. You’ll see if the deck is fitting your original intention, or if it might be taking you down a completely different road. You’ll probably also fall in love with it. Which is kind of nice.

5. Don’t be Afraid to Ditch Your Project

If at any point in the process your enthusiasm wanes, don’t be afraid to put it on the back-burner. You can always pick it back up when that perfect solution strikes you, or reformulate it entirely. Sometimes good ideas need a little while to percolate. Other times…our good ideas were never that good to begin with.

Good reasons to stop:

You don’t like the idea anymore. It doesn’t resonate, and you think you can do better.

You like what you’ve done, but you’re burnt out on the process. Take a break! Come back fresh.

Bad reasons to stop:

It’s been done before. I’ve got news for you…everything has been done before. As long as you’re not copying someone else’s work, there’s room for your creation in the world.

No one seems to care. I don’t think this is ever a good reason to stop anything. However, if you weren’t doing the deck for you (above everyone else) in the first place, then yeah, you might want to reconsider the project as a whole. Whenever you do something, do it for you. You can’t control whether or not people will care, or like it, or hate it, so the best remedy is to make sure that you care, and that you enjoy it above all else.

To go with the general theme of this week on witchblr...

I am absolutely fucking serious. The original meme, without the big red denial, is someone's attempt to fucking kill people.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE of pennyroyal oil. Even Mother Earth News says there's no reason to use pennyroyal essential oil for ANYTHING, even topically or as a fragrance, for fuckssake! That should give you some idea about how dangerous it is!

Pennyroyal tea, plant matter in hot water, is a traditional abortifacient. It is *incredibly* dangerous, induces abortion by bringing the body close to organ failure (and frequently pushing the system right over the edge, because dosage is impossible to meter), but I would drink a gallon of it before I took a half-teaspoon of pennyroyal essential oil.

Two teaspoons, taken across 48 hours, has successfully killed someone.

Three teaspoons taken as a single dosage killed the consumer within THREE HOURS.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE! FOR PENNYROYAL OIL INTERNALLY! NONE!

There is no antidote for pennyroyal oil poisoning.

Logic Brain: There are multiple rational explanations for ghost sightings and related phenomena, from hallucinations, to carbon monoxide leaks, to infrasound, to simple pareidolia. What we call ghost sightings are likely a combination of several different phenomena, be they mundane, preternatural. Even if ghosts are an entirely real, entirely rational phenomena, it is so astronomically rare that it is effectively impossible to study with any real rigor.

Occultist Brain: There's no agreed upon or appropriately scientific taxonomy of ghosts. Folklore around ghosts and related entities is extremely broad. What you're describing, the dark rectangles and humanoid shapes, are what most people nowadays call "shadow people." Which are a phenomena more closely associated with hallucinations and sleep paralysis than the spirits of the dead. Ghosts are likely a combination of rational and irrational phenomena, i.e. hallucination and folklore, therefore study should be focused on individual cases.

Anthropologically speaking, magic is like religion and science; it’s a way of interfacing with and understanding the world.

It can have metaphysical functions, like offering some corn to the storm god so the storm god doesn’t fuck over your crop harvest.

But magic sticks around because it also serves social functions: it makes people happy to have a corn festival for the storm god. Festivals are fun, it builds community.

One of the most important forms of magic is called “transactional” magic; forming relationships and communicating with entities that are personified elements of human life. The Greek god Ares is a personification of war, by pouring out some wine for him in the hopes that you’ll survive a war, you are performing an act of transactional magic.

The advertising concept of Branding often seeks to personify a corporate entity whose only goal is to sell you things. Coke isn’t just coke, it’s hip, it’s young, it’s fashionable, and by purchasing Coke, the corporation will impart those qualities upon the customer. Which is by definition an act of transactional magic.

There's so much shit from the New Age where you can tell the white author is just disillusioned with Christianity and trying their ass off to understand Buddhism/Hinduism but they just don't have the necessary context.

If I was living in Wisconsin back in the 1970s my entire context for "eastern religion" would be the media of the time and whatever books I could get my hands on. But it would be very hard for me to find an actual Buddhist to interview about even basic concepts. Even then, that would just be one person to base your entire understanding of a religion on. It wouldn't have been impossible to learn about these things, but it would have been a significantly more difficult battle, and one I have to remember not to take for granted.

It's not about the tools you have, it's about the intent behind what you're doing. You don't need expensive tools in order to practice your craft!

Birthday Candles

Tealight Candles

Sticks for homemade Wands

Grass (yes, straight up lawn grass) for protection spells and knot magic

Wildflowers that you can pick for spells

Herbs from the dollar store

Notebook app for a digital grimoire

Notebook for a physical grimoire

Pocket knife for a ritual knife (be careful! don't cut yourself!)

Charge your things with the sun or moon

Deck of playing cards for cartomancy

Necklace that you already own for a pendulum

Stones you find on walks or on the beach

my new sabbat list includes:

someone doesnt understand the 3fold law is only a wiccan thing and starts curse-shaming non-wiccans for cursing

the “blessed be” debacle happens again, creepy invasiveness be damned

people conflating wicca with witchcraft / gatekeeping other people’s crafts

cultural appropriation in droves so we have to bring out the afterschool special ^tm posts (special addition, appropriating person says “i was that race, but like,,in a past life”)

someone wants to shame people who like aesthetics, calls them “fluffy bunnies”

TEH BURNING TYMES WERE REAL AYE TELL YEA AND I SAW GOODY PROCTOR WITH TEH DEVIL

“witchcraft is only for cis womyn uwu✿ ” bullshit, sometimes even brought back by terfs that dont even practice witchcraft ??¿?

someone has a problem with other people using emoji spells, despite no one forcing this rando to use emoji spells. 

“love spells are basically rape” discourse happens about the same as a blue moon

Here is what I already know not to do as a baby witch: 

No love spells

No blood magick

No spells right away

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What is some other good adivce?

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If a witch sees this, I am a baby witch who is new to the craft and looking for tips and a mentor witch who I can ask for advice!

It’s always a good idea to study anything you want to do before you try it, just so you have some idea of what you’re doing. And it’s always good to examine your motivations and intentions before casting a spell, just so they’re clear. But there’s nothing that says you have to wait a particular interval before doing magic on your own.

This idea is kind of a carryover from organized traditions that require a period of mentored study before you are considered knowledgeable enough to work independently. However, if you’re following a solitary path of self-education, this really does not apply. (And the internet needs to stop pretending that the practices and values of one tradition apply to all of witchcraft.)

In fact, I think you should learn and cast spells right away, starting with cleansing and protection. Practice cleansing yourself and your bedroom space for a start, then practice putting magical protections around your person, your valuables, and your home. These are the best way to practice your spellcasting while also creating a safer environment for yourself and learning the techniques you’ll need later on.

I’m not sure why you’d want to do love magic or blood magic right off the bat, but if there’s something you’re curious about, research it. And hey, if you want to try an attraction spell or use a smudge of blood to seal a protective sigil, you go right ahead. Some things you will only learn from experience.

You want to worship a deity? Do it, start praying.

You want to cast a spell that people say you shouldn’t cast? Cast it anyway.

You want to use a form of magic people say you shouldn’t? Go ahead.

Will there be consequences? Will there be fall out? Probably. Will you have to be the one to deal with it? 100%.

But sometimes you just have to try something, regardless of what people say. Sometimes you have to experiment with what is right for you, instead of just reading what other people have to say. In the words of a great educator from my childhood.