#willow's asks

It is! In fact! Not! To take those very varied cultural concepts and lump them together under energy or manifestation is to water them down and try to make them fit a homogenous narrative that goes directly against my ethics. We should take great care to learn about the actual cosmological systems of the faiths we choose to engage ourselves with, because they will always form a more complete picture than attempting to make them fit the energy work / manifestation narrative - especially given both of those things entered the European spiritual zeitgeist through third wave Western Esotericism appropriating concepts from eastern traditions.

(I haven't really seen you on Discord, and I thought it'd be nice to check up on you!)

(@kaeyas--bf)

She takes a step back, clearly surprised.

Anyways, you mentioned how the term "magic" can feel fictitious based upon all these factors, and it got me wondering if you used a different term then, if at all (and if you're comfortable sharing)? Sometimes I feel the same way about the term "magic" and its various spellings, especially when discussing the topic with people who are not as familiar with spells and ritualwork and the like. I've kind of changed to simply saying my "craft" or "practice" when it makes sense in a sentence.

howdy!!! what a fun ask.

Some important context for why it feels a little weird to me to use words like 'magic' (because I don't really use 'pagan' and 'witchcraft' in reference to myself at all, for people who didn't see the reblog in question) is that really all of that meta-language, those big umbrella terms that describe such big concepts by their function, is all in essence colonial. Most European pre-Christian traditions didn't have that kind of metalanguage, because their spirituality was completely integrated into their daily life and cognition. The language we're used to using in reference to our pre-Christian faiths and practices comes from an outsider's perspective, and not just any outsider, but specifically two major colonial forces: Christianity and western science.

So there's not going to be a non-colonial word to describe such broad categories as 'magic', because the attempt to categorize it like that at all is based on outdated and colonial perspectives (e.g. that there is a hard distinction between 'magic' and 'religion', and also between them and other historic traditions such as law and medicine). There's definitely still value in those words, especially because we rely on them to communicate with people who aren't immersed in the culture of our personal faiths, but if you're struggling with the connotations of words like that, there's not going to be one-to-one replacements (recommendations at the bottom though).

That said, oftentimes the original culture whose practice you're participating in will have words specifically intended to describe their own 'magic' systems. Those words can also be incredibly valuable to learn about because of what they imply about the role 'magic' occupied in people's lives and perceptions! For example, Old Norse 'magic' included functional categories across space and time (seiðr as a queer, transgressive, death-culty, fate-oriented system and galdr as a more honorable, commonplace, literate form of magic, though lines blurred) or euphemisms intended to describe these doings (siðr) and states of being. But those obviously don't help in communicating with other people, where in order to lesson the eye-roll factor of the word 'magic' you could consider:

pre-christian belief, folk medicine, folk magic, folk belief, folk religion, folk practices, divination, sorcery, superstition, fore-telling, charming, summoning, healing, etc can all be used depending on context.

Where I live, April sounds like the gentle chiming of water running under sheets of ice, warning the walker of its treacherous nature. It sounds like the first sandhill cranes bugling their announcements overhead, and the shrill ring of varied thrush returning to the alpine woodlands. It sounds like the whisper of wet snow turning into a chatty rain, like new streams carving their charmingly destructive way through the landscape with no regard for human infrastructure.

It tastes like breaking the fast after Pascha, stuffing your face with meats and dairy, finally, finally. It tastes like eggs filled with anticipation, like the promise of future chicks and ducklings, not too long from now. It starts to take on a sort of spiritual blandness, a mouthful of reminder that these are the final meals before finally green will erupt from the earth, and we can eat ferns and berries and fireweed again.

It feels like softness underfoot, like rotten snow and the first show of mud giving way to your boots. Like the wind is not so toothy anymore, like the sun could heat the wood of the outlook, like you want to take a nap and let the sun just barely manage to heat you out of your coat. It feels like holding your breath, waiting to see when the moose will chase off last year's babies.

It smells like briny southern winds, carrying the promise of salmon and halibut. It smells like wet soil, like rain, like water, when you haven't seen wild water in months. It smells like you could convince yourself there's pine sap in the air, fresh, but not yet ready to fully awaken and loudly announce their return from dormancy.

It looks like bark chewed off of alder trees by moose, like sunsets that last forever at 10pm, the atmosphere distorting its red light enough to see mountains otherwise hidden by the horizon. It looks like thousands of kittiwakes roosting on the harbor structures, like otters clinging to their new babies. It looks like bird food offerings left behind in favor of bugs and grubs revealed by the softening soil, like crows picking through the seaweed for mussels.

For outsiders, April is the worst time to be in Alaska. It's wet, cloudy, slippery - foul snow tries to eat your boots and runoff from the thaw destroys roads as it carves channels, freezes and breaks up again. Life has not yet come back, businesses are not yet open in these rural quarters, and the weather is only hospitable to those who sweat at 40F. But among locals, an air of buzzing anticipation hangs. Pascha is past, and this is the brief, silent interim between the dead of winter and the arrival of the first tourists. We can almost fish, we can almost hunt, we can almost forage, we can almost set up our stalls and open our doors, we can almost almost almost put our big coats in storage. Somewhere in the distance, a stampede of life is barreling toward us, and we are feeling its thunder in the shaking of the earth.

We laugh at eagles struggling to carry driftwood to their nests and beefing with ravens. We marvel at congregations of moose chewing back the last of the willow shoots. We await, in silent eagerness, the first dandelion through the snow.

O all ye gods of the earth, bless the stronghold of the sun.

hey and thanks for the question!! I would love to. To be clear though, I'm not a linguist even though I speak most of the modern equivalents of these languages, so take my history with a grain of salt.

For reference, the last ancestor that German, Dutch, Low Saxon, and English all share is West-Germanic. The split between them is usually put in the very early middle ages with the advent of Anglo-Saxon or Old English, the first insular ancestor of English. At this time, around the 8th or 9th century, is where people usually start recording what is called 'Old Saxon' the ancestor to modern Low Saxon. It turned into Middle Low Saxon in the 12th century, and to many people's surprise was the primary written language in central Europe during the Hanseatic period, and served as the local 'lingua franca', having a lot of linguistic exchange even with the Nordics, which we still see reflections of today. During this time, a standardized language was forming, but it never got the opportunity to fully materialize and take a foothold. It started declining rapidly as the Hanseatic League came to an end, and the speaker area was made significantly smaller when Low Saxon/Low German speakers were expelled and displaced from their Eastern communities after and during WWII. and by the 19th and 20th centuries, German and Dutch had already been completely standardized, Low Saxon left behind in the dust.

The modern day Low Saxon language area is complicated, but the area occupied by speakers of Low Saxon proper (we'll get into it) is primarily nestled in between the Netherlands and Germany, both colonialist countries who had their own ways of trying to assimilate Low Saxon speakers. Today, a pretty solid distinction exists between Dutch-national Low Saxon speakers and German-national Low Saxon speakers, both in history and how the language looks and sounds. In Germany, despite opposition from Low Saxon speakers, High German was considered the language of intelligence and education, and it was decided to completely exclude Low Saxon from mass education, instead educating all children in High German. Just like in the Netherlands, regional languages and dialects were thought to limit the intelligence of the speaker, and Low Saxon gained a reputation as outdated, primitive and backwards. Despite this, casual and at-home use of Low Saxon survived better in Germany than it did in the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands, due to denser populations causing more urbanization and multiculturalism even in rural areas, Low Saxon experienced a further decline than in Germany, simply for lack of space for a regional language to be applied and expected to be understood, alongside all efforts from Dutch native speakers to eradicate Low Saxon from education and formal settings on grounds of it being supposedly unintelligent and primitive. However, on the Dutch side of the border, a music movement founded in Low Saxon language and culture arose with the arrival of the dialect-rock band Normaal, whose footsteps were rapidly followed in by other musicians, creating a Low Saxon art subculture that is still alive today.

Of all the maps I've seen describing the current language area, this one I like best:

Striped areas represent areas where the language is no longer spoken in most everyday situations, but still exists in rural communities/at home/in elders. It should also be factored in that in most of the areas where the language borders on Dutch, German, or other majority languages, Low Saxon speakers adopt words from that majority language or assimilate into it, and thus are often no longer able to speak Low Saxon 'properly', for lack of resources on learning it, and general discouragement from non-speakers (and sometimes even older speakers who remember being punished for speaking it in school)!

The language has no official name. I and many others choose to default to 'Low Saxon' on grounds of this being a fairly common name that does not imply the language to be some lesser version of Dutch or German - also, contrary to popular belief the 'Low' in the name(s) refers to altitude, not social standing - instead opting to refer back to the original tribe of Saxons that inhabited the North sea coast and spoke Old Saxon. The language is also formally known as Low German in English. Some academics opt to only call a certain set of dialects 'Low Saxon' and the rest 'Low German', so confusion abounds. In Low Saxon itself, though, the language has many more names and epithets: In Germany it is often called Plattdütsch, Plattdüütsch, Plattdütsk, Plattdüütsk, Plattduitsk (South-Westphalian), Plattduitsch (Eastphalian); Neddersassisch; Nedderdüütsch. In the Netherlands it is most commonly just referred to as 'plat' (lit. 'flat'), also in reference to the geographical area that speakers most commonly reside in, but that term refers to any dialect or language in the Netherlands associated with farming or farmland. More rarely some variant of 'neadersassisk' is used. It is also sometimes semi-derogatorily referred to as just 'dialect', but this also groups in other non-Dutch languages perceived as dialects by Dutch speakers. In Slavic areas and among Slavic diaspora like Russian Mennonites it is often called Plautdietsch.

Whether Low Saxon is mutually intelligible is an interesting question. Despite English, Dutch, and German often being mutually intelligible especially in writing, many Dutch speakers and some German speakers note that they find Low Saxon extremely difficult to understand and sometimes even confuse it for Danish. Part of the reason this is, I suspect, is because Low Saxon is extremely variable, has no standardized writing (and when it is written, often uses diphthongs and letter combinations not normally seen in Dutch or German), and people are not frequently exposed to it. Speakers of Nordic languages may at times have an easier time grasping Low Saxon due to their familiarity with certain sounds made in Low Saxon that do not exist in other West Germanic languages, like å and oa. That said, Low Saxon is technically closest in relation to English and Friesian, and then Dutch and German and whatever other West-Germanic languages you choose to acknowledge. Nevertheless, in my experience as a Westphalian speaker, I even have trouble understanding speakers of eastern dialects of Low Saxon, so I'm not surprised that it is even more difficult for non-speakers. It's definitely partially mutually intelligible, but due to the extreme regional and cultural variation as well as the lack of consistent way of writing it, it's not as easy to decipher as Dutch-German or any some such combination.

Here I'll share a sample with you in the orthography devised by a set of enthusiasts at Skryvwyse:

Et (neader)sassisk – ouk wel bekend under de namen: plat(düütsk), neaderdüütsk, laegsassisk, of under regionale benamingen – is ne westgermaanske språke med ungeväär 6 miljoon spreakers. De grötste grup spreakers woanet in Düütskland en Neaderland. Anslutend is der ne kleine grup spreakers in Dänemarken. Ouk leavt der ne behöyrlike grup nåkummelingen van emigranten uut et düütske Vöärpommeren in den brasiliaansken deylståt Espírito Santo.

Dutch: Het (Neder)Saksisch - ook wel bekend onder de namen: Plat(Duits), Nederduits, Laagsaksisch, of onder regionale benamingen - is een Westgermaanse taal met ongeveer 6 miljoen sprekers. De grootste groep sprekers wonen in Duitsland en Nederland. Aansluitend is er een kleine groep sprekers in Denemarken. Ook woont er een behoorlijke groep nakomelingen van emigranten uit het Duiste Vorpommern in de Braziliaanse deelstaat Espírito Santo.

German: (Nieder)Sächsisch – auch bekannt als Niederdeutsch, Niedersächsisch oder unter verschiedenen regionalen Bezeichnungen – ist eine westgermanische Sprache mit etwa 6 Millionen Sprechern. Die größte Gruppe der Sprecher lebt in Deutschland und den Niederlanden. Zudem gibt es eine kleine Gruppe von Sprechern in Dänemark. Eine beträchtliche Gruppe von Nachfahren von Auswanderern aus der deutschen Region Vorpommern lebt zudem im brasilianischen Bundesstände Espírito Santo.

English: (Low) Saxon - also known under the names plat(düütsk), neaderdüütsk, laegsassisk, or other regional names - is a West Germanic language with around 6 million speakers. The biggest group of speakers live in Germany and the Netherlands. Additionally, there is a small group of speakers in Denmark. A significant group of descendants of immigrants from the German region of Vorpommern also live in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo.

It looks like your series will answer the questions I have (how do I tell what’s genuine and what’s appropriation? Etc) so I’ll wait for them to come out instead of asking here, but as I’m an avid reader, aside from the reading already recommended on your post, do you have any more recommendations? As much as I’d love to jump right in to learning about Scottish witchcraft in particular, I think I should learn more about the appropriation of witchcraft first. Also, is there any advice you would personally recommend me to remember before/as I begin learning?

Thank you so much and I look forward to reading the rest of your series!

Moi!! I'd be happy to! My first advice would definitely be to not wait to start until you feel confident that you can't fuck it up, because that time will never come. Let yourself make mistakes, and be open to the fact - and aware of the fact - that you will make them no matter how hard you try to eliminate the risk. It can be really paralyzing to have a mindset that isn't oriented around compassion and forgiveness for yourself, even in the face of mistakes, because it stops you from being willing to just start shit knowing you may do something wrong. Polemic and critical as my writings are, my base ideology will always be oriented around compassion - for others and yourself. Compassion for others comes in the form of researching the impact of your actions and considering how you affect others, compassion for yourself comes as the willingness to take journeys knowing there may be parts you have to forgive yourself for, and being willing to do that.

If it helps to hear, also, it wouldn't actually help anybody to go completely hands-off in a hypothetical where you discover you've been participating in appropriation. For one, it's highly likely that you engage in a kind of appropriation or cultural diffusion very regularly in your daily life right now, be that in your language or the things you consume or anything equally innocuous. In the case of something as important as connecting with your own native culture, dropping it like a hot potato upon discovering a mistake you're making is avoidance of the problem, where the most radical thing you could be doing is confronting it, solving it, and moving along. Connecting with your own culture is a lifelong process, and especially in a world so heavily oriented around white supremacy, mistakes will be made. And that can be okay if you make it so, by letting those things pass you by, taking them as an opportunity to educate yourself (and potentially others in the future!), and continuing down your path of reconnection. That is the real antidote to appropriation and white supremacy!

Another piece of advice that I can offer is to be very intentional and mindful about what you call "witchcraft." The word 'witchcraft' certainly appears in Scottish literature relevant to your quest, but it will severely limit the kinds of information you'll be presented with. Using the word "witchcraft" in your search queries and research objectives will heavily bias what results you get in favor of Wiccan and pseudo-Wiccan material, folkloric material that depicts a nonexistent "other" and magic that wasn't actually practiced, as well as historic Anglo-centric sources that depict Scottish magic as Dark, Ethnic, Spooky magic (in much the same way as "voodoo" gets depicted in more recent pop culture). On top of that, the word "witchcraft" carries heavy baggage to do with antisemitism, misogyny, pseudohistory, Christian propaganda and general witchhunt craziness - and most Scottish magic that was actually practiced historically would not have been called 'witchcraft' by its practitioners. I know people heavily favor the term for self-identification purposes, which I shan't condemn, but when it comes to research here are some alternative key words to use and be on the lookout for:

folk magic, folk beliefs, folk religion, fairy faith, folk medicine, pre-Christian religion, superstition, folk life, folklore, folk tales, tall tales, fairy tales, folk legend, mythology, charms, etc

These won't all give you the same kinds of sources per se but they will all yield stuff that should be useful to understand the magic traditions and the context they exist(ed) in!

I do hope to cover a lot of advice for recognizing and avoiding appropriation and bad scholarship and such in the rest of my series, but I'll still throw some quick ones your way because I'm famously not the fastest writer:

It pains me to say (I wish it wasn't so, truly) but ALWAYS prioritize historic, scholarly and academic sources over ones written by practitioners or addressing (aspiring) practitioners.

Make sure not to forget that context is important! On top of reading things that directly discuss religion and magic, also be sure to contextualize that information with other information about the time period that will help you understand why things are / were the way they are.

Speaking of context: the format that you find information in matters. Some sources may offer somewhat straightforward insight into how things were done (like actual contemporary accounts), but things like folklore and witch trial proceedings are often unreliable accounts of how magic was actually practiced, and instead are more valuable for understanding the social structures and belief systems around magic.

Read actively and intentionally! Experiment with note-taking and annotation, and treat reading as a conversation you're having with someone. I can't recommend it enough to use your annotations or notes as a way to learn how to argue with an author, it helps you learn how to recognize good information. Question everything, preferably in a way you can refer back to.

Balance theory with practice! Tons of reading will just make you forget things, humans process through action and movement. Try stuff out, or even just go outside and look for the subjects of folklore and folk beliefs. If you don't know where to start with putting things you read into practice, get a local field guide and look for plants mentioned in folklore!

And don't forget your culture is still alive and extant. In reading about the past, don't forget about the present, and make an active effort not only to keep yourself grounded in it, but also to adapt the things you learn about to fit the modern era, without diminishing the past, twisting it, or insulting it.

I don't have any sources on the appropriation in the witchcraft community, sadly. It's not something that has been written about much to date, especially not in a scholarly context. Peers certainly have great commentaries, and I'm always on the lookout for other people writing about these topics, which I recommend you to do too if you're interested! But decolonizing your practice, at the moment, can only be done by reading broader material about colonialism and white supremacy. I recommend looking for books about these topics, especially those that are more relevant to your geographical area and cultural experience - which I only specify because a lot of material on the subject can be highly Americentric, since that's where the movement largely started, though those are still very worthwhile to read.

I'll leave you a handful of sources that I have found interesting, mostly unproblematic, and helpful, and wish you the very best of luck on your search!! (Re)connection is a noble undertaking and I really hope you find much fulfilment in it.

County Folk-lore - FOLKLORE SOCIETY GB : Eliza Gutch, Edwin Sidney Hartland, Mabel Peacock, et al. 

Myths and symbols in pagan Europe : early Scandinavian and Celtic religions - H.R. Ellis-Davidson

Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland - John Gregorson Campbell

Scottish Folk-lore and Folk Life: Studies in Race, Culture and Tradition - Donald MacKenzie 

Collected words of Eleanor Hull, downloadable.

Denham Tracts - Michael Aislabie Denham

Survivals in Beliefs among the Celts - Henderson

An Encyclopedia of Faeries - Katharine Briggs

The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies - Kirk

The Certainty of the World of Spirits, to which is added the Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather - Baxter

New Flora of the British Isles - Clive A. Stace

Compendium of Ritual and Symbolic Plants in Europe - M. Cleene (can be found online with some searching)

The Carmina Gadelica

to be fair, I just made that term up because I like alliteration, but in Germanic folklore there are quite a lot of different traits people can have that either indicate their inherent 'faery/trollish/otherworldly' nature, or are ones that in the process of getting them they adopted or gained faery/troll/otherworldliness. they're often not stated outright and rather implied, as well as being highly variable, contextual, etc. it's a spectrum, and an impossibly complex one a that. I should note that contrary to popular belief, 'faery' is not just a class of beings in the same way that 'troll' isn't. both of those words were originally more like adjectives than nouns, they refer to states of being and lived experiences rather than hard categories or specific individuals. generally speaking these words, and many many like them in Celtic and Germanic folklore - are extremely complex ways to indicate some kind of 'otherness'. 'Otherness' was a sort of socially agreed upon unnamed but highly powerful feature of the world that one found in such things as death, the unknown, the grotesque and malefic, the incomprehensible, the unnavigable, the misunderstood, the arcane, the creepy and uncanny, et cetera. so 'faery' or 'troll' is not an easily grasped class of beings so much as an umbrella term for a whole range of groups and kinds of beings/things/creatures/states that primarily exist outside of our sensory and instrumental perception.

this means that something can be a faery when it's any kind of creature that lives in the otherworld (including, at times, just the ancestors!), but somebody can also be faery to any extent, from somebody who is a full-blown changeling to somebody who just has features that puts them in connection with this concept of faery. things can be faery, places and situations can be faery, and all of this can be to completely varying degrees. just wanna get that out there before people start being like "OMG DOES THIS MEAN I'M HALF FAIRY" because no please settle down

folkloric 'faery features' can be anything like:

amputated limbs or physical deformities

notable and unusual dental differences

blue eyes, red hair, pale skin, tight curls, heterochromia

bodily fluid related notable differences

dwarfism

anything that makes you half of something: half deaf, half blind, limping heavily, being one-legged or one-armed, etc, all gives you "one [x] in the grave/otherworld/etc"

dying and coming back to life

being extremely beautiful, but like, in a Spooky Way

mental disabilities and noticeable or severe mental illnesses

speaking coherently early in life or being extremely far ahead of your peers as a child

just being freaking weird as hell

being very good at divination, very wise, or accurate in predicting the future

etc etc etc etc etc