The Second Sister

I'm so stressed out about how close we are and how fragile our position is that I literally can't stop crying.

He's got a new full-time job where he's going to be making enough to keep this (motel room) roof over our heads, so no more bouncing around following odd-jobs... which also means I can finally start looking for work! When he was doing odd-jobs and we had to follow the work, it meant it was never predictable what town we were going to be in from day to day and week to week. It was hard for me to commit to a job when I didn't know if we were going to be living within reasonable driving distance for longer than a few days, you know?

But now we might actually be able to make a home for ourselves!!! FINALLY!!!

Granted, it's just a motel room with a duddy little home-made kitchenette, but most of the people here actually live here and it's a thousand times better than freezing to death spending another Canadian winter in the car (last year was BRUTAL 🥶)

~~But~~

We desperately need to get about a week or two ahead of the game in order to be able to keep this room. Bobbin hasn't gotten paid yet, and we're living on borrowed time. We needed to pay for this week in our room by Friday (it's now Sunday), and we haven't yet. Bobbin's trying to get an advance on next week's pay, which he will probably get, except then when we have to pay for the room and the gas to get to and from work every day this week, by the time his actual pay day rolls around again we'll have already spent it and won't have the money to pay for the following week of rent and gas and we'll be right back to worrying about having to go back to living in the car. You know? Its a vicious cycle. We need to get a week or so ahead in order to avoid having to go back to the car.

I'm Canadian so I can't beg for money via venmo or cashapp or whatever, because those things aren't available here from what I can see... But if you can email transfer money, would you be able to spare a few bucks?

[email protected]

The room is $350/week (at the high end of the average cost of renting a room in a landlord's home, only this comes with way more privacy... Yes, housing is that expensive here, and no, poor people like us can't even get into the cheapest rental rooms because there is a deep housing crisis and we're competing with people who can offer a year of rent cash-in-hand up front).

Gas to get to and from work is costing us about $120/week.

Bobbin will be bringing home about $700/week when he starts getting paid, so while it'll be tight we'll be able to afford it... Especially if I can get a job too.

Even a few dollars could mean the difference between eating and not eating or getting gas and not getting gas!

Please halp. I'm right at the edge of my sanity. We're so close to stability that my anxiety can't handle how fragile our tenancy here is right now. I don't want to go back to living in the car. Please please please.

White (culturally Christian) witches are very into rewriting history to place themselves on the pyres, when in reality, their ancestors were the ones who formed the mobs, often specifically against ethnic minorities. Oppression isn't a game or a costume, and some of us are still actually harmed by the religious bigotry of these institutions. And honestly, it's a slap in the face to hear white witches throw around terms like "generational trauma", without even bothering to consider that some of us learned that our ancestors were burned at the stake from the Yizkor prayer for martyrs at our synagogues on Yom Kippur – not in a hot take citationless wiccan blog post written in 2015.

I’ve really exhausted myself going through Heathen Practice books to find something—anything—I can recommend to newcomers. But every single book on Norse Pagan practice I go through, from Folkish to progressive, suffers from the same issue: They all try to define what Heathenry ought to be, rather than defining it by what it is.

It got me thinking of two concepts found in linguistics: Prescriptivism and Descriptivism. They describe two schools of thoughts for approaching the English language. “Prescriptive” approaches seek to define strict rules for how to speak, write, and use grammar while labeling anything outside of that as incorrect. This thinking is considered very outdated. Conversely, “descriptive” approaches look at how language is naturally used in various different settings. Not only does Descriptivism account for dialect differences and African American English Vernacular (AAEV), it also paints a much richer picture of how language evolves, changes, and functions. This is the approach linguists take these days.

I realized these concepts can be applied to Heathenry. Prescriptive Heathenry is the belief that Heathenry looks a certain way, or ought to look a certain way. Descriptive Heathenry seeks to understand the many different ways Heathenry is practiced, so that we may better understand how it naturally functions. A descriptive approach to Heathenry can inform us what underlying core of Heathenry is when not weaponized for extremist groups.

Ah, so lineage is different from heritage.

Heritage is a piece of identity you inherit from your cultural, familial, or historical background. Contrary to popular believe, having a heritage doesn’t actually make you an authority on what you’ve inherited. (For example: Not every Norwegian knows how to practice Heathenry just because they’re Norwegian.)

Lineage, in this context, is a practice, skillset, or bank of information that’s passed along a line of succession. Getting a specific college degree is a form of lineage. Apprenticing under a master of a trade is a form of lineage. Passing a family practice of Heathenry down over generations is a form of lineage. It’s just a process of where information comes from, how it’s curated, and where it goes.

For example, I practice American Forn Sidr. This traces back to a family Heathen practice originating from Denmark. Those who practice Odinism can trace their lineage back to Naziism and the Volkisch Movement. Those who practice Asatru can trace their lineage back to the founding of Asatru in Iceland in the 1970′s. And so on.

Ethically speaking, anyone who’s taking on the role of teacher needs to be transparent about their lineage and where their knowledge comes from.

I see Heathens habitually hiding their lineage with credentials that actually don’t give any indication of where they got their information on Heathen spirituality from. Some common ones I see are:

I’ve been a Norse Pagan for [X amount of years].

I have Norwegian/Swedish/Icelandic/etc. heritage.

I have a degree in Norse Studies.

I am a Gothi/Gythia.

(If you want my honest guess, this was a precedent set by Folkish Heathens to hide their white nationalist roots, but it spiraled out into greater Heathenry as “the way you show credibility.” Just be aware that titles of seniority don’t actually mean anything in a system without an identifiable standard of quality.)

So yeah, tl;dr, I’m very dubious of teachers who aren’t forthcoming about the origins of their information, and I think everyone should be.

Loki, holding up the newest baby Lion King-style: IT’S!!!!! A WOLF!!!”

What white people hear: never use sage ever, don’t ever buy it, don’t own it, don’t even look at it.

Look, y’all. There’s a couple of facets to my talk today.

1) Yes! You can buy sage! You really, truly can! Buy it from either native sellers (go to a powwow! Eat our food, buy our stuff, watch some dancing!) Or buy it from a seller who sources the sage from native people. Pick one. And no, buying it from 5 Below doesn’t count.

2) you CANNOT smudge. This isn’t just you “shouldn’t”— this is a YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF SMUDGING. Waving a sage stick around your doorways IS NOT SMUDGING. It is smoke clensing. Smudging, depending on the tradition and tribe, could easily have dancing and drums involved. You, as a white person, do not have the cultural BACKGROUND to even know how it works. At all. Period.

3) please, for FUCKS SAKE, stop making posts here on tumblr where you tell other white people about cultural appropriation and what they can and cannot do. Please stop, your license has been revoked because none of you bother to get the facts right. We native people are FULLY CAPABLE OF DOING IT OURSELVES. Consider instead: a) reblogging our posts where we talk about it! We’re here! We have made posts!! b) Making a post that states what we said and then LINKS BACK TO US. Screenshot with a link if you must. Stop centering your own voices in these conversations. You are already centered in everything, stop centering yourselves in a native space.

I’m tired of this nonsense, y’all.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk ™

——

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Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/jnwampler

A wild unscheduled post appears. I’ve just been seeing a lot of something lately that’s been bugging me and I wanted to put it into words, mostly for my own sake. Though my frustration here is rooted in my path as a shadow worker which is the topic I’m writing about this month so maybe it’s more of a prelude.

It’s really just a riff on what plenty of other people have put more eloquently – positivity culture is toxic – but with regards to the witchcraft community in particular. I see so many feel good posts about “When you don’t feel witchy enough…” followed by a list of affirmations. I watch people get responded to blithely when they ask questions about witchcraft with “everyone’s path is valid.” 

This, quite frankly, is incredibly shallow.

Feeling bad isn’t a bad thing. It’s positivity culture adding pressure to feel good about yourself and your practice all the time that makes these totally normal and helpful feelings into things that need to be soothed away, into feelings to reject. Feelings – even bad ones – exist to try to help us. This is more complicated in cases of mental illness but, for the most part, feelings exist to help you.

Your bad feelings about your practice help highlight an area that isn’t working for you. If you just try to affirm the feelings away, you’ll never figure out why the practice isn’t working for you in the first place. What I wish those posts would say instead is to look at why you don’t feel witchy enough and be honest with yourself. Are you actually doing the work of studying and practicing witchcraft? If not, then what could you do to improve it? If you’re not in a place to work on it right now, how can you practice acceptance for the season of life that you’re in?

That takes work and a willingness to reflect and change, but it does begin to actually resolve the underlying issue at hand. I find it preferable to having to reapply affirmations ad infinitum.

And I would chalk this up to a difference in taste if it weren’t how it works its way into all aspects of the witchcraft community. I have frequently been greeted with hostility and “all paths are valid” when I ask questions about how other people think through their witchcraft. The very act of asking questions – especially ones that are beyond a beginner’s level – gets treated as if people are invalidating whatever it is they’re seeking to understand. I’ve watched as some communities take a more aggressive stance with practical questions about intermediate witchcraft than they do actual racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Validation, like affirmation, is the easy and temporary way to cope with discomfort. “All paths are valid” is absolutely meaningless. It is a non-answer in almost every case I’ve seen it used. It’s also untrue. Paths that appropriate closed practices, have misogyny and racism imbedded in them or as part of the goal of their craft, that are used to justify and further transphobia – not fucking valid. The fixation on not invalidating anyone is wild to me. Why is it that in so many spaces that is valued over open discussion what our personal values and paths actually are?

One of the reasons it took me so long to call myself a witch and to practice more regularly is how this sheen of validity covered up everything useful from any sort of scrutiny to figure out whether it would work for me. It wasn’t until I finally found people who could be comfortable with their practice, did not seek my validation, and could answer my questions freely that I ever got anywhere.

I can’t control what other people do, but I since I’ve gotten a flurry of new followers I thought it might be good to restate one of my main principles with my work here on this blog – I will never make you comfortable with my materials at the expense of your well being. I will never affirm you staying the same when change is absolutely necessary.

This community wide discomfort with discomfort is toxic, stunts people trying to be become more skilled, and creates a haven for people reproducing systemic oppression in the community. If we don’t accept discomfort as a natural part of learning and growing, we run the risk of creating a space that is more focused on feeling like witch than actually being one.*

TL;DR – Feeling bad isn’t a bad thing, stop trying to affirm it away. Saying “every path is valid” gives racists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes a pass and keeps people looking to learn in the dark. Discomfort with discomfort is toxic.

Why is the witchblr community so afraid of being honest with themselves?

A boss once said to me ‘if you’re feeling comfortable then you’re not learning anything’ and this applies to every aspect of life tbh.

Pentacles

⭐️ Element: earth

⭐️ Associations: Finances, nature, material world, physical world, work, business

⭐️ Deities (This is very vague though because it’s for a whole suit!): Gaia, Terra, Demeter, Ceres, Macha, Freyr

Wands

🔥 Element: fire

🔥 Associations: Power, ambition, will, creativity, taking action

🔥 Deities (This is very vague though because it’s for a whole suit!): Lugh, Hephaestus, Ares, Mars, Vulcan, Bellona, Pele, Áine, Brigid, Apollo

Cups

🍷 Element: water

🍷 Associations: Emotions, reflection, love and relationships, imagination, thoughts, friends

🍷 Deities (This is very vague though because it’s for a whole suit!): Poseidon, Aphrodite, Venus, Neptune, Isis, Boann, Hera, Amphitrite, Hathor

Swords

🗡 Element: air

🗡 Associations: Intellect, insight, taking action strategically, thought