Rosa canina by Benjamin Vierling The Rose Labyrinth Pen & ink on paper ᛭ Illustration from The Green Mysteries By Daniel A. Schulke

@luc3

Animism and Violence

I have been thinking a lot recently about violence.

Mostly, I’ve been thinking about how violence is inherent in our animistic communities and how we should think about that. How we should think about the healthfulness and morality of that violence.

In many worldviews, violence is inherently immoral or immoral if practiced by individuals. The State, the Church, or other Authority, has a monopoly on violence that cannot be infringed on. You may be sentenced to violence, god or gods may bring violence on you, and those above you in the community may bring violence on you, but violence may not happen *horizontally* in this system.

All life is inherently violent.

The problem is that if we believe that all living things and many non-living things are beings with agency who deserve respect, then we are violent to beings and beings are violent to us constantly. Because we have respect for these beings, this is horizontal violence.

We can’t help but maim and kill pathogens that enter our bodies. Mosquitoes cannot help but harm us so that they can live. When we walk, we crush invertebrates and plants. We compact the soil and harm mycelium networks beyond our sight. We trap burrowing animals. Birds and fish and mammals and reptiles, all of them have to kill to eat.

Discerning Violence

Like everything else, it’s not whether or not violence is right or wrong. Violence is a part of the nature of energy exchange in our world. It is the natural order. The transfer and transformation of these things is painful and violent, a rending of form into a new form.

We have to be discerning and consider the violence that we choose, that we don’t choose, and that occurs in the beings around us, and how it works in our communities before we can make judgments about the rightness or wrongness of a particular violence.

Return of the Wild Horses

Hail, Spirit of the Mountain, Hail, Landvættir!

Hail to you, Spirit of the Mountain lands, Although I am from Appalachia, you welcome me as your own kin and Daughter.

Hail to you, Landvættir: the Great Deer Herds, The Guardians of these mountains and woods, Keepers of the Ancient Wisdom and tales.

May I recognize your presence all times, May I always listen when you speak up, May you be blessed in all your endeavors.

Hail, Spirit of the Mountain, Hail, Landvættir!

I'd wanted to find the time anyway (papers where authors analyze every instance of a word are spectacular but more time intensive), but the reason I was digging up Járnviðr/iron related stuff in general was that without taking away from the practice elsewhere, especially because you do see instances of it starting to happen later on, but in the myths/sagas I couldn't think of any instance where iron was used for the purposes of supernatural protection or similar apotropaic purposes, unless you count the rather more conventional use of iron weapons, which actually didn't always work. that, and you run into the issue where your seeress/battle magic specialist* is very often carrying around a staff made of iron, trolls are as likely to hit you with an iron bar as be chased off by one, and then there's this, which is kind of a side-conclusion of possibilities to the author's main focus on smithing motifs in Völuspá/Völundarkviða:

they're responsible about mentioning that all not being certain, but given the direction that Craftsmen and Wordsmiths takes re: craftsmen in the sagas often being similar to poets with regards not only to skill, but being distant from society on a number of levels with the "power, esotericism, and monstrosity" often associated with that distance, I think there's at least some interesting connections to explore if one was so inclined

*not a perfect definition for "völva" but not the worst you've ever seen

👀 Well that thesis is getting added to the TBR pile

the days sink, fitting one into the other like holding hands, like sun into sky,  as cairns on sliding sand, leading you down endless from one into the next. these are rabbit warren days– and they are as likely to get lost in themselves as I am in their turns. the only way out is down. 

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?

it's probably from assholes making asks a minefield of trolling/harassment for years with no real blocking ability, which turned people off from allowing asks on their blogs so as a whole the site moved away from it

but now that we do have better blocking, we should try to revive it.

Reblog if your ask box is open.

Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry

The abundance of lichen in Finland is... debatable. According to economic standards, there's enough for commercial harvesting (which is done by harvesting 20-30% in a given location, then harvesting is banned from that specific location for the next 5 years. At least this is how things go in theory...). However, there's a constant issue of reindeer not having enough lichen to feed on, since reindeer are always herded in the wild. This leads to reindeer herders having to give them species-incompatible supplementary feed.

Personally, if the native species don't have enough food to feed on in the wild, to me that would be a better standard to measure the economic viability of harvesting lichen for other purposes with.

Also there's a constant issue of poaching lichen from the wild for which culprits are almost never found. Part of it can be simple issue of ignorance or thoughtlessness. But undoubtedly there are people doing it for commercial purposes, knowing it's not part of the "jokamiehenoikeus" ("everyman's rights", which gives Finns moving in nature the right to pick berries and mushrooms or whatever pinecones they find on the ground in the woods for their own use).

Thats terrible, but I'm not surprised, I suspected it might not truly be sustainable.

Yeah. Harvesting this stuff on industrial scale to be sold for arts and crafts is not acceptable.

Do not buy reindeer moss.

Prayer to Sif

There will always come storms; there will always come rain. But even in times when our best efforts seem in vain, You teach us how to survive and not let our hope be slain. You inspire us to cherish the bounties we've attained; You remind us to be grateful for the wisdom that we've gained. Even as biting frosts coat our once-golden plains, In the dead of winter, as winds howl and sunlight wanes, You help us withstand the cold, and we remain Until spring's budding dawn warms us once again, And we bathe in the summer sunlight, gold as grain.

[[original work]]

The most common mistake people make when thinking about prehistory and how to avoid it.

In "The Dawn of Everything, A New History for Humanity" David Graeber gives what I think might be the best piece of advice I've ever heard for understanding deep human history, and that is to get your mind out of the Garden of Eden.

People speculating about prehistory before modern archeology were quick to frame early humanity as existing in a "state of nature", either with pure innocent tribal communism, or being brutish barbarous cavemen, then something happened to bring us from the state of nature into "society". Did we make a Faustian bargain by domesticating plants and animals? Why is evidence of intergroup violence in prehistory so rare? How did we fall from the innocent state of nature? This, of course, smacks of the biblical creation story, so even if people don't believe it literally, they seem to have a hard time letting go of it spiritually even in a secular context.

This is pretty much nonsense, of course. Humans have existed for over 2 million years. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 300 thousand years. Behaviourally modern humans (with symbolism, art, long distance trade, political awareness) have existed for at least 50 thousand years, from our best evidence, but possibly a lot longer. The time between the Sumerians inventing writing and urban living 5,000 years ago and now is only a narrow slice of human history.

If we want to understand human history properly, we shouldn't understand people of the past as fundamentally different from us. They were intelligent, politically aware people doing their best in the world they found themselves in, just like we are today. We didn't fall from innocence with the development of behavioral modernity, religion, farming, war, money, capitalism, computers, or anything else. The world has changed a lot, but people have been experimenting with different ways to live for as long as there have been people, like this example I've posted before about disabled people's role in late pleistocene Eurasian society.

People have been the same as we are now for at least the last 50 thousand years. We have lived in countless different ways and will continue to experiment. There was no fall, and we don't live at the end of history.

ROADKILL / SHRINE

an homage to a dead deer i was driving past a few weeks ago and thoughts of becoming earth.

mixed media installation // ko-fi

Drowning Morana during the total solar eclipse. About two weeks later than usual, but it’s not exactly every day that you get a total eclipse, much less an early Spring one.

Photos were taken just prior to totality. The pic of totality is a blatant steal from a friend, my phone camera lens isn’t up to that!

I’ll have pics of her rebirth later today or tomorrow.

@msgraveyarddirt @labradorduck @slavicafire @zarya-zaryanitsa @slaviclore