The Sneaking Smiter
Friendly reminder to witches and pagans who want to incorporate ancestral beliefs into their practice: be mindful that a lot of modern nations and their current dominant culture are relatively new, and even the concept of a national identity is very, very modern. Modern borders may not necessarily reflect the world your ancestors lived in.
For example: immigration documents record my great-great-great grandparents immigrating from Germany in the 1870s. But my ancestors weren't German -- they were Bavarian. They were both born in the country of Bavaria and fled to the USA after the unification of the German Reich (no, not that one). They wouldn't have spoken German as a first language -- they would have spoken Bavarian. And if I wanted to incorporate their culture into my practice, I would need to narrow my search to Bavarian folk practices. Other regional practices from other parts of modern Germany wouldn't have been relevant to my ancestors.
There's a similar situation with another great-great-great grandfather, who immigrated in the 1850s iirc. He was from Lombardy, near Milan, and was fleeing the unification of the Kingdom of Italy. He probably very much did not identify as Italian.
And on the other side of my family we have a Northern English line we've been able to trace back to the 1100s, and those ancestors from the Middle Ages probably identified as Northumbrian rather than as English. My "Scottish" ancestry probably actually comes from that same line, because Northumbria was a border state between England and Scotland.
Modern resources like Ancestry.com and other genealogy sites will use modern country names and borders, which can sometimes give us false understandings of where our ancestors actually came from. This is why it's important to do your own research and fact-check outside the ancestry documents.
Off topic but adjacent: for anyone who's ancestry includes things a neonazi might take a second look at, when you find a cool new thing I recommend googling it with "[new term] antisemetism," "[new term] closed practice," and "[new term] jewish."
(Me? Learn about an interesting looking folk healing practice only to realize that the words were believed to have power because They Worked For The Jews and now they were being used by good Christians using The Power of God Not The Power Of Satan? Run screaming away? You bet.)
I been getting into Sigils and art magic 💙🦌 and into developing my own personal method for creating magic Sigils.
As a starting point, I decided to develop some sigils to correspond to Bríd and The Mórrigán the two deities I've been exploring most, as devotional pieces. The upper Sigil is for Bríd and the lower for The Mórrigán. Each is made based on the name of the Goddess using a modified version of the Austin Osman Spare method in combination with celtic artistic motifs and stylings.
These two I made while practicing the process 💙💙 The smaller of the two is a simple general protection Sigil. The larger is a banishment of transphobia 🏳️⚧️
I'm really happy with how these came out, though I do still wanna work on the Mórrigáns Sigil.
Anyone else developing their own Sigil craft?
Some little owls to start off the week.
hail to Anat, anointed in blood and crowned with bones. may you stand behind us before the enemy.
hail to Anat, venom-tongued, who spits at the feet of the Creator. may you hand us a sword when we lose our shields.
hail to Anat, king-slayer, She who prunes Death like a weed. may you drag us back from dust and demons and into the sun.
- a prayer to Anat for strength (@antlering)
This is amazing
Anat, Baal and Astarte - the Ancient Egyptian gods from Near East / エジプトのアナト、バアル、アスタルト
近東出身のエジプト神(彼ら以外にも何名かいます) ウガリト神話の絵はそこそこ枚数があるので、後でまとめようと思います。
Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost
- The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction
- The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity
- We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either
- Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender
- The gods didn’t actually have animal heads
- Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)
- The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous
- Noses (and ears, and arms) broke off statues and reliefs for a variety of reasons, none of which are “there is a widespread archaeological conspiracy to hide the Egyptian ethnicity”
- The carvings at Abydos aren’t modern machines but recarvings over old carvings. Sure they look like them but if you can read hieroglyphs and know that Ramesses II will even usurp the carvings of his own father just to be a little shit
- ‘No soot on the ceilings and walls of the Dendera temple!’ is actually because of extensive restoration works and not because Egyptians were in on shit like Baghdad “batteries”
- While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago
- The pyramid is the simplest, sturdiest shape with which to build and many different cultures discovered this in their own time. There were never any weird fish humans/aliens involved
- The sphinx of Gizah is only an approximate 5000 years old; the 10,000 year/rain erosion nonsense is proven hokum
- Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose
- Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards
- Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”
- The Battle of Kadesh ended in a stalemate (twice)
- While they had feline deities throughout their history, Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats themselves. This was a later Greek/Ptolemaeic addition
- It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that
- Herodotus lied about a lot of things and many misconceptions about ancient Egypt can be traced back to his Greek ass
I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On
- Seth was not the god of “evil”, and despite his chaos providing a foil to order, he wasn’t completely villified until very late in Egyptian history, when he became associated with despised foreign enemies
Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.
Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:
- Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids
- Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt
- Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt
- Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt
- Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization
- Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
- Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt
- Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt
- Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)
- McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs
- Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion
Guys do me a solid and reblog this version instead of continuously asking for sources on the other versions thanks
wait…. there are people who take Herodotus 100% seriously?
do they not know that his nickname is “the father of lies”?
people like that would buy copper ingots from just anybody without checking
The Gorilla Effect is a psychological quirk of human observation. The effect was named for an experiment where an observer was tasked with counting the number of bounces a basketball player makes, and how somebody dressed in a gorilla suit could walk across the stage without being noticed by the observer.
What the scientific paper suggests is that alien communications might be all around us, but we are not equipped to perceive them. We’re too focused on optical telescopes & radio signals to detect (say) fluctuations in dark matter.
newly released wizard spells 2022: Cosmic Gorilla Effect
@hrusewif you told on both how old my blog is and how long you've been on tumblr with just that like. 😂
Welcome back.
Thoughts on Jewish Neo-Canaanism?
I'll be honest that I'm not familiar with that as a specific term, so here are my best two guesses.
If you meant that in reference to (a possible resurgence?) of the Jewish movement from the 1930s/1940s: I don't know enough about current politics to make a proper response. From quick googling, I'd say that the fascist origins gives me a really strong, negative response.
If you mean Jewish people involving historical Canaanite associated practices in their current faith: I really don't get to make a judgement on this, as I am not Jewish. I'm only just starting to research Jewish culture and beliefs, but the one thing that seems to be agreed upon pretty universally in those communities is that there are as many opinions as there are Jews, and an equal variety in their practice. If they feel it works for them, wonderful. Judaism is more than a thousand years old. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are Jewish examples in history and thought that might lend support to those ideas.
If you have specific questions, feel free to send in more anons. (Or pm me, if you don't want them posted publicly. I promise I won't bite. :))