[img desc: POC fist holding Mjolnir and text that says BLACK LIVES MATTER]

HEATHENS STAND WITH BLACK LIVES MATTER

Pass it on!

An elk spirit bringing a veil of mist.

Done with watercolors and heavily editted in Photoshop

Pagan / Witchy Tik Tok is like…. The worst thing I’ve seen.

I have only heard of it by osmosis through tumblr and it sounds like it.

From what I’ve seen, it reminds me a lot of early witchy tumblr. >>

Beginner Pagan/polytheist tips

Buy your own tarot deck! Buy it because you like the art. Buy it because it's your aesthetic. Do it!

Choose your own deities, not everyone is chosen and that's okay.

You favourite animal = the perfect familiar/guide. What a great choice!

If you want to invite your favourite deity or spirit to watch a movie with you, that's totally okay. Some may refuse but there's nothing wrong with wanting to involve the deities in daily life unless that isn't the norm historically.

Throw out the Wheel of the Year, throw out seasonal calendars that don't mesh, celebrate local seasonal observances and cultural events, don't force yourself to adhere to a calendar that doesn't mesh with your environment.

Respect living cultures and traditions

Me waiting for everyone to leave the house so I can do witchy stuff

2020 is the year we end the Loki vs. Odin malarky and admit they’re both equally important ratbastards ‘til the end and beyond.

Norse paganists getting pissy because Jewish people and other minority people are wary of their runes and symbols are fucking annoying . Until you start actively combatting the antisemitism and neonazism in your communities you don’t get to be annoyed that we’re wary of your symbols 

Norse pagan here, really queer, only about half white, and… yes. Please read the above post, and then read it again.

Look, every time I find a vendor with stuff I like or a book that looks interesting, I have to play the “Are they legit or are they a nazi?” game, counting the number of times they use words like ‘ancestors’ and ‘heritage’ because those are both known dog-whistles and important parts of the religion. This game is not fun. And as someone who’s Latine, who works far more with ancestors of color than the white ones (largely because I don’t know much about the white ones, save the general regions they came from), I am frequently literally afraid of interacting with other Heathens in person without a shitload of googling beforehand, checking which runes people adorn themselves with, matching that to the potential dog-whistle count, and still never being sure unless I see them specifically denouncing racism/antisemitism/transphobia/homophobia/etc.

I am a part of this religion, and this is my experience. If I didn’t profoundly love our gods and traditions, I would’ve packed my shit and gone back to generic multi-pantheon polytheism. So if I feel this way, I need y’all to take a moment and think about what it’s like to someone who’s not on the inside, whose experience of us is basically just neonazis and the #notallheathens crowd, people who see our symbols being used by the ones emulating the fascist fucks who literally tried to exterminate people like them, and have not actually stopped trying.

And the neonazi Heathens are us. We don’t get to say they’re not, we don’t get to No True Scotsman them just because we don’t like how they’re doing our religion. They’re still doing it. We can’t point at the worst and most racist parts of Christianity and use them as examples of Christianity’s many flaws (which is a phase most pagan types seem to go through, myself included) and then act shocked and insulted when someone does the exact same thing to us.

Jewish people, Black people, LGBTQIA+ folks, and countless other marginalized groups have every right to be wary. They don’t owe us a fair hearing. They’re just trying to survive in a world where some of us are literally killing them.

Yeah, we have the right to be mad that our sacred symbols are being turned into instruments of hate, and that they’re inspiring fear in people who aren’t familiar with what we’re actually about. I sure as fuck am. But we need to be mad at the nazis, not their targets. And then we need to do something about it. If we do nothing, we’re complicit. Lecturing the people who are being hurt in this circumstance is not helpful, not sharing wisdom, and not creating frith* with people who are part of our larger communities. We create frith by listening, and by seeing to the comfort and security of our communities as best we can… and our communities out here in the Really Real World are bigger than just our co-religionists.

*Frith, for the non-Heathens out there, is generally translated as peace, but the concept encompasses ideas about hospitality, cooperation, obligation, and security. Frith is what holds communities together, and keeps us from getting stabby when we’re all stuck in close proximity to each other. No frith with fascists.

Anyone remember DJ Conway's work? After taking a scholarly approach to Celtic myth and older source material, where did she come up with some of her concepts?

Was she filtering it though a Wiccan lense?

Like the Morrigan is not a crone. I can see how she can be associated with the crone aspects power... but still...

I think you could say that she was definitely looking at it through a (Neo-) Wiccan lens but AFAIK the triple goddess thing began with Robert Graves, people read Graves, the same people started operating under the assumption that the triple goddess is a "universal" symbol so they started looking at mythology and being like "Those goddesses come in threes! OMFGS TRIPLE GODDESS!" Are there three goddesses that even remotely have the same attributes? It'S tHe TrIPLE gOdEsS....

Pretty much this

She interpreted things through a Neo-Wiccan lense. Even if the source material is so far removed and unlike modern day neopaganism, she found a way to make it fit that context

Which isn’t new when it comes to Irish polytheism (and lets be honest, all the other forms of polytheistic religions). They all pretty much get forced into a neo-Wiccan framework

I think this is all incredibly generous. She just straight up made things up. The thing in particular that comes to mind is from Celtic Magick which...even the title, come on, but she insists the “ancient Celts” used white, gray, red, and blue to represent the 4 elements. Yet she never cites a source and conveniently doesn’t even name a specific culture this supposedly comes from, which ignores the fact that Gaelic peoples used a 3 element system afawk and even then not in the same way as the Pythagorean system she’s trying to shoehorn it into.

My thought is that she used her knowledge to make things sound plausible in the pure endeavor of selling books, history and ethics be damned.

^^ Agreed. If you look at her other books, which unfortunately were some of the first books I read as a baby pagan, she basically recycled the same material, just gave it different set dressing

This. So much this.

As a further example of recycling things, I had a copy of both Norse Magic and Celtic Magic at one point. Turned out they were essentially the same book, but with the Norse things swapped out for Celtic ones. By that point, I was not surprised

This thread is so good. 

THIS. ^^ 

As a folklorist, this kind of thing bothers the hell out of me. So much of what people think of as ancient is Victorian era or newer. Or just wildly inaccurate, really.

Another part of it is that much of what Victorians would view as planar communication or “channeling” was conceptually an altered state in ancient times.

Like the Greeks knew that the oracles at Delphi were huffing fumes. And that was cool. Faerie wasn’t a land or a race, but the altered, glamorous reality of the fae, the gentry who lived in the hills. It was overtly compared to intoxication. Djinn lived all around us, invisibility, raising their own cattle herds and going on hajj to Mecca.

The “other world” wasn’t another place, but another way, a demimonde, an invisible society within our own, or divine madness.

“The less magical the world was believed to be, the more it became necessary to posit a division between us and the realms of wonder.”

“The idea of the mundane hadn’t been invented yet.”

@spiritspodcast

The idea of the mundane hadn’t been invented yet.

Phone wallpapers // Gods and modern issues

The other day I got a worried person asking “why I bring politics into this” and why I am “not going to give an apology” to them because I don’t tolerate racism, xenophobia or misogyny. It was… the clumsiest attempt at emotional manipulation I’ve yet faced. I really hope that Nazis and their friends learn to read some day, because I think I do have it written down on this blog in several places that hey, fuck off.

These are from me to you, use as phone backgrounds if you want to! Click on them on my blog or reblog them to your own (I would appreciate it if you use any!) to get the full-size pictures.

1 TYR - 2 SKADI

3 ODIN - 4 FREYJA

5 LOKI - 6 IDUN

Little descriptions under the cut.

Keep reading

@hufflebuffstuff

I love all of these

I reblogged this once and got shit for ‘blackwashing’ Norse gods. It turned up on my Facebook recently and I shared it, basically saying, “Share to piss off a racist!” and swearing to reblog it wherever and whenever I found it. Again, to piss off racists. Pissing off racists is my jam.

Reblog to piss off a racist!

I was reading about the Wild Hunt and how apparently, Odin Allfather was a typical father in that he refused to ask for directions during his annual Yule ride through the night sky, and instead of turning his fun, flying sleigh around or taking a slightly different route, he’d just plow on through the same route he always took, regardless of who or what was in his way. 

And if your house or land WAS in his way, he STILL wouldn’t reroute. He’d just burn the house down instead.

Which is THE funniest thing I have read in years. And it just got funnier when I pictured the whole thing turning into a buddy road trip with Loki and Odin and Sleipnir, and voila, a wild comic appeared.

(File those two kids under unimpressed.jpg.)

I’m just never going to understand how anyone could read into Norse history and mythology and think: “Wow, all this stuff about racial intermarrying and being hospitable to travellers goes so well with my beliefs about keeping European blood-lines pure, I’m gonna use the symbols of my socially progressive nearly-democratic ancestors to back my obsession with tradition and fascism!”

Since I had a neo-Nazi follow me today, a reminder of the stance of this blog.

I think the point is that they don’t actually read into Norse history and mythology. They just go with what they think Norse history and mythology are like.

Let’s be real, they just play Skyrim and daydream a lot.

Forn Sidr of America would like to wish everyone a wonderful Yule! We hope your day is filled with warmth and merriment. https://www.instagram.com/p/B6WMt82HiGn/?igshid=o8xkkhosqcax

The verse in question: "for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away."

See this is why you don't send people pics of your squishy bits unless they're cool with it.

TERFs gonna TERF

It’s been said before by multiple people, but y’all be wary of Ellen Evert Hopman. @thetwistedrope mentioned her before and I’m sure I’ve got other screenshots from earlier, but this is her latest bullshit.

Of course group admin removed my question because it was somehow a “personal attack” then doubled down that I was being rude because of her “supposed” ideology and my “agenda.” No, I’m not gonna reveal the group cause I’m not tryin to be dramatic, but I am very much warning people that they shouldn’t have anything to with her or her events if they care about trans folks.

She was also posting support for Max Dashu (TERF who created the Suppressed Histories Archives) earlier this year when the latter was disinvited to PantheaCon.

I hate that shes a local pagan and her writings are becoming more popular. She brings nothing new to the table except continuing the old bullshit that is no longer relevant.

Witches reblog if:

This post is being made because some people think that being sceptical makes you less of a witch or somehow makes you a fake witch, so I want to make a point of how many witches are part-time or full-time sceptics but still continue to practice regardless

Having doubt is to be human. We may be witches, but we’re human beings first. It happens! Hell, it happens to me a lot! Not saying I doubt witchcraft but I’m also a realist and understand that my actions will dictate my magical workings more. 

It’s ok to doubt yourself and your craft, this is a time to reaffirm your craft to yourself and ponder your path.