Hello! Would you be able to recommend items for an altar? I never practiced in the past but I've been interested in starting however I keep getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information thrown at me when I try to research it. I have a lot of anxiety and chaos in my life so I'm hoping to use it more or less for calming, centering and emotionally protecting myself. Nothing extravagant, no extreme spellwork. I'm very much a night owl and most active/alert during those hours if that helps any. I'm not a religious person but I feel like I need something to guide me and witchcraft has always been a practice that speaks to me and feels like my best option. Thank you ❤️
First, keep in mind that there is no one specific witchcraft practice so there’s no correct answer to this unless you join an existing witchcraft tradition. Second, I’ll ask why you think an altar is important. Not all witches use altars. Some witchcraft traditions require specific items for altar for specific reasons like gender or elemental representations.
What does an altar mean or represent to you? What purpose would it fulfill? To me, as a secular witch, my altar is a work space and a storage space. That “work” could be blending herbs, doing a daily tarot card pull, or doing spell work. To some an altar is a devotional or meditation space.
I make the distinction between altar and shrine. I see altars as a changeable place for working. I see shrines as a more static space for remembrance or an archetypal representation. Maybe you are actually looking for a shrine, like a static space of veneration to you or your aspirations.
The funny thing is, I’ll be you already have this. Do you have a space where you collect ticket stubs, souvenirs from travel, trinket boxes, or photos of friends? That’s like a shrine to your existence and what makes you happy. Now you just need to organize something like that to suit your needs.
Above all, I think a self made altar or shrine should be pleasing to you, and I can’t tell you what that is to you. Maybe it is to keep it simple if you struggle with chaos? Maybe a stone or driftwood you found on a beach at a time you felt calm? Maybe candles in a color that pleases you… Or no candles at all if fire is not your thing. Maybe you just keep a clear space with a notebook to journal in.
Maybe you bring flowers in from your garden… Or maybe not if you have allergies.
Again, if you are not following a specific witchcraft tradition, you can put anything you want on your altar. I just feel it should be a pleasing space for you.
Hey there! A witchling curious about your statement that Burning Times is a myth. Could you please elaborate?
It’s a complete fabrication. Those accused of witchcraft were not witches and would never have self-identified as witches.
You are not the granddaughters of the witches they didn’t burn because they were not witches in the first place. Can we also stop perpetuating the disproved Margaret Murray myth of the unbroken line of a pre-Christian witch cult? It’s a fabrication based on poor scholarship.
People who were accused of witchcraft were not all women, some were men, some probably fell outside the perceived gender binary which raised suspicion. People were accused of witchcraft for political reason like jealousy, owning property someone wanted, a woman being able to read (or reading the wrong prayer book during Catholic/Protestant conflict) being an older widowed women with a cat. There’s also a lot of documented history of Jewish people being accused of witchcraft.
Being accused of witchcraft does not make someone a witch.
I’ve said this over and over. Just because you think something looks like witchcraft, doesn’t mean it is witchcraft. Just because it looks like a magical practice, doesn’t mean it is witchcraft. Calling people witches who did not self-identify as witches got a lot of people killed. Don’t call people witches who are not witches.
That’s not to say that Christians at the time and in places of power didn’t believe in witches, because they most certainly did. They were just highly superstitions and suspicious of anything that didn’t fit into their highly structured world view.
Lastly, there is no fucking way 9 million women were killed for witchcraft in a 300 year period. Due to the plague deaths there weren’t event 9 million people alive in Europe.
I will have you know that a small witchling child came up to our both after casting a good luck spell on everyone here and gifted me with a second good luck spell.
I’ve got double luck!
Anonymous asked:
Do you have any reading recommendations for a witchling interested in energy work?
It’s a tricky area because it easily slips into the new age world of misappropriated discussions of quantum physics by people who have no training or business discussing quantum physics. Anything you read on the topic of energy work should be read critically and also tested where you can.
All that being said, I really enjoyed the silly named: Magical Power for Beginners: How to Raise & Send Energy for Spells That Work by Deborah Lipp. She’s Wiccan but acknowledges other practices and her writing is intended for other practices too. The tone is conversational and she discusses different kinds of power including knowledge, cultural power, as well as sending, receiving, and storing. I like the use of “power” over trying to make it sound scientific and use “energy”. So much of witchcraft is observing relationships between things and people and places and observing the use (and sometimes misuse) of power.
So if someone is still in the learning stadges of the witchcraft community they are called a witchling?
I personally like witchling, but some might not like it. Some say new witch or novice witch. What I don’t like is the term “Baby witch”. I think it denotes infantalism and lacks agency. There is not general term for a new witch so whatever you are most comfortable with works.
Mmkay, this is an important thing to discuss and it requires a little modern history. And I want to preface this by saying this is not a judgment on you or any other witch who runs into this idea and takes it at face value. This isn’t something that gets talked about a lot.
The one-point-up vs two-points-up orientation of the pentacle has absolutely no bearing on whether it is a “good” or “bad” symbol. Flipping the star around doesn’t indicate beneficial or baneful magic. What it DOES indicate is the still-prevalent influence of the Satanic Panic on modern witchcraft.
During the 70s, 80s, and part of the 90s, there was a huge moral panic in America over the alleged presence of secret Satanic cults. Supposed “evidence” of their presence included the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG games, violence and occult symbolism in children’s cartoons, hidden messages in rock music and product packaging, and the increasing shift of American youth away from “traditional values.” If you’re thinking conservative Christian mass hysteria, you are correct.
(There were also several famous legal cases involving daycare workers who had allegedly abused or even murdered children for the cult, for which there was never a single shred of physical evidence. Some of these people are still serving time for crimes that never happened. I suggest listening to the American Hysteria podcast episodes on the Satanic Panic for more information.)
Out of this panic grew the Moral Majority, which has been a part of the American political scene ever since they helped get Ronald Reagan elected in 1980.
At the same time, the modern witchcraft movement was beginning to gain steam, particularly toward the late 80s and early 90s when the panic was starting to wane. But it was still a very dicey time to be a witch or to display the symbols of your craft, such as pentacles, in public. And since the panic was largely about Satanists, non-satanic witches (Wiccan or otherwise) took it upon themselves to create this differentiation with the orientation of the pentacle.
“Nope, this isn’t a Satanic pentacle! Look, they have it with two points up, like the Baphomet symbol, right? Well mine only has ONE point up, it’s just for good magic. We never use magic for harm, only for love and light and to help others….”
Sound familiar?
Anyway, all this to say that the idea is still circulating among modern practitioners. It gets quoted in the literature, but very few authors seem to take the time to research or notate where the idea comes from. And it’s very important to do so. Because Satanic witches get thrown under the bus all the time and it’s only fair to recognize that and not perpetuate the idea of an “evil” pentacle. There is no such thing.
Hi I'm quite new to Tumblr and I stumbled into your blog which I find quite interesting. I am really into the idea of making little objects, and I like how you seem to tie spells to them. I have accumulated a substantial digital library on most esoteric subjects but the books I found on witchery always tie it to Catholic practice, which I would rather avoid. Is there a way you could share a few parcels of your knowledge or how you got it ?
OKAY FIRST OFF: That is a great question, and a very very good way to ask it. You gave me context, gave me reason you’re asking me in particular, asked about my own personal practice, and did not talk to me like I’m an encyclopedia or Google. THAT IS VERY GOOD, AND I LOVE YOU FOR IT.
Anyway, to actually answer your question…
Oh yes, I also avoid the Catholic and Christian tie-ins. It’s not my jam, and I don’t want it in my practice. A really really really basic explanation: You’ll find a lot of those tie-ins in folk magic, and less in newer magic. (That’s a big generalization, but it should at least give you a direction. Older esoteric books are more likely to rely on biblical stuff, while newer ones are more likely to rely on Wicca.)
Now, neither of those things are my cup of tea, and I found my home in witchcraft once I discovered secular witchcraft. You said you want to avoid Catholic tie-ins, but I don’t know if you mean you want NO religion, or if you just don’t want that specific one. So here’s a few blogs to check out…
@asksecularwitch and @upthewitchypunx are both secular witches and have built their own practices from scratch. They’re both my biggest influences, not necessarily in terms of *how* to practice, but in terms of *how to build* a practice. These days, neither of them post much info for beginners, and you won’t find a whole lot of step-by-step stuff from them. But they’ve both been around this website for a while, and combing through their tags will give you a lot of good stuff to look through. Mostly, keep an eye on how they talk about their practice, what questions they ask themselves, what they’re pondering about or experimenting with. You won’t learn how to do what they do, but you’ll learn how they’ve come to do what they do, yaknow?
If Wicca is your thing, @traegorn is a good one to check out. @torque-witch is a Norse polytheist (I think? Correct me if I’m wrong?)
But honestly, the best way I’ve found to navigate Witchblr is to stay out of the tags, to just follow blogs who post things you’re interested in, pay attention who they’re reblogging from, and follow those people. See a post you like? Go check out the person who posted it and see if they have more content you want to look through. It tends to be a pretty good way to stay out of the drama.
What am I talking about. Hi. I got off track somewhere. (Hint: It’s the ADHDemon. I am incapable of giving short answers)
AS FOR HOW I BUILT MY OWN PRACTICE.
It basically went like this:
I started off reading and reblogging all witchblr content I could find, regardless of whether it applied to me or not. Basically consuming all the information I could. When I did spells, I hunted through the internet until I found one that did what I needed, and then I followed that exactly as it was written.
I started getting more of an idea of what worked for me and what didn’t. As I did spells, I learned from their results, I learned about the “moving parts” of the spells, how they were structured, and started to get my own ideas on how they worked. I was able to modify spells to tailor them to what I needed. I still worked from a base spell that someone else had written, but I knew enough to be able to say “That’s good, but I will change this one thing to make it better for me.”
Modifying spells gave me even more insight into how they worked for me. At this point I started to write my own spells from scratch, but still worked from existing correspondence lists. I still needed to look at the lists to learn what magical properties of each crystal, herb, color, oil, etc. did, but then I was able to put them together into a spell on my own.
This helped me “build a relationship” with the things I was working with, until I was no longer looking at lists to help me. I knew what ingredients did what, because I had worked with them before. This solidified their meanings in my mind. Basil meant money, not because a list told me so, but because every time I did a spell for money, basil is what I reached for until Basil and Money became linked in my brain. At this point, I wasn’t researching correspondences anymore, but just reaching for things, knowing that they would be exactly what I needed.
And here’s where I am now. I started wondering why things worked the way they did, how magic worked at all, what is the Stuff that makes my spells Go. I’m in the process of building that idea fully, and it’s very complicated to explain in a blog post, but has a lot to do with the link between Chance and Narrative. These days, the ingredients and moving parts are getting even less important. Or… not that they’re not important, but they’re maybe a lot less systematic. I might use a screw in a spell not because screws are good for what I need, but because this particular screw is what I need.
My “making-objects-and-tying-spells-into-them” happened… somewhere up there in that list. I have always been a crafty person, even before practicing witchcraft. And I wanna say… somewhere around step 2 or 3 is where I started to play with the idea that there was magic in my handcrafting. So I was applying what I was learning to something that I was already doing, and then expanding from there.
Anyway, I have absolutely TALKED YOUR POOR EAR OFF. But that’s it. That’s how I’ve come to build a practice (that I am, in fact, still building). Happy to expand on anything else if you have follow up questions! Just uh… keep in mind that I cannot do short answers 😂 Bless you if you actually read all of that.
The PBW Witch Shop is a curated selection of witchcraft and magic related zines,
books, pin-back buttons, tarot cards and more.
We focus on traditional and folkloric witchcraft, animism, chaos magic, secular witchcraft, magical herbs and plants, queer witchcraft,
tarot & Divination, witchcraft & magic in politics, history, culture, and social & racial justice, and aspects of non-Wiccan forms of witchcraft, magic, and paganism.
Pre-Covid the Portland Button Works primarily made custom pinback button. Selling zines and books was secondary and more of a hobby for me to share things I’d like to read.
Right now our business is pivoting to focus on books and zines that
people can read in the comfort and safety of their own homes.
Some items are from well known witchcraft and occult publisher and some are titles from small publishers with interesting items I don’t see in other shops but I’m excited to elevate.
Not everyone has income to buy books right now, we totally understand that, but I would love it if you were able to reblog this post or share Portland Button Works and PBW Witch Shop with your friends.
If you have been looking for a book about something specific, or if you think something would be a good fit for our catalog, get in touch. We can order almost any book in print, even if it isn’t witchcraft or magic related.
With that being said, here are some categories of items we carry:
Some good books to get you started studying witchcraft:
What are zines? Small independently made magazine and pamphlets filled with stories and unique ideas that you won’t find from major publishers!
Some topics you will find in zines we carry are Secular Witchcraft, the fantastic Fiddler’s Green Pamphlets and lots of zine on the places where Politics, Paganism, and Witchcraft intersect.
All items are shipped from Portland, Oregon in plain packaging or United States Postal Service Flat Rate envelopes or boxes with the return address as Portland Button Works. We ship daily and most order come with small fun gifts of buttons or magnets.
Thank you so much for supporting your local witch!
I’m not sure if hanging around these Facebook witchcraft groups is good for me or not. It is giving me some insights into things I should include in my zine about practice building.
I keep thinking of that person and on here asking what the point of a spell jar was when you have all the stuff already. I think someone else said something about how you have all the ingredients for a cake in your kitchen but that doesn’t mean there’s cake in your kitchen.
I’m sure a chaote might disagree with there not being cake in that kitchen, but facebook group witchling aren’t ready for that yet.
In my kitchen there is zucchini bread, which is basically just cake made from two naughty zucchini that grew gigantic when I turned my back on them. Zucchini are the chaos magicians of vegetables.
Hmm. I hope people don’t lose the spirit of the original post because it’s very common these days to have the numbered lists be like “things you have to do in order to be xyz”. Or “How to make your spells better!” Or “Sec is telling you these are the only valid paradigms!”
That’s not the spirit of the post.
The spirit of the post is these are completely separate and individual paradigms that exist in some form, and sussing them out completely from each other is sometimes harder than it seems. Because a lot of paradigms are combined with others.
Generally the context of that original post had other posts surrounding it in deeper discussion of spellwork.
But considering that most people haven’t spent that much time around figuring out exactly what paradigm people are casting spells in (or at least some flavor of it), it’s just ones that I’ve particularly run up against in spellwork myself. In casting for myself.
-nod- I’m not saying anything else in that post, I promise. xD
I’ve been dumping this thought on witchlings in Facebook groups every time someone tries to tell them to read Bucky’s Big Blue Book. I ask them what they are interested in and what are ways they think magic works and keep saying that there’s no one way to witch.
How come “baby witch” is the term new witches are using these days when “witchling” is cuter, more mysterious, and less infantalizing?
Because tumblr now only allows 250 links on a page or some nonsense
like that, here’s my DIY Witchery Resource page broken down. It’s not
all of, but I did as much as I could for now:
There
was more on the original page but this is all I’m able to get to now.
Hopefully some day I’ll be able to add the rest and add more as these
are at least 2 years old and there’s been some fun witchy stuff on
tumblr in the last few years.
Please don’t post on tumblr asking for any random person to be your “witch parent” unless you have seriously thought through a very specific vetting process, which I suspect you haven’t. The witchcraft world is full of predators in sheep’s clothing and attention seeking abusers that would love to take you up on that. That’s not to even start to mention the 17 year old kids who have been studying witchcraft for 5 months and declare themselves a priestess looking to mentor people.
Reblogging this again because there’s another one of those fucking posts up in a tag I follow from a witchling asking for a mentor. Just fucking stop with this nonsense.
Anonymous asked:
I'm not a witchling but I've always been unschooled and I really appreciate you mentioning the theory of it in your witchling tips post. People don't talk about it that much and often when they do it's in a negative way. Every time it is mentioned neutrally or positively it leads to more people looking into it and understanding what it is and so I just appreciate the small part you contributed to that. Have a good day/night!
Aw, thanks! I think it is really important that humans know their curiosity is human and can be explored. So much education is just boring memorization and, as I’m sure you know, it kills curiosity and education, especially for those that learn differently.
