margridarnauds:

Okay but the LONELINESS of Blodeuedd as a figure. 

Like, think of it – She’s not “o’r genedyl yssyd ar y dayar honn yr awr honn”, which is often translated, not incorrectly as “of the races that are upon this earth at this time”, as per Aranhrod’s curse. However, while “race” or “nation” is one translation that can be used, another translation is “family” or “kindred.”

 Lleu and Blodeuedd are similar in some ways – both of them being born in strange ways as the result of Gwydion and Math Fuckery, both of them growing up quickly (in Blodeuedd’s case, instantaneously) both of them described as the most beautiful people in the world, but the one strong divergence, and the thing that damns them, is that Lleu HAD Math and Gwydion, while Blodeuedd had…no one. No one to act as her family. She was always treated as a creation, as a consort for Lleu, but never as a person. As opposed to Rhiannon and Pwyll in the First Branch, or like Rhiannon and Manawydan or Pryderi and Cigfa in the Third, who travel around together, Lleu leaves Blodeuedd alone when he goes off to visit Math. Of course she fell in love with Gronw – he talked with her, one on one, the ymdiddan, the conversation that’s so important for relationships in the Mabinogi. He treated her like a person. Of course she agreed to kill Lleu – what other option did she have, when she’d been made for him and there was never a chance for anything else? 

There’s just…such a deep, deep sadness about her character when you think about it. No one ever really loved her – not Lleu, not Gwydion, not Math, not Gronw.

zarya-zaryanitsa:

zarya-zaryanitsa:

Among the Indo-European peoples, the fire and the hearth chain give physical expression to the bond between the living and the dead, which explains rites of aggregation like the following: “A servant should, on entering the house, see if there is a fire in the fireplace and stir it up; in this way her position will be secure there for a long time.” “If someone has stolen something from you,” says Johann Georg Schmidt, “affix a horseshoe that you have found by chance to a spot where the fire is constantly burning, and you shall get it back.”

- The Tradition of Household Spirits by Claude Lecouteux

Let me also explain the magical significance of the locus chosen for the ritual. The Russian stove is often a place where rituals take place. It serves as a communication device between the human and the spirit worlds. For example, after a funeral people shout into the stove that the deceased is no longer in the house. Here too grandmothers washed babies, creeping into the oven and reading prayers over them. In the same locality, we recorded a story in which one wizard transferred his knowledge to another, also making use of the stove. The initiator stands in the house at the mouth of the stove and speaks “words” into the stove, while the one being initiated sits on the roof by the chimney and “gathers them in”.

- A Letter to the “King of the Forest”. Contemporary Magic Practice in Russia by Svetlana Adonyeva

literaryreference:

catominor:

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that’s considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

1. I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don’t have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what’s new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.
2. When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that “Murders in the Rue Morgue” was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn’t garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.

feyosha:

cadaverkeys:

You guys rlly don’t realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered “relevant” enough to digitise).

Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips…it’s not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.

creature-wizard:

“If the Law of Assumption is fake, what about the success stories?”

This is a question gotten a few times, so I figured I’d do a post on it.

First of all, the methods used by LOA practitioners to change their beliefs about themselves would certainly have profound psychological benefits to many people who’d internalized false beliefs about their personal agency and value as people. There are a lot of great brain hacks here to break yourself out of learned helplessness and unwittingly sabotaging yourself and others through the Pygmalion Effect.

Here I would like to state: if these methods have helped you regain your personal agency, learn to love yourself, and develop healthy relationships with people, then by all means keep doing them. There’s nothing wrong with using affirmations or using a little make-believe to make yourself believe.

Next, there’s really know way of knowing for sure whether the LOA actually had anything to do with people’s apparent successes. Like if somebody tries to manifest money and finds a hundred dollar bill on the ground within a week, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the LOA was the cause of that. Sometimes people just find dropped money; it’s not exactly statistically improbable.

Of course, it also doesn’t mean that they didn’t somehow metaphysically arrange for a hundred dollar bill to come their way. But even if they did, it wouldn’t prove that Neville Goddard was right about literally everything, much less the extreme solipsism he pushes in pieces like The Pruning Shears of Revision.

We’ve also got to remember confirmation bias, where people are more likely to remember things that support their beliefs and dismiss whatever doesn’t. Somebody might try to manifest a hundred things, get five of those things, and count the five as proof the LOA works, ignoring the ninety five that didn’t. The reality is that the more things you try to manifest, the more likely it is that at least one of them will actually happen.

Also, there’s the whole affirm and persist/living in the end deal, where people are supposed to just behave as if they have everything they want. When you see people posting about their successes, they might just very well be trying to act as if their desires have already manifested. They might not actually have it at all.

Finally, people just lie sometimes. Tumblr itself was host to the infamous hivliving, a blogger who lied about having HIV, among… many other things. If you ever want to learn just how ridiculously dedicated someone can be to keeping up a lie online, look into the story of MsScribe sometime. If you think nobody in the LOA community is lying, I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

In fact, Neville Goddard most probably lied about some pretty important shit. You’ve probably learned that he learned about the Law of Assumption from this Ethiopian rabbi named Abdullah, who supposedly got it from Kabbalah.

The thing is, if you’ve studied mysticism and the occult for any length of time, you pretty quickly realize that claiming to have been taught by a mysterious foreigner is pretty much just code for “I pulled it out of my ass.”

It’s also pretty obvious that the Law of Assumption has more in common with New Thought and Protestant beliefs about divine reward and punishment than it does with Kabbalah, which is a closed practice to non-Jews. (If you want to know about the history of Kabbalah, and get enough of an idea of what it’s actually about so that you know why the Law of Assumption has nothing to do with it, I recommend Dr. Justin Sledge’s lecture series over here.)

Additionally, Goddard’s claim that the Kabbalah actually supports his obviously Christian form of mysticism isn’t only just absurd, it echoes centuries of antisemitic Christians claiming that Kabbalah actually proves that Jesus is the messiah in order to try and convert Jews.

Goddard’s use of the Bible, by the way, is appalling. If you’ve ever read the texts he quote, it’s obvious that he’s just ripping passages completely out of context to spin them into something that was definitely never intended by the writers. In other words, he’s blatantly lying. (And by the way, if you ever want to learn about the real history of early Christianity, I recommend the work of Dr. Bart D. Ehrman. He’s also got a YouTube channel over here.)

Now tell me this: if Neville Goddard so blatantly and so brazenly lied about the source of his ideas, why should we believe him when he claims that the Law of Assumption can do literally anything? Shouldn’t we consider that maybe, just maybe, he might have lied about some of that other stuff, too?

creature-wizard:

Some things associated with New Age that aren’t inherently bad

Since this blog can get kinda heavy sometimes, and because there’s some people out there who think that anything remotely adjacent to New Age is evil and must be banished forever, I figured I’d write something on elements it includes that aren’t necessarily bad.

Its general concept of God and divinity

New Age beliefs typically posit that God, or Source, effectively split itself into many different souls in order to have different kinds of experiences. There’s nothing wrong with this model of divinity in itself, since it doesn’t by itself imply anything hateful or suggest any kind of action that might lead to harm. Where it gets messed up is when people start claiming that if you’re suffering, it’s because you deliberately chose to have this kind of experience before you incarnated. That’s just victim blaming, and it’s wrong.

Energy healing

Energy healing on its own is a harmless practice, and many people do report feeling better for doing it. Dismissing energy healing as inherently bad in itself would be like dismissing prayer for recovery as inherently bad. It’s really not. The problem is always when people start believing they should only rely on energy healing or prayer, or fall into the belief that pharmaceutical medicine is sinful or an evil conspiracy.

Listening to relaxing tones

No, those “healing frequencies” probably won’t cure any serious ailments. But that doesn’t mean they can’t make you feel more relaxed or help you focus. You don’t have to subscribe to any specific belief system to listen to these audios.

Glossolalia

The New Age practice of speaking in light languages is a form of glossolalia, which basically involves relaxing and speaking whatever sounds immediately come to you. Doing it can be cathartic and relaxing, and you don’t need to subscribe to any specific belief system to do it.

Tarot reading

Reading tarot cards doesn’t require subscribing to any specific spiritual belief system. Nor do you even need to be spiritual at all; you can read tarot cards with the perspective that what you’re doing is prompting your own mind to consider things from new angles.

Meditation

Meditation is known to have beneficial effects, and doing it doesn’t require subscribing to any particular belief system. Yes, it’s a problem when somebody subscribes meditation as a cure-all, or use it as a form of spiritual bypassing, but that’s a problem with the teacher, not the practice itself.

Eating more plant foods

Provided you don’t have any allergies or intolerances, eating more fruits, vegetables, nuts, and the like usually isn’t a bad idea. The problem with New Age is when it effectively moralizes food by decreeing certain foods “high vibrational” or “low vibrational,” or when it’s pushing conspiracy theories about modern processed food items being intentionally poisoned to block our psychic abilities or keep us dependent on the healthcare system. And obviously, it’s appallingly ableist to tell someone that they could cure a chronic illness by switching to an all-natural vegan diet or something.

Belief in aliens

It’s a big universe, and it’s not unreasonable to think we’re not alone in it, and that maybe there’s beings who are observing us. The problem is when belief in aliens becomes part of a conspiratorial worldview that scapegoats certain groups of people for the world’s problems, displaces real history, and misuses other people’s traditions and beliefs.

Belief that things can and will get better

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett’s words in The Hogfather, we sometimes need to believe in things that aren’t true (such as justice and mercy) so they can become true. Believing that things can change makes people feel like their efforts are worth something. Meanwhile, when everyone’s got a doomer attitude nothing will change for the better because nobody will even try.

One problem with New Age’s optimism in specific is that they tend to believe that things getting better is contingent on converting a large number of people to New Age spirituality, which includes getting them to accept a large number of conspiratorial beliefs that target and harm vulnerable minorities, and/or distort and erase the actual spiritual beliefs of people from different cultures (many of whom are marginalized minorities and/or have been severely harmed by colonialism already).

Another problem is when you get the whole 5D ascension thing going on. 5D ascension is basically the New Age version of the Rapture, and just like the Rapture, it’s always said to be right around the corner, but it never materializes. (If you’d like examples, here are predictions for 2012 and 2015.) Very concerningly, New Agers often list a number of physical and mental health symptoms as “ascension symptoms.” They were claiming this as far back as the 2010s, when December 31, 2012 was supposed to be the big day. (Here’s an example.)

Basically, hope and belief that things can get better is important - but it’s also important not to hang our hopes (and medical decisions) on supernatural predictions that have already failed multiple times.

Wanting to promote compassion and understanding between people

This is a great thing to want! The problem with New Age isn’t that they want to spread peace and harmony, but rather the way they want to do it without really listening to the people they supposedly want to help. You can’t, for example, genuinely fight colonialism if you’re engaging in cultural appropriation and misrepresenting their spiritual traditions - you’re an active part of the problem. Promoting compassion and understanding begins with you shutting up, listening, and learning without imposing your own preconceptions or reacting from your ego. You’re not doing this if you’re looking for mythology to project aliens onto, or dismissing anything you don’t want to hear as a conspiracy.

And here’s some critical thinking tips before you go

When you’re evaluating any belief system or practice, it’s always important to remember that belief and practice are not the same thing. Most of the time the practices are harmless in and of themselves; the actual danger comes from the conspiratorial and morally polarized worldviews many practitioners also subscribe to. Nobody’s ever died from putting rose quartz in their room or getting a reiki session. They have died from refusing evidence-based medical care because someone convinced them that the health care industry is a scam and will also separate them from Source.

When it comes to beliefs themselves, ask yourself what kind of narratives they’re upholding. If they basically promote the same kind of conspiratorial narratives used by Nazis, witch hunters, or far right Christians to justify their hatred and violence, that’s a pretty strong sign that this belief is bullshit. But of course, there’s a pretty stark difference between believing that aliens could be out there, and believing blood-drinking reptiles have invaded the Earth.

abwatt:

mamaangiwine:

I think one of the most powerful tools a practitioner can use in ritual, though not one I see discussed often, is reenactment.

Reenacting the myths of your gods.

Reenacting the trials of your saints.

Reenacting the movement and rhythm of the natural world around you.

To act as these is to invoke these, body and soul- both from without and within. To feel the exact space that they occupy in the ritual, which is yourself. It is to clothe yourself in their divinity, so that a small part shall remain.

This is the spell, you see. That piece, that part, is the gift imparted to you. To shape you or guide you in the way you ask.

In many group traditions, the re-enactment of myth upon a candidate is itself the initiatory process by which an ordinary person is ‘plugged in’ to the source of power.

In an ordination of a small-c catholic (i.e., Roman Catholics, Greek and Russian and other Orthodox, Anglican/Episcopalian, and Lutheran) priest or minister within the Christian tradition, the priest-candidate makes oaths and promises to God and to the Church, and then takes the role of Jesus at the Last Supper by consecrating and distributing the bread and wine as the flesh and blood of Christ.

In the raising of a Master Mason, the third degree, there’s … well. https://sacred-texts.com/mas/dun/index.htm

In the Grange, there’s a series of workings where the farmers of America received wisdom and initiation from Ceres, Flora, and Pomona, the ancient Roman deities of corn, flowers, and fruit. http://www.stichtingargus.nl/vrijmetselarij/grangers_r3.html

In one of the published third degree rites of Wicca, there’s …. whatever this is.. https://sacred-texts.com/pag/gbos/gbos35.htm

In other words, there’s a long and honored history just in the last century and a half of putting on plays and re-enactments of ceremonies for the sake of training someone in the ways of a tradition. And the tradition is a LOT older than that.

But the interesting thing about them, is that it’s a process or procedure usually reserved for this thing we call initiation... the act of making an ordinary person into someone set-apart or set-up to be a spiritual professional of some kind (even if it’s only a part-time spiritual professional, as in the case of Freemasonry, the Grange, or Wicca’s third degree).

So by all means, re-enact myths. Just be aware that when you make yourself into this sort of central character in myth, you might be plugging yourself into a really interesting sort of power.

buddyblanc:

an underrated/underutilised method of listening/communicating/connecting with the land is to walk around with a bag and gloves and pick up some trash

HOWEVER:

• if you have a lot of tattoos, ppl will assume that you’re doing Community Service, and/or ‘casing’ the place.
• ppl will tell you/threaten you to “get off [their] property” when you’re not on their property - if there’s trash over a property line, *EVEN IF* its easy to reach, JUST. LEAVE. IT.
• ppl will tell you you missed some, like its your job and not theirs
• ppl will project all kinds of weird politics onto you/react like your actions are accusing them of something
• Safe to assume that these (and other) risks go up the further from white/cis/male you look
• OH and somebody will most likely talk about you on Nextdoor - odds are 50/50 whether itll be praise or complaint
• carry a mask 😷😷😷

BE SAFE.