Witchcraft

I am looking for some kind of magick item, does anyone have a recommendation?

I'm trying to avoid wasting my time with scams or weak amulets and enchanted items.

I bought this patch a couple of days ago from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, UK. I was wondering if it actually has any significance or meaning, or if it just looks cool.

Apparently, the design comes from a book (The Black Pullet, 1800s).

This is such a lovely video! I'm going to go and watch more of her stuff -- exactly the sort of "lifestyle content" I never seem to find. Friendly energy, syncretic bits of practice and fact, beautiful shots of nature, and some hands-on advice: love it.

I think the lost hollow is my favorite. Which is yours?

Hi witches of Lemmy! I don't know if this is the right community to ask this in, but lately I've become really interested in chakras, specifically the colors that correspond to them and how that relationship between colors and chakras can help me build a really kickass UX for my app. I want my app to scream "I will help you! I will empower you to get your shit together!". (My app helps people get organized; it's a .org file editor). What color-chakra combination should I use?

I had death jump out of the deck while I was shuffling a month or so back. I'm still trying to figure out what it means--I took that cliched view of "change!" since I was dealing with a lot of frustration at stasis in my life.

I don't mean the technical term magical thinking as much as the broader set of mind necessary for approaching magical stuff, which then includes a lot of the "assume meaning until proven otherwise" heuristic core to magical thinking qua technical term.

It was one thing when the Surrealists picked up on techniques for making meaning out of what might sensibly assumed to be random. Plenty of them were involved in various flavors of the occult anyway.

But for the Startup Brains to come upon cleromancy and determine it fit for their use -- I will not have it. I will not have it, I say!

It turns out I'd linked to something really outdated and what's been done since is so great that I just have to share again.

All of the work into establishing visual atmosphere is so communicative.

From Landcraft,

Landcraft is a system designed specifically to be used with earth-centric religion or magic. I don’t like the four elements as they are used in Wicca. I do like the Tree of Life very much. However, both seem a touch…odd and inauthentic to be working with landspirits and fairies. It feels like a rude imposition of an alien system onto spirits which simply don’t fit.

This is spot-on.

There is a series on walking as a spiritual practice that I am going to read seriously.

Their Dreamwidth states "My gender identity is coward", so I'm gonna use they/them for the author here.

There's a lot here. I love, love, love efforts to sever an elemental way of thinking from its gendered history, and the Sun/Moon/Star page gives a lot of that.

There's one aspect that tangled up my brain. From the Key Ideas page:

Landcrafting is: [...]

• A mystery tradition - we draw our myths from publically available texts, but find our power in meditation, speaking with the spirits, dreaming, and other private practices. We maintain our tradition by Staying Silent about key aspects of our work.
• Open-source, decentralised, and anti-authoritarian. We don't have leaders, hierarchies, or holy books; everyone is welcome to participate, and develop their own thing from what is written on this website.

I think this gets at what I find unsatisfying about Internet witchcraft/occultism writ broad. I don't think it is possible to be both a mystery tradition and open-source. (What they're saying here is probably valid rephrased to "A tradition of mysticism") There is something in mystery traditions that is inextricably bound to the social relations along which knowledge is passed. These social relations have historically been thicker than the relation of publisher and audience.

I suppose heavily coded/symbolic means of expression create an alternative to social relations as the functional limits of information distribution that define a mystery tradition. The alchemist who renders her notes unreadable except to the studied adept is not in discourse with the adept, not necessarily socially relating with him; she relies on prerequisite knowledge to suss out who should be given her insights. (Something something and that's why critical theory is unreadable something something.)

All the way over on the other hand, I'm very curious to think what an open-source witchcraft tradition on the internet could look like. The sacred text shall be a wiki... and the edit wars as fierce as any Nicene skirmish.

Most of the time "oracle decks" and such feel very lifeless to me. I love how this is made with clear adoration for the history of tarot, but with some experimentation too -- I can't believe I haven't seen something like those Luna cards before!

This is fascinating to me.

One thing that I've been rolling around in my head is the frequency with which contemporary cults invoke a need to reunify science and religion. There is an actual weight to that idea, but I wonder what it is that makes it such an effective selling point--and with a throughline to the early nineteenth century, at that!

I came across this post on tumblr with links to lots of different witchcraft books. I saw a few authors I recognize but I'm not sure if there are any that are appropriative or not. I hope this helps!

I know that the modals and such may scare you off, but if you can get past it, the card descriptions are really thoughtful.