(no subject)

Additional point on the physicality of the old gods: in the Norse pantheon, gods can be disabled. Odin loses an eye, Tyr a hand, and there's no question that the gods are made of spirit and those choices don't hurt, and don't continue topact them as any one would be.

(no subject)

All I want for Yuletide is...a traditional witchcraft blogger whose writing style doesn't raise my pulse and my stress level as if I were in a small house with someone who was very, very angry, and trying to make myself smaller so they don't take it out on me.

I can't quite put my finger on what it is; and I know I am myself very vulnerable to anything which triggers this "walking on eggshells" sensation, perhaps oversensitive. Still, it's writers in my own tradition who seem to have a particular problem with...writing in a way which conveys defensiveness and rage, even when the topic is something neutral like growing plants or reading books.

It's possible that tradcraft is especially attractive to people who are a touch more unstable, and therefore a bit more prone to anger and distress and taking it out on strangers and writing as if they're ready to lash out at any moment. We're not a good fit for sitting quietly at a Church of England service, or dipping crystals in purest Goddess water in the name of love and light. Religions and movements attract people best fitted for them; and perhaps revering the darkest of dark gods, and the stellar in the undergrowth, and loving the old witchlore where the witch is rage and delight is particularly attractive to people who are a certain kind of hurt, and a certain kind of difficult as a result. And that comes through in our writing.

I just want new ritual tips and idea and lore to copy down into my grimoire and new ways of thinking about the world and its wyrd, and to not feel afraid when doing so.

(And I don't mean "afraid" in the cool cthonic sense, of witches being a bit scary; more like the school bully, violent and petty)

(no subject)

Oh man, I really want to collect more of the Ghost Box albums but...they're kinda expensive, and they're both:

1. Hit and miss
2. The kind of music you really need to listen to the whole album four times through before it gets under your skin and you really appreciate it
3. Rare

Which is a bad combination, because you have to jump at them when they come out; invest in them on trust; and then listen and hope that gamble will have paid off. I understand that's the kind of pre-internet, old-world experience I'm kinda craving right now; at the same time, I'm simply not in the position to collect new expensive niche records pretending to be old expensive niche records. And because the fact they can only be sourced from a boutique online store, or from collectors, wrecks some of the tangible magic of finding them in a bargain bin - and that tangible 1970s magic being part of what Ghost Box sells. I mean look at them:






They've got this freakin delicious crunch to them. I can't even explain what that means.

I've been listening to Seance at Hobs Lane recently, and I am completely obsessed beyond words with it. But it took three listens for it to get deep under my skin, and stay there - and then trip me out into an otherworld laid across the land, the red eyes of dogs, the snarling in the heart, the lengthening of ears, the red star above the landscape, empty roads, fogs, rains that come from nowhere and recede, diversion signs to nowhere, and the thing from the forest whispering in my ear. That's the feeling I'm kinda seeking from these albums, the very feeling which they themselves promise to provide - but it's subtle, of course, and that's back to where we started. I can't collect a handful of them on a whim to find out which ones affect me; and I don't want to taste-test them all on the internet to find out, because that partially defeats the experience as well.

Oh world, please open up the worlds of work to me, that I might exchange my hours upon this earth for the possession of consumer objects, that so by collecting I may ward off the inevitability of approaching death.