For The Witches

Practically Speaking

Let's not do this toxic kind of crap please.
It is incredibly difficult to differentiate between mental illness or self-delusion and psychic abilities. This is an ongoing struggle in the Craft for everyone in it. If you are a Witch get mental health treatment going for yourself and keep it ongoing. Also use science, logic, practical experience, and above all evidence to determine what is real and what is not. Imagination is great, but not when you're mistaking it for the truth.
Value science and scientific reasoning over intuition, blind belief, or psychic anything, every. single. time. It quite simply trumps the more nebulous stuff because it's closer to the truth. In other words, value the truth more than what makes you comfortable, and even more than what makes you happy. Besides, failing to value logic and the hard rigors of science are precisely what caused the Witch burnings and the Burning Times in the first place!
Given a choice between believing in what science and scientific reasoning says and what Witchcraft (or similar or related disciplines) and its own form of reasoning says, choose science. Every time. Generally results in a better outcome.
Yes, it is a really good idea to learn science and everything else you can in great depth and detail. Yes, it is a great idea to continually learn things. And by great idea I mean if you don't, you run a potentially-serious risk of fucking up in the Craft and paying a high price for being a moron. Speaking from personal experience.
Keep yourself grounded. "Hearth and home" is important. Do your best to hold down a job, avoid all addictions, do the adulting stuff and all that b.s., be a Responsible Adult (tm) keep your relationships healthy, and keep your priorities in order. Otherwise you won't have the ability to do much of anything else.
It is entirely possible to learn fantastic Witchcraft and related lessons from authors and teachers that later on become (or reveal themselves as) truly terrible people. That's just how it is.
Experimentation, experience, adapting your methods to become more effective, and good old fashioned hitting the books will trump superstition and blindly following along with something every single time.
Time spent seriously considering magic, life choices, spirituality, and other important matters is rarely wasted.
Rest and fallow times when you do absolutely nothing are just as important as times of frantic activity
Do your best and you'll likely get a better outcome

An observation, 7/4/22: There are many kinds of love. Many kinds of goodness, and many beautiful, divine things in the universe, in infinite variations. But there is only one kind of evil. Evil is evil is evil. Each evil person truly believes that they're doing something original and clever when they concoct some new fuckery, but in reality, it's all the same. Look at it enough in enough ways as it presents itself to the universe and you'll see it for what it is: boring. You've probably seen it before, the sow's ear, only this time it's dressed up as a silk purse. And ultimately it is a sad, pointless waste of life. How to determine what is evil? Well, I'll just say the byline from a certain NSFW subreddit. You'll know it when you see it (caveat: it has to be as obvious as that subreddit's subject is, indeed, to be known and understood on sight). If you aren't sure, withhold judgment.

7/6/22 further observation: The trouble is that when you see true evil, it's often like a suckerpunch to the gut. It creates cognitive dissonance, because what you are seeing surely can't be real, can it? And if you admit that it is real, it damages your psyche, making you hurt to know that such a horrible thing really does exist. Not only that but chances are your conscience bugs you deep down because if you allow this evil to continue to exist, you allow it to grow and fester. So most people go about in a state of self-induced protective denial about just how much evil is around them and (yikes) how much evil they have accidentally done or are doing; how much responsibility they bear for what's going on if any. That way they avoid the trauma, or so they think, often pretending that some other thing or scapegoat is the "true" evil, until things get so bad EVERYONE is forced to confront that things are shitty and have been for a very long time. It has been my experience that often true evil is the most charismatic, most loved person in the room or the society or the clique, and the best at hiding it. But you'd never know unless you're weak enough to be the victim of such a thing. Therefore listen to children, and listen to the weak, and listen to the sick, and listen to people who claim to be victims, and don't instigate witch hunts due to what they say but do take these allegations seriously.

Spell beggers, tarot querents, people seeking a magical fix for life's problems? One of them you? Check out this section, which is under construction Tarotnspellsdiys

The Universal Laws

These are some things I learned through study and (ahem) sometimes the hard way.

Black magic is a crime punishable by death, sometimes permanent death, depending on the offense. The Powers That Be handle this. However, this law has certain implications if you wish to have a society that functions correctly. Namely, that you must take every last person who you can prove practices black magic intentionally or unintentionally and toss them in prison. Who could do the proving? Witches. Occultists. Whoever they are they must have been properly initiated by a respected and legitimate organization, such as (believe it or not) any modern Gardnerian coven; as they take an oath to harm none. Obviously, the Catholic Church is out. A couple of modern-day examples of magical crime (black magic) are whatever the fuck Putin's Witches are doing, ritualistic cross burnings done by the KKK, ritualistic book burnings done by the far right, and anyone who decides sacrificing an animal as part of a working (several famous people "practicing magical rituals" come to mind) is a "great idea." Interestingly, this last one is practiced in several monotheistic religions as part of the religion as well as in Voudoun, so that's something that needs to be fully hashed out in a just, not bigoted, manner. A lot of people will go like "Okay, no magic ever, that's the solution." Gently remind them that when cocktail swords are outlawed, only outlaws will have cocktail swords. Sure, it's understandable to start up literal witch hunts when people are working black magic, but to start them up on the Good Witches also is to get rid of one of the only protections most people have against black magic. Not to mention to cause extreme harm to the innocent and undeserving, and honestly most good Witches and good magic workers are some of the gentlest, kindest people. You'd also have to get rid of the priests and clergypeople of all other religions too, since strictly speaking they work High Magic also... what do you think religious services even are, anyway? That's magic too
Black magic is also a gigantic mess. No matter how justified you might think it is. Any of you remember when there was this movement on Tumblr and social media where Witches told each other "let's hex Donald Trump"? That was actually before the pandemic. I believe one of the posts went "Let's put all our brainweirds on him." I somehow don't think that the people doing this put any kind of caveats in there such as "let's make sure this doesn't harm the innocent" and "maybe let's hex him after he is out of office, and only if we're certain that he actually committed a crime, and stipulate it will only work in a manner that is ethical and good or not work at all, so this doesn't cause unintended consequences." Wow, that really went well. Thanks a lot! :) :) :) Now don't get me wrong the guy was a disgusting piece of shit creep to begin with, but he wasn't yet completely unhinged. Is this what pushed the idiot over the edge? Honestly, even the psychological suggestion that someone was cursing him could have done that. Did anyone actually harm the guy with black magic? I don't know. All I know is now we've got a giant mess on our hands.
Every bit of magic done results in karmic results. Every iota of karma you earn from magic returns to you in the most perfect way possible. Again, the Powers That Be dole this out. This applies if you know you are doing magic. This also applies if you are working it unintentionally. Your punishments or rewards are given accordingly and in a way that is perfectly just. This may take time, even a lot of time, but in the end it is served up in full. The Universe sure knows how to serve up "the dish best served cold." And if you messed up it will kick your ass.
Do not harm the innocent or the undeserving or else. Practically speaking, if you're not sure doing something will do that, then it's best to avoid doing it.
Interfering with someone's free will without their freely given, explicit consent counts as "harm"
The Power is not yours. You do not own it. It is incorrect to act as though you do.
The Power does not get channeled through people who seek power. It chooses those who it wishes, for its own reasons. It is more likely to choose those who are virtuous, mature, responsible, wise, and stable. For reasons of ensuring it is not misused.
The Power is not necessarily all that fun to have and is a very heavy responsibility. Without wisdom, it is an overwhelming burden.
Harming the innocent or undeserving unintentionally or without understanding what you're doing still counts as a crime and is punished as such
The Gods, your mentors, the Earth, and all others that love you and give you gifts and lucky breaks and privileges that have benefited your soul and/or given you wondrous things must be treated with as much respect as possible, for many things are debts so great that they can never be repaid
Gratitude is underrated
No matter what the external world is doing, barring literal mental illness to the point that it would be classified as a disability in a court of law, it will never provide sufficient justification for doing the wrong thing yourself. Do the right thing because, barring severe mental illness, you cannot blame failure to do so on anything but yourself. Therefore it is usually a better idea to focus on being pure of heart and good yourself than to focus on the faults of the external world.
Don't get too big for your britches. Hubris is considered bad for a reason. You can't be a Witch without humility.
Honor the truth; never EVER lie to yourself, not even a little bit
Honor nature
Honor that which is good, but understand that you might not fully understand what that is. It's good to try to figure out what goodness is.
Victim-blaming under any New Age or religious philosophy such as 'karma explains all harm ever' or "you manifested this because you Didn't Think Positive!" or the worst one "you aren't part of my cult/coven/tradition/religion/philosophy and that is why you suffer!" when you don't know another person's story is obviously horrible. Mistreating said victim as a result is - duh - bad karma.
Try to do the right thing always. Do the best you can, morally speaking, with the cards that you've been given. Try. It is okay to mess up, but there is no excuse for not even trying.
When the Universe is giving you message after message after message after message, it's very very unwise to ignore it
Try to love yourself, because harming or hating yourself counts as harming the undeserving... and yep, you will get punished for it. Usually by having the Universe allow you to hurt yourself. Besides, it's pointless.
Other real Witches share a sacred bond and kinship with you. You can disagree with them, even dislike them but Do. Not. Fuck them over. However, any Witch who has deliberately harmed the innocent puts us all at risk of another Burning Times and other Witches and Occultists must have a zero tolerance policy for such idiots.
One of the oldest rules of the Craft is to support and lift up your fellow practitioners, your brothers and sisters and siblings, of the Craft. Especially if they are in trouble. This old rule is mostly ignored these days and we are all paying the price.
The trouble with humans is that we don't know when to stop. We want to keep trying, striving, getting, improving, fixing. But there comes a point in everyone's life when you have to stop or you wind up a little like a plant that has been fed too much food. It gets rotten. No challenge, no room for its roots to search for space, no downtime to absorb things. It seems like it's a great idea to keep getting more and more power, more privileges granted, more miracles, more, more, more, faster. But we can't see when we already have enough, and if you can't be content with what you have, you will never have enough. Truly, learning to be content with what you already have is more valuable than all the gold and granted wishes in the world. Spells and workings are not as valuable as learning how to be content with things as they are. Often, what you desperately want and need "to be happy" would ruin your life and possibly also your soul if you got it. In spoiling yourself rotten with privilege, you fail to improve at the core level you'd need to even appreciate the blessings given. Imagine what people are already doing to the environment in an effort to improve their luxury. Now extrapolate that to magic. You can overcook that goose.
With that in mind, ever be mindful of the fact that the Gods know more than you do as things like that are so not obvious. They have very good reasons for doing what they do. Often you won't know until years later, if ever.
Another thing with that in mind is that it is generally a far better idea to focus on your spiritual well-being than all the magical training and spell work in the world. In fact, the magic stuff isn't even necessary to practice the Craft.
Far wiser to focus on virtue than to focus on things like power, getting what you want, success, and so on. Also, the latter ain't really a powerful viewpoint at all as it is mostly based on things like fear, craving, grasping at straws, and so on. You can draw a direct comparison between that and marrying for convenience as opposed to marrying for true love.
The only true treasure there is is a good heart/soul. No one can ever take that away from you, but you can choose to get rid of it or to not value it and let it become worse. Value it above all else and you have everything.

A very very quick primer in High Magic

The strongest and best magic of all is being a good person, having a good heart, doing good things with the best possible intentions. Kindness, compassion and mercy trump everything else. Magic doesn't work quite like science. It has links to intuition. Listen to yours and you'll probably know I'm right.
That being said, yes, everyone works magic (although without training, it's not certain how effective they are at it) without realizing it. It's "vibes," and a lot of religion seems to be at heart about promoting good vibes, but it seems they've often gone astray from that. Therefore, if you really think about it, compassion, kindness, mercy, love, and all that is good is what true religion should really be about. Hatred, fear, bigotry, all that is bad, ignoring a guilty conscience, and cynicism have NO PLACE in religion. Or in the human heart.
What you send out comes back in one way or another. Actions have consequences. Even your belief in magic has consequences, and that's even if you are completely unable to work magic for real. It's basic psychology, not to mention how things work. You do something, your action causes a reaction. Plain and simple.
Personal experience: the most effective magic I have ever done was the magic where I went "thy will be done, not mine" to the Gods. I was just in the right place at the right time for the energy to go through me. I don't think I would have been able to do this without a whole lot of prayer and communing with Deity first. That being said, magic is still very hard work.

Old Wiccan and Witch Sayings

If you don't like the outcome of divination, change it.
If you have to ask, the answer is no.
Rush in where Angels fear to tread, for the Gods are with you
Courage and honor endure forever. Their echoes remain when the mountains have crumbled to dust (okay, it's from the Havamal, but it's still valid as a Witch saying)

Here’s a doozy of a story. Snow White. It is an allegory of pre-Christian Matriarchal religion and Christian religion. Here’s how. The Queen in the story is pre-Christian society wishing to create a “daughter with skin of white, hair of black, and lips of red,” the colors of the Maiden, the Crone and the Mother. She (pre-Christian religious traditions) does, and dies in the process. Snow White grows up good and kind, and can sing to birds, and commune with animals. Sound familiar? Snow White gets an evil stepmother, Christianity. Her narcissism is apparent, as seen with her magic mirror, and Snow White is fed a poisoned apple (yes, an apple, the sacred fruit representing good Witchcraft, Avalon – land of apples, and Summerland). This is reminiscent of the Christian narrative of Eve’s fall (btw the fruit wasn’t actually mentioned in the Bible’s original Hebrew, and if it had been apple everyone would know since Apple in Hebrew is “tapooach;” besides apples did not originate in Israel and can't grow that well in a desert country) and all of the other ways the Church tried to take over with assorted historic revisionism, as you can see for yourself if you directly translate the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to English. As every good Witch knows, that was a deliberate slander of everything sacred in the Craft so the Church could take over and (well, the rest is a sad story of genocide and brutality). So who’s Prince Charming? And who are the Seven Dwarves? Interesting.

Additional Concerns For Wiccans, Witches and Magic Workers, section added 10/14/24

Energetic pollution is a real thing. It's as real as air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution and general accumulation of garbage on this planet. There have been a wide variety of spell ideas floating around probably since magic existed that essentially boil down to "discard what's bad outside of you." For instance let's say you are visualizing all negativity to go off of you and go somewhere else, without being purified first. Where exactly do you think it's going to go? Who do you think is going to clean it up? Nature spirits can only do so much of the work for you and consider the karma. If you're going to be doing something like that, purify whatever you're banishing before you just flood the Earth/Universe with more crap.

Concerns for the Magickal Community

We are slowly reaching a critical turning point, where the majority of the world actually starts to believe in magic due to experience and not superstition. Once it, and the scientific community, actually reaches that point, we have a problem. Specifically: we are going to need to be able to show the world that we self-regulate amongst ourselves to ensure anyone working black magic is rendered totally powerless to harm the innocent and thrown in prison, too. And aside from the Universe generally guiding us to do so, we do not have any formal consensus among the magickal community or rule-making authorities policing this process. And unfortunately, relying on karma to solve these issues for us is not viable enough because it's too slow to prevent potential victims from becoming actual victims; what good is karma if it harms the perpetrator after the second, third, fourth crime? This is a huge problem. If we don't solve it, those who don't work magic and can't even sense it are going to attempt to do it for us and we all know how that can go. Right now, the magickal community is enjoying itself and it's all fun and games, but it can't last.
So many people have ruined themselves focusing on getting what they wanted to the detriment or even total exclusion of doing the right thing, and lots of them are in the Occult community, embarrassing us all. Generally the more popular the person, the more suspicious you need to think about being as the Craft has no formal hierarchy as we are so far beneath the status of Gods it's ridiculous to put one of us over another. And if someone is working magic, they also fall under the same category as the rest of us punks: mere human mortal. You would think that the actual act of working magic would speed up a person's maturity and help them grow the fuck up so they make wise decisions. You would be wrong. In fact, I've seen a distinct handful of folks assemble a crowd of yes-men around them as a replacement for doing the right thing, crowding out the people going "hey hold on a second, this is fucked up" so they can exist in an echo chamber, and have the people in said echo chamber recruit more for their cult of personality. Yep, just like what Putin seems to have done. Plus overcharging for all of their services or starting a brigade on some helpless group of people in order to get the high of power tripping; that's a hallmark of these con people. Oh, you best believe I'll never forget witnessing this in the Witch community, and I hope you don't either. Remember their names. Tell younger generations what you saw, now and years from now.
9/1/24 I'm not the only Witch who feels this way now: Satanists need to get the fuck out of our business. Our holidays are not Satanist holidays. Our rituals are not Satanist rituals. It's bad enough having the Catholic Church and a lot of fundies coopt our shit on the one hand and insult it on the other, but to have the Satanists doing the same thing is fucked up. It's your pseudo-Christian religion, don't drag holidays like Beltaine and Mabon into it*, or Pagan Deities like Cernunnos and Pan into it. Witchcraft is Pagan. Satanists are not part of Paganism. They're another flavor of Christianity and that's the way it goes. And let me make this clear: Wicca is not Satanist either. Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente may have been into some dodgy shit and they got famous for rebooting older Pagan mystery traditions, but they did not create those traditions. Nor did they get them from Satanism.
* 9/4/24 edit: Technically, Mabon and Beltaine are seasonal holidays so gatekeeping the secular parts of these is like trying to gatekeep full moons. So I'd like to amend this to focus strictly on the religious bits of these. They're not Satanist. Don't use that as part of your religion if you ain't Pagan.

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