Dear Neophyte
As members of a counterculture, we are often under the impression that our choices are right and best for everyone. Everyone should be vegan, everyone should be ok with bi-sexuality, everyone would know perfect happiness if they would only admit theirs isnt the Only Way.
We long for a return to what is popularly termed the 'old ways'. Though it is known now that these 'old days' did not exist, and there was never a prefect Atlantian-like culture where men and women were equal and everyone’s 'quirks' were accepted, we still use this term. "Old Gods" and "Old Ways" are umbrella phrases to describe our goals and our journey.
1. Women would once again become tied to the hearth as wives and mothers, while men would be responsible for fighting wars to keep their families safe. A great many women died in the olden days from inhaling smoke from cooking fires.
2. All advances in medicine would be lost, leaving us only with homeopathic remedies, and prayer, to contend with such things as rabies and epilepsy. Could you have took surgery without pain killers?
3. Church = state would once again be the norm, instead of a legal separation. Our new government would of course be based off our religion, as just about every government of the past was. Can you handle having the religious laws you now claim to follow being made into legally binding laws?
4. Slavery existed in every ancient culture. If these 'ancient valued' reemerged, our modern valued would either have to be sacrificed or compromised. Maybe your religion didnt condone slavery, but the Roman Reconstructionists next door dont have a problem with it. The cool fact of the matter is that most slavers though they were doing people favors by taking out of barbarian lands, introducing them to civilized culture and proper religion. Could you handle people doing that to other people?
4. Lifespan would be shortened dramatically. The very real work that goes into getting up at the crack of dawn and hand-plowing 10 acres of land a day to feed your children would take it's toll on your body, taking it's tolls on your life expectancy as well.
5. Wealth would once again be counted by how much land you owned or how many cows you had. You would be expected to fight to defend them as well, maybe even resulting in the lives of you or your loved ones. In ancient times, when one group's numbers outweighed the amount of food they could produce on their land, they often went looking for it elsewhere. Never was there a time when ancient cultures weren't fighting over farming and grazing lands. It wasn't a matter of sharing because whatever you were letting them keep was another member of your tribe going hungry!
6. Plural marriage would be normal again. Could you stand to share your spouse with 4 other people? How about four people and a few slaves your spouse would be banging on the side? Polygamy is the practice of men having more than one wife, and polyandry is the practice of women having more than one husband. Both are still practiced today.
7. As standards of sanitation decline, disease and plague would start to rise. Remember: no doctors, antibiotics or ant virus medication. No ambulance or emergency room. No life flight to the nearest hospital. Just about every civilization that flourished had sanitation problems. Dont think that just because we have toilets today that we wont forget about them in generations to come. After all, the Romans had toilets in every home, and running water - but Medieval Europe forgot about them and were still shitting for hundreds of years after and then dumping it into the streets!
8. Burial customs would have to be reinvented. After all, some religions created elaborate tombs for their dead and some ate them. Just dont think of display, cause the Christians already did that, and better than you ever could!
9. Cats and dogs would not be indoor pets, but be expected to help hunt or keep the rat population down or they might wind up in the cook-pot. From left to right we have pictured: Food, Food, Maybe Food and Will Be Food If He Doesnt Fetch Stuff I Shoot At So I Dont Have To.
10. Drought and famine would result in mass losses of population due to starvation and murder for food. Circle of life is a bitch sometimes: Eat or be eaten. How's that negotiating for more farming space while your people are starving looking now?
11. Guns would disappear, making the carrying of knives and swords the norm. Only it wont feel epic because, yeah, you got a nice big sword. But so does everyone else.
12. Modern music and books would disappear, making traveling bards a MUST. But since they will be traveling via horse back, you wont be able to hear real music for several months at a time.
13. Only cities would have libraries. Very few would know how to read due to lack of educational requirements. If you had the patience I suppose you could teach your kids how to read. Hope you dont mind having a library that could fit between your nipples by which to do that with.
14. Superstition would run rampant and con artists would be crawling out of the woodwork. Hint: If you ever see a bottle of this, DONT BUY IT!
15. What is accepted forms and reasons for murder would be reinvented. Maybe your Roman sect wont bring back honor killing of unfaithful wives - might they bury disgraced Vestial Virgins alive instead? What about ridding the village of children that will only be a hindrance to their families in times of severe food restraints? Will you make the parents pretend it was an accident, or allow them the dignity of a legal cop out? What about killing enemy troops and lining their bodies up for their people to see? What about sacrificing these same enemies to their gods in order to gain their favor for the next battle?
14. Laws from Gods you don’t worshiped may not be pressed upon you, depending on the whim of the neighboring tribe who just won the war with your tribe over cattle pastures. Egyptian women had great freedom of expression - however, Romen women were not only forced into layers of clothing that coered them from head to foot (ahem! see similarity to the recognizable picture below) and not allowed to wear but a few articles of jewelry to stand apart from each other.
15. No vote. For anything. Taxation without representation. Taxation because the hereditary rules decided you had too much bread and wants you to have less. Hope you like wheat too, cause that flavorless processed white bread is *gone* when the new age comes!
16. Hereditary rules that do not have YOUR best interest at heart, only THIERS. If you plan to get anywhere in live, swearing blood oaths and sacred vows of loyalty before the Gods that you will support the monarch is in order. But dont worry, the lectures often have a test at the end. Several in fact.
17. You will never see the world. You will never step more than 15 miles beyond your front door all of your life. You will only ever hear about happenings from outside your community.
18. No pads, tampons or condoms. No reliable birth control or safe abortion. No paternity tests, baby formula, disposable diapers, rocker machines, etc. Men, get used to handwashing poopy diapers and ladies - enjoy stitching your home made reusable pads!
19. Homosexuals would be oddities, not accepted. Men and woman who don’t want to couple and make babies were never accepted in ancient cultures unless they were status holders of some kind (priests, kings, land barons), or the lover of a status holder. Its been like 20,000 years and were still not ok with the gays just yet - if we reverse time, it's not going to get better! (DAMN, is he pretty in this picture!)
20. What is and isn’t acceptable would change dramatically and shockingly. Sanctioned honor killings and revenge, public hangings and dueling. If someone crossed you, or your sister (or husband if you were Egyptian, cause their women were the revenge seekers) then you were either a man (or woman) about it and did something or you were a coward and ostracise's from your community.
21. No electricity and no car. Just to understand this, turn all your lights and electric appliances off (with exception of fridge), and have a friend drive you home from their house so you don’t have a car. Live that way for just three days.
22. Dietary changes. Meat would be scarce, as would most fruit. We’d be living off porridge and wheat cereal again. Malnutrition is one thing that would shorten life spans. Hope you like grain cause it's 70%o f your diet now. That is, if the king hasnt taken it all in taxes and the warning neighbors arnt overrunning your lands today.
23. Hazing would become commonplace again. Tests of manhood and rites of passage for women. Failing would most likely mean becoming ostracized from your community. Back and abdomen slicing to both men and women, genital mutilation for both men and women and tests of fertility for both men and women.
24. Your entire wardrobe could fit in a suit case, all four seasons worth. And you had to hand wash it all, but only once a week since it was such a chore. Let me tell you, from someone who used to hand was their own laundry on a wash board - it gets old. Fast. Especially when you multiply that by 4 to 12 people all living in the same household (you'd be living with your in-laws most likely and taking care of them in their old age). For the record, I only stopped hand-washing my laundry because I moved in with people who didnt believe you really can get clean laundry by hand-washing.
25. 25. The very real possibility of starving or freezing to death during the winter. Just look up Donner Party.
26. Inflation. No minimum wage. No job security due to any job contracts. Best come to terms now about what you will and wont do for money. Especially if children are involved.
27. Salt would be worth its weight in gold again.
28. Arranged marriage existed in almost every culture. Would our mommy and daddy let you marry the person you chose? Who would they have chosen for you?
It's laregly up to us to shape the future, but if we are genuinly trying to reconstruct dead religions, you have to understand the culture they come from. You have to understand the region, the agriculture, the animal husbantry and the enemies.
We are our own counterculture. Fighting to recreate cultures we will wind up reinventing. We'll take the Vikings form what they were and make them what they COULD have been.
Salutations,
Sesh
Dear Neophyte,
I'm using my morning devotions as a time to pray for specific things now. I'm down to a schedule of sometime around waking I go to the altars and say a quick greeting and prayer. I had been doing more complex rituals that involved getting dressed in robes and lighting candles and making offerings but when I get slammed with 'life' I feel so guilty for not carrying out the complex ritual. I've since shortened it to a quick ritual so I dont feel so guilty. Quick is still better than none at all!
Bow before altar; ring bell three times. Hands in Goddess positon:
"Hail [deity],
I greet you in this day/night.
I trust your endevors have gone well
Since last we met.
I thank you for the blessings you have bestowed upon me (and mine)
Since last I stood before your altar;
And ask for your continued blessings upon me
Till next I stand before your altar.
(specific prayer hear)
Blessed be."
Kiss fingers, touch third eye, extend hand to image (loving gesture)
Repeat for next altar and so on.
When ritual is done, ring bell three more times, bow and exit room (backward if you feel this is more respecful)
I try not to get too upset with myself if I have to hurry threw this or if Im not 'clean' by way of brushed teeth or combed hair. It's just respectful to at least brush your teeth before speaking to a deity, lol.
Salutations,
Sesh
p.s. Not my picture. All these items are for sale in various pagan and occult shops around the internet. This arrangement is beautiful and if they were not all made out of glorified plastic (I'm against plastic) then I would gladly buy them all! I dont think it quit captures the essence of "Hekate" but it certainly is magical!
Dear Neophyte,
Apparently my nephew can see spirits too. He claims to see a "Brown Man" coming after him whenever he was at my mom's apartment. In distress she called me up (me somehow being the go-to person for fixing magical problems) to ask what she should do.
I tell her not to bother with a house blessing because the man was after Roo and that she needed to teach him to get rid of the problem. She seemed surprised by this and I dont know why. I gave Melissa the same instructions when her brother was being bullied at school. She taught him to do a spell to 'freeze' bullies and it worked like a charm! - till she moved out and he forgot to refresh it.
I instructed my mom to make him goofer dust! It's an old Voodoo thing that was possibly used to fight other Witches at first, but then became about fighting evil spirits as internal-wars are frowned upon in the Pagan community now.
Goofer (or Gopher's Dus)
Brimstone (sulpher) Cayenne
Salt Black Pepper
Rattlesnake Skin or Rattle
Chief weapon in Hoodoo arsenal. Protects property and can be used to blow bad intentions towards intruders with melitious plans. This dust brings together earth and air elements. Can also be used to dispell evil spirits and intentions.
It boiled down to salt and pepper (cause no one is crazy enough to give a 4 year old cayenne to wave around!) and when Roo tried it, it worked like a charm. The Brown Man has gone away and left him alone. A note, however, that my mother did re-do her housebelssing after all, preventing anymore oogies from sneaking up on Roo while he sleeps.
That's THREE for me and ZERO for the oogie-boogies!
Salutations,
Sesh
Dear Neophyte,
Quantum Physics - Everything exists as energy manifest to reality based on how fast the molecules vibrate. The slower or faster the vibration, the more solid or unreal a substance seems. There is more than one plane of existence. ~ Various Sources
Magic – Charging energy to manifest goals based on Will. There is more than one plane of existence. ~ Alester Crawly
Chaos Magic – The mixing of quantum physics and magic: Creating change from the universe by changing their vibrations in order to manifest your thoughts into reality. Literally playing God; literally creating God, demons and change. There is more than one plane of existence. ~ Various Sources
Thoughforms – Energy crated and sent forth to do a specific purpose. Once they accomplish their goal, they dissipate. If they are to be kept around to keep doing their work, they must be fed. ~ “Green Magic” $RW also made a Thoughtform panther to prowl around her house and keep it safe of demons.
I had a problem with a certain bad entity haunting the a while back. It couldn't come into my room for several reasons: My room was sacred ground, the presence of two altars to two very powerful gods and the fact that everyone wasn't tracking bad juju threw my room.
The people who like to sit in their misery and stew rather than fix their problems were inviting bad energies and not doing anything to shoo them away. The peeps who are good to themselves will be able to react and, even unknowingly, banish the spirit. Parents telling their children there is no such thing as monsters just to get them to go to sleep alone is bullshit and needs to stop. Families are meant to be together, not separated, in the nights.
I've always been able to feel bad spirits, I just though it was unease or some other excuse to deny what it was. However, they are real and I've come to believe they are even more drawn to those who know they exist. You can call it a curse, or bad luck, or whatever, but it's bad spirits / energies.
This is what I get for not re-doing the house blessing on time. The bugger that is haunting us was crawling threw my house every night and I could actually feel it as I was lying in my bed. It would repeatedly try to get into my room but I would mentally re-seal the space as sacred.
I would first envision Isis appearing in my room, very angelic, wings outspread and flooding the walls with golden light. When that wasnt as powerfull anymore, I'd chant till I fell asleep.
"Isis I pray
Protection I call
Guard me from
Danger all"
When the chant stopped working I called on Hakate. Again, this is what I get for delaying my house-blessings! Hekate came, but this aint her bag of apples, so she let the zombies comp at my throat, but made sure they couldn't bite. Like I was gonna get any sleep!
I summoned Terry Savage. Hella yeah, I did. And he sat on the edge of my bed behind me, crouching and ready to rake his nails threw something’s flesh. He’s quick (speed), fast (kill), efficient, absolutely loyal and totally obedient. He’d die to protect me, but only in theory. The reality is that there is nothing in existence that can kill him.
Any time the demon tried to get near me, he went into action. Shields, dark wards, waves of energy meant to cause agony to demons. He put a circle around just the bed and nothing, not God Himself could get to me. He’d pace around the outside of his circle till he was sure it was safe again, and then return beside me in his crouching sit. And wait.
If your wondering WTF then let me clue you in. I made a thoughform out of a vampire made up when I was 12 to come protect me while I slept. Almost every religion in the world believes in non-physical beings, or beings from other planes of existence, that can travel to ours. And most of them teach that your thoughts become reality on this other plane and then manifest into our own. Or vise versa.
(Terry, like Daemon, has a shit ton of issues. Unlike Daemon, Terry wont get boring by falling in love with a vapid teenager, accidentally turn her into a vampire [yeah, I read the books 12 years ago so SPOILER ALERT!] and spend eternity chasing her skirts ^_^)
Moral of the Story: Renew your House Blessing BEFORE the demon moves in and your Deities take off to teach you a lesson! Laziness means others have to do more to keep you up and eventually they will drop you like hot bricks! Do your part and they will do theirs; fail to do your part and they will let you flounder.
The theories of chaos magic and quantum physics are worth checking out. Keeping our house safe from bad juju is our jobs. Knowing how the bad juju manifests, what draws it or how to get rid of it is vitally important!
When I got started in Witchcraft I told my mother about the demons I could feel and she confessed that, pretty much, everyone in my family can o_0. My brother did, she did, my nephew can see spirits and my sister has 'the gift' whatever that is (I wasnt there to witness this proclamation and ask questions).
She also told me that she used to say the Lords Prayer whenever the uggies came to her. It worked because she believed it did and so did many others. This gives it power, even if you arnt Christian. It all goes back to Quantum Physics and the New Age mumbojumbo about manifest reality.
Salutations,
Sesh
To see this entire post please visit Hearthwitch @ livejournal.com
Dear Neophyte,
Sobek seems to be a God of All Animals in my mind. I don’t know where I’m getting this feeling but it’s very persistent whenever I think of Him.
As if, to honor any animal, I would just need to call on Him. To give offerings to the Critters in the Bushes (CitB), I would call on Him to disperse them evenly or guide the CitB to the offerings. If I were going to heal an animal, I would call on Him. If I were finding a lost animal, I would call on Him. If I were adopting out a lost animal, I would call on Him.
He just seems to be a God of All Animals. Like the Veterinary God, if Egyptians vets even had a patron Deity. BTW, Egyptians did have veterinarians who were trained to deal specifically with animal health and well-being, whether farm, pet or exotic wild beast in the zoos.
I think I would weather proof His shrine and place it out-of doors where the wild animals could come eat of the offerings.
I need to do more research to see if any of this is true or if I'm just seeing a great gator head and confusing some kind of message.
Salutations,
Sesh
Dear Neophyte,
Time for another house cleansing. Which is what I went back to my books to read up on. I have an Egyptian style house cleansing that I used last time and it worked quite well I think. The issue I have with this is that I have since acquired a new patron deity and may still be acquiring another. While I think it slightly lazy to use the generic term “god and goddess’ as opposed to calling them by their myriad of Names, I find it downright insulting to call upon a Deity who has not revealed themselves as your Patron yet.
I have to look outside the Egyptian culture for a Hearth and Home deity, since the Egyptians had Gods for specific aspects of the home, but not one that ruled them all. The Romans had family gods and gods of each house. The problem, here, again, is that I don’t have a god in my family nor do I know how to go about finding the ‘god of my house’.
I guess I will do an ancestor House Blessing to get rid of funky bad spirits. These are the one things that remain constant threw the years. I’ve even had Matron deities come and go. Artemis and Pan (if you can believe it!), for instance, back in my wilder and more savage youth. Ancestors are forever.
Salutations,
Sesh
Dear Neophyte,
I have a plethora of Deities I'd like to explore more and work with, but I'm completely out of room for anymore shrines!
Im very adamant that it’s unkosher to invite a Deity into your home, especially a patron, and not even have a square foot of space that belongs to Them. It’s like having company over and not having a seat to let them sit in.
My wall altar idea was an ingenious one and a simple one that I think I will take up again. It’s a slide top wooden box (from Hobby Lobby) that I painted gold inside and out to resemble the Naos of an Egyptian shrine. In Egypt, the deity image was housed in a box and kept from view by anyone but Their priests. This assured purity. I wanted the same since everyone
I used some carbon paper to create what is essentially Isis receiving an offering from me over an offering table. The table itself is empty and so are my hands, but She is cupping my hands to receive the unseen gift. Likewise, the image can be of me receiving an unseen gift from Isis. I left it blank on purpose because my needs and Hers may change over the years. I didn’t want to image to become outdated. Also, anyone who saw it might comment on the gift and taint the shrine’s purpose.
I kept Isis in her traditional garbs but when I reversed the female model to make myself, I changed it to the Amarna style dress, because I love the way they flow. They are beautiful. I added a priestesses red cord and accessed my room.longer-than-normal hair (though still Egyptian) to make the image be myself as a priestess of Isis.
Inside the shrine I put an image of Isis I hand carved (and then partially painted) and two ‘ever burning’ votary candles. I hung it on the wall where the image sat facing outwards from the box. And the slide top lit slid neatly into place over the image, protecting it from tainted views.
It bothered me that I read on the Netjer.org forums that Isis in particular doesn’t like second-hand or broken images on her altar. Nothing is second hand, unless you count that all the supplies were purchases for me instead of by me, and the image is cracked.
I would like to do this for all of me patrons and line them up in a row on my wall, or even in a box shape. One for Set, Anubis, Sobek, the Muses, Isis, Hekate, and I guess the Hearth Goddess shrine could go in the kitchen. For that matter, the Muse shrine could go anywhere in the house.
So, you see my problem?
Salutations,
Sesh
