i guess i should clarify that most witchcraft is garbage but not all of it

@k i think some right hand is too but left hand seems to usually just be edgelords who are too caught up in the aesthetic or are chaos magicians who end up going insane ime

@snacks i don't do witchcraft, it's never really made sense to me, but i've met some witches who really seem to have it figured out somewhat

@tamamizu i need to start reading some stuff about it

@bl00d i've read a fair bit. to me it seems like a lot of witchcraft is based in ancient theurgy, which is tied to a lot of cultural values and knowledge that doesn't really exist anymore. it doesn't make sense to me for someone's witchcraft rituals to be so disconnected from the culture they're a part of/the values they actually hold

@tamamizu @bl00d There is magical value to kayfabe, if you are doing a ritual it is much much much easier to get your mind in the zone of "real magic" if you're doing something associated with a tradition that you have a little boned for. (I used Egypt a lot, the Papyri are very accessible.) But at the same time, yes, the mindset is totally different and that's both the biggest barrier and the biggest asset. (You're way too far away from a Ptolmaic Egyptian to get the same suggestive meaning out of their abracadabra strings/glyphs, and that might even mean they're going to work BETTER for you.)

On the other end of the spectrum, as soon as we're working with chaos magic (which we inevitably are tbh) we might as well work in things that have power in our own psyche, symbols that are directly relevant to our own lives: I've used a panel from Hokuto no Ken as part of a sigil arrangement, for example. But if you can't get over the mental hump of "I'm LARPing doing spongebob magic this is ridiculous" then the results can be excellent since you can target them so specifically.

In the long term though, the requirement to constantly force yourself to believe in bullshit starts to put you in a state resembling psychosis. It sounds very hypocritical coming from someone who did so much magic, but I think most people should just leave it alone tbh.

@druid @bl00d >the requirement to constantly force yourself to believe in bullshit starts to put you in a state resembling psychosis

this is why i shy away from it unless i'm already starting to get psychotic again lol. prayer usually works better for me if my goal is to keep my sanity intact

@tamamizu @bl00d Same on both fronts.

Tbh, I believe that magical practice is what sent me insane to begin with. The official line is "uhh you were like this since birth but it magically didn't manifest for over 30 years" but that's bullshit. I was a totally shut down hylic, it was all the work I did to scratch my third eye open that broke things.

It's nice to talk to someone who has an understanding of magic for what it is, and not for what they wish it was.

@druid @bl00d but yeah my criticism of witchcraft being misaligned with our values isn't so much a criticism of its functionality as magic, but more from a confucian standpoint of like, ritual propriety as one of the five virtues. confucius and his school, ofc, are very affirming of society, but i think for me as a person trying to address/navigate her own alienation from society, it's good for me to think in those terms a little, even if ultimately i kinda think society needs a massive radical change

@tamamizu @bl00d I'm not a confucius fan but I absolutely get what you mean. One of my friends who did a lot of work turning me on to paganism (and eventually magic) in the first place is inherently much more VOLKISCH than me and spent a lot of time trying to convince me of the benefits of having a (good) religion at the heart of a community/society rather than just using it as a vehicle for individual magical practice. (Worshipping the trickster of the pantheon makes you not terribly inclined to play along much anyway, though yes I do understand that that's PART of the social health.)

I initially rejected her rhetoric but honestly, I've come around to it. Like many people, I had arrived at the conclusion that my religion was an entirely individual matter by being at odds with the Christian society I inhabit. When all you have seen of religion's ability to hold a society together takes such a gross form, it is easy to get sucked into the Varg Zone of fantasising about burning churches, but not having any positive ideas at all about what to put in their place or how to help people see that moving away from Abrahamism is a positive thing. It becomes about the war, revenge for Christianisation. Before long it becomes almost indistinguishable from Nazism, where all the onus is on feeling sore about the defeats of the past and fantasising about the day not the rope.

That's not how societies change.

I'd love nothing more than a return to a society that values the plurality of the gods and the human experience, and that is concerned with drawing magical inspiration from the lived experience instead of a gothic fixation on a cult of undeath. But let's be real: perhaps the underlying values of society are Abrahamic, but the average person now worships nothing. Relearning mythological thinking is hard for people, even though they mythologise figures like Luigi daily lol