it's kinda fucked up that I feel like I'm being called to The Morrigan because I don't know shit about Celtic paganism and do not trust most pagan or occult literature on sinister goddesses, which makes researching and getting into a practice always seem like an impossible task if it's not something I'm already familiar with or at least have good intuitions with. like most occult literature is already bad, and most pagan literature is even worse because it can easily be New Age woo shit or at least adjacent to it, but with a goddess like The Morrigan (or Hekate, Lilith, Kali – basically every goddess I feel any affinity for) you really want to know what you're doing otherwise you're gonna learn what it means to fuck around and find out

@nyx many of the war gods of north europe I believe were invoked for weather and timing attacks for raids, like the volvas of scandinavia would record tide patterns and have their warbands attack on foggy nights or during thunderstorms, the invocation of corvid symbolism might indicate similar augery signals intelligence (if there's many crows in an area there's likely to be an abundance of human food waste, encampments, anticipated carrion)

@ink that makes a lot of sense, is there any literature on this topic or is it like an original theory you have?

@nyx this is kinda why i haven't been able to get into this sorta stuff. i am decently drawn to celtic pagan stuff but between nationalistic fakery & touristic stuff aimed at amerikkkans who are 1/256th scots/irish (which deeply intersects, like, harry potter merchandising 💀) & brit TERFy vibes it's hard to figure out where any of the good stuff lies.

@nyx what is a "sinister goddess" ? like a goddess representing bad/dangerous stuff?

@nyx @ink thats bird theory

@nyx @ink thats the theory when you go 'yeah the birds were telling us the whole time' and the other party goes quiet and goes like '...oh shit..'

@cyb3rm0shp1t there is a common thread in occultism of making a dualistic distinction between "white" magick (right-hand path) and "black" magick (left-hand path (i.e. sinister because "sinistral" in Latin means left-handed lol)) where white magick tends to involve stuff like worshiping a god to return to a state of oneness and union with the god vs black magick which involves working with the god to affect some sort of change in the material world

to be clear I largely think this dualism is kinda bullshit and a product of an extremely western patriarchal mindset where the material world is inherently profane and whatever the spiritual world is, it's something separate from the material world and also the only sacred thing. I think that divinity is immanent in the material world and that there is no distinction, but I specifically am drawn to sinister goddesses because they are the only examples in history of the divine feminine (in the west at least) that defied being recuperated into Marian type figures (virgins and mothers) and instead retain some kind of unquestionably sovereign feminine status. so they became conflated with their most "sinister" aspects (Hekate being a goddess of witchcraft for instance) when it's really that all these goddesses simply had dominion over whole cycle of life AND death, of "white" and "black" or "good" and "evil".

but because the divine feminine in every western tradition has for so long been cast down from her rightful sovereign status, I consider it dialectically necessary to uphold the most severe forms of the divine feminine. the biggest mistake goddess feminists made is trying to recreate this moralistic dualism of western civ where the goddess was simply made into something inherently peaceful and benign and "good". I think that's the wrong approach. we must become evil and kill the Demiurge

@nyx the closest thing to primary sources on the Morrígan are heavily euhemerized texts translated by medieval KKKatholic monks unfortunately. Cross & Slover is the most comprehensive reference, or the Táin obv.

other than that go befriend your local crows 🐦‍⬛

@rowb1t fortunately I've gotten quite good over the years at reading between the lines to find the threads of divine femininity that have been suppressed and erased over thousands of years of patriarchal dominance. but it's also exhausting =w=

@nyx ty nyx i appreciate the explanation :>

@nyx you could look into triple goddesses as a starting point. you just gotta be critical of the material you read. im fond of brigid but its like where to begin? just be critical and ultimately keep your interpretation first and foremost in your mind. that’s all you can do, especially when it comes to entities seen as “sinister”.

@revenant I've already been a follower of Hekate for years, that's part of what's drawn me to The Morrigan recently

@nyx the bit on volvas forecasting weather for raids is mostly original (in old norse and modern icelandic there is a connotation of "records keeper and soothesayer or seeress, memorizer and anticipator of signals" in the modern icelandic term for computer there is "Tolva": "tally"/"count" + "Volva"), however augery is pretty universal to all pre industrial knowledge systems, Odin was a prototypical worldwide perennial warrior wizard shapeshifter/animal expert with his sigops ravens Hugin and Munin, most of the major Celtic characters including Morrigan and Merlin were shapeshifters, every hunting culture which gets into raiding or has to deal with harsh weather patterns requiring forecasting and animal observation or enhanced embodied sensing has this pattern

I can't remember where I read about the vikings attacking at night or during storms but again this was likely used as a tactic by all warrior cultures

@nyx @cyb3rm0shp1t agree up to the point where you say "kill the demiurge". Maha Maya carries pasha (knot for binding us to ignorance) as well as ankusha (goad for making us seek moksha) there is no distinct jailer and liberator, they are the same.

@georgia @cyb3rm0shp1t I don't literally believe in the gnostic Demiurge, I have like a very idiosyncratic way of using the term :p

@nyx @cyb3rm0shp1t im listening queen

@georgia @cyb3rm0shp1t I mean this is like some gnosis type stuff that I've only ever communicated with anyone in person but my belief is that the Demiurge is not like, a jailer who created the material world (like I said, I believe that divinity is immanent to the material world). rather I think that the Demiurge is sort of like the archetypal egregore that every egregore is ultimately derived from – by which I mean false ideas that nonetheless make themselves real by influencing the world in real and largely negative ways in a very parasitic fashion to maintain their own existence. to me the Demiurge is basically what Max Stirner's concept of spooks (Geist) describes, or morality as Nietzsche critiqued it; the Nation, the State, "God", all of these things are aspects of the Demiurge, who on its own is nothing more than the tendency for humans to believe in false ideas that are false because they are life-denying. but why I elevate this to the status of the Demiurge specifically is that this is something that seems to be universal to human beings: we all have a tendency to believe in false ideas and illusions, across all cultures and time, and so it is a sort of concept that we cannot help but have knowledge of.

@nyx @cyb3rm0shp1t thats very interesting

@nyx @cyb3rm0shp1t its very neat because human divinity itself is regarded to be what makes egregores real, no?

@georgia @cyb3rm0shp1t that's more or less where I'm coming from since part of my stance that the material world is immanent with divinity is that it follows from this that each of us has various spirits (gods and demons) dwelling in our flesh. though this is inspired by Daoism since it's like the only surviving religion in the world that is very close to my own gnosis

@georgia @cyb3rm0shp1t @nyx devi mahatmyam names the Goddess as Mahamaya or the hindu equivalent of the demiurge also

@ink hmm seems I'm gonna have to get pilled on augury then although that's fitting because I have been thinking lately about how I feel like I get the chthonic and oceanic/abyssal aspects of the goddesses pretty well but the ouranian ones I've never been able to intuit as easily

@unmind @cyb3rm0shp1t @nyx the difference is maha maya is both liberator from ignorance and ignorance itself

@georgia @cyb3rm0shp1t @nyx yeah, that