Does Anyone Want To Start Another Dancing Plague With Me

Most people don’t understand how easy and common it is to develop psychotic symptoms or that everyone literally everyone has the capacity to experience psychosis

In fact if you’ve ever been sleep deprived including being able to sleep in shorter bursts but unable to get several REM cycles or you use substances to cause sedation rather than sleep you’ve likely experienced mild hallucinations already

They’re called disturbances. The things like thinking you heard someone call your name, feeling crawling sensation on your skin briefly, seeing things move in your peripheral but nothings there when you look.

This is (one of the reasons) why I really hate the “I’m [anxious/ADHD/depressed/etc.] not crazy!” The divide you draw between yourself and people with psychosis and psychotic symptoms only serves to harm. Not only those you alienate but also yourself. Because you have no guarantee that you will not join us one day.

We are all several nights of poor or no sleep and several bad things away from psychosis. It serves no one to be ignorant of it.

The Beer Witch Post

(or how the stereotypical Wicked Witch is based in part on female brewsters*) 

Some background:

Women have been brewing beer for nearly 10 thousand years! 

That’s right! Beer is traditionally a woman’s drink, in that it was invented, produced, and drunk by women (and children) for all of recorded history. (src)

Beer only recently became associated with men (around the time it was commercialized of course!)  How did this happen?

Like many things, it involved the Church and a Witch Hunt.

(Note: this post is about a western stereotype; the action takes place in Europe.) Around the 11th cent., the Church realized that brewing alcohol was a great way for monasteries to generate revenue. At the time, brewing was the domain of Germanic tribal woman, and was important bc:

there was a huge demand for ale, due to its cheapness and the lack of potable water in most households

it allowed women to generate their own income at home.

That first part smelled like profit to the Church. That second part meant female independence, which they didn’t like at all. The solution was to get women out of brewing, and monasteries in. What better way than a witch hunt?

Of course, to have a good witch hunt, first you have to invent a witch.

Inventing the Wicked Witch

As female brewsters were pushed out of their fields (being denied licenses and guild membership), the Church set up shop. Monasteries & nunneries were sort of the perfect place to manufacture, what with their land & resources & free labor. Women were still the main brewers in many communities, but this would change over the centuries as the Church waged a War of Defamation against alewives & brewesses. 

The association between woman and sin has always been an easy argument to make, biblically. As women, alewives were ridiculously easy to defame. The rhetoric went something along the lines of:

women created sin

women are sinful

women use beer to spread their sinful ways & take money from men

Alewives, who ran alehouses, were cast as treacherous, deceitful women who cheated men by luring them into playgrounds for the devil, ruled by the sins of gluttony and lust.  

Alewives in hell became a popular Church-spread trope:  

“The Church specifically taught that alewives would be the only people left in hell after Christ freed all the damned.“ (src)

Thus, female brewers became easy target to associate with the devil, and with witchcraft. 

Whether or not brewsters were outright accused of consorting with the devil, the implication was there. And later, so was the imagery.

The Church’s centuries-long smear campaign worked too, helped by the fact that as brewing became more lucrative, more men entered the field, and were happy to help push women out. By the 17th century, the (European) brewing industry was male dominated, for the first time in human history. 

Witchcraft & Brewing: Symbology

The lifestyles, clothing, and tools of real women brewers were taken and used as iconography for witchcraft. 

Many of the props associated with the stereotypical Wicked Witch were just common objects alewives used to denote the brewing trade.

CALUDRONS & CATS: The image of a woman standing over a boiling cauldron once had a very different connotation: ale brewing. Cats, of course, were kept around to protect the grain supply.

BROOMSTICKS: these symbols of domestic trade were used as advertisements. A broom or ALESTAKE hung outside a home or alehouse was an easy-to-recognize sign that ale was available to buy. (Keep in mind that before literacy was common, most signs would be symbolic, not written.)

THOSE BIG, DISTINCTIVE HATS: This was a marketing thing too! Wearing a large hat to stand out in the market crowd was a symbol of a brewster with wares to sell. (src)

An Alewife, in her innocent witchy attire. Simple advertising like these allowed women to sell brews that they were already often making for their families at home.

The more you know! A shoutout to all those ladies brewing throughout history, from priestesses to alewives to homemakers alike. For thousands of years, generation after generation of families were fed & watered & kept healthy by women brewing at home. Thank you ladies, for your service.

if you enjoy my posts, i have a ko-fi! (this post took about 2 hours to research/write. links below)

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Art by  AbigailLarson

You don't need to do anything to be a witch. Being a witch goes beyond the superficial images on social media. It's a profound journey of self-discovery, a daily fight to become who you aspire to be. It's about forging connections with yourself and the Earth, cherishing the blessings it offers and the abundance of resources it gives you.. Witchcraft is finding your community and caring for it while prioritizing self-care. No one has the right to define your journey; it's a deeply personal exploration filled with passion and purpose. That's your journey for you to decide.

she's already dead what do you mean

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) - On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees, Untitled (Vid betraktande av blommor och träd), Watercolor on paper, 18 x 25 cm (1922)

There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function

I was just thumbing through this book on Amazon's preview function out of curiosity and. Asperger's in remission