I Made This To Show Someone On Mastodon But I Think It Really Belongs Here

WITCHES' SABBATH Part 1

Illustrations by Jack Wilson

I love Thomasin’s journey to freedom in The VVitch. From the start she was blamed for things that weren’t her fault and you can see how ingrained the hypocrisy of christianity is into their lives. When her brother noticed things about her it was her fault, when her father sold their silver cup it was her fault, when the twins never did their chores it was her fault. Her father succumbed to pride, her mother to envy, her brother to lust and the twins to sloth. She was the purest member of her family, yet they blamed her for their own sins. Thomasin had likely been dealing with this long before the witches preyed on her family, yet when they did she was blamed for that as well and accused of being a witch. Some people believe Thomasin didn’t have a choice to sign Black Philip’s book because she was manipulated by outside forces for so long. That she traded one master for another, but I don’t see it that way. Her family, who had already succumbed to cardinal sins, were exiled from their village and moved out into the middle of no where. The witches likely would have preyed on her family anyway but they saw Thomasin as an opportunity so they gave her an in. Thomasin signed Black Philip’s book and for the first time she tasted freedom from the hypocrisy of christianity. When a master offers freedom, freedom from subservience, freedom from hypocrisy, freedom from from blame, is he really then a master? No. When a master offers freedom, he is not a master, he is a liberator.

btw almost every single thing pagans credit with “the reason we aren’t respected as a religion” is wrong. it’s not community infighting, or woo magic users, or pop culture pagans. it’s the fact we live in a culturally Christian society that teaches all other religions are “primitive and backwards”, and considers similarity and proximity to Christianity to be the basis by which other religions are evaluated as “respectable” or “superstitious nonsense”. if you think that you would get “respect” from mainstream Christians and secular people because you’re a strict recon who never argues with other pagans or does anything considered “weird” within paganism, you’re fooling yourself.

i wonder why it is that so many people are so very concerned with getting “respect” from mainstream religious groups and the secular world, while you can’t be bothered to treat other polytheists and pagans with respect as soon as they in any way challenge your personal comfort, or jeapordize your perceived “respectability” by association.

Just to make something clear, Gaelic paganism (and folk practices) is not closed, you do not need any initiation and anyone telling you need "celtic" blood is just a racist. Anyone in the world from anywhere in the world can do it.

That doesn't mean you can pick and choose what words and figures you like from it, remove them from their original contexts, add nonsense information and claim it as fact (UPG should always be labeled as such especially if its in complete opposition to established lore). And then claim these terms and ideas actually have nothing to do with Ireland, The Isle of Mann and Highland Scotland. This is appropriation. Especially when this is all being spearheaded by English people in the 50s.

U.S. conservatives always talk about creating jobs but get SO MAD whenever anyone mentions banning prison labor like imagine the insane ammout of jobs that would be created literally overnight if companies in your country had to actually employ people instead of using slave labor from people that got caught with weed 10 years ago.

This is a ward my husband created using a Crawdad Claw and a piece of old Lead that he pounded flat and ritually inscribed—both of which were gifted to him by the river that initiated him. The ward was additionally composed from, and underpinned by, the virtues of Wild Rose .