People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
i don't believe in witchcraft but I'm not bold enough to challenge people to hex me. not because it might work, but because i might just be unlucky enough that something completely irrelevant would happen to me and that would forever convince them they were right and i was wrong and i would never live that down.
it might even happen while I'm uploading the update to say that everything's fine. something would fall on my head or some shit, I can't take that risk.
I'm loosely pagan on a spiritual level and I vibe a lot with druidism and many of the things that witches do, but as much as I enjoy the culture, I never fail to cringe over the collective hubris of self-proclaimed witches. It's always the edgiest 30-45 year old women who wear House of 1000 Corpses t-shirts and extreme amounts of eye shadow, who post "Proud Bitch" memes on social media and exude an undeserved air of confidence because they believe so deeply their spells are real.
While I admit that Wicca is quite beautiful and largely misunderstood, the things most witches/hexers are practicing only date back a few decades. They're not speaking the ancient magicks or communing with old gods. I can't speak much on the divine feminine because I'm not informed enough on that subject, but for the other half of their belief system they have taken the rather ambiguous depiction of Cernunnos and turned him into a sexy, big-dicked goat man, and have fabricated their own lore to explain the workings of something that is in reality unfathomably old and lost to man, with no surviving origin story and little to no oral tradition.
We can certainly make some educated guesses, but the bulk of that information died with the druids.
It's not important that it only dates back a few decades. At one point, all supernatural belief systems only dated back a few decades, and look how they proliferate.
People represent it origins as far older. And by doing so, claim a more authentic mode of being in the world.
Wicca and paganism in general has always had those cornball types. Back in the 70s and 80s, every tool who renamed themselves after a cool animal and weather condition/celestial body claimed to have a grandparent who secretly initiated them into an ancient unbroken lineage of witches. In the 90s and 00s, it was appropriation gone wild with white ladies from Iowa claiming they had a lineage in closed religious communities like conjure and Vodou. Now it's fucking deluded 20-somethings on TikTok who "godspouse" or work with Naruto characters.
It's just like any other system of belief. You can sit around praying for something, or you can cast more effective hexes, such as "hit this guy with my car," or "actually give him poison."
Lets hope all these internet witches don't learn the power of ~~direct action~~ real magic.
You spot fake witches because they believe in magic instead of Magick. Being a witch is a spiritual practice, if curses actually worked the world would be very different (and way, way more fucked than it currently is)
I like the "headology," or the idea that what people believe is what is real.
“So people see you coming in the hat and the cloak and they know you’re a witch and that’s why your magic works?” said Esk.
“That’s right,” said Granny. “It’s called headology.” She tapped her silver hair, which was drawn into a tight bun that could crack rocks.
“But it’s not real!” Esk protested. “That’s not magic, it’s—it’s—”
“Listen,” said Granny, “If you give someone a bottle of red jollop for their wind it may work, right, but if you want it to work for sure then you let their mind make it work for them. Tell ’em it’s moonbeams bottled in fairy wine or something. Mumble over it a bit. It’s the same with cursing.”
-- Equal Rites, Terry Pratchett
When I read Mortimer, in which he reveals the afterlife is just what people believe it to be, I tried to convince myself I would be reborn as an eternal goddess just in case that’s actually how it works 😆
Hey, you never know!
Wicca was invented in 1954. They're all fake witches.
That's a linguistics debate. Are all Christians fake christians just because the god they believe in is an imaginary friend? Or are they real christians because they actively believe in their imaginary friend?
Or was your argument that the age of a belief lends creedence to it's legitimacy regardless of its truth value?
Right. It's all fake, regardless of age.
Sure, but just to clarify/reiterate my point, you can be a real member of a group that believes fake things.
I feel like the concept of magic doesn't become any more credible if you use the archiac spelling "magick", and differentiating between "spiritual" vs "supernatural" is splitting hairs. It's close enough to the same exact thing that i don't believe a person can call bullshit on one without calling bullshit on both. If brooms and cauldrens are fake then so is Beltane.
I think that you don't think that there's any meaningful difference between "spiritual" and "supernatural " then you're missing the point.
I used to be an atheist anti-christian skeptic type that didn't understand my partner's beliefs at all, because why have beliefs if you know they aren't real? sugar_in_your_tea's above quote from Equal Rites actually fits it really well.
Your beliefs have an impact on how you act, and your acts have an impact on the world. Therefore I choose to live by a set of guiding principles and interact with the world in a way that fits what I want it to be like. The whole point is that you can only influence what you interact with, but also you never know what you'll interact with.
That said, I think that people who claim to be able to influence the lives of others without interacting with them directly are on ego trips.
However, I also don't think that anyone can say anything for certain, as we live in a universe driven by probability, where "spooky action at a distance" is an actual scientific phenomenon.
tl;dr: Spiritual describes how people interact with the world but supernatural describes hypothetical (meta)physical phenomena.
This is why I usually self-describe as “Christian” : I believe (for the most part) in the philosophy of Jesus Christ.
Do I think he was a real guy ? Probably not. Historical evidence seems to suggest he was at least two guys, plus a story about an angel, plus a few other things on top. That’s kinda irrelevant to me, though.
Do I believe in god ? Only in the deistic sense, even then I’m not sure.
Jesus is like Frodo or Heracles to me, a character that we can learn from. I really like the whole “love your neighbor as yourself” “give to the poor and help the needy” which I see as his main message.
I’m a Christian in the same sense that I’m a Pragmatist, but Christianity has the edge in that it has a story and a character to relate to. The guy preaching love and getting trampled by the world for it, is sadly still a relevant image today.
I feel like if the supernatural exists as portrayed by popular culture, then societies around the globe must have had a coordinated and lasting effort to snuff it out at every turn and would have to meticulously continue those efforts even today.
We could debate that the crusades, Salem witch trials, burning of the library in Alexandria, etc are all proof of this effort, but how could anyone really prove it? And would knowing it is real and it is just not accessible make things any better?
Honestly, as much as the idea of controlling forces not inherently responsive to my own command is intriguing. Realistically it would add a whole new level of messed up to our already botched attempt at existence as a species.
I prefer to think of magic as simply the science we haven’t yet discovered.
What do you think someone from a few centuries ago would say about the technology we have today?
Nothing fails like prayer. Or magic, which is just a different flavor of prayer and vice versa.