mandrakeandmarjoram:

Adventure Time.

Some witches are so hell bent on being “traditional” that they don’t actually give space for themselves to go where the knowledge they seek is.

Spirit is fluid and transgressing. They may be in that spiritualist church. Or that wild hill top. Or in a tavern. Or in a metaphysical new age store.

It makes me sad and frustrated seeing some witches turn their noses up at things because it doesn’t look old or dusty enough.

It makes me sad because I used to be one of them.

Where is your sense of adventure?

You might as well go back to being a pious worshipper of Mother Church.

Why would the Craft, that old shape shifting serpent path, stay only old and consistent?

Don’t you think the Old Gods are delighting in the ingenious ways some of us witches have been working our Craft? That Old Split Foot isn’t jumping with glee at the witch reading fortunes from the black mirrored surface of her IPhone?

Who do you think helped nudge Apple Inc. in that direction of advancement?

You don’t think Juno is there strutting in the Financial District? Oshun in Watah Theatre helping direct the next revolutionary production? Mercury and Dionysus club hopping with their frenzied devotees through the queer Villages? Making out with musty men in the back of dark rooms and giving quickies between stalls while people cheer on and make love?

That Venus and Ishtar aren’t found on the upper floors of a sex club bedecked in red fabrics, sipping Margaritas while some man adoringly kisses her hand?

That Hekate and Lucifer aren’t at city protests, marching with Saint Lazaro through the streets?

Santa Muerte watching over me making sure I get home safely after a night out. Smiles when I whisper a prayer and kiss her prayer card I always keep tucked in my bra when going out at night.

It’s here babe, the magic is all here. No tricks, no gaps. Hidden in plain sight and site. We just need to learn to tune in and see, call their names, be present and ready for an answer. I assure you they are an never far.

cycas:

:

I guess nothing is more British than straight-up lifting things from other cultures 

The thing is though, England Is Not Britain, and that Tolkien was not creating a mythology for Britain.   

And I can’t resist the need to explain this… sorry. 

Britain is an island which has, as Tolkien was very aware, been invaded many many times, and is still inhabited by the people who were here before the English, who were originally the British.   Britain has many many mythologies.  Ask the Welsh, or the Scots, or the Cornish, or the Manx, about the inappropriateness of an Englishman attempting to invent a Mythology for Britain, and be prepared for a lengthy answer!

And Tolkien, who grew up near Birmingham watching the coal trucks roll past from the coalfields of Wales and being inspired by the strange Welsh placenames written on them  (see how Sindarin feels kind of Welsh…?), was very aware of that, and respected it.

And he was very aware that England’s heritage is as both conqueror and conquered.  The early kingdoms of England were created by invading Angles, by Jutes, and by Saxons, who came from what is now Denmark and Germany.  Remember King Arthur, that great story of a great king?  That’s not an English story.  That’s a BRITISH story.  It’s about one of the last great defenders of Britain against the invading Angles, Saxons, Jutes, who would become English.  

That’s the kind of story Tolkien’s trying to match.  England has, in a sense, claimed Arthur, but Tolkien knew perfectly well it didn’t belong.  Arthur is British, not English, and the bloodyminded, persistent and talented people still speaking Welsh after over a thousand years of the worst England could do to them deserve their hero.

So then Britain is invaded by the Vikings, who came from what is now Norway and Sweden.  Then invaded again by the Normans, who were basically Vikings who had settled in France for a while.  All these peoples left their mark, as of course had the Romans (who came from EVERYWHERE) and the British people who had been there before the Romans came, before the English and before the Norse. (in Tolkien’s time, it would have been debateable how far the native British were displaced in what is now England and forced Westward, but we now know that a lot of them simply stayed where they were). 

So the key thing here is that England is a mongrel nation created by successive waves of invaders.  There is no original ‘pure’ Englishness. When they came here, the invaders would have carried their own mythologies with them.  For most of them that was probably in some ways Scandinavian/Germanic, but flavoured by Rome, by Greece, by Egypt, probably, and of course by Britain too. 

But when the Germanic world went Christian, its legends were largely lost.  Scandinavia still has most of its mythology because it converted late and the stories were written down, and not destroyed by zealots or subsequent invaders.  Of the mythologies of England, we have tantalising scraps, but very little.  Hence the use of adapted Scandinavian themes, which are the closest that survive to the stories that the early English may have told. 

We do know, for example, that Alcuin wrote to reprove the monks of Lindesfarne for telling stories about heroes that are lost.   ‘

What has Ingeld to do with Christ?

‘ he wrote, reprovingly.  But we don’t know, from English sources, much about what those stories were, because they were disapproved away out of history.   We know of stories that were destroyed for being heathen.  We don’t know what they said.  Beowulf that great work of early England on which Tolkien built much of his academic reputation, survived by the skin of its teeth, because nobody bothered to chuck it out. 

So no, he’s not saying the British are the Coolest.  He’s not doing anything for Britain at all.   Britain is a big complicated tangle of invaders and invasions going all the way back and Tolkien knew it.  He wanted a mythology for England, which had lost its own, and he knew a hell of a lot (far more than me!) about exactly where the roots of that mythology might lie. 

(I’ll pass by the fact that the ‘Mythology for England’ idea is far from drama: he mentioned it once as an idea he’d had in his foolish youth and later dismissed, in a letter to his publisher.  If that’s drama, I don’t know what this post is  xD ) 

galpalsincorporated:

galpalsincorporated:

Women cursing? HOT

I mean this is both a profanity way and a witch way