I 💖Aphrodite, do u?

Actually useful shit to have as a witch

You really don't need all the fancy bullshit every tumblr influencer will ever tell you to use. Here's my countdown ofaxtually useful shit.

And a last tip- if something is too hard for a mortar and pestle, a plastic bag and hammer works too.

They say Venus takes many forms 🐚

The Hermit - a Major Arcana tarot card illustrated by me and @vivtanner for the Sefirot Tarot

Other witches and myself have, strangely and unfortunately, seen an uncomfortable increase in online “witchcraft academies” or schools, whatever they want to call themselves.

Young or new witches, I recommend that you do NOT give your money to these “witches”, do not even give your time to them even if they’re free, don’t trust them. There’s nothing wrong with learning from other witches, but this isn’t the way. This is a spirituality, a personal belief, and there’s FREE information at your fingertips everywhere. I’ve only been exploring witchcraft for three years and while I wouldn’t mind hearing opinions or personal experience from longer-time practicing witches, personally, I would NEVER invest myself in one of... these... “schools”.

This is just my opinion on them, though, something about them just irks me and makes me uncomfortable.

As a person who's seen these things from the inside... Run. You can find everything you need on your own. It's not worth the drama and chaos that they always seem to bring about

Photography by Xuebing Du

Instagram: xuebing.du

i want to shake those two little Victorian girl bitchs hands who faked the pictures of themselves playing with fairies and thank them for paving the way.

OP can we please see the pictures

The photos are of (and by) Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith, who were respectively 13 and 11 at the time! Not Victorian, but just after - the pictures were taken around 1920.

Something that amazes me about this story is how absolutely bonkers it is that they got away with it for so long, and how if you just read about the story and didn’t see the pictures, you’d be damn near convinced that they actually took photos with actual fairies or something until basically the very end, and even then you might wonder.  Because most written accounts of what happens goes something like this: they took these photos and someone saw them, and BREAKING NEWS! And now suddenly believers and skeptics alike are itching to get ahold of these photos and determine whether or not they are real, because just looking at the photos had them either completely convinced, or else certain that some kind of photographic trickery must have been used. So there were all these experts who examined the photos, the camera, the film/plates, the whatever, to try and find out how they faked these photos (or IF they faked them). Like, expert experts. Like they got the folks at Kodak to examine them. (Over the next few decades they’d also be xrayed and all kinds of stuff.) And they couldn’t find anything. There was no evidence of early 20th century photoshop. They examined the photos, the negatives, everything, and concluded that they hadn’t been tampered with. Arthur Conan Doyle was LOSING HIS SHIT because he thought they were real and this proved it. Whether you believed in fairies or not all the experts were coming to the conclusion that the photos were totally real, and the skeptics were getting really really mad about it. Because there was no way these photos were real! Except they totally seemed to be! And the girls were sticking by their story. (And actually Elsie and Frances were 16 and 9 respectively, when the first two photos were taken in mid-1917, and the photos became public in mid 1919.)

Doyle was still losing his goddamn mind and so to put the matter to rest, another believer went to them in 1920, bringing cameras and stuff for them to photograph fairies with. The thinking was that if they were using equipment that had been examined and everything beforehand, and then developed not by the girls, then the opportunity for fakery was cut out and they could determine the truth. And lo and behold, the three pictures they girls took (alone, because “the fairies won’t show up if we’re not alone”), were also verified as being real!!! Okay, okay, you don’t believe in fairies, and believe the photos have to be fake, but still, there is the mystery of how did they do it???

And if that is what you read it’s understandable to be thinking that woah, what did these girls capture on film? Were these children just on to some advanced af photo trickery? What advanced technique did these kids figure out that fooled all the experts? Did they really actually capture pictures of something supernatural?

No. They fuckin cut some drawings of fairies out of paper and took pictures with them.  There was no trickery detected with the photos or photo equipment because they didn’t have to fake that part. They were genuine photographs….of little girls with propped up drawings. Elsie copied some drawings from a book, added wings, cut them out, and propped them up. You look at these photos today and they look fake as fuck. These are obviously little drawings. They do not look the slightest bit realistic. There are people out there TODAY who will argue that it’s totally possible that these girls took pictures of actual fairies. Because that’s a better story, I guess. But if you hear that version of the story and then see the photos it’s just laughable. 

I can only assume that the reason anybody fell for it at all is the same reason that people praised the special effects in old movies that now look ridiculous. 

But at the same time….nobody noticed that these fairies looked like children’s book illustrations???? Like it took another fifty years for this to be put to rest, because even if you didn’t believe they were real, NO ONE COULD FIGURE OUT HOW THEY COULD HAVE FAKED THEM. It wasn’t until the fricken 80s when someone tracked down the girls that they admitted to having faked the photos by using little drawings. And even with that admission and the actual book they copied from, plus computer examination revealing that there were little strings and stuff holding the cutouts in place, there are STILL people who will maintain that these photos were real.  For their parts Elsie and Frances disagreed over the veracity of the fifth photogragh (not pictured here). Both claimed to have taken it, and Elsie said it was fake while Frances said it was real. (Even in the 80′s.) The truth is most likely that it was a double exposure and so both girls did take it. Also they apparently kept up the lie because once they had fooled Arthur Conan Doyle they felt too weird about telling the truth. Seriously, EVEN THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND HOW THEY HAD FOOLED SO MANY GROWNUPS. THEY WEREN’T EVEN TRYING TO PULL A HOAX. 

Read that last sentence again. They really weren’t. They were just trying to take some fun little photos. And ALL THESE GODDAMN ADULTS WERE FREAKING THE FUCK OUT THINKING THAT THEY HAD PHOTOGRAPHED ACTUAL FAIRIES. AND IT WAS SUCH AN AWKWARD SITUATION THAT THE GIRLS JUST WENT WITH IT.  They didn’t keep it up for money or fame or pride, they kept up the hoax because it would be too awkward to tell the grownups they’d fooled them. 

THEY CREATED A MYSTERY THAT LASTED LIKE 50 YEARS BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO IN AN AWKWARD SITUATION. 

Frances straight up said: “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.” 

TL;DR: Two kids were dicking around with a camera and some fairy drawings, accidentally fool top experts in the world with super fake looking photos, feel too awkward at having fooled so many smart people to admit that it was all fake until a few years before their deaths. True. Icons.

“They even fooled Arthur Conan Doyle!” is a less-impressive statement when you remember that Doyle was friends with Harry Houdini, the famous illusionist, and was convinced that Houdini had actual magical powers. Houdini would specifically go out of his way to perform seances and other spiritualist events with the intent of demonstrating how they were achieved with mundane trickery rather than magic or connection to spirits, and Doyle’s reaction was “Holy shit, Houdini has actual magic powers and is in denial about it”.

There’s a really fun movie about this on Prime!

Just ordered a bunch of larger shells to make some more of these bad boys! Should be ready to order within this next week. Thank you to everyone for supporting my creativity and my crafts! 🥺🤍

the moon controlling the tides sounds like something out of a fantasy novel and yet…there she is…doing That…every day…

I know some of you may be tired of reminders like this one, but I just really want to talk about this. Remember Aphrodite has a “dark” side too. Remember that Gods are not bound to fulfill our selfish human expectations of what “good” is supposed to be on a casual level, which often involves just our benefit. The Gods are good on a cosmic level. They are concerned with the progress of this universal mechanism we call existence, and they do not serve humanity (we serve them by helping with this task, being virtuous).

Now, I talk about Aphrodite mainly because I saw a tweet last night about her, and something on that post just got me thinking. Perhaps I had been focusing too much on her Loving, Creative, and soft sides. It terrifies me a bit to remember her epithets. Yes, Aphrodite is the Mother of Love, and she's a world spirit, a cosmic womb; she's a creator and gives birth to Life; but she's also Androphonos, the eater of men. She's Melainis, the dark one. She's Areia, war-like. She's Tumborukhos, the grave-digger. Aphrodite is also a goddess of trickery and illusion. She's heavily associated to Persephone, and in some ancient mystery schools Persephone was regarded as the saviour from Aphrodite's darker side. There is a part of her that belong to death, dirt, bloodshed, strife. There is a part of us, too, that responds to that nature of hers and of the other Gods, as well as a part of us that belongs to their goodness, and love, wisdom, light.

This does not mean they are ‘evil’. Please. Forget the very christian idea that God must be pure goodness. That's a deformed platonic premise. The goodness we see in God does not have to fulfill our human standards, I repeat. It's not your goodness. It's the universe’s goodness. Gods are enormous, and they've been alive literally since the begining of existence, even before our material universe emerged. We are so, so small, like ants; we don't even realise how small we are in comparison, how little power we have. We owe Them everything. How can existence be evil?

And because the Gods are the main cause of existence, then everything that exists, including the things that hurt us —and the ones that make us happy—, come from them. And that's fine. Because it's supposed to be that way.

So love them. Love them despite the dark things, the tricks, the illusions, the death. That's life itself, we live through them. It hurts us more to think that they must satisfy our own benefits and needs. Let them, and let us, be. We are whole.

hehe *gets lost at sea*

— Annwyn Avalon, Water Witchcraft: Magic and Lore from the Celtic Tradition

I have 28.5k followers and I’m using that fanbase to bring Minecraft back.

The craft? You mean the MINEcraft.

How do I make this relatable for witches? They got… plants. They got enchantin. There’s potions. Swamps.

All the cats and empty bottles you could ever want, my pal!! Books to not write in!! The Dead!!

I use minecraft to help with my Visualization and it makes for a great hidden witch place to practice!

More can be found here

Holy crap or practice actual witchcraft apparently….

Minecraft + Magic

I’ve been playing a lot of Minecraft recently and it’s really got me thinking on/about it being used as a sort of like an altar/e-shrine that one could use if they were still a hidden witch or even a beginner witch. When playing I know that most players enjoy building a home so I figured why not build a home with rooms of worship inside it? Each room would then be dedicated to a god/dess and then i would go out into the world looking for the devotional items or things that would symbolize that god/dess.  Inside the game there are many potential representations Torches - Candles Lava - Fire Element Rivers/Lakes/Waterfalls/Oceans - Water Element Dirt - Earth Element Feathers - Wind Element YOU CAN MAKE AN ENCHANTING TABLE WITH A FLOATING SPELL BOOK. YOU CAN BREW POTIONS TOO!

There’s so much potential for Magical workings in this game. Seriously guys go check it out or try it for yourselves~

I’ll try to take pictures of my house to show you what i mean, hopefully it’ll work… Anyways talk to me about it! What are your thoughts?

“Rocks have been stirring… that’s when I like to be down here. The rocks speak very softly.”

– CASTLE IN THE SKY (1986) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

if my son is stealing pies off windowsills its because i taught him to do that bitch 

Hyvää Juhannusta!