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.
This man is a true servant of The Emperor, the touch of Chaos must be resisted at all costs.
You know about Chaos? Time to exterminatus the planet to make sure this forbidden knowledge doesn’t spread.
You want to preform Exterminatus on Holy Terra? HERESY!
Moshi moshi, inquisitor-sama? Yes, these two up here, heretics
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.
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 actionreal magic.💧💧
Two sips of water counter the next spell cast your way, no wonder he’s having such an easy time avoiding themReminds me of this classic: https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/hvy31q/witchcraft_hexing_the_moon/
I have a made up word I have never said to anyone.
Nobody claiming to be psychic has ever been able to detect it.
While it’s a meaningless thing overall, it is endlessly entertaining to watch someone spiral from “trying” to discover it, to random guessing, to being angry and declaring that I’m lying and they got it the first time.
It’s kinda like my secret. I have a secret I have never told anyone. It’s another thing I will put before a self proclaimed psychic. Even once they progress to guessing, none have ever even thrown it out as an option.
And you’d be amazed how many self proclaimed psychics there are out in the world, and how many of them seem to really think they are psychic, to the degree that they’ll accept someone presenting one or both of those challenges.
The made up word would be a difficult guess for sure. But my secret isn’t something so rare that nobody could possibly hit on it as a guess.
I’m not willing to outright say that there’s no thing that could be called psychic ability. What I am willing to say is that nobody has ever exhibited such, and likely never will
Beans
Melphosia
Bro you didn’t make up that word. You heard it on an episode of Always Sunny and forgot. I’d say it but honestly it’s so close to a racial slur that I’d rather not risk it.
You have said it before, it was the last thing you said to Brian before he went out that night and… well I can sense there’s a lot of unresolved drama there so I’ll stop talking now
Anyway don’t worry about Brian, in the great hereafter he became really good at Sudoku and is considering reincarnation on a planet in the Crab nebula. Interesting choice considering the people of that world are all female. Humanity won’t discover them for about two weeks but first contact will be surprisingly underwhelming
Naw I’m messing with you. This was all stream of conciousness… but maybe I freaked someone out who thought I was serious.
I fucking loved it!
🙄
Burrchismo
You stuck a hot wheel tire… '64 Corvette Stingray, up your nose as a child and it never came out
Easy peasy
Snork
Bro that was a TV show
Is it “frint”?
kwyjibo
thousanfolcut, mr samurai
Nothing fails like prayer. Or magic, which is just a different flavor of prayer and vice versa.
I’m curious to what you all think of this:
No, we’re not referring to your beloved Atari Pong paddles – we’re talking about your brain. The EPOC uses a headset that actually picks up on your brain waves. These brain waves can tell the system what you want to do in your virtual reality. In other words, you think “lift,” and a virtual rock actually levitates on the screen.
Magic or nah?
Well, at the moment I don’t understand how it works, and any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, but if I follow the link titled “How the Emotiv EPOC Works” then it will remove the mystery, thus making it distinguishable from magic.
So what you’re saying is half the world is magic because we don’t know anything about half the world. We have theories, but they can’t or haven’t been proven yet. Naming it and harnessing it doesn’t mean we really get how it works. Reading people’s thoughts is supposed to be impossible according to most of this thread. Turns out, they’ve been doing it for close to 2 decades.
Argue with Arthur C. Clarke.
Argue with Arthur C. Clarke.
why?
He’s the guy who said the quote, and I’m not gonna do it.
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Classic theurgy vs thaumaturgy
I know there’s at least one dead fireman that proves god protected Trump or so I’m told.
Pfft. They have had that covered for centuries.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways…”
Could one not say “witches work in mysterious ways”?
Thry work in witchy ways.
Magic works in mysterious ways.
That certainly explains why there’s no peer review of the magics
Coulda, woulda, shoulda…
Well if he didn’t die, it was just part of God’s plan. Unless he did die. Then it was part of God’s plan, obviously.
When I used to be New Age I believed that not believing in magic gave you a resistance to it because Quantum…
Accepting the truth that magic ain’t real was tough
As a kid I asked a friend’s dad who was a chemist if magic was real and he replied “Do you think anyone would go into years of schooling for engineering if a shortcut existed?”
Like a reverse roko’s bassilisk. Interesting. I mean that way around is at least comforting/ gives main character energy.
Science is magic if you don’t know how it works so you can always re-establish your beliefs
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– Arthur C. Clarke
I prefer… Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced
This simple statement explains the entire human history of religion.
I mean I’d say I don’t believe in witchcraft but I wouldn’t take on this challenge, so I guess I do believe in witchcraft
“I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.”
Mark Twain said he didn’t believe in ghosts, but they scare the hell out of him.
Witch casts fireball via an amulett (molotov)
I think that would be more of an oversized ampule.
Do I want a bunch of maladjusted internet weirdos to have a personal stake in my life going wrong? Do I fuck.
I’m not worried about Miss Cleo spoiling my aura, I’m worried about Charles le Sorcier finding my house.
I’ll be that a witch told him to do this.
A gag like this discourages the amateurs and helps the real ones stay under cover.
the “real ones” lol
The guy isn’t getting sick, which proves my point!
no it definitely does not lmao
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As I’ve discovered, sarcasm tags seem to be almost required in certain cases here on Lemmy lol
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Check his next comment to me.
Considering what I’ve seen they have to provide?
you need to make a new account friend. lem.ee is dying
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This is just a high effort version of “…Then may God strike me dead!” but targeting a spiritual minority instead if the hegemonic national religion. Shouldn’t the amount of un-smited politicians indicate that there is no God?
it’s a risky thing to do,
the vast majority of cases, you’ll be right. but no one will care.
however, in the unlikely event where you suffer a immediate tragedy, like trip and break your nose, stroke, bird shits on you. you might start a new religion
Yeah, I got taken in like this for a while.
I grew up religious and one time prayed for a friend who was going to go though a couple of surgeries and would have to eat through a straw for a few months. I prayed that I could take some of the pain for him if needed. Turned out that I had a small accident and got my first stitches the next day and my friend was able to avoid additional months of recovery because the surgeon was able to do both operations at once. I took that as a sign that my prayer had worked and believed more strongly in God. For a while until I realized that coincidences can happen and that believing in God is pretty stupid.
imagine there was a Messiah, god incarnate born on earth, but he didn’t believe any religious nonsense, and every one in a while he accidentally does some miracles. which he dismisses.
that’s you
And squander your magical talents for substitutional atonement??
Strangely enough, I could never get it to work again. Must’ve been my fault though, not God’s.
Shouldn’t the amount of any un-smited politicians prove any spiritual group that claims to have the ability to harm people wrong? I mean why are witches so mad that they can’t hurt a random guy?
I can only actually name one politician that was smited
There’s this one Turkish politician that got smited right after he said that Allah will judge Israel
Not quite the same. God (hypothetically) has their own plan, so if I pray for god to smite you, and they don’t, then I can just say “well, I guess that’s not God’s plan”. Whereas, if you believe in hexes and/or curses as something fundamentally different to a bog standard prayer, then presumably the hexer and/or curser has more agency over the result than that.
I think if God has a plan, then telling everyone he can smite people, then never doing it isn’t a good look haha.
It’s really funny how the “singular, omnipotent god” religions fucked up the logic behind prayers. When you had many gods and spirits and whatnot, a prayer not being heard could be taken as it not being stronger than another spirit/god, or the god of your choice ignoring you, or something else.
With omnimono, god has a plan, so prayers are either trying to convince him to change the plans (which, if assumed true, opens a very interesting can of theological worms), or will fall on deaf ears, as the plan won’t change.
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?
