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wytchoftheways · 4 months

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Horned God Invocation: ⛦

By the flame that burneth bright

O Horned One!

We call thy name into the night

O Horned One!

Thee we invoke by the moon led sea

By the standing stone and the twisted tree

Thee we invoke where gather thine own

By the nameless shrine forgotten and lone

Come where the round of the dance is trod

Horn and hoof of the goat-foot God

By moonlit meadow on dusky hill

When the haunted wood is hushed and still

Come to the charm of the chanted prayer

As the moon bewitches the midnight air

Evoke thy powers, that potent bide

In shining stream and secret tide

In fiery flame by starlight pale

In shadowy host that ride the gale

And by the fern-brakes fairy-haunted

Of forests wild and wood enchanted

Come! O Come!

To the heartbeats drum!

Come to us who gather below

When the broad white moon is climbing slow

Through the stars to the heavens height

We hear thy hoofs on the wind of night

As black tree branches shake and sigh

By joy and terror we know thee nigh

We speak the spell thy power unlocks

At Solstice, Sabbat, and Equinox

Word of virtue the veil to rend

From primal dawn to the wide world's end

Since time began---

The blessing of Pan!

Blessed be all in hearth and hold

Blessed in all worth more than gold

Blessed be in strength and love

Blessed be wher'er we rove

Vision fade not from our eyes

Of the pagan paradise

Past the gates of death and birth

Our inheritance of the earth

From our soul the song of spring

Fade not in our wandering

Our life with all life is one,

By blackest night or noonday sun

Eldest of gods, on thee we call

Blessing be on thy creatures all.

🕯️🐐🕯️

🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿

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psychopomp-recital · 2 months

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2/18/24

Feeling like I wanna work with the folk devil and/or Satan. Anyone got any good resources or recommendations?

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silverthornwitchery · 6 months

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I Say this as someone who's devout to the Folk Devil under a myriad of ancient names: we, as pagans and witches, need to acknowledge and be specific that our associations of old gods with the folk-devil are out own personal gnosis and beliefs. It does damage to parade around saying that a specific entity is the folk devil as if it is fact.

#folk devil #devil worship #paganism #witchcraft

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thehexwitch · 1 year

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Some animistic bone-reading tips

I've been practicing bone-reading for about five years now, and through that I've picked up on a few things that I don't regularly see people talking about, so I decided to put together a list that I would have personally found helpful at the beginning of my divination practice. Please be advised that I come at bone-reading from a very animistic perspective, so if that's not a viewpoint that you believe in, most of these tips probably won't be helpful to you.

The method of bone-reading I use is to ask a specific question and toss the bones to read. This is a common method, but there are also alternate practices, such as tossing bones in the fire and reading them based on the burns and heat cracking.

Choose your bones carefully. Pick ones that want to be worked with, and ones that you're personally able to resonate with. Bones that don't want to be read can't be used effectively from my experience.

Feed your bones. This is the practice of giving your bones offerings to maintain their willingness to work with you and to build your relationship with them. I find divinatory herbs and blood to be a great offering, though blood should not be used without experience and caution. Food the animal would have eaten while alive can also be effective (for example, if your set is made primarily of fox bones, a small offering of meat might be appreciated).

Listen to your gut. Bone-reading is an incredibly instinctual and personalized form of divination. Don't try too hard to logically assign meanings to your bones - from my experience, they will usually let you know. If you can tell a bone would like to be used for a reading but can't tell what the bone might mean, add it to your set. It will let you know once you start doing readings with it.

Use a mat. This is partially a mundane recommendation; if you throw your bones straight onto the floor, they're eventually going to break. This also makes it easier to tell when a bone breaking is significant to the reading. A mat can also serve as a center of the reading; the bones in the middle may be more significant, whereas the bones that fall off the mat may be irrelevant to the reading. This isn't a format one has to use, but it can be helpful, especially to beginners.

Just start bone-reading. Obviously you should go into it having done research, and with a cautious and respectful attitude. However, at a certain point, doing research and preparation isn't helpful. Because bone-reading is so personalized and instinctual, there is so much you can only learn once you start. During your first few readings, pay close attention to each bone, where they fall next to each other, and what they may be telling you about their meaning.

#bone reading #bone divination #osteomancy #divination #trad witch #traditional witchcraft #witchblr #crooked path #animism #faery faith #folklore #folkloric witchcraft #faery witch #folk devil #folk magic

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czortofbaldmountain · 2 years

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Many of those who praised or turned to the Devil appear to have done so only on a few occasions and under extraordinary circumstances. But some individuals clearly maintained worldviews or belief systems in which he constituted the major supernatural principle - a prince by whose name lesser spirits could be summoned, a god of the outsiders and the disposessed; a principle considered more powerful, more reliable, or more real than even God.

'It is better to believe in the Devil': Conceptions of Satanists and Sympathies for the Devil in Early Modern Sweden written by Mikael Häll in The Devil's Party: Satanism in Modernity edited by Per Faxneld and Jesper Aa. Petersen.

#czortposting #satanic history #quotes #lucifer #satan #folk devil #luciferian #satanist #luciferianism #satanism #folk satanism #theistic satanist #theistic satanism #luciferian witch #luciferian witchcraft #satanic witch #satanic witchcraft

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thewitchofwhitfield · 1 year

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Hi witches! I’ve been reading up on traditional witchcraft and am very interested in the Faerie King aspect/guise of the Witch Father (and I suppose by extension the faerie faith). I was wondering if anyone had any resources or information they would be okay with sharing to point me in the right direction 人(_ _*)

#traditional witchcraft #trad craft #the witch father #the king of elphame #the faerie king #fairy faith #faerie faith #faerie witch #witchfather #folk devil #the witches’ devil #the horned god #the horned one #faery faith #robin goodfellow #folk magick #folk witchcraft

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 years

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By: Lee Jussim

Published: Mar 28, 2022

KEY POINTS

There is no consensually-agreed upon definition of implicit bias. This makes communicating about implicit bias quite difficult.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most common method for measuring implicit bias. Yet it has several flaws and limitations.

Those limitations, which are well-known among psychological scientists, are rarely acknowledged to the wider public, including students.

Implicit bias is in the air. Hillary Clinton famously declared that "implicit bias is a problem for everyone." When she was California Attorney General, now-Vice President Kamala Harris expanded implicit bias trainings for police and has attributed many things to implicit biases on her Twitter feed.

Given widespread distress over unconscious racism, many consulting firms now provide implicit bias trainings and assure you that they deliver. A simple Google search for "consultant, implicit bias training" yields pages and pages of hits. Is this kind of corporate response to the problem of implicit bias justified?

In a 2018 essay, West Virginia University sociologist Jason Manning argued that "unconscious racism" bears a resemblance to older superstitions about the evil eye and sympathetic magic—but rather than mysterious unseen supernatural forces, we have mysterious unseen unconscious forces. There are, of course, some differences between beliefs in the evil eye and unconscious racism. There is no evidence that people can harm you by looking at you, whereas there is a wealth of studies on implicit social cognition. But I argue that the comparison may still be justified because the evidence for unconscious racism is so weak.

A moral panic occurs when some substantial portion of a society creates a "folk devil"—members of the community considered deviant and dangerous—and exaggerates the dangers they pose. In one research report, for example, people massively overestimated the number of unarmed Black people killed by police in 2019, with more than half of all liberals surveyed estimating the number at 1,000 or more (when data indicated it was more likely to be around 27). And many people have been denounced or socially ostracized for opposing things like affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, even though the majority of Americans, including majorities of Black and Hispanic respondents, oppose basing college admissions or hiring on ethnicity or race.

Others have been denounced or publicly shamed for a maladroit compliment of a supermodel or for sharing a peer reviewed sociology article, if doing so is viewed as deviant behavior or contrary to widely-held views. I personally have witnessed a talk in which a Jewish professor was publicly called a "grotesque Nazi" by physics professors for having described Obama as "half-black" (he has a Kenyan father and a White American mother). Such responses can be seen as evidence of a moral panic and the creation of "folk devils" surrounding the topic of racism.

Returning, however, to the implicit bias consulting firms—it's possible to find powerful testaments to the effectiveness of their trainings. But what does the science actually say—not just about the trainings, but about implicit bias more generally?

The workhorse method for assessing implicit bias is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You can take several of these here to see what they are like for yourself. But before you do, you should consider these reasons to be skeptical about any claims about implicit bias.

1. The peer-reviewed scientific literature has witnessed a great walking back of many of the most dramatic claims made on the basis of the IAT and about implicit social cognition more generally.

Several researchers in this domain have put together this repository of over 40 articles (and growing) identifying flaws, artifacts, limitations, and threats to the validity of the IAT. Here are the titles of just a few of those articles:

"More Error than Attitude in Implicit Association Tests"

"Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure"

"Implicit? What Do You Mean? A Comprehensive Review of the Delusive Implicitness Construct in Attitude Research"

In fairness, there are still plenty of research articles that take implicit bias seriously, such as this one. The point is not that the notion has been completely debunked or the IAT shown to be completely worthless; I even do research using the IAT! Instead, the point is that most of the most dramatic claims about it have been debunked or, at least, shown to be dubious and scientifically controversial. These are not firm grounds on which to sell the public on the power and prevalence of unconscious racism or trainings to mitigate it.

2. There is no consensually-accepted scientific definition of implicit bias.

Across five articles, there might be three with different definitions and two that do not even provide a definition. No one knows what "implicit bias" even is—at least if "know" is taken to mean "a clear understanding shared by most scientists."

3. The IAT measures reaction times, not things that most people think of as bias.

Whether reaction times might be considered bias in some technical sense is beyond the scope of this essay. Reaction times are not what most people think of when they think about bias; the IAT does not directly measure racism, oppression, or unfairness. (Whether it does so indirectly with any reasonable success is controversial, as described next.) To claim reaction times constitute any sort of bias in the common understanding of the meaning of "bias" is to import a conclusion by fiat rather than evidence.

4. At best, the IAT measures the strength of association of concepts in memory.

When reaction times are faster for some pairs of concepts than others, it is possible that the two concepts for which reaction times are faster are more closely associated in memory. That's the only thing the IAT can directly show: the closeness of association of concepts in memory—not "bias," not "racism." But it goes downhill from there; a slew of statistical issues and methodological artifacts suggest that the IAT is not even a clean measure of strength of association.

5. The IAT may capture prejudice, stereotypes, or attitudes to some degree, but, if so, it is not a clean measure.

Critiques of the IAT have concluded that it contains more error than attitude or reflects actual knowledge about actual group differences and conditions; and that IAT scores reflect four separate phenomena, of which attitude is just one.

6. The IAT, as used and reported, has a potpourri of additional methodological and statistical oddities.

Although a deep dive into them is beyond the scope of this blog, the interested reader can find them laid out in gory and technical details here and in the online repository of articles.

7. Many of the studies that use IAT scores to predict behavior find little or no anti-Black discrimination specifically.

If "unconscious racism" was as powerful and pervasive as its advocates claim, one would expect some, and probably a great deal, of anti-Black discrimination in these studies. Its absence in many studies justifies significant skepticism about claims about the power or prevalence of implicit bias.

8. Whether IAT scores predict behavioral manifestations of bias beyond self-report prejudice scales is unclear, with some studies finding they do and others finding they do not.

Racial prejudice is real and is readily measured by self-report scales assessing attitudes towards various racial and ethnic groups. It is not clear that the IAT captures much beyond these self-report scales, though.

9. Procedures that change IAT scores have failed to produce changes in discriminatory behavior.

One might ask, then, the point of such procedures and why is there such enthusiasm for these trainings.

10. There is currently no clear evidence that implicit bias trainings accomplish anything other than teaching people about the research on implicit bias.

It's not that there is "no evidence." This is not a case of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." It is a case of "there is tons of evidence, but most of it shows little or no effect."

11. There is no evidence that IAT scores are "unconscious."

Research finds that people are quite good at predicting their IAT scores.

12. Critiques and discussions of its limitations or weaknesses are often not presented when the IAT is taught to introductory psychology students. Gambrill & Reiman, 2011, defined propaganda as “encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible” (p. e19516). Does extolling research on the IAT without presenting its limitations and weaknesses constitute "encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible"? I leave that to you to decide. Regardless, this omission is contrary to the aims of science.

What This All Means

Here is my advice to you: Take an IAT or two (which you can here) if you have not already, just to see what the buzz is about. But now you are armed with enough information to reject any simple-minded proclamations about unconscious racism or the supposed power of implicit biases.

WIGGUM: OK, here's how the process works. You sit on the broom and we shove you off the cliff. MARGE: What?! WIGGUM: Well, hear me out, if you're innocent, you will fall to an honorable Christian death. If you are, however, the bride of Satan, you will surely fly your broom to safety. At that point you will report back here for torture and beheading. SKINNER: Tough, but fair.

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bad-moodboard · 1 year

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Title illustration from a 1678 pamphlet called “The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire.”

#devil #devils #1600s #17th century #Illustration #folklore #folk horror

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ichimakesart · 6 months

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Prepare your offerings well this Spirits' Eve.

You will need them.

~☆◇Prints◇☆~▪︎~☆◇Commissions◇☆~▪︎~☆◇Kofi◇☆~▪︎~☆◇For inquiries: [email protected]◇☆~

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sunflowers-and-a-tardis · 9 months

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the amazing devil are like a pair of gods, walking the earth and watching its stories unfold.

of monsters and men are like etheral witchcraft-practicing mountain spirits.

hozier is like an ancient celtic god, wandering through a forest and telling stories to the trees.

the oh hellos are like a gathering of fey dancing and reveling in a flourishing meadow.

the crane wives are like a travelling band of bards traversing the world, spreading music.

and the arcadian wild are like a courageous, valiant group of seafaring adventurers.

does that make sense?

#the amazing devil #of monsters and men #hozier #the oh hellos #the crane wives #the arcadian wild #literally amazing #folk music >>>>>>#this makes no sense i am aware

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slavicafire · 1 year

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Tales of regional devils, elements of Christianity, remnants of beliefs in old Slavonic spirits and demons, combined with variations in folklore to provide a rich tapestry of demonology. Since in the majority of Polish witchcraft confessions there were no references to familiars, it can be suggested that the personiﬁcation of the devil was an analogous concept.

However, the familiar nature of devils could equally be perceived as a continuation of the tradition of the domovoi (house spirits), who were an important part of ancient Slavonic mythology. They were mischievous, rather than harmful spirits who looked afer the home and were placated with oﬀerings of food. Christianity, according to Pełka and Baranowski, demonized these harmless creatures. The lingering spirit of the Christian could conveniently be viewed as a Slavonic water or forest spirit, and many of them were identiﬁed with liminal Christian situations, such as death without the appropriate rites, for example suicides or the death of unbaptized infants. Thus from a brief examination of the trial records and printed sources, one can see that the portrait of the devil serves a variety of purposes and beliefs and appears to be distinctly diﬀerent within elite and popular cultures.

- Jewish, Noble, German, or Peasant? The Devil in Early Modern Poland by Wanda Wyporska. [Demons, Spirits, Witches Vol. 2 :Christian Demonology And Popular Mythology - Gábor Klaniczay, Éva Pócs (Eds.)]

#Wanda Wyporska #folk devil #domovoi #suicide mention #polish witch trials #witch trails

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wytchoftheways · 2 months

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feather-bone · 7 months

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This is the devil’s hole pupfish! A tiny species that lives only in One water-filled limestone cavern in Nevada. It was one of the first animals on the endangered species list. At the last count in 2022 there were 263 pupfish observed - the most in 19 years! They’re tracked pretty carefully, as their 215 square foot habitat (the smallest of any know vertebrate) is fragile and has been disturbed in the past by groundwater extraction and other human interference.

[ID: an illustration of a shiny metallic blue fish, the male devil’s hole pupfish, facing to the right. It is on a lighter blue background with a ripple pattern. End.] l

#fish #fishes #fishblr #devils hole pupfish #icthyology #they were apparently controversial little guys in the 70s bc a family bought the land they’re on and tried to build a bunch of wells #and some agencies were like hey don’t build those here there are these pupfish #and I guess they went to court and it was a whole publicized thing and folks were getting bumper stickers that said either #save the pupfish or kill the pupfish #and the concept of being so self absorbed that you’re like I would rather a species go extinct forever than for one human family to have #wasted some money #and I’m gonna get a bumper sticker that informs you of this #is so fucking funny to me

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silverthornwitchery · 6 months

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My Experiences With The Horned God

Ok goes without saying but this is my own experience, my upg. Whether or not things are historically accurate is NOT my concern with this post. I am simply documenting my experiences. I am also NOT a reconstructionist, I am an Eclectic Neo-pagan that draws inspiration from NUMEROUS sources.

In my experiences Worshipping The Horned One and The Goddess, they're definetly like, the Primary Godheads/Energy Archetypes of the universe/nature.

My experiences with the Horned One aligns pretty well with Feri tradition, albeit he's a bit more Faceted for me.

I Experience Him as The Lightbringer, The Lord of the Forest, and The Royal Darkness/The Arddu. I'll go into Detail Below:

The Lightbringer - The Solar and Illuminating aspect of the Horned God. This form of him is the divine rebel, and very much into embracing the joys of life and pleasure. I Break the Lightbringer down into two more facets: The Blue God, and The Solar God. Both are relatively similar but to me the Blue God (this name stems from Feri) is the more esoteric and taboo aspects of light, and The Solar God is the more nature based and wild aspects of the sun itself.

The Names I use currently for these are Oberon for the Blue God, and in the past for the Solar God I've called upon Apollo and his various celtic forms, but I can't seem to find a name that sticks. I've also used Lucifer for the Lightbringer as a whole, but I'm trying to frame this side of my practice in English and Celtic folklore specifically for sake of ease. I am including things like Shakespeare, Arthurian Legends, and so on in this.

The Lord Of The Forest - This tends to be the popularized form of the Horned God. Fertility, Nature, Animals, Magic, the Cycle of Life and Death. He is blending of both the LightBringer, and The Arddu. The Lord of the Forest is a seasonal God. With the Oak King being his Spring and Summer forms, and the Holly King being his cthonic Fall and Winter forms, but name wise, I use three.

Cocidius/Callirius being the more human form of this God. Mostly human aside from ears and antlers or horns.

Herne is the Median between human and Animal, primal yet civilized, he is at least to me, 50/50 in terms of man and beast, but can shift between either pending what you are doing. The way he manifests to me and his energy feels is basically Hircine from TES, and I have worked with him under that name in the past.

Cernunnos to me is the Animal aspect of him. He speaks through nature itself, and is the large stag in the woods. He is cthonic, he is liminal, he is primal. He is the green forest itself in the warm seasons, and the dead and rebirthing forest in the cold. Cernunnos is the masculine embodiment of nature itself.

The Arddu - The Dark/Shadow aspect of the Horned God. He is the master of the Witches Sabbath, the embodiment of death, decay, and the shadow. Since he is death he is also rebirth and transformation. He is not malevolent, actually quite the opposite, but he is not opposed to destroying things to rebuild them, nor is he opposed to baneful workings in any ways. The Arddu as I understand him, often appears as a humanoid black goat or Stag with a candle lit between his horns. Sometimes his head is a skull, sometimes it is not. Sometimes he is more human in appearance. Regardless, The Arddu fulfills the role of "folk devil" in my own practice, though I've moved away from calling him that, as Arddu, meaning Dark One, feels more natural to me. Though I am not against, and actually quite enjoy the reclamation of the word Devil.

The Arddu comes to me in two colors, Black and White.

Black is the color of the fertile soil, which is made that way through decay. Black is the color of the shadow, the subconscious, and the taboo. That which we as people are taught to fear, but once embraced gives us immense power. In this form he's been coming to me as Arawn, but also in the past has come to me as Sathanas and the archetypal Sabbatic Goat. He dons the skull of either a Stag, Ram, Wolf, or Goat, or has those skulls for his actual face.

White is the color often associated with the otherworld, and the Wild Hunt. The White Arddu is the Light Betwixt the Horns and the winter snows. He is faery king in essence. To me he manifests in a more humanoid form, and is very fae-like. He is a trickster, a teacher, and a phantom.. to me he appears as Gwyn Ap Nudd, and I understand Gwyn and Arawn to be two sides of the same coin in my path.

#upg #pagan #the horned god #wiccan #witchcraft #folk devil

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