Looking for some October magic? Below I’ve included two rituals — one a Santa Muerte rebirth ritual dreamed up by Leza Cantoral (witch, author, and editor of Clash Books) and published in Light Magic for Dark Times and one a tarot writing practice from The Magical Writing Grimoire.
Over the past several years as Doughty, has continued to travel the world to give talks and educate folks on the wonders of death, she found that her favorite part of these talks came in the Q&A portion. It was not just the opportunity to get to hear what she calls “people’s deep fascination with decaying bodies, head wounds, bones, embalming, funeral pyres—the works”—that the most direct and provocative questions about death came from young children.
Stephanie Valente lives in Brooklyn, NY. She has published Hotel Ghost (Bottlecap Press, 2015) and waiting for the end of the world (Bottlecap Press, 2017) and has work included in Susan, TL;DR, and Cosmonauts Avenue. Sometimes, she feels human. http://stephanievalente.com
Aela Labbe
I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. I couldn’t look away. My breast buds were sad little stubs above my rounded belly. My glasses left a raw red mark on the bridge of my nose. My nose and forehead were shiny, my hair scraped back into a ponytail. I had never been a pretty child.
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Aleah Michele
As I sat there feeling a familiar ache inside me, an old memory came to me, without my calling, often like these memories do. I must have been ten or twelve years old in the memory, and I could see myself in my maternal grandmother’s house. I used to often spend my summer vacations with my maternal relatives. I guess my parents needed some time off me, as I did off them. I wouldn’t mind spending the days there, as it meant no more evenings full of terror-filled waiting as I dreaded the sound of the doorbell and the state my father would walked in, and the fights between my parents that followed. I felt invisible and doomed.
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Sebastian Hilgetag
Every witch needs magical supplies and a fitting wardrobe, but what if you can’t find what you’re looking for at the mall or even at a pagan shop? If you do, what if it’s too expensive? If you require supplies for spell casting or for your magical altar, there is another option. It’s fun to take a thrifty approach to finding magical supplies, because they didn’t just come from a factory; each item journeyed to find you. By collecting items in this way, you become the curator of your own practice.
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Helmut Newton
I had my suspicions growing up, but they never bothered me enough to mention it. At the age of eighteen, I met my biological mother for the first time at a Denny’s restaurant in my hometown. Prior, a friend of my eventual mother-in-law stopped by to visit, and on this summer evening, we discovered through a depth of conversation that she was my aunt. I felt astounded, and rather nervous as she laid out a story of hurtful feelings, broken dreams, and painful abandonment.
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Jessika Cheyenne Guarapuava
This is a series of confessionals about the intersection of Asia America and feminism in desperately melancholic times. Asian American women are committing suicide. The number of us with depression is rising at an alarming rate. It is my hope to illuminate the will to live in a radical spirit of exile. Welcome to PHANTASMAGORIA!
Read MoreYou can bind the herbs as a stick, light the end and then promptly put it out so the end is smoking. The process is called smudging and you direct the stick in all corners of the house. Imagine the negative energy is being blown out of the house. If it’s not to cold throw open the windows and watch the smoke drift out the window. Say some positive words as you do this, either out loud or in your head.
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Aëla Labbé
The woman who works in the office points out where Anna and Mildred walked together, where Mildred pulled out a pistol and shot Anna, then herself, because of a man named Jack. Mildred survived, went to the asylum in Waterbury, where she stayed until her family took her away. Anna died, not in the tower where both the women are standing now, but in the field. The woman who does not work in the office asks the woman who does why Anna would be here. "I don't know," says the woman who works in the office. And then, "I don't think she's here." And then, "I don't know why she would be."
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Madison Young
Madison Young is an author and radical feminist performance artist and director. Her breadth of work in the realm of artistic intersections within the fields of sexuality, identity, and pornography spans from documenting our sexual culture in her internationally screened and award-winning feminist erotic films to serving as the Artistic Director of the forward-thinking nonprofit arts organization Femina Potens Art Gallery. Young has curated over 500 performance art and visual art exhibitions and has exhibited her performance art, video art, and photography internationally. She is the author of Daddy: A Memoir, and two forthcoming books from Greenery Press and Cleis Press.
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via Bladerunner
It all began when a fucking idiot blindsided me with an old-fashioned skateboard. I got knocked down two flights and broke my leg.
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Victor Hamke
But dreams can also be nightmarish. They go beyond the peculiar and the unbelievable—they’re uncanny in the most terrifying sense of the word. They cause our deepest wounds to gush out. They make us wake up in cold sweat, dreading to ever go back to sleep again. They shake us up to our core. Because as much as they’re not real, they still mirror our deepest fears.
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So, I decided to pull a Tarot card out of the deck for 2016, to get an idea of how to live better, of where we're collectively headed, of what's brewing. I pulled the King of Swords. At this point, you're probably thinking: What does that mean?
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Helmut Newton
I paused at the threshold of my bedroom, waiting to soak in the emptiness of the one person I would never see in there again. I was greeted with a somber smile that seemed like a hard slap across the face on that November day.
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