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
Alex Talmon
My partner Dion and I huddled against the chilly April morning, waiting on the Provincetown pier for the whale watching cruiser Dolphin IV. Once we were out in Cape Cod Bay, I pulled up my hood and slipped off to the aft deck, a little ceramic urn concealed inside my coat pocket.
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With the first debate between Clinton and Trump this evening many of us have anxieties about our future given this insane election. Many also turn to Tarot Cards as a way to prepare when they have anxieties about their future. So what do the cards tell us about the frontrunning candidates? Can we predict their motives or outcomes? Probably not, but let’s try! We will examine each of the candidates through Arthur Edward Waite’s tarot deck.
Read MoreOne school day, when I was a young teenager, my guidance counselor called my mother to tell her she needed to pick me up. I was being sent home for the day because they found out I was “cutting”—using cuticle scissors to carve stripes into my thighs and lower belly. My mother brought me to the diner and bought me lunch, and over french fries and grilled cheese sandwiches, she admitted she’d had no idea what I’d been doing, or how emotionally confused I was at the time.
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Tim Marshall
I’m 30 soon and I don’t deal in regrets, but I come closest when I look back on the last decade and count the moments where I instinctually deferred to the expectations of others without checking my own pulse. I use the word “instinctually” when it’s not, not really. From childhood on, women are shooed away from any personal pulse-taking — instead of figuring out who we are as individuals, we’re encouraged to locate an external archetype and align ourselves with it. To find a planet with an “appealing” orbit and sync up. To self-help ourselves into an inoffensive cookie-cutter shape that satiates the people around us at the expense of our own hunger, because the supposed communal appetite holds more value than ours.
Read MoreAn “aura” is a rainbow-like, kaleidoscopic, electromagnetic field of energy that pulses around the physical body and is attuned to our emotions, health and external circumstances. It is a technicolor dream coat of many layers: the etheric body, astral body, mental body, higher mental body, spiritual body and the casual body, each of which together give the impression of a blending together of colors and light around the skin and is, essentially, an extension of the physical self.
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Teddy Kelley
Whenever I think back on my childhood, it’s almost as if a projector sets itself up in my mind and plays one specific clip, over and over again. I can picture myself running through a field (not unlike something from a cheesy commercial). I don’t care about getting my clothes dirty or bugs or strangers or of falling down and getting hurt. Essentially, I, not unlike many others, associate childhood with freedom. We feel free to learn, to grow, and to simply be who we are. After all, at a young age, it seems impossible to be anyone else other than ourselves.
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Guillaume via Unsplash
Lately, I've been trying to get to the bottom of a funny habit I picked up in the last few years: treating my anxiety with horoscope columns. Every few months, when work gets overwhelming or I spend too much time thinking about the future or develop a poorly-timed crush, I start to compulsively read my horoscope, and the horoscopes of my loved ones. I find this practice incredibly soothing, in someone else's predictions, I'm finally able to calm the storm in my brain and look within myself for a solution.
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Natalia Drepina
Good sex for me is when I can forget myself. That moment when all I am is the pleasure that I am feeling. All my energy coalesces into one point of focus and explodes. I think this is what the Big Bang must have felt like on a monumental scale. Energy exploding. Infinite potential. The sense of multiplying expansion that will never end. But it always ends. The universe cannot keep being born and I cannot remain in a state of perpetual orgasmic ecstasy.
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via The D-Photo
When I was nineteen, a therapist told me she thought I had post-traumatic stress disorder.
"Like a soldier?" I asked, halfway laughing.
She pointed out that I was extremely anxious in our meetings, that I couldn’t sit still, but bit my nails to the quick and glanced around the room and at the closed door. I couldn’t sit with my back to an open window, and I talked as if I had to get the words out quickly, quietly, before someone else heard. That I often looked as if my heart was beating too fast. (It often was.) Hypervigilance, she said.
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But if the physical appearance of the Yase-otoko arrested me, the reasons for the ghost’s suffering shocked me: "punished either for having killed human beings or animals or for being obsessed with being treated unfairly during his life." The first part of the reasoning made sound sense but the second confounded me. How could one’s obsession with being treated unfairly during one’s life be equated with the suffering brought on by killing human beings and animals? I stared at the description for several minutes hoping I had read it wrong. I wrestled with this question on my walk home, and for several hours afterward.
Read MoreSalt is one of the most powerful magical elements on earth. It has the ability to absorb negative energies, removing them from your own mind and spirit. Sea salt is particularly potent, especially when harnessed the right way.
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What's a good book if your body is writhing around on the inside? Seriously. Think about that for a second. These four books cut me to the core.
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BY LISA MARIE BASILE
[Via IngenueX.com]
Midsummer(during the summer solstice), is here, you lovelies. This is such a glorious time of year for everyone here in the Northwestern Hemisphere – everything we worked through during the long winter and Spring is now behind us, and we can use the rejuvenating days of summer to prepare, build on or resurrect something – whether that is a material or tangible thing or an idea, mindset or self-healing path.
This year's strawberry moon (or rose moon, as I prefer calling it) makes Midsummer even more glorious, and even more potent. There are so many things we can do to commemorate this time of year – to tap into nature and yourself.
Some of my favorite childhood memories can be accredited to glancing up at the moon and taking a deep breath. My grandmother taught me that was our families equivalent to stopping to smell the roses. The deep night air was thought to clear the mind and the moon was a constant companion, far more reliable then the rich perfume of a flower.
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BY LISA MARIE BASILE
Here's everything you need for a) using a ouija board on the beach, b) casting spells on a summer night or c) being the fashionable house party witch.
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Which one would you rock more? The black or champagne?😎
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Link in bio of ya tryin' to wear these to an Avenged Sevenfold show 👦🏻☠🎙
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The cure for dancing all night & sleeping all day 💀 Coffee in the Black Magic Travel Mug
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By popular demand. A few of your favorites are back.
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