As mentioned in Notable and Quotable 22, Julian Vayne is doing a series of interviews in which magical practitioners share the story of one of their magical things.
folklore
Folklore Against Fascism
One of the highlights of my week is the Folklore Thursday hashtag on Twitter. I’ve not had time to look at it for a few weeks though, so it seems I missed the occasion when some völkisch fascists tried to hijack it, much to the horror of the regular participants.
One of them accordingly started a second hashtag, Folklore Against Fascism, and several participants tweeted about their opposition to fascism and commitment to inclusive folklore.
Wassailing
On Monday, we went to the Orange Peel Morris annual Wassailing at Spirit Tree Cidery, Ontario.
Books I read in December
Some science fiction, some fairy tales, some Tom Cox (he’s his own genre, y’know), and some Robertson Davies.
Books I’ve read in August
Books I’ve read in August.
Instinctive Witchcraft
Many years ago, Steve Wilson gave a talk entitled Archaic Witchcraft. One of the things he said was to remember how you imagined witchcraft would be when you were a kid. What thrilled you about the idea? What did you imagine that witches did? And then he suggested creating a Witchcraft to fulfill those childhood dreams. He proposed calling it Archaic Witchcraft. I suppose it could also be called Instinctive Witchcraft.
Notable and quotable 14
This week, some interesting attempts to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: science and spirituality, the Bible and feminism.
A post drawing a much-needed distinction between beauty and glamour, which are all-too-often confused with each other. And a post about the often contradictory mythology and folklore of owls. And an amazing post about how magic, prayer, and visualization can be explained with the ideas of morphic resonance.
First footing
How to make a New Year luck bag for first footing.
The folklore of the Wild Hunt
The Wild Hunt is a very widespread motif in Indo-European folklore and mythology, appearing in Indian, Greek, Czech, Polish, Slovenian, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and Welsh legends. The deity who leads it varies from one culture to another, and it has different names in different places, but enough shared characteristics to be fairly certain that it is the same folklore motif. It even has its own classification number, ATU E501.
Wassailing
One of my favourite folk rituals is the practice of wassailing. This is done in apple-growing districts to wake up the apple trees and encourage them to produce plenty of fruit in the autumn. I love it so much that I planted an apple tree in my garden so I could wassail it.
![Apple blossom. Photo by Maky Orel on Pixabay [Public Domain, CC0]](https://dowsingfordivinity.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/apple-blossom-2300177_960_720.jpg?w=300)
Apple blossom. Photo by Maky Orel on Pixabay [Public Domain, CC0]
