Unbaptism.org lets you print out a certificate denouncing your baptism and I think it’s great. 

I was manipulated into getting one because my little sister did as well and since I couldn’t find the original baptism certificate, I decided to get this and frame it in my house. 

Of course no one needs a certificate to denounce a baptism but it might be comforting to have something physical in your hand. 

Yo more people need to know about unbaptism.org I think that would give a lot of people great comfort

I will forever be baffled by why some people want strict rules and taboos in Norse heathenry.

I’ve talked to people from Scandinavian countries whose families have been practicing for generations and they tell me, in paraphrase, “Yeah, we just vibe.” As far as I can tell, only certain Scandinavian magical practices actually have rules, and these practices are treated as nondenominational (i.e. not specific to Norse paganism) for the most part.

Some people seem to have the impression that "real" religions have strict rules and if you aren't being rigorous in your religiosity you're doing it wrong.

It reminds me of a debate I had with a Catholic where the argument was basically "if you're not suffering you aren't in a religion".

If you aren't

I’ve been told that so many times by various Christian sects. It’s the belief that pain makes you stronger and brings you closer to God. Like suffering is the key to ascension... much like how Christ suffered on the cross. It’s super dark and personally I find the notion horrifying to teach others. I also find it hilariously ironic that modern fan clubs are trying to police ancient systems. Pretty sure if it’s existed for thousands of years already, it doesn’t need your help Debra.

That smacks of sadomasochism.

I just don't get why people, upon realizing the toxicity of this dynamic, will continue to build structures that trade in their agency and inherent worth for rules and dogmas that basically state "you're a piece of shit unless you can prove otherwise."

I truly don't.

It's my belief that this dynamic is the mark of white imperialism in this day and age. This is the mind-barrier that prevents people from accessing what is righfully theirs; their personal sovereignty and inherent right-of-being.

I know a lot of it is Christian conditioning and an instilled fear of the unknown and "but what if I'm doing it wrong?" And don't be fooled; I still have to fight similar conditioning despite my areligious upbringing.

(Hell, there was a time where I was afraid of taking my own agency at all because the idea was so big and foreboding. But that didn't mean I never wanted it. I just didn't feel ready at the time, and I knew that.)

But I understand the conditioning part. What I don't understand is when people choose to agree with the idea of earned worth. I don't get it when people flat-out reject the idea they are entitled to their own personal sovereignty, even after rejecting Christianity. If someone had told me "your worth and wellbeing is inherent to your existence" at any point in my life, that statement would have burned itself into my skull.

I know I sound super flabbergasted, but I'm truly not being hyperbolic at all. I'm genuinely trying to understand where this conscientious rejection comes from. Please, Tumblr, I'd love to be enlightened.

Hagging Out: Oct 28th - Oct 30th [🔒]

Thinking about taking part? Reply to this entry - or send me a DM - and I’ll add you to the list of October Hags. 💀

WHO: To join this challenge you must 1.) identify as a hag (trans, non-binary, and dude Hags welcome!), and 2.) be 30 years or older. (Tumblr Baba Yagas unite! <3) While not mandatory, all former participants have been some flavor of pagan or witch or Christian, so incorporating the challenge into your practice or devotional schedule isn’t just tolerated, it’s encouraged!

WHAT: October’s challenge is about keeping unwanted creepy crawlies out. Focus doesn’t necessarily need to be on yourself; we’re casting the net wide to include home, ritual space, or even an object/tool.

WHERE: In the convenience of your home! Unless, of course, you want to be a bit extra. Whatever you decide to do, and wherever you decide to do it, be sure to tag your posts with #Hagging Out so fellow crones can follow along. (Over the past year we’ve essentially strong-armed everyone else out of the tag and claimed it as our middle-aged Hag fort, LMFAO.)

WHEN: October 28th-October 30th! Participating Hags are encouraged to complete their challenge and write their entry when it suits their schedule, then pick one of the three “open” days - October 28th, 29th, or 30th - to post it.

WHY: To consolidate our strengthening crone powers and exchange tips on the best way of covering stubborn greys. And because it’s occasionally nice to be social in the comfort of your own home without actually having people over.

HOW: Create a charm, share your favorite prayer or petition, or give us the low-down on a personal practice that locks the uninvited out. (Hand-carved jack-o-lanterns are totally valid, btw! 🎃) As long as you’re warding you’re on the right path. Feel free to riff and push boundaries, that’s what this is all about!

💀 October Hags: @msgraveyarddirt, @satsekhem, @salfige, @buddyblanc, @nightjasmine, @fernandfog, @wildwood-faun, @luc3

Putting out the Hag all-call for October’s challenge!

Missed out for a couple months on account of wildly swinging from super organized and capable to “Oh god I just ADD’d ten hours and I don’t think I ate, drank, or went to the bathroom today… where am i?” - gonna really put in the effort and do somethin Real Damn Worth It for this one.

We doing this shit!

Got you added, sis! <3

I keep missing chances to participate, and this time I’ve got something that needs doing that having a post to make will ensure gets done. Put me on the list, please?

…and you’re officially on the October Hag list! Welcome! <3

Christians keep stealing shit from other esoteric traditions when St Barbara is right there.

Y'all have a PATRON SAINT OF BOMBS AND EXPLOSIONS AND NONE OF Y'ALL EVER MENTION HER

Her symbology is the Chalice and Cannon. Queen.

her Wikipedia page says she's lesbian

*LEBANESE

patron saint of osha

𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐜𝐤 𝐈𝐜𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞 Built around the mid-1800s, this Ice House was used for ice in drinks and to keep food fresh for the nearby Cairncastle Lodge. Full report here: https://urbexhub.com/carnfunnock-ice-house/

gotta admit that my favourite part of irish folklore is that theres an island that appears only once every 7 years and is solely inhabited by giant bunnies and a wizard

second favourite is that in 1999 the construction of a major motorway would have had to cut down a shrub that belonged to the fairies so they just. stopped the roads construction and rerouted it slightly to the left to avoid the bush.

it was this one

actually this is the funniest fucking title you could have given to an article about this

Genuinely love Ireland's whole thing of "Faeries aren't real but they're 100% real"

There is an old belief in Serbian villages and small towns that certain pumpkins (and watermelons), when left outside during a full moon, will turn in to a vampire.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

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*whisper chants* vampire pumpkin vampire pumpkins vampire pumpkins

This is the quality fall shit I’m here for

I think it’s great that Pumpkins (and other squash) were only introduced to Europe around 1600 and the Serbs wasted absolutely no time blaming them for their problems.

The Alsea were a Native American tribe of Western Oregon.  When Lewis and Clark reached them, the Alsea may have numbered about a thousand. By 1910, as a result of disease and displacement, they were reduced to a 29 or so individuals, who took refuge with the nearby Siletz tribe. They are probably extinct, although a few members may be mixed in with the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, many of whom live on the Siletz Reservation, where the remaining members were relocated. 

An Orthodox Jewish man swings a chicken over his children’s heads as part of the Kaparot ritual in Bnei Brak, Israel, Monday, Oct. 7, 2019. Observant Jews believe the ritual transfers one’s sins from the past year into the chicken, and is performed before the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish year which began at sundown Tuesday. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Sometimes all you need to do is sit in the woods until you feel the earth numb your soul and seep into your bones.

one thing that i think i really do appreciate that Judaism has is the practical application of sacred/profane time. like heathenry would delineate space but it really always did a poor job of applying the notions of sacred time, even during holidays and ritual. and having a way to have sacred time actually mean something is very appealing to me

I am unfamiliar with the concept of sacred time, does anyone want to further elaborate? (for context: was raided evangelical, hasnt been for ten years but was vaguely agnostic but spiritual, have been a heathen for the past year)

edit: tbh im sure heathenry lacks this largely because of its erasure, and subsequent attempts to reconstruct, it doesn't exist as a whole like other religions

So a lot of heathen, and neo-pagan, recon especially, theology is based off of the works of some prolific anthropologists and historians, so keep in mind that a lot of this is a lot less “ancient” than we often talk like it is. A lot of it is based off of these works.

So that said, a little bit on ritual. It is typically defined as “the established form for a ceremony” but for our purposes, I’d like to also add “an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner” or “a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence” So using these second definitions, ritual is defined by doing, or more precisely preforming. This will be important later.

According to Mircea Eliade (other ritual theorists make use of this distinction but do not go into nearly as much depth in how to designate sacred vs profane space), the space of the universe, of our world at least, is delineated into the sacred and the profane (the opposite of sacred, this is not a moralized word) two opposite states of being with clear distinctions. Eliade describes the sacred as “[manifesting itself] as a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities” and “man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane” therefore it is helpful to understand that, for Eliade, the profane is our natural, mundane, world and we distinguish the sacred by its difference from the profane.

So when it comes to sacred space, that’s usually pretty easy. A church, a tree, an altar, a crossroads, a hǫrgr, etc. These are places in which the divine presence can be not only felt but observed. Whether it is the sanctity of the space that allows the divine to enter or the presence of the divine that creates the sacred is open for interpretation typically, but one does not exist without the other. And you’ll often hear about people purifying themselves before entering a sacred space, so as to not make it profane.

However temporal sacred-ness is a little more difficult to nail down. Using Eliade again, sacred time is “a primordial mythic time made present” meaning, when we are in a sacred time, we are in the ‘before times’ in which myth occurred. and it “represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past” so essentially, sacred time is then repeating itself in a cycle, every time we enter into it, we are entering the same sacred time as before.

For Catherine Bell, time is an important factor in ritualization and the construction of tradition. She discusses tradition as being a paradox between an “atemporal order and the profane world of temporal change” and how “each is differentiated from but dependent upon the other.” This really doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own but in the context of myth and ritual, it is a way to set something up as ‘how it was always done’ or a sense of continuity in the context of the creation, and subsequent recreation, of ritual. This recreation of meaning, and therefore ritual is best explained by Ronald L Grimes “ritual meaning consists just as surely of the random thoughts and gestures that occur during a ritual” and so the ritual meaning is different from when they were first constructed just by virtue of the continual doing.

Ronald L Grimes discusses the different types of ritual time. “a time between the times” or transitional times or seasons, lifecycles, or a change in social status, is a displacement of the usual sense of chronologically ordered time. He mentions kairos or ‘a pulse of opening and closing’ described when we experience things we cannot anticipate, they catch us by surprise. As well as ‘anticipated time’ or cyclical time, which is like what Eliade describes, though maybe not quite the same, since we can anticipate the return of that time though many do not consider it a repetition. This latter kind of time, the return is what categorizes most traditional liturgical rites.

So what does that have to do with heathenry? many heathens consider only Eliade’s conception of ritual time, wherein ritual as we preform it is a recreation of the moment of the creation. However this is not a particularly practical way to look at ritual in the heathen context. There is indeed very little to be found of a real creation of any sense, beyond the recreation of ritual as Grimes explains it. I would posit that the sacred time in which heathen ritual typically exists is more along the lines of ritualization and construction of tradition. What heathens are creating when preforming ritual is the ritual itself.

When talking about Judaism and the Jewish way of viewing sacred time, the cyclical time of return seems to be the most accurate way to understand it. For them, the Shabbat has been happening since the creation of the world itself, it has been the way they have delineated time for themselves and is thus both tradition in the sense of Bell and cyclical in the sense of Grimes, while also invoking the idea of the mythic time as set up by Eliade. This traditional ritual time is sacred itself because God made it so. It was declared scared ‘in the beginning’ and has been at every time it has reoccurred since then. This is the definition and practical use of sacred time I was referring to in the op. The application of it is meaningful as both a religiously symbolic time as well as a regularly occurring time that is designated as separate from our profane time of the rest of the week, thus as per Eliade making it sacred.

Sources The Sacred and the Profane Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice Beginnings in Ritual Studies

You know what I love? Calling it "Christian Mythology." Referring to their god as "The Christian God." Refusing to conform to the idea that their religion is any more valid than anyone else's.

Oh, it makes them spicy. Gets them all twitchy. They wanna fistfight me in a Denny's parking lot, but they know they can't 'cause I'm right.

90% of the stuff many people think every religion has is just stuff specific to Christianity.

For example, here's a list of stuff Norse Heathenry doesn't have:

Locks of red and untamable spirit

Wild and cunning, that none may miss your wit

Laufey’s son of many faces

Hear my call and guide my path

May we bask in your blessing and graces

Protected always by your holy wrath.

Though I am to your workings blind

Your laughter crackles at the back of my mind

Loud and clear when you are at ease

Yet warm and sweet like the summer breeze.

Our love for you knows no end

And each day your stories we sing

So that our wounds you may mend

And your wisdom to us bring.

Across the seas may you ride

Foretelling the end of all

Neither do we cower nor hide

For we stand proud and tall.