Do you see the cobbles on the streets? Everywhere you look, stone & rock. Can you imagine what it feels like to reach down with your bones & feel the living stones? The city is built on itself, all the cities that came before. Can you imagine how it feels to lie down on an ancient flagstone & feel the power of the rock buoying you up against the tug of the world? And that's where witchcraft begins. The stones have life, & I'm part of it. - adapted from Terry Pratchett
Of course I don't need to tell you that I side with Ukraine.
As always all methods must be used against a cunt like Putin and I am delighted that the hackers group Anonymous are acting. These people are heroes of mine and legends.
If you would care to join in magically here is a simplified binding spell to prevent Putin harming (adapted from here). You don't need all the ingredients.
Take something which can be Putin in your head. The important thing is that it reminds you of him. An Action Man would be good. Or a potato, a bread roll, whatever. Write his name on it or stick his picture on it.
Now if you want to call on any energies or divinities of your choice, do so. If you don't that's also great.
Tie up the Putin object. You can use string, ribbon, duct tape or whatever. As you do so picture him prevented from harming Ukraine in your mind and say,
Hear me, oh spirits
Of Water, Earth, Fire, and Air
Heavenly hosts
Demons of the infernal realms
And spirits of the ancestors
I call upon you
To bind
Vladimir Putin
So that he may fail utterly
That he may do no harm
To any human soul
Nor any tree
Animal
Rock
Stream
or Sea
Bind him so that he shall not break the Ukraine
Usurp their liberty
Or fill our minds with hate, confusion, fear, or despair
And bind, too,
All those who enable his wickedness
And those whose mouths speak his poisonous lies
I beseech thee, spirits, bind all of them
As with chains of iron
Bind their malicious tongues
Strike down their towers of vanity
I beseech thee in my name
(Say your full name)
In the name of all who walk
Crawl, swim, or fly
Of all the trees, the forests,
Streams, deserts,
Rivers and seas
In the name of Justice
And Liberty
And Love
And Equality
And Peace
Bind them in chains
Bind their tongues
Bind their works
Bind their wickedness
Keep the object in a dark, hidden place. Get it out now and then and see him prevented again as you say the verse.
Just in case you're thinking this is a bit subtle for me when I cursed our own Prime Minister, well the priority is the imminent danger. I'm nowhere near finished with him yet.
I have often posted about tarot here but I have rarely posted an actual tarot reading. However in this case the subject is just too fascinating and the cards too interesting to keep it to myself.
A court in the state of New York has ruled that Donald, Donald Jr and Ivanka Trump must all appear before the attorney general (sorry if I get the terms wrong, I don't understand how things work in the US) and testify in a civil case about, I believe, finance. This is in addition to the criminal case which is also ongoing. To be frank considering that so many of his businesses have been alleged to have money laundering written all over them it's a bit surprising that the orange freak has managed to get to the age he has without getting arrested - there is even a whole Wikipedia page about legal cases involving Donald Senior.
Of course as soon as I saw this, being totally nosey I wanted to know what was going on in the Trump family's world about this. I don't do predictive readings however there is available a much more predictive reading by the legendary Z Budapest if you want a different take. She did it at one of his impeachments and if you don't want to watch the whole thing I can summarize it for you by telling you she says he's going to prison.
So anyway the first card I pulled was for what Donald is thinking and the Death card just leapt out at me!
Obviously Death can refer to an actual death and my gut feeling would be that there is probably some level on which Trump wishes he were dead. Oh the ignominy of having spent your entire life getting away with grift and it finally catching up with you at the age of 75! In fact I think that is the meaning of this card in this situation. In addition to deaths it means natural endings which happen to everyone without fear or favour and are unavoidable. He's thinking that it's over and his life has caught up with him.
Of course I'm not a lawyer and no doubt his lawyers will continue his usual tactics of spinning things out as long as possible. That said his accountant has abandoned him and given that one of the things which led to this is that he directly contradicted in a statement what was said in a statement by his legal team, he must be a total nightmare to represent or advise. He must be paying his legal team huge amounts - that's if he is paying them lol. Anyway the witch's advice (for reasons which will become apparent further down the reading) is just open up your history for a full audit and take the consequences. Being overweight and living on junk food he realistically has ten years of life left but his legacy will certainly carry on to his children.
Which brings me nicely to Donald Jr. He had two cards pop out for his thoughts, although his thoughts were rather confused to say the least.
The 4 of Wands is called The Lord of Perfected Work by the Golden Dawn. That said it is in the fiery wands suit so is much more about the will behind the work rather than the actual work. In this case the natural inference would be that he is thinking about the wealthy show off life which the family have built up over decades. That's what it's all about in his thoughts. The Tower means that he thinks this life they have willed into being could well be ended. The Tower means a quite different ending from the ending of Death, where things have run their natural course. It's exactly the ending depicted in the card - sudden, catastrophic, and painful.
Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.
Ivanka had the most bizarre card for what she's thinking. The six of wands is in the same area of fiery will and means definite accomplishment. The Golden Dawn called it the Lord of Victory and Pam's depiction very clearly shows a victory parade. It is tied to the Beauty sephirah of the Qabalistic Tree of Life and I'm going to put a punt on here that she thinks her beauty will prevent anything happening to her, probably by daddy protecting her. By this stage I feel physically sick because the only sensible thing to do if your dad publicly says he would be with you if you weren't his daughter, is take out a restraining order.
I'm honestly surprised that Donald is the most insightful here, but then I suppose the kids have been brought up with the idea that they could just get away with anything.
To be frank surely nobody will be surprised if they turn on each other or throw one of them under the bus (probably Don Jr) - certainly Mary L Trump, who is in a position to know, describes his children's relationship with Donald as entirely transactional and conditional.
Oh alright, I couldn't help myself. I just had to look at what the legal team think about this and to my delight The Fool leapt out!
This is one of the tarot cards which in my opinion has its main meaning slightly misrepresented all the time. There is a lot of emphasis on the innocence or holy fool aspects but little emphasis on the Qabalistic meaning that the Fool is the thing before anything happens. He's like the thought you have before you speak, or possibly the intake of breath at the most. To put it bluntly, the legal team don't have a sensible defense prepared. There is no sensible defense. To put it another way they are walking towards the precipice and the Trumps are refusing even to plan, listen to advice and their legal people don't even think they've got a leg to stand on.
What I find totally bizarre (but then I wouldn't dream of creating a business empire built largely on other people's money and creative accounting) is that this obviously can't carry on forever. Unless you escape to a banana republic sooner or later the powers that be expect to see your books. Who knows, it may not happen in Donald's lifetime but you would think as a father you wouldn't want that hanging over your kids. Wouldn't you?
Hope you've all got lots of popcorn in because it's going to be televised.
All acts are magical acts, said Uncle Al, and so hot on the heels of dishwasher magic, magic with reviews, another apparently mundane magical tool.
Actually it makes sense that reviews would cross over into magical territory because they are incredibly powerful. Estimates of consumers who pay attention to online reviews are consistently over 80% and that is why firms are so eager to manipulate them. Not looking at a certain review site about holidays in the slightest, nor rumours that Amazon employees get bribes to fiddle reviews, but obviously you can't always be confident but this post is inspired by the most extraordinary experience I had of the power of a review. I will put some detail because I think it helps to show what my review was up against.
Long term readers will know that I walked out of my shitty employers in 2016. They are one of the two large mental health providers in this city (actually they're both shit in different ways but the other one is merely incompetent and doesn't have the culture of abuse of the one I walked out of) and has a very good reputation amongst the people who work for it. This was difficult to reconcile with my almost consistently bad experience of important governance things being neglected, of bullying, and non existent leadership. It seemed reasonable that if I was that dissatisfied with it other people must be.
And yet, I went on an employment website and the reviews by employees were consistently excellent, even glowing. It couldn't be that in a freak set of circumstances I had managed to experience all the crap in the organization and everyone else had had an excellent experience! I had actually sat in training courses and seen people in tears because they felt so unsafe and were so frightened of their manager!
And then it struck me. It was one of the dysfunctional cultural aspects of the workplace. They have a culture that we can do it and we will deal with it; we know what we are doing and do a good job (usually this is phrased in opposition to the other mental health provider). It struck me that the organization fed off the can do culture of its employees, gained any success it had from their work while also treating them like shit and filling their minds with the idea that stopping to say things weren't ok was because they were incompetent or couldn't cope. The majority of people doubt their own perception, give other people the benefit of the doubt, and those combined with the workplace culture would be guaranteed to stop negative reviews. Perhaps I should say that the reviews online by service users are far from positive, devastatingly accurate and the service is doing a critical incident review after a series of murders. Even the coroner criticised the service for its traumatizing response to a family after a preventable suicide of a service user.
So I left a review. It wasn't overly dramatic but I pulled no punches and it was fairly crap. I made it very clear that I was talking about a succession of bad experiences and gave clear instances of all the shit I had seen.
I was surprised at what happened next, and I think this is one of the strengths of online reviews because my simple act of leaving that review had clearly changed something for other people, and that is always the clear sign that something magical is going on. I went back to the site six months later and the reviews had changed from being uniformly good to being predominantly terrible (with the odd good one) with my review as the turning point. There clearly were other people who had terrible things to say but hadn't said them.
So what change does this actually make? Well I think you have to change thoughts and attitudes before anything else changes. This change in people's minds will chip away at the culture and help to stop people doubting themselves. A change in culture has knock on effects. For example that trust is very good at drilling people what to say before a Care Quality Commission inspection, and I have frequently seen people saying all the right things and the provider keeps looking good. I wouldn't claim to take the credit for it but on its next inspection after my review the report said a lot of the staff reported that they tried to give good care despite the organization and it dropped down a point into requiring improvement. My spies said the powers that be were visibly furious and I couldn't have been happier.
Of course I'm talking about an organization which doesn't take feedback and I would hope that a good organization would deal with a negative review in a way to turn it positive. I am very taken with the philosophy of dealing with complaints which I have tended to associate with Japanese businesses (although I typically can't find any specific reference to it online at present): that a complaint is an opportunity. I just think you can tell everything about an organization by the way it responds to complaints and I'm talking about an organization where the staff would typically avoid a 'complainer' while making a point of audibly moaning how difficult they were. When an organization won't change its mind because any contradiction is threatening or it doesn't give a shit, your only option is to change it whether they like it or not. I would also theorize that although it may seem like some businesses genuinely don't give a shit, a solid bank of negative reviews will build up the karma in a big way. Even if it only warns people what they're like.
So to sum up, reviews are a powerful magical act, which while they can present some problems because of online reviews being manipulated, have a real potential to make changes happen.
Despite having knocked about and met all sorts of people there are still many human experiences I can't claim to understand and I make a point of trying.
One of them is that I can't claim to understand the experience of being transgender however I have been reading two trans women's blogs to try to get a better understanding.
One I have been reading for literally years although she has now removed much of the posts about her process of transitioning now. What strikes me is the sheer bravery of doing that in her fifties, having previously been married to a woman and having retired early from a career as a tax inspector. My main impression is actually how magical this has been - she has literally refashioned herself as she thought fit! She doesn't even have her original family name now and instead has a surname she chose herself. Many of the things she talks about are still things I will never understand but I think that means it's for me to sit down and shut up.
The other one is on Instagram and their life isn't going so well. Bigots at this point would of course say that they want to transition as a result of their diagnosed Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder but sensible people know that that is just hatred. In fact the sheer trauma occasioned by being trans would likely cause a personality disorder. In fact I was shocked to read that as recently as 2017 a trans person was given asylum elsewhere because it would be too dangerous for them to come back to Britain. This country is an embarrassment. This person's transition also isn't going so well and they have long periods without being prescribed testosterone. They are so brave and so kind to other people: they literally put on their Instagram that anyone who wanted to go round for Christmas lunch would be welcome!
A Trans Spell
This blog is about the magic and I suspect trans people are naturals at it. So here's a spell that can only be done by trans people.
Put a curse on your dead name. What the curse does is of course up to you but don't think small. How good is it if every time someone uses your dead name or misgenders you patriarchy, Donald Trump or white privilege wither. We know that therefore are many people who will happily murder trans people so literally don't worry about whether this is ethical. One more cursed rapist means fewer rapes, for example.
Obviously it would be wonderful if magical people's washing up matched the Hollywood image.
However in reality a dishwasher also has magical uses.
There are essentially two sorts of witches - the ones that do jar spells and the ones that don't - and dishwasher magic will obviously appeal to those who do. Its obvious magical use is of cleaning and washing: just put a heat- and waterproof magical link in there and you're good to go. You could even do it with your dishes.
When you do a cycle to clean out the actual washer itself, to my mind the magical use would be slightly different. Obviously detergent is never actually pleasant but I personally use white vinegar to clean out the pipes. I hate vinegar and so the magical environment in the washer would be distinctly unpleasant rather than cleaning alone. You could of course use a commercial cleaner but I have never felt the need myself.
And at this point I would like to welcome Vincent Price to demonstrate another use of a dishwasher.
