Endless Bullshit

Honestly, some people.
I have commented here before that I semi-regularly read this person's blog, who doesn't half talk some rubbish. I only read it when I can stand to, but continue to read it because she is an interesting person.
Previously I think I have commented that she spouted one day that she had this particular bowl to eat from and how green and wonderful it was because it was reused from a salad.
The salad in question was from Marks and Spencer.
I know so, because she just threw that in there.
She also spouts the wonders of a minimalist wardrobe. This seems to entail fairly frequently giving her current clothes away and starting afresh by buying a new wardrobe on eBay.
But the most ridiculous thing she talks about is the Gerson protocol. One of these days I will do a post about why it's utter nonsense, but suffice to say that it is a quack treatment for cancer. She thinks it will stop her getting cancer. The Hound has news for her, that people who peddle dangerous quackery can find themselves getting a good hard slap from Fate. But anyway, she published some pictures of her kitchen, with its array of expensive foodstuffs, and amongst them was special Gerson coffee. Look online, I promise your hair will stand on end when you see how much it costs. And it's not even for drinking - it's for coffee enemas!
All of these things are only available to rich people. The cost of minimalism is that you have to have money to buy things you need because you don't have them. Poor people tend to own more stuff because they can't afford to replace stuff they have thrown out.
The blogger I am talking about presents all this shit as a'spiritual' thing. The Hound thinks it's just another form of consumerism.
Today she has posted a link to a YouTube channel about minimalism and mindfulness. Each video has an Amazon link to buy the things you see in the video!
Why am I expatiating about this? Consumerism/capitalism have a habit of pretending to be other things. In this case about spirituality and mindfulness (don't start me on that one). Personally I love a good shop. But you won't find me pretending otherwise. My own aspiration is to be right sized, and I think that eiwi not involve disproportionate use of Stuff.
This is one of the reasons I started this blog. I had something to say and didn't want to write a Llewellyn book. I wanted it to be free on the internet and to embody my own do-it-yourself ethic, that you can't buy magic, but once you step on that path, what you need will always appear.
And I suppose this is my witchy version of mindfulness - I have to focus on my intent and do the Great Work without deviation.

Knock off Chinese Tarot Decks and Not Going to Pride

I have recently bought two knock off Chinese tarot decks. This is not to be derogatory about the Chinese, the decks actually came from China and are very clearly knockoff.
Of course there is an immediate ethical problem here, however one of the decks was one which I had thought I would never buy because it was too expensive - the gorgeous Prisma Visions Tarot. If you want to buy the original you can get it here, but in my own case I was never going to buy it and so I'm not cheating the artist out of any money. The other deck is the Pamela Colman Smith centennial edition.
These decks have the disadvantage that they are very obvious cheap reproductions, and you can tell they are such because they don't even have a publisher's name on. The printing is not perfect and they feel cardboardy, which personally I prefer to the high gloss of many decks. Also if you lose them, that's less of a problem.
These decks have one big advantage for a decrepit old witch like myself, which is that the cards are rather smaller than standard size tarot cards, which makes them easier to shuffle.
You can find endless knock off decks on t'internet. You can tell them because they are ridiculously cheap and ship from China.

This weekend is Birmingham Pride and naturally the Hound isn't going, for reasons I have rehearsed here every year. If you are a recent visitor you can click the label 'queer' down there 👇on the web version and see my reasons. That is why the Kray twins illustrate this post, as they are my exemplar of non-establishment queer sexuality and definitely non-conforming if psychopathic with it.

Inspiration from Mixed Martial Arts

The gentleman whose picture illustrates this post is a mixed martial artist called David 'One More' Round. My opinion is that witchcraft, in fact magic, bears more resemblance to a martial art than a religion, and in fact I think David's tattoo is a perfect motto for a witch: Be the Hero in Your Own Life. The witch, as well as the martial artist, must step up and stop looking for heroes outside. Below is a video of David talking and another of a suitable song for the theme of this post.

May is Masturbation Month

Hooray it's come round again! Although I do wonder whether, being the Hound I am, I shouldn't instead be humping things and sniffing crotches. Blush.
Incidentally, since I aim to be educational as well as entertaining, I would like to point out that there are photos of different wanking techniques on Wikipedia. Don't thank me, it's all part of the service.
Enjoy!

Everyday Tarot Review

This is a review of the Everyday Tarot (the deck, not the book, which I bought some time ago and am just getting comfortable with. I tend to find that a new deck will just sit for some time until its time comes to pick it up.
First things first, this is a pocket deck, more like the size of ordinary playing cards. The card is quite thick, so it comes in at about twice the thickness of a playing card deck. The edges are coloured gold. I don't know whether this is the case with all decks, because some pictures on the internet make the edges look shiny as if gilded, and they are not on mine. It is also cheap, compared to most tarot decks, coming in at not much more than a tenner.
I like it, is my verdict. The images are streamlined and simplified versions of the RWS deck. It therefore lacks the hidden mickeys for which that deck is famous. All the cards are in the same purple, gold and white colour scheme, so there is a layer of meaning lacking that the RWS has. The flip side of that is of course that the cards could take on meanings which they don't in the RWS because they are not contained by the colours. A major change is that this deck introduces many more women than RWS, and the illustration to this post shows just some of the cards which depict figures who are usually male but female here. This includes some of the knights!
I think this would be a good deck to learn with, and comes with a little book of meanings. The deck's basis in the RWS means that it can also be used for more developed reading based on that deck.
One thing I would say is that the cards tend to stick together when new, and it's taken several months of handling for mine to separate and ease up.

Easter Does my Head In

Goddess, how I find this festival intolerable. It is intolerable on several fronts.
From a pagan point of view a lot of twaddle is spoken about it (much of this twaddle and a sensible rebuttal of all of it can be found here. The reason any talk of pre-Christian paganism in Britain is on a hiding to nothing is that our pagan forebears didn't write stuff down, and even if we have artefacts left, we don't know what they were used for because they are literally pre-historic. Any accounts of what paganism was like were written by Christian missionaries, who are not the most objective people in this situation, and may well also not have understood what ritual was about.
Eostre, for example, has only one historical mention by a bloke called Bede who was a monk. We can believe that the missionaries deliberately attached their religious events to pagan days, but it is well nigh impossible to say what the pagan festivals were about. This is also the reason the witch cult in Western Europe is a fantasy.
In case anyone thinks I'm only going to offend pagans, this is where I start on the Christians. The central event of the Christian year is a real problem for the Christians in my opinion. How in hell do you celebrate a resurrection? It's an event outside of our experience, if taken at face value. If not accepted uncritically it ceases to be special at all, because of the great difficulty historically in determining death. It is not unusual in history for people to appear dead but not be. And I'm not even going into the bloody horror of their tortured Messiah. And people say witches are weirdos!
Apart from anything else the Christian calendar is repetitive and everyone knows what's coming next. I like my gods to be a bit surprising myself. There used to be a joke about a woman who saw Jesus in Southwark cathedral on Good Friday. After much agitating she got an audience with Archbishop Amigo, and told him she had seen Jesus in the cathedral, to which he replied, 'Well he's got no business being in there on Good Friday.'
And don't get me started on Ostara! At least it marks an actual astrological event, but the Hound is firmly of the opinion that the current pagan calendar was cobbled together by old Gerald and that other nudist who was a druid, in the 1940s.
EbEv the chocolate is frequently wrecked by putting milk in it. And stop saying Bournville, the Hound likes white chocolate.
And not even estrogen has the decency to be derived from Eostre. I was hoping it would turn out to have been named after the Goddess as being to do with being randy and getting impregnated when the sap's rising. But no, the hormone has a boring etymology. But this hasn't stopped me illustrating this post with an advert for the pill.
Pass me another egg.

Tarot: The Tower Today

I have been avoiding writing this post, simply because it is such a difficult subject, but of course another modern Tower has happened again this week.
The Tower is one of those cards which people dread turning up in a reading, since it represents monumental, irresistible, sudden and traumatic change. The actual tower itself can represent any of the physical, psychological, or social constructions which help to shelter us from the world outside. Much of the point of the card is that these are the sort of defences which can be suddenly brought to an end by a life event or'act of God'.

This is ironic, since the traditional name for this card is La Maison Dieu, with the phrase's historical connotations of being obliged to depend on the hospitality of the church, through poverty. That G*d could cause the downfall of his own sacred institution is one of the fears of the G*d-fearing, and a reminder of the need to please him at all times.
It is of course more difficult when the 'lightning strike' is not caused by inscrutable divinity but by humans, and one of the main characteristics of this card is that the events will bring out the real motivation behind events. A marriage ending in murder, for example.

This theme has been apparent this week, as apparently a few French billionaires have pledged a huuuge amount of money to the cathedral's restoration. They could have used this cash, which is obviously surplus to requirements, to end world poverty, but they didn't. Thus the restored cathedral will be a monument to the wealth of a few, and another tower in the sense of this card.
There is another way of taking the events of this card, for example if you are stuck in an abusive situation you may be at least partly relieved to be out of them. There is a tradition that the tower in the Tarot de Marseille has an unseen exit in the back, implying that the tower we are in is one we could get out of if we tried.
I mentioned above the ambivalence found in an abuse survivor, and the events of this card, because they are traumatic, will normally provoke complex reactions. The best example of this is probably Grenfell Tower. A huge proportion of emergency services workers at the towertower trauma symptoms, as do survivors, complicated by survivor guilt. This complex reaction makes it difficult even to engage in the therapy which the local mental health services have set up, and to get on with life.
While on balance it is better to be out of the tower, it will have ongoing effects.