Gävlebocken Being Devoured By Birds Is Incredible. There’s A Whole Creation/destruction Mythos Around

I was in line at Aldi and this girl with two toddlers in front of me had her card declined and she looked so fucking sad and said “let me call my husband real quick” and it was only 18 dollars, so I just paid for it, and she was very sweet and then as she walked off, the lady behind me said `”You know that was probably a scam, right?” and like, even if it was, like what a sad fucking scam, right? 18 dollars at the Aldi. If you’re “scamming” me for some Tyson chicken and apple juice and cauliflower, then just take my fucking money. 

“A scam” people are fucking wild.  

Crystalline Cascades

© gif by riverwindphotography, August 2022

Hereafter by Grady Frederick

me walking into the animal shelter: hi id like the stupidest cat you have

Jack-o'-lanterns have such a grab bag of lore, i love it

Fire, of course, has a long history of offering protection from evil forces. During the Celtic festival of Samhain (from which many Halloween traditions originate), the veil between worlds was considered thin, and ritual bonfires reminded the spooks to stay on their side of the lane.

Many a lantern has protected the lonely traveler on a dark moonless night. But lanterns can be dangerous too—especially the supernatural ones. in certain folklore 'jack-o'-lantern' was another name for will-o'-the-wisps, atmospheric ghost lights (or as legend has it, lost souls) that appear above bogs and lure unwise wanderers into sinkholes.

Then there's the 18th cent Irish folktale of Stingy Jack, a mischievous fellow who tricked the Devil twice, exacting a promise that hell would never claim his soul. So Jack goes on his cheerful way, and dies (as humans are prone to do), and ends up at the pearly gates. Now Heaven, it turns out, doesn't want a damn thing to do with him. So Jack jaunts on down and goes knocking on the gates of hell—only to have Satan slam the door in his face! How this leads to Stingy Jack being doomed to wander the earth carrying a hollowed out rutabaga lit by an ember of the flames of hell, I couldn't tell you. But that is how the story goes.

Whether the legend of Stingy Jack inspired or fueled or was created-by the gourd-carving practice, by the 19th cent, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh alike were annually carving jack-o'-lanterns out of turnips & rutabaga & beets & potatoes, and lighting them up to ward off Jack and other wandering spirits. Immigrants carried the tradition to North America, where pumpkins were indigenous and much easier to carve.

And so the modern Jack-o'-Lantern was born!

Not that gourd lanterns were anything new. Metalwork was expensive, after all, and gourds worked as-well-as and better-than-most crops when it came to carving a poor farmer's lantern.

As for carving human faces into vegetables, that supposedly goes back thousands of years in certain Celtic cultures. It may even have evolved from head veneration, or been used to represent the severed skulls of enemies defeated in battle. Or maybe not! Like many human traditions, jack-o'-lanterns evolved over multiple eras and cultures and regions, in some ways we can trace and others we can only guess at. But at the end of the day, it makes a damn good story, and a spooky way to celebrate—which is as good a reason as any (and a better reason than most!) to keep a tradition going.

In conclusion: happy spooky season, and remind me to tell yall about plastered human skulls one of these days 🎃

srcs 1, 2, 3

Point Defiance Park, Tacoma 2021

Mathijs Delva

Dancing trees

In case you don’t know this story, the Norse gods wanted a wall around Asgard to protect themselves and a jotun only known as The Builder offers to make it in exchange for Freya, Sun and Moon. Freya gets rightfully pissed and refuses (no word on Sun or Moon’s feelings about this), so Loki turns into a female horse and lures The Builder’s horse away, causing all work on the wall to stop. Because he can’t finish the wall The Builder has to leave without Freya, Sun and Moon. Loki disappears for 9 nine months and returns with an eight-legged foal (yes, he had sex with the horse and got pregnant. I know you all love that part). The end.

For some reason people often leave out that The Builder wanted Sun and Moon too, and English translations often translate it to “the sun and moon” as if he wanted the heavenly bodies, but no, he wanted the goddess and god responsible for said heavenly bodies. He absolutely intended to have sex with all of them which is why a lot of translations leave out Moon because ew that’s gay.

Freya didn’t want to marry a Jotun, let alone as part of a god damn harem me thinks.

Witchy Idea

If you feel lost or confused in your identity make a sigil out of your name and charge it with memories of your experiences. This can also be used to symbolize yourself in other sigils as well as in spells and rituals.