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A mixture of the two: they're getting away with prommoting hate speech, and whatever I do doesn't seem to stop them. Worse yet, they manage to prommote further posts which I already addressed, but their followers are spreading like wildfire, ignoring said addressals.

Usually I'm successful in preventing shit like this, but whatever I do doesn't seem to halt them one bit, if anything it just seems like they're being more succesful.

Oh boy, that's a doozy. On a mundane level, you can always de-friend them to keep yourself out of the impending shitstorm, but you can also meditate and ask a deity concerned with speech/truthfulness/justice about doing something about them. As a whole, deities concerned with truthfulness will probably not tolerate hate speech, and once they realize someone's going around collecting followers, they'll work to put a stop to that.

Don't have much advice about actual rituals/spells, though.

Thanks for the advice.

I've tried some spells, will probably incorporate help from Ma'at, the universal principle or truth and justice.

Shimegi, I don't know how eclectic you would be, but there's a Nidstang spell out there that's been tweaked to keep haters in heathenry on the down-low, maybe it can be retweaked to help you.

While I'm not sure about actual spells, the entire Otherfaith pantheon seem to take what you describe as a particular concern; the Ophelene could be especially concerned.

I'm not good with poetry, so I can't really restructure a Nidstang, though at least there are several anglo-saxonic generic curses (availiable in the Wikipedia page on anglo-saxonic magic).

Thanks regardless.

I suppose I'm technically an atheist or agnostic or fluffy bunny, but I've often been called a "cheerful pagan". I invented my own gods when I was younger, was very enthusiastic about nature and magic. Nowadays, the Hellenic pantheon resonates with me to a degree. I was raised in Reform Judaism, and though I found the religion useful to me at certain points in my life, having many gods is more interesting (and explains the world better, I've found).

Indeed, many pantheons are essentially "a bunch of Anthropomorphic Personifications that explain the world."

A few months ago I (stupidly) performed a spell to rid myself of a heart heavy with unrequited love- and it worked. By replacing it with heartbreak.

Unfortunately I don't think the spell unraveled properly after running it's course- not only is the specter of heartbreak impossible to get rid of but my romance life otherwise has been completely poisoned. It's what I get when I draw on Diana for affairs of the heart I guess.

In order to fix it I'm going to try and capture the spell inside a crocheted square (I do a lot of magic these day through textiles) and then unravel it. Hopefully that will get rid of the lingering spell and (also any other harmful energies I can draw in to the square)- but I don't think doing it with white yarn will be enough- sage should help as well, but I was wondering if I could get away with soaking the yarn in a baby's breath/spring water solution in order to enhance its purifying properties- or if there was another herb/plant that would suit better/method of applying the herb.

edited 20th Feb '15 11:31:38 PM by LMage

Yay, love spells gone wrong. *hug*

If you can get another color of yarn, I'm thinking pink or amethyst/violet would be more specific choices than white. You don't need full-on purple or red because you don't need love/psychic energy, you need to get RID of it (the energy being "spell gone wrong"). Pink is a lot more gentle than red, and the shade of amethyst/violet in particular is good for healing and dispelling negative energy.

Why did you pick Diana? I'm surprised she didn't turn you down, too—a goddess of chastity isn't exactly the best counsel for unrequited love.

Speaking of love problems, I had to friend-zone a male friend the day after Valentine's Day through email. I still feel bad about it. This is the third time a guy proclaimed himself very attracted to me, and I didn't have ANY feelings back. It's really confusing because I don't even fucking date.

Also, Hades and Persephone were very active in my drum-circle this month. Persephone advised me to get something of amethyst (whether violet-colored or the actual stone) to help with my issues. And yay, amethyst ended up pertinent to TV Tropes as well!

So near the end of the circle, she and Hades enjoyed the music so much that they started dancing around the room together. Thanks to my history of friend-zoning, bad relationships, and unrequited love, I got really upset watching them and went "I WANT THIS KIND OF RELATIONSHIP, BUT IT'S REALLY FUCKING HARD WHEN AT LEAST ONE PARTY NEVER FEELS THE SAME WAY." And Hades told me, "This will happen for you in time."

Which isn't too helpful, because I already know that I shouldn't focus on relationships right now. It just sucks because it feels like I'm just waiting around doing nothing.

edited 22nd Feb '15 9:01:47 PM by Sharysa

I picked Diana specifically because she's generally opposed to love and a patron to those seeking refuge from it: I should have guessed I was asking for trouble, but when I cast the spell the hope was that she would help me get rid of my feelings of unrequited love and go back to being relatively loveless/sexless. It worked by turning it into heartbreak instead.

(In my defense, I'm mostly Greeko/Roman- my choices of assistance with anti-love spells are not great.)

Ah yes. Details are REALLY important in spells.

As for having good choices in deity-assistance for love, ooh boy. *more hugs!* I'm not much of a Greek follower—Hades and Persephone are mainly here because of the family chaos in my life. Dionysus shows up whenever the fuck he feels like it, and I don't even know why because he tends to be either drunk or oracular (or both) when he does.

Still, I'd think Hera/Juno would at least make a good-faith effort to help given her constant marital troubles, and Aphrodite/Venus or Cupid/Eros are fairly even in terms of love assistance (at least going by the myths and what I've heard, since I don't have personal experience with them).

Heh. Eros is can be tricky- his general response to most things, including wanting to fall out of love, is to throw more love at a situation. Aphrodite, though never really malicious, tends to play with people's love lives like a game, and isn't above twisting an already sticky situation even worse to see how things go.

Hera...I don't know. When I need the aid of a Mother Goddess, I defer to Hecate's second aspect, since Hecate is my personal patron. I suppose given her history she might have at least been a better choice than Artemis(/Diana), but I would be lying if Hera didn't scare me a bit.

@Sharysa: I have to admit, I envy how active your spirits are in your life. While I do feel the presence of my own "personal pantheon" at times, I've never had direct experiences like you describe. Although, it might be because I currently suck at meditation.

In other news, I've officially migrated out of Haitian Vodou and into Ifa (the Yoruba religion from which Santeria is derived). I'm still not an initiate or anything, but I know the path I'm walking now.

Thanks to a very bad learning experience, what makes it onto the Net most of the time is a consolidated and far more coherent account of what actually happens with the gods and ancestors.

Throughout my day it's usually a constant trickle or intermittent bursts of ancestor/god-talking. Occasionally they talk about really tiny things, like who should get more of X-food.

I occasionally get these unanticipated bursts of energy and information from my "Dark Mother". She's been teaching me the things I need to know to advance my spiritual position and get closer to self-empowerment. Among the lessons of honesty (with myself about myself), independence (even from her intervention), and divine purpose are lessons about my ancestors. For example, lately, the idea of erecting an altar (for meditation, prayer, offerings, and ritual) has taken hold in my mind - I feel the need to "feed" my ancestors, because they've been neglected for so long.

I also feel like I'm becoming more aligned with my Dark Mother, so I understand her ways a little better. She wants me strong and she only knows one way to make me strong: leaving me to my own devices, even while I beg her to make contact with me (she refuses to offer herself to me on a silver platter and wants me to make the effort to reach out to her, which is why I'm trying to teach myself to clear my mind and focus on spiritual things). I feel more alive when I so much as speak her title aloud. I can't even talk or write about her without rambling because she's...everything

Anyway, I'm working on the whole meditation thing. I know about walking meditations, but are talking meditations a thing? I feel like I can clear my mind and focus better when I just...talk it out (whether to myself or to Her).

It seems like a disproportionate amount of Pagans are from California, for some reason.

I think what it is is that California is where Hollywood is. It's where the Golden Gate Bridge is. It's where the summer of love took place. It's where women's lib and gay rights took over It's where Anton Lavey started the fricking church of Satan. California seems like the kind of place where anything and everything can happen. It's like this golden dream, a fantasy land that's part Mexican and part East Asian and part "American". It's the westernmost state in the continental US, and "going West" was once a very big deal for whatever reason, especially once all the gold was discovered.

We have world-famous cities and then just enough forest to keep things interesting. We even have a desert somewhere I don't know why, but California seems like a magical place. But whereas places like Massachusetts are "misty magical", California is "sunny magical". And that breeds a certain kind of pagan, one who is more willing to believe in real magic for example.

edited 14th Mar '15 11:46:39 AM by nekomoon14

Okay, that makes sense.

I think a potentially stronger reason is that California is, on the whole, very liberated. You can be Pagan here without the local evangelical community breaking your windows and getting you fired. This is less because California is some Utopia of tolerance and acceptance and more because people here tend to be too wrapped up in their own concerns to give a shit what anyone else does. This is great for "live and let live," but it does make community-building harder than it might be elsewhere.

I'm not so sure about that. I've seen terrifying shyt here. But I live in the San Francisco Bay Area where the extremes of glamour and horror converge from one street to another. So, it's not some utopia, but it seems to appear that way in the minds of certain kinds of people, specifically those who "dream big". Of course, New York City has a similar feel, I think, but it seems more urban in the "general imagination" than California.

A college town has a lot of pagan, because most colleges are more tolerant.

I met quite a few chem, bio, physics and engineering majors who were pagans. And quite a few in the military as well.

nekomoon14 is right, Cali is where the crazy energy flowed in The '60s and The '70s.

But Sincerity Mode, a lot of "new age" beliefs were mainstream back then in California, as they were in college towns and places like Santa Fe and Taos in my home state, New Mexico.

In The '80s, the fundies got a lot of clout and had tv shows on those UHF channels and even on regular network TV stations. I say funides, because most of them were caught being less that holy as the decade closed out. Most UHF Christian broadcast stations were preaching to the choir of Christian viewers. So the pagan = satanism thing receded from the national conscious as more fundie preachers were caught in no-tell motels.

But a funny thing happened. I posted in the military thread, the Nazi's view of the Russians as "untermench" got de-Nazified over time and somehow the robot commie coming to invade Peoria took root in the Red Scare.

The pagan/satanist/baby sacrifice/ritual abuse transformed into the Goth or Emo kid who was troubled. Or it was "just a phase", or drugs or mental illness. So outside of tolerant communities, most parents and adults exposure to anything "pagan" was the Point-and-Laugh Show.

Or hysterical news anchors, or "experts" in name only. Or Hollywood, cause pagan are fictional amirite?

California was a hotbed of the "satanic ritual abuse" meme, but also a hotbed of political activism. Pagans began to organize.

And people move where they are wanted. Your small town that can't tell an emo kid from a microwave isn't as welcoming as a big city or college town where there are diverse communities. Ones that won't stick a hot pocket into that poor emo kid.

edited 16th Mar '15 11:10:38 AM by TairaMai

It might also be because California has a fucking huge immigrant population as a whole, who are often not Christian. Right in Oakland there's masses of East and South Asians, Middle Easterners, Europeans, Native Americans, Latin Americans, and Hawaiians.

Many of their beliefs don't have the concept of the One True God in the first place, and it's not like people go around asking if you're Christian/Hindu/Buddhist/whatever. My own beliefs are a cobbled-together mesh of Celtic, Norse, and shamanistic/animistic spirituality.

If we were as intolerant/close-minded/traditional as some parts of the US, we'd probably all kill each other.

Of course, that doesn't stop people from being prejudiced. At the beginning of the semester, I got a horrible reminder that even some of my friends think it's okay to make Asian jokes.

Edit: Fixed the typo, thanks!

edited 16th Mar '15 11:57:18 AM by Sharysa

You mean, "Hindu".

Hindi is a language.

edited 16th Mar '15 10:07:02 AM by SpaceWolf

The other big problem is the fluffy bunny pagans and the wannabe "This IS WHO TOTALLY I AM MOM" types. In the words of The Offspring "if you don't rate/just overcompensate/at least you know you can always go on Ricki Lake." Or Maury Povich.

A lot of "goths" and "pagans" most people see on mass media are the drama queens and the attention whores. When I first found Witch Vox, wow was I amazed and the depth and diversity in the pagan community.

And that's why it hurts when I see things like a "goth" forum with a subfora "If you have a spell, post one, need one ask for one".

-_-

There wasn't a middle finger big enough. I think that forum's down, I lost a lot of my bookmarks when my laptop died in Korea (shakes fist at HP).

edited 16th Mar '15 11:20:35 AM by TairaMai

I know, right? Most people have their fluffy stage, but when it's literally ALL YOU SEE on the media even from thirty-somethings who should know the fuck better, I just want to curl up and sleep for a while.

Also, this is why I'm constantly writing Urban Fantasy so we can get normal, functioning pagans into the spotlight.

edited 16th Mar '15 12:02:59 PM by Sharysa