Pinned
Reblogged thewitchofsuperstition
In regards to research:
Don’t accept witchcraft books for history. Read history texts.
Don’t accept witchcraft books for mental processes. Read psychology and biological texts.
Don’t accept witchcraft books for mythology. Don’t accept witchcraft books for religion. Read original texts and papers written researchers credited in their fields.
Use witchcraft books for witchcraft, and witchcraft alone. That is what they specialize in and what they are published for. If it branches out into a different subject, be suspicious and research the topic later.
On the note of that last point: if you’re reading a witchcraft book and they make a historical, medical, psychological, anthropological, or scientific claim, do one of two things.
- Stop reading right then and look up what they’ve claimed
- Make a note of the fact - sticky notes, notes app, notebook, etc. - and research it at a later date
When researching, look for high-authority cross-reference sources. What I mean by that is, look for sources that have a legitimate, easy-to-prove claim to expertise. This’d be sources like (for example, not exhaustive) university presses, scientific research papers, museum publications, experts with degrees and years of experience in their fields, and, for cultural information, elder members of said culture and internally-run cultural heritage organizations.
Great places to find solid sources for cross-referencing:
- The Smithsonian
- Encyclopedia Britannica
- JSTOR
- Oxford Academic Journal
- Sage Journals
- Science Direct
- Google Scholar
- Your local library
If no one else has made this claim, it’s probably not true and you should take it with a massive grain of salt.
Reblogged xxalted
Had the cutest Ostara 🍃🌼🌿
Reblogged
Taupe Bow Floral Ostara Pentacle Wreath ✨️
Featuring a grapevine wreath adorned with a taupe velvet bow, faux boxwood, and pink flowers. White satin ribbon is weaved through the branches forming a pentacle
The wreath width and length are 6 inches
Buy it here
Archetypes in ATLA
The sun and the moon
Since pre-historic times people have taken note of the Moon's phases and its waxing and waning cycle and used it to keep record of time.
When we look at the northern water tribe, we see a hunter- gatherer society who lives in a small village. The men are gone because they fight in the war and left women and children behind. The southern water tribe is more developed and the gender roles are stricter, women are not allowed to learn water bending because they are traditional healers. But they still depend on the moon, a symbol of feminine power while they try to mimic the fire nation army in order to trick them.
They represent a society that is outgrown of the moon worship because it started to center men while women get oppressed in order to defend itself from the imperialism of the fire nation.
In order to do this they need to make a sacrifice and that’s the devine feminine power, represented by princess yue who is now a moon deity worshipped from distance.
Many cultures have implicitly linked the 29.5-day lunar cycle to women's menstrual cycles, as evident in the shared linguistic roots of "menstruation" and "moon" words in multiple language families.
Many well-known mythologies feature moon goddesses, including the Greek goddess Selene, the Roman goddess Luna, and the Chinese goddess Chang'e. Several goddesses including Artemis, Hecate, and Isis did not originally have lunar aspects, and only acquired them late in antiquity due to syncretism with the de facto Greco-Roman lunar deity Selene/Luna.
This represents the transformation from matrilinear hunter gatherers societies towards patriarchy and civilization in early human history.
Contrary to the assumptions of ethnographers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, in the "primitive", archaic religious and mythological systems, a particularly revered "cult of the Sun" is not observed. In them, the Sun is perceived as a minor character or even an inanimate object.
The cult of the Sun comes to the fore in cultures where the role of the "sacred king" is increasing.
Solar deities are often thought of as male.
So the sun represents a dark masculine archetype in the story of ATLA as we see in season three, were warriors of water tribes attack the fire nation. In this situation the masculine power of the southern water tribe restored itself but without adopting harmful elements, representing a healthy way of masculinity as the opposite of the imperialist patriarchal firelord ozai. In order to defeat the firelord, they choose the day of a solar eclipse because it restricts fire bending.
Eclipses of the Sun and of the Moon have been described by nearly every culture. In cultures without an astronomical explanation, eclipses were often attributed to supernatural causes or regarded as bad omens.
When it comes to the fire nation, we also have Hama as a water bender who represents the evil witch, a myth that represents the big fear of the feminine power and revenge in patriarchal societies. Her power of blood bending only works during full moon. She represents a wounded feminine archetype.
The fire nation can’t be defieted during the eclipse and sozins arrives. It seems like everything is lost but then zuko and aang explore the ancient civilization of the sun warriors who are mimicked from mesoamerican cultures who were also on a transition point between hunter-gatherers and early civilization. They learn the ancient spirit of fire bending from it‘s source: the dragons.
That gives aang the right amount of strength to succeed in the battle against ozai who declared himself phoenix king. The sun warriors represent the inner strength that’s needed to change a system from the inside. They represent healthy masculinity just as the water tribe warriors but instead of attacking the fire nation from the outside, they teach aang how to conquer it with its own power. At this point the meaning of the sun changes into healthy masculine and the comet represents the imperialist masculine.
ATLA is full of archetypes and that’s why you like it!
There are four nations for the four elements and each nation is on a different economic stage (hunter-gatherer, early agriculture in nomads, city states, a large kingdom and the early industrial revolution), which reflects the different stages of human history that shaped our consciousness.
It has gendered archetypes that represent the inequality between the sexes.
Female:
-the healer, represented by katara
-the mother and her disparagement in the modern world, represented by kataras and zukos mothers
-the wise old woman, represented by grangran
-the evil witch/erinya represented by Hama and Azula
-the amazones represented by Kyoshi, the kyoshi warriors or the blind bandit
-the moon as a female symbol represented by princess yue being replaced by the sun as a symbol because the fire nation gains power from it (it’s believed that prehistoric societies valued the moon as female entity but replaced it with a sun god once patriarchy and civilization got invented)
Male:
-the hero’s journey (represented by aang and roku as avatars)
-the lover represented by jet and haru
-the old wise man represented by uncle iroh, gyatso and guru pathik
-the absent father and good and evil within the fathers role by hakoda and ozai
-the patriarch by master pakku, ozai, zhao or the earth king
-the warrior in zuko and sokka
But there are also non gendered archetypes like
-the jester found in king bumi and Ty lee
-the orphan especially in aang and toph, but also in Katara and sokka who lost their mom, zuko and Azula and Mai and Ty lee
-the rebel in toph and Katara who fought gender roles but also in zuko with his big redemption arc, jet ofc and even a little bit in aang who questioned his role as avatar
-the normal guy represented by sokka being the only non bender
-the fire nation as the antagonist
-the winter solstice as opener to the spirit world
Reblogged warcrimesimulator
danielodowd-deactivated20170124
"We always recognize, when we say "Goddess," that She is the Life-giver, the Life-sustainer. She is Mother Nature... There are only two kinds of people in the world: mothers and their children. Mothers can give life to each other as well as to men, who are not able to do the same for themselves. This constitutes a dependency upon the Female Life Force for life renewed, and was accepted naturally in ancient times by our ancient forebearers as a sacred gift of the Goddess. In patriarchal times this sacred gift was turned against women, and used to force them to give up roles of independence and power."
Z Budapest