welcome to the quarter century life breakdown of a mad crippled neuroqueer cryptid. crafting, tolkein, hermitcraft, and classic tumblr night blogging. on the landroval lotro server. barely on this plane of reality. i am pro nouns.
Priority time, folks: TikTok witches being kinda shallow with their craft is a threat to no one. TikTok witches spreading recycled Satanic Panic/NWO conspiracy theories is a threat to everyone.
I don’t have tt so idk abt this, any context?
TikTok, like any poorly-moderated social media platform that uses algorithms to boost content, is yet another transmission vector for far right conspiracy theories.
A lot of modern alternative spirituality is more deeply entwined with far right conspiracy theories than most people realize, and it’s very easy to go from a harmless interest in neopagan spirituality to believing in a satanic pedo network, and pretty much everything else pushed by QAnon. (This idea that there’s this underground movement of satanists whose religion requires them to abuse young children for ritual purposes has roots in blood libel and witch panic.)
The New Age movement (which is an actual spiritual movement; it’s not just a bunch of people being kinda shallow about Eastern spirituality) tends to buy into the New World Order conspiracy theory, which which derives from claims pushed during the Satanic Panic by a bunch of (now extremely debunked) people who claimed they were involved somehow in this satanic cult (whether because they were straight up lying or misled by false memories unintentionally implanted by people who’d already made up their minds that the conspiracy existed). The NWO conspiracy theory is effectively just The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion gussied up to appeal to the political biases of the average 20th American conservative rather than the 19th century European conservative.
Now, somebody reading this post might be wondering, “wait, New Agers are pretty critical of Christianity and consider themselves progressive - why are they going for this?” One reason is that New Age is a very libertarian movement, and libertarians slide into fascism pretty easily. Also, a lot of New Agers simply aren’t progressive whatsoever; they’re just conservatives who aren’t Christian. Another reason is that some people who consider themselves progressive assume that these conspiracy theories must be fundamentally true on some level, put their own spins on them, and functionally repackage this bullshit to sell to a new audience. Thus we get people thinking it’s progressive to believe that Christianity was produced by an ancient global conspiracy, because unlike those mean Nazis, they aren’t blaming Jews for it. They’re just blaming… (checks notes) …space lizards who just so happen to be dead ringers for every antisemitic allegation in the book.
And of course, another idea that’s popular with a lot of neopagans is the Great Goddess hypothesis. The Great Goddess hypothesis is one of those ideas that came about during the Romantic period, that influenced modern witchcraft. The problem is, it’s discredited as hell. There’s literally no evidence of some pan-European goddess cult that only ended once patriarchy became a thing. Loads of evidence for many diverse goddesses, sure, but that’s obviously not the same thing.
However, some neopagans refuse to accept this, and quickly resort to conspiracism to maintain their belief that this pan-European goddess cult was a real thing. Depending on who you ask, you’ll hear that Christians, the patriarchy, or the Jews are part of this conspiracy to keep the truth of the Goddess from the masses. (Albeit, they probably won’t say “Jews” outright; they’ll probably use some form of antisemitic dog whistle.) This is because once somebody accepts a conspiracist explanation for one thing, it’s pretty much only a matter of time before they’re accepting conspiracist explanations for just about everything they have a grievance with.
I realize this is a long post, but I wasn’t sure exactly what all you didn’t know, so I figured I might as well get as much context in as possible. I hope it gives you what you were looking for.
(throwing out there that the Law of Attraction is just conservative meritocracy propaganda aimed at non-Christians!!)
Oh yeah. Stuff like the Law of Attraction and the Law of Assumption are 100% conservative Christian meritocracy BS repackaged for the “spiritual, not religious” crowd.
And then there’s the weird emphasis on the gender binary and reproduction in many Neopagan circles. So many of these people are poisoned by paternalistic religions (in the U.S., that’s typically Christianity) and never really recover. They just recapitulate some of the most toxic divisive crap, but now it’s under the auspices of their interpretations of the divine.
It’s why my queer self was never fully accepted into most of the groups I interacted with in my twenties, and why others who criticized the cishet white dominated mindset of the “elders” were marginalized - most of them left rather than fight the hierarchy.
It’s been my experience that these types cling to the conspiracy theories and pseudohistory pretty hard, too. Like they just refuse accept that the real world is messy and complicated and hold onto a straightforward “us vs. them” narrative so they never really have to question themselves or think critically about much of anything.
in a world that so many of us are grieving what we loss as we brace ourselves in the knowledge that life has a lot of loss in it, it’s important to remember that this pain doesn’t mean the end. you can still begin again. you can still try, and trying is often a merit not recognized. there is more to life than suffering, and I hope you can expand your life beyond this pain, because it’s not all you have. the smallest joy counts. trying to creat joy when you’re suffering is hard, but it’s the trying that matters. you have suffered loss, we all have. but you are more than whoever or whatever you have lost. you can still move forward, and the weight of grief does get lighter to bear, though it will sting from time to time.
you are still alive, and there are still possibilities for your even if they feel limited. Please remember this grief is not all you have, it’s not the end of hope. you still matter. you can still find a new way to carry on. a forced new beginning does not necessarily mean that this version of your life will be even worse than the one you had before. but please, go through that new journey. don’t isolate yourself in your suffering, don’t be ashamed to talk about it. don’t be ashamed of all that grief makes you feel. there is and there always will be new opportunities for joy and those joys help you heal a little, help you carry on despite your loss. so please, don’t become paralyzed when you want to move forward. you are alive and you will feel truly alive sooner than you think.
“In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves. ‘The so-called straight person is no safer than I am, really. The terrors that homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to admit.’
As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it, but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual. One way to think about this is that homophobia is the outward expression of heterosexual misery; a kind of subconscious jealous rage against the gendered and sexual possibilities that lie beyond the violence and disappointments of straight culture.”
the british parliament just ruled that british soldiers and loyalist militants will not be prosecuted for past murders of northern irish civilians. the families of their victims, many of whom were children, will never receive the justice they have demanded for decades.
reminder that the occupation of ireland by britain is ongoing, illegal, and evil. this is heartbreaking news.
a lot of people are mentioning soldier f who is david cleary in the tags which is all fine and good but i want to encourage people to know the names of the irish people they killed. an estimated thousand victims will be denied justice because of this bill, some of whose files were previously closed for decades, denying their families and murderers justice in their lifetimes.
The Mexican Supreme Court has officially ruled to decriminalize abortion across the nation.
The Supreme Court declared that “the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional [because] it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.“
GIRE, a reproductive rights group in Mexico City, also noted that this ruling means any federal public health service or federal health institution must offer abortion to any patient who requests it.
good vibes, a hug if you’d like and a warm drink and/or blanket if you’re cold, to all disabled people for whom being undiagnosed didn’t mean invisibility but neglect. to those of us who didn’t get the benefit of not having a label, to those of us who were mistreated without ever knowing a reason besides existing.
diagnosis and lack of one both have their benefits and disadvantages, but far too often, undiagnosed people are treated as if our struggle was invisible - and that’s why we suffer, but also why we benefit. this is for all of us whose struggle was in plain sight, yet still ignored.
ALT
