joanspoliticalposts: needsomeshelter: dorknewton:tathrin:onion-souls:caledoniaseries:unautho
joanspoliticalposts: needsomeshelter: dorknewton: tathrin: onion-souls: caledoniaseries: unauthorized-magic: This thread is so good. THIS. ^^ As a folklorist, this kind of thing bothers the hell out of me. So much of what people think of as ancient is Victorian era or newer. Or just wildly inaccurate, really. Another part of it is that much of what Victorians would view as planar communication or “channeling” was conceptually an altered state in ancient times. Like the Greeks knew that the oracles at Delphi were huffing fumes. And that was cool. Faerie wasn’t a land or a race, but the altered, glamorous reality of the fae, the gentry who lived in the hills. It was overtly compared to intoxication. Djinn lived all around us, invisibility, raising their own cattle herds and going on hajj to Mecca. The “other world” wasn’t another place, but another way, a demimonde, an invisible society within our own, or divine madness. “The less magical the world was believed to be, the more it became necessary to posit a division between us and the realms of wonder.” “The idea of the mundane hadn’t been invented yet.” @spiritspodcast The idea of the mundane hadn’t been invented yet. I remember reading an interview with Doreen Valiente who was Gerald Gardner’s high priestess. She mentioned being shown elements of ritual that she was assured were straight out of the oral tradition and hundreds of years old, which she recognized because she wrote them in the 1950s. People want their religious practices to be old, so they convince themselves that said practices are old even if they really aren’t. -- source link
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