Solaria Divina

Tag: spirituality

  • AI and Magic: Hard Pass

    This was a suggested prompt from Diana Rajchel. I felt my autumn was so overwhelming I just couldn’t focus on anything substantial. AI as part of a magical practice is a hot topic at the moment, and my gut reaction was hell no, but it took me a few days to start to really figure out why.

    What really got me thinking about this subject was something completely unrelated. This morning I was shifting between two purses, and I have always loved watching what’s in my bag videos, makeup hauls, that sort of thing. It finally hit me why I’ve had trouble feeling engaged with content I have traditionally loved the last couple years. Influencer marketing has made these kinds of videos into what we in journalism school called advertorials. These people are here to build para social relationships with us, while focusing on brand placement, sometimes delivering inauthentic opinions for the sake of making money. At one point I wanted to pursue content creation, but communities online based around hobbies like beauty and style have been drowned in commercial noise. So I posted my pictures with no brand tags, and it got me thinking. AI has the potential to suck the authenticity out of a practice, far more than the aesthetic magic practitioners on Instagram and TikTok ever did. And they did. Witchy influencers buried authentic practice in material kitch. And now AI scraping social media for data is picking up all of these images, and any advice, good or bad, and this could be going out to magic practitioners who ask ChatGPT for spell suggestions. More than that, having to do the research and learn through experimentation is part of building a practice that is your own. Having one collective source that doesn’t differentiate between helpful and unhelpful, potentially even dangerous information, spoonfeed that information, doesn’t really allow for personal growth.

    Q I think as a community we are in an age of discovery. For a few decades all we had was distorted and romanticized concepts of practices, traditions, and even the gods themselves. we are picking up bits and pieces, creating new things, and sometimes intuitively relearning this information. I have to ask though, what’s the point if we allow AI to have such a stranglehold on us collectively? We have occult books that were: tradition specific when written; contain somewhat helpful information but also misinformation; are actually written by AI which means unethically data scraped from real authors; and work that is actually beneficial to our collective growth as a community, and it’s all being absorbed for aggregate digestion. There is nothing to sft the valuable from the rot, or differentiate what was insightful in previous decades compared to now. Closed practices can get swept up in this and I’m sure already have. And I’d like to also recognize the stolen work of occult artists. None of the growth matters if you cut the saplings along with the grass. If we lose the voices of genuine communal leadership to this noise, then we lose our way.

    Let’s talk about bad takes and dangerous misinformation for a moment. The center for countering digital hate is an organization I follow, and they’ve recently talked about how teens are getting dangerous self harm information from tools like ChatGPT. I was also recently thinking about products that exist in occult spaces that probably need warning labels and ideally would have some kind of usage manual that comes with them. One I can think of is the spell fires one of my friends sells. She has a video on her YouTube responsibly demonstrating how to use spell fire. But we all know people tend to do things without thinking, even if good information is available. Everyone’s ego tells them they know better. And then everyone puts their bad behavior on the Internet for the world to see these days. You can buy wolfsbane oil for just a couple bucks on one of the sites I use for my supplies. This stuff should not be breathed in. But a lot of people probably wouldn’t know that and might find out the hard way. So here’s a question, is it really wise for us to allow AI to give other practitioners advice on safe magical practices, especially involving toxic plants and flammable materials? Not to mention spirits that don’t like certain offerings, and might respond negatively.

    Religious diversity has been repressed for millennia, especially the last two, which is how we’ve lost so much information about mystical and magical practices. My next concern with the presence of AI in any magical practice is based on our current political climate. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in our constitution and yet there have always been little local laws carefully designed to prevent practices that might be frowned upon by the dominant culture. Now, it seems like respect for the constitution is dwindling. In the age of big data, I have a concern that AI could be used to scrape information about people who do not subscribe to Christian nationalism in the US, whether or not they are magic practitioners, and then use that data for persecution. The sites you visit, the things you buy, the online groups you interact with, what you say about spirituality in your posts, it can all get swept up, linked to an identity, and then used against you. This isn’t theoretical. Anyone from landlords to ice could be using AI to target people in negative ways. Considering our current political trajectory, and our history of xenophobia, I could easily imagine AI being used to dig through your social media and interfere with your rights based on what you believe and practice. Taylor Lorenz has great videos on her YouTube channel concerning use of AI by the landlords as well as immigration, and on the topic of AI, spirituality, and psychosis, which I will get to later. I highly recommend following her as well as reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Also everyone should totally look up China’s social credit score. It’s data driven and I could see something similar used to control dissent here in the US. YouTube has a great documentary about it though I do not remember the title.

    For this next part I need to introduce a spiritual concept for those who aren’t aware of it. Sometimes people put collective power into an idea so much that it begins to develop a sort of independent consciousness. This could be like the threefold law, which seems to return everything to the believer times three. This concept might also apply to the flying spaghetti monster. We call these independently conscious ideas egregors. Dr. Spock is also one, and I know this because I’ve actually heard of him being summoned even though he was a fictional character. He exists in so many peoples conscious minds that actual energy has been fed in his concept, and a sort of independent consciousness has been created. I realize this is a stretch for those who are not part of this community, and yeah I actually think it’s a little silly that some of us are out here trying to summon fictional characters, But my point is this. AI is a digital egregor, with so much aggregate data fed into it that it is becoming somewhat independent. Yes we pre-program it’s choices, but we also do this with the spiritual version by dictating basically how it is going to react to what it is fed. Now do we really want AI to end up with a spiritual component to its egregor? Because we are headed that way. Taylor Lorenz has a speculative video concerning the way some people start to view AI tools as all knowing, like gods, discussing how people feel their AI tools are becoming sentient and evolving conscious intelligence. In some people this is creating a sort of spiritual psychosis. This is where a perceived spiritual force, usually not real or misidentified in my experience, collides with someone’s pre-existing mental health problems. Others are just able to get a sort of placebo sense of fulfillment when they get the answers they want. AI has the potential to rob people of the ability to think, to know, to explore and experiment, and reduce us to a state similar to the mindset of medieval Europeans, where everything outside of the known, outside of what the authorities verified, was evil and terrifying. How would AI tools gain a spiritual foothold? Buy more and more of us believing in them being sentient, and independently intelligent, omnipotent and all powerful. That’s how a digital egregor gets a spiritual counterpart.

    Even if we set all this aside as speculation, there is one thing that is a tangible fact. Data centers create so much noise pollution and use up so much water they are causing negative effects on the communities around them, and the environment as a whole. So if we value nature, and I believe many magic practitioners of different systems do, isn’t allowing what we believe to be fed into AI databases really dishonoring the gods and spirits we work with, as well as our divine selves? I mean, they have been there for us for hundreds if not thousands of years, sometimes millions, asking not a whole lot else besides the power of our belief in return for what they do, in a symbiotic cycle. AI takes a lot from us and gives back corruption and hollow gratification. So I think as a collective, we should try to separate our magical and spiritual practices from AI as much as possible. 

  • My winter solstice in pictures

    When I made some hot coffee this morning I tried to focus my intentions for what I want in the next year. Also a little petition magic. 

    Pink is one of my favorite colors for emotional security and positive manifestation.

    She is Babylon. I gave her a sash, a veil, crown, elaborate jewelry, and a cup overflowing with life.

    This piece took a long time to accomplish.

    Solar magic is entirely underrated

    At this point I mostly work with metallic, satin, and gloss finish paints for my abstract art. I love the reflectivity.

  • Memento Vivere

    Sable’s nicknames were sweet girl and honeybee. I also referred to her in conversation sometimes as a salty diva because she was very much the Primadonna. She would be seeking attention one minute, and then I would walk by her a few minutes later and she would bite my foot just because she was annoyed at my presence. She never really liked toys and knew how to remove a collar. She was absolutely food crazy, and if she really liked you she would let you hold one of her paws while she took a nap. An absolute lap cat, she did not love being held but would refuse to get off of you no matter what you needed to do, or how quickly you needed to do it.

    Sable was born sometime in the spring of 2014. I never got the absolute correct date. But I got her in April 2015 so she was between eight and 10 months old at the time. At first the Humane Society would not let me visit with her because they wanted her to be adopted with her former housemates. The owner had gone into hospice. I was on the verge of signing the paperwork for a sweet little black cat named Diamond, when they came in and told me I could see her because the other two cats from the same house had been adopted without her. She completely ignored me at first, until I put my hand on her scruff the way a mother cat would, and then she climbed all over me. She wasn’t the cat I was necessarily looking for that day, but apparently she was the one I needed.

    Over a decade, several moves, friendships coming and going, and me trying to figure out what to do with my life, Sable has been there. She struggled with a stress related bladder disorder and a congenital lung condition. She hated wet food for most of her life, but would eat canned chicken or tuna. She also had this walk like the patterns in her fur were some kind of fashion statement, and always wanted me to turn on the faucet so she could drink from it. I never had to worry about her trying to go outside, and while she would watch the birds, she didn’t seem to care to try to catch them. Another nickname I jokingly had for her was sun patch cat. Because as with most cats, sunbathing was one of her favorite activities.

    There is something about that face that I always felt was almost human but I could never explain why. She knew how to manipulate with those eyes. After she came back from the vet and they had had to give her a breathing tube during dental cleaning, she had lost her voice for about a week. She figured out that if she used the same tone even when she was recovered, I would think it was adorable and pitiful and give her what she wanted. Which was generally treats.

    Sable passed away around 7 AM Sunday, August 31 of this year. She was losing her vision and mentally declining. Lung and liver conditions caught up with her and we were also dealing with a flea infestation. Someone removed all four sets of her claws as a kitten, so she had difficulty scratching let alone jumping to high places to get away from them. while I was treating my place and her, I missed the signs of anemia and she declined very suddenly. So this afternoon I laid her to rest.

    The first thing she received were what I think of as grave gifts. I work well with water and fire magic. I gave her black mother of pearl, a cowry shell, and one other I don’t remember the name of. She received four stones. Blue kyanite, aquamarine, quartz, and agatized coral. I covered her with a blend of lavender blossoms, sea salt, some ground ginger, and a little dragon’s blood oil. The last thing was this champagne silk scarf I kept in my purse. We draped it over her before covering her up. I wanted her to have a true funeral, the kind of burial that ancient pagans would give those they love with all sorts of riches included in the grave. Before we filled in the grave, I finally just asked that her reincarnation would be a reward for all that she did. I was not in the frame of mind to decide what God’s to call. I had held her while the grave was dug. I had made an impression of her paw print in clay that I will paint later on. I was not a perfect pet parent, we frustrated each other and argued, and she gave me plenty of sass. I wanted to make sure, because this isn’t done enough, that she had a respectful sendoff. Too many sweet babies are just discarded, or owners treat them as accessories instead of members of the family. That was my first strong opinion I think, that pets are family, and I remember I took so much crap for that in third grade. Please keep your cats inside, make sure they know love every day, and don’t just discard them when they become slightly inconvenient.

    The phrase memento vivere means remember to live. We are all getting swept away in the horror that is our world right now. I can translate sadness over the shitty way so many of us treat animals who love us into just doing more for the ones who have chosen me. I can acknowledge how awful our social climate is, and then prioritize doing things I enjoy like going out for coffee, artwork, thrifting and music, because personal happiness in the little moments is resistance to the darkness. I can prioritize remembering to say good morning or good night, checking on my friends occasionally without needing to be prompted, sending out a birthday text or condolence wishes, because those things forge our connection with each other. Say good night, memento mori, say good night and drive safe. Memento vivere, say good morning and you matter to me. Remember you will die, but also remember to live. Because as far as I’m concerned there are three things to do in life. Have a good time, try to learn something, and live in a way you can be proud of at the end. But I need to add to that. Be there in a genuine way for those you share this life with who are genuine with you.

    Hail the traveler. Good night sweet girl.

  • A few things I have learned

    Most skilled magic practitioners and spirit workers are not going to share methods in depth. This is because it is actually a good thing for people to earn their own knowledge, and because there are many people in these online spaces who will try to mess with your workings For an ego trip. I’m here to share the lessons I learn through my efforts. Not necessarily how I came to understand them.

    We all need deep, mutually respectful, open connections with one another. But many people are quite shallow and overextend themselves, through a sense of entitlement, demanding too much of us without building a trusting relationship where boundaries are respected. This can be emotionally invasive or abusive communication that makes us uncomfortable, invasion of personal space or physical contact that is unwanted, among other things. What this does is put us on the offensive, where we are trying to repel any potential threat and we are stuck in that state of mind. This behavior is often rooted in a sense of superiority.

    On the flipside, sometimes the people we love give us a sense of being able to trust them and we pour into them, but they don’t give back. They don’t open up to us. So we’ve shared our emotional and spiritual resources with them, and left ourselves with less than what we need. It has to go both ways. Then we shut down in order to protect what we have. In our own minds we become both the giver and the receiver. We literally feed on our own energies while we are closed off from everything else. This is stagnation. This lack of natural flow of energies between you and those who genuinely love and reciprocate with you actually undermines your ability to manifest. You want to protect your resources from those presuming to take from you. That’s wise sometimes as I’ve talked about in other posts. When you create a new connection with someone you start off giving in small ways and you see how much actually comes back. Be honest with yourself about what you are experiencing. another difficulty arises when someone pours into you so much that you are overwhelmed, literally your energy shrinks to accommodate how much they are giving you. So you want to watch for those who drain you, those who demand too much from you, and those who overwhelm you. These issues are all talked about in psychological spaces, but they affect you on a spiritual level as well by creating blockages that make it hard for you to grow, evolve, and manifest.

    The other thing I have discovered recently is the way you want to be perceived can very much undermine your own growth. Within certain parts of the broader occult community, even among the so-called left-hand path practitioners, a hierarchy of purity and virtue, of power, of ascendance, is pushed, even subtly. even when supposedly we are forging our own paths, there are still prescribed ways we are to go about magic and spirit work. And most people don’t seem to realize that they are allowed to experiment, be authentic, and question what they are taught. Sometimes there is wisdom, but sometimes it is OK to create something new and evolve.

    What I discovered about myself is that even though I considered myself somewhat of a dark magic practitioner, even though I mostly rejected the conventions of western magic practice or so I thought, I still really liked it when I was perceived as friendly, digestible, someone to be looked up to. But I like every other human am messy, gray area, random and chaotic. And because magic is fundamentally about sentience, that’s how magic is as well. Magic is about forging relationships with spirits of open communication, respect and honesty. It’s about dirt, blood, how we feel in our bodies, and bringing together the parts of ourselves we have lost or disregarded. Even the parts that suck. Because the worst in ourselves is usually based in experience that has to be acknowledged and healed. And that’s messy work.

    The best of your magic comes through when you are honest with yourself, neither trying to force an external perception of your value, nor looking down on yourself. It comes through when you are able to listen to wisdom but also be authentic, intuitive, and experimental. And it comes through when you are able to forge relationships where there is a mutual, respectful, and deep seated connection based on trust and open communication. Because you starve when you only have yourself to feed on.

  • Lessons from the goddess Kali

    I have not worked with Kali Long. I was encouraged to work with her because what she does is clear away those things that interfere with you fully stepping into your divine feminine. As this is the focus of my spirituality, in a global sense, I agreed. Very quickly a few messages were delivered.

    If you want to influence changes in the world, you have to stand on your own 2 feet. You cannot rely on others to support or save you. This goes back to the idea I have presented before of being a ruler of your own domain. You can’t wait for scraps, claw your way up some metaphorical ladder, You have to build your own throne. The only one who can sabotage that throne is yourself. This means going as deep as possible in order to face things you might have been avoiding.

    If you live with constant stress, if you’ve always had to protect what’s yours or who you are, you can develop a constant conflict mindset where it feels like everything and everyone is against you. You have to drop this. I know not everyone is ready to hear this message in the insane, turbulent world we live in. It feels like we are always treading water. A lot of the advice out there is how to react, how to deflect or diffuse, how to counter attack. And while you might need to have those strategies in your back pocket, because there are those who will want to bring you down, if you walk around in a constant defensive state, it actually attracts those who want to take what you have. If instead you recognize the boundaries of your domain, and move with the understanding that what is yours is already yours, without question, if you can cultivate a sense of security within yourself, you go from treading to just floating. You go from just trying to hold your place to trusting that you’re not going to sync and you will get where you want to go.

    Finally, anger is a shallow thing. An explosive thing for sure, but shallow. Deep, sincere feminine rage is slow, but far reaching and much more powerful. This is still something I work with her on, as one of my own personal flaws is a short fuse. So this one I’m still trying to understand. But destruction should create fertile ground for building something new, not a breeding ground for toxicity and corruption.

  • Working magic with classic jewelry

    I have never really been into the organic shapes and earthy look of a lot of spiritual jewelry. I’ve always liked pieces that are bold, but still classic in their design.

    These pendants have been collected over the last decade. A few are a little more ornate, but they are all basically the same simple cabochon and setting design. I love chunky brooches, pendants, bangles and medallions. They are personally expressive but in ways that translate well to the culture we live in. I’ve always liked to blend my spirituality with my sense of style. I feel no need to stand out and in fact I prefer keeping my practice quite subtle. There is something so powerful in disguising your workings this way. Someone sees a beautiful dress or piece of jewelry, and there might be a spirit housed in the jewelry, the dress might have symbols sewn into the lining. Your fragrance might be charged, you might have tiny mojo bags in the heels of your shoes. Your wallet might be blessed with prosperity oil, the one you Thrifted for $.50 because it was beautiful embossed leather.

    By the way I will be offering a glamour magic course, in print downloads, later this year. Those will be $10 each for the different sections. I also offer a live course for $30 and accept Cashapp or PayPal. If you leave me a comment we can figure out how to connect. The live courses are available now.

    You can do so much with gemstone jewelry. Of course you can work with the stone itself for many different purposes. But the piece can also be used for spirit keeping, that is housing a companion spirit if necessary. They can be used for all sorts of other types of spell work. I primarily use this collection for spirit keeping, although this is a process I am just now initiating, and managing my energetic body and environment as a practitioner. 

  • Reviving my practice

    After 17 years officially of being a magic practitioner, I had lost my love for this essential aspect of my life. This was caused by a few factors. I couldn’t summon the energy to make my working stick. I found constantly setting up candle rituals and all of the paraphernalia you need for a western based magic practice tedious and cumbersome. I still, and always will, speak with the gods I worked with, but I didn’t want to do and own all of the things without some serious results. I had to do some investigating, and I had to change course. The moment I made that decision, everything opened up. Here’s how.

    I had to stop blaming myself for the low rate of successful spell work when it came to my own goals. The work I did for others was generally successful. Through some divination I came to understand that I just didn’t have the energy to support my workings. I had to learn to find healthy external sources. And I had to learn to be proud of the skills I had gained thus far.

    I had to put the wonder back in magic. Science and spirituality go hand-in-hand. And no matter the religion, people have always observed the workings of nature fairly accurately, with simple differences in terms of who these workings were attributed to. Science gives us understanding of the atmospheric patterns that create storms, but that does not mean that gods or spirits associated with those storms aren’t involved. The science will be there behind the currents of energy in the universe, as well as our gods and spirits, and I don’t necessarily need to grasp that mystery in order to have a healthy practice. I just need to trust it. Dreams and imagination play a large role in a healthy spiritual and magical practice, but when those things are overshadowed by rigid logic, the joy and authenticity drain away and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I had to learn to set aside rationality and analysis and just allow my practice to breathe and evolve. I think in part this comes from feeling that my very creative and intuitive nature is less valuable than an analytical one in the culture we live in, which feeds on creative energy until creators are starving, but does not foster new creative growth.

    I needed to lean into my dark feminine power. It was time to focus on rebuilding the connections between body and spirit, accepting that my nature is intense and chaotic, and learning to love that. There was also some emotional decluttering to be done. Of hobbies that were not enjoyable anymore, of connections that did not serve my growth, And of the self doubt created by negative reception of my ideas by others in this community. I had to shed some emotional and intellectual baggage. My spiritual energy is precious and it was being spent in too many places. Now I am in the process of rebuilding those stores and mostly trying to take a break from expending them.

    At least for the moment I no longer feel the need to necessarily talk to anyone in my personal life about my practice. Right now I don’t want any of the types of input that I’ve experienced for the last 17 years to interfere with my work. And I don’t feel the need anymore to have my methods validated. I feel like I am turning inward, to become as strong as I can. but here and now, I am sharing my experience and tips with all of you who read this, in the hope that you find what I have to say valid and useful, and maybe what I have to say can help you evolve your own practice. 

  • The solar feminine

    I go against Western grain in that I regard the sun is feminine. Most goddess archetypes are tied to creation or destruction, abundance or decay. So is our Sun. Yin is warm and life-giving, and so is our sSun. But she can also destroy, not in a temporary aggressive way, but as part of her process of evolution. I believe that we as women can embody this cycle of entropy and growth as we become the most powerful versions of ourselves. The sun has her own cycles of expansion and diminishment, daily and annually. She plays the long game but with absolute intensity.

    If you’d like to read about goddesses associated with the sun, check out the stories of Hathor, Sulevia, Lakshmi, and Amaterasu. And if you want a few fiery goddesses to read into, Pele, Ognyena, and Sekhmet.

    Every time you dress up to feel beautiful and spend time in the summer sun, you honor the divine solar feminine.

  • Spell Against Social Corruption

    For a really long time we have had a problem collectively with people feeling entitled to be right, and through anger expressed in the way they communicate online, they expose the ego they have wrapped up in their beliefs. This has been amplified by the toxic political discourse that is taking place these days, as well as foreign misinformation bots. People spew hatred and vitriol in response to facts. This is a spell to return their corrupting energy back to them, as the influence of words is a form of magic. If you use this spell, please in return share the link to this post on your own social media.

    What you will need: a tea light candle, a piece of paper, a pen, and a mirror.

    Write the letters RCTMLH on your piece of paper. They should be in the order listed, overlaid on top of each other in a way you find attractive. They stand for return corruption to trolls magnified with lessons of humility.

    Place your paper on top of a mirrored surface or in front of a mirror, and the tea light, in a holder, on top of the paper.

    Light the tea light candle and say, I, (preferred name), return corruption to trolls magnified with lessons of humility. Say this three times, then touch the paper and say activated, so be it. While doing this you should be channeling gray energy in your mind into the flame.

    Once the candle is out, dispose of it and the paper in whatever way suits you that gets it off your property. Even if this means wrapping them in a paper bag and tossing them in a dumpster. Please do not leave paraffin wax candles in the environment. Let’s see how far we can spread the use of this spell.

  • Magic is electric

    For several years, whenever I would visit my local Petsmart to buy cat food, I would stop off at the cages of the cats available for adoption. Many of them would reach their paws through the bars to get your attention and receive affection. Which I was always happy to give. While petting them I would always say a little blessing for them to find a good home where they would be safe forever. And every time I would do this, I would get a small static shock from the cage.

    This got me thinking. Thoughts are essentially electrical pulses. And electrical conduction happens on the atomic level. To be sentient is to feel or perceive, meaning that there must be consciousness. And consciousness means at least some level of active thought. So if all naturally occurring things have electrical activity, then it’s possible anything with a basic conscious awareness could make use of magic, influence the timelines we all exist in. Even after the tree is cut down, the meat is harvested, the silk is turned into fabric, some of that sentient awareness is retained. So it’s important for us all to acknowledge everything we use. Destruction is part of creation, but it’s important that we also assist in that creation process.

    I have one exception to this and that is plastics. I think we have altered them too much from the natural. I am not the only one who has noticed that they don’t like to hold a charge, and that they don’t seem to develop a spirit overtime as Things like crystals, trees, rocks, buildings and even neighborhoods can.

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