Author: Madeira Darling

Madeira Darling is a snarky mystic, devout Satanist, serious Marxist, laughing dominatrix, and writer from San Fransisco where they live with their boyfriend in a house full of altars to their various demons.

I would just like to let you know that the post you wrote about “the great rite of banishing” is the best thing i’ve ever seen and has been a light in the darkness of our current times. my question is, is there a story behind it? or was it just a random thought to decided to put out into the interwebs?

It’s what happens literally every time I put anything anywhere sensible.  I have accidentally banished nearly every pair of socks I own, my birth certificate and my favorite earrings among other things.

You Know Wiccans’ Pseudo-History

Contributed to the loss of folk magic traditions in England and other places but especially England because they were supplanted by an imagined past and not recorded because of preconceived notions of how stuff worked.

Also I really don’t like it when Paganism gets all weirdly culturally Protestant and starts engaging in fallacious anti-clericalism based on pop-culture depictions of history based on nonsense by Margaret Murray rather than actual history.

I think the post-modern “magic is the effect ritual has on your individual psychological state and does not go beyond that” idea has something to do with atomization under capitalism, especially late capitalism… and that basically ritual and “magic” cannot function as they might in less atomized societies (note: I’m not saying I believe in the supernatural, I’m just saying that our ideas about magic are influenced by the shape of the society they come from.)