Be Careful!

 ｡⋆  🎀 terfs suck 🎀  ⋆｡

Terfs: wombyn are their ovaries!!! Ovaries make a wombybybynnn. Accept that u are a womynbdgnn you have ovaries !!!!

Me, a trans man on the danger list for ovarian cancer and is going to get them removed in the distant or near future:

not for long

---

• 🍯 Honey Magick 🍯 •

Honey

Honey is a natural substance created by bees within their hives. The hive consists of primarily female bees, which will leave the hive to collect nectar from flowers and then return to transform this nectar into sugary honey for later consumption.

Humans have been collecting honey since 8000 BC, and it has been utilized by nearly every culture across the globe for food, healing, and spiritual purposes.

Honey is universally considered a talisman of prosperity, beauty, health, and sweetness, and it can be utilized in all of these types of witchcraft.

Prosperity

Honey is a representation of abundance: its primary use in nature is as a stored source of food to be used in times of hardship, both for bees and for humans. It is also created from the nectar of flowers, imbuing it with the energies of the Sun and springtime. As such, it can be added to spells for wealth, abundance, fertility, or prosperity in order to amplify the effects and create surplus in your life.

Beauty

Sympathetic Magick states that an object’s physical qualities are reminiscent of its spiritual properties. Honey is golden, pleasing to the eye, and sweet. On its own or added to face masks, it can cleanse, nourish, and moisturize the skin. It can also be added to beauty or glamour spells in order to add a sweet glow to your energy.

Healing

Honey has been used to treat wounds since the time of the Ancient Egyptians. Its viscosity and moisture creates a moist seal around a wound. It also contains natural antibacterial properties, providing a stable and sterile environment for wounds to heal in. Metaphysically, honey can be added to protection spells or wards in order to create an environment of positivity and sterility, and can also be added to healing spells in order to strengthen the recovery process.

Sweetness

Honey is appealing to humans and animals because, above all else, it is sweet. One of honey’s most ancient uses - utilized in magical practices ranging from Egyptian to Greek to Voudoo - is to add ‘sweetness’ to a spell.

It can be added to glamour magick to make the illusion more easily accepted. It can be added to curses in order to make the energy seem harmless when entering the target’s life. It can be added to money spells or job spells in order to ‘sweeten the deal’. It can be added to love or sex spells in order to sweeten a relationship or conjure an appealing partner. In general, it can be added to any spell to make the effects more pleasant and inviting.

Offering

Honey’s final use is especially helpful to witches who work with nature spirits, fairies, the Dead, or deities. Honey contains a very pleasing, warm, Sun-type energy, and therefore it is extremely enticing to spirits. Since the time of the Ancient Egyptians, honey has been used as an offering that symbolizes the utmost love, care, and respect.

Honey can be drizzled onto a candle and burned. It can be drizzled into a body of water or directly onto the earth. Most commonly, it can be drizzled into an offering bowl (or on top of an offering meal) and left outside, in a graveyard, or on an altar. Because it is excellent at preserving itself, offerings of honey can be left somewhere for prolonged periods of time without worry of it spoiling, which is extremely helpful to forgetful witches (like me) or witches with long-term altars.

So, all in all, honey is maybe one of the most underrated magical ingredients, and I hope this post got some of you hip to honey magick.

Happy Witching 🕉

dip your head and feel your antlers, worn, moss-dripping, gouge the earth below. you are stirring things forgotten. They are dark. They are lovely.

🔮3 OF SWORDS–ACE OF PENTACLES–KNIGHT OF CUPS🔮

This week (and every day) a lot of pain has been surfacing for survivors and resistors. There is heartbreak in the fact that with the way things are set up, we are all trained to hate women/femmes/gender non conforming folx and not be surprised when they are hurt, traumatized, and/or killed. Take the space that you need to recover from the weight of this. You might also be processing the fact that the men/masc ppl in your life haven’t shown up for you in this life, that they still have so much to learn and still do that learning at your expense. It is ok to be angered by this. It is ok to live into the fullness of whatever emotions surface for you, now. You are allowed to feel big, cry big. Remember that you are far more powerful than any person who comes for your dignity. Remember your self-knowledge, the fact that you have survived your whole life until this point. Remember all that you have striven for and worked towards in your healing process, whatever that looks like for you. Celebrate, my loves, because an opportunity to make real change is possible. Where do you fit in the change process ? What is your place in the revolution ? Where do you find your work ? Maybe it’s in direct service, in healing work, in planning, in organizing, in balancing budgets, in waking up each day so that you can continue to support others. Wherever your work is, know that there is a lot of potential for success. Together, we can move into the next way, the next moment. Into a time when ppl arent afraid to walk on the street or wear a piece of clothing or have a conversation in fear of pain and death. This is a time to mourn. To feel. So that we can move forward with the lessons from that mourning. Don’t ever let someone tell you what it looks like for you to grieve. Do what works for you, live into the whole self. With what you have to offer, we can start building stronger communities. Even if what you have to offer right now is your depression or anger or joy or comfort, we can use all of these in conjunction with our collected knowledge to make things happen. There is power in vulnerability and emotion. . 🔮: Rider-Waite https://www.instagram.com/p/BojubQoF-vn/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=mimm3me666aw

🌱 little “good news” summer spell 🌤 gather clear quartz, mint leaves, and a handful of wildflowers. place them in a sachet and with both hands cup the sachet and take in the refreshing scent. with your eyes closed, while breathing in through your nose, think to yourself the mantra “beauty is on the horizon,” then slowly breathe out through your mouth. place the sachet on your windowsill or somewhere else in direct sunlight for the rest of the day. i’d recommend pressing the flowers the next morning.

[A]

Alfalfa:

Growing Alfalfa

Common Alfalfa Mistakes

Video - Growing Alfalfa

How to Grow Alfalfa Grass

Alfalfa in Magic

Allspice:

How to Grow Allspice From Seeds

Allspice Cultivation

Allspice | CCGrow

Allspice Growing

Allspice in Magic

Aloe Vera:

Growing Aloe Vera Indoors

Beginner’s Guide to Growing Aloe Vera

How to Grow and Care for Aloe Vera

How to Plant Aloe Vera

How to Grow Aloe From A Leaf

Video- Plant and Grow Aloe Vera

Aloe in Magic

Apples:

How to Grow and Harvest Apples

Growing Apples

Grow an Apple Tree From a Seed

Apples in Magic

[B]

Basil:

Growing and Harvesting Basil

Growing Basil

Everything You Need to Know About Growing Basil

3 Ways to Grow Basil

Video- How to Grow Basil

Video- How to Plant Basil in Containers

Video- How to Prune Basil

Video- How to Propagate Basil

Basil in Magic

[C]

Catnip:

Growing Catnip

How to Grow Catnip

How to Grow Catnip (with pictures)

The Benefits of Growing Catnip

Catnip in Magic

Chamomile:

Growing Chamomile

How to Grow Chamomile at Home

Chamomile Info

Growing Chamomile for Tea

Chamomile in Magic

Cloves:

Tips for Growing Clove

How to Grow Cloves

Detailed Guide to Growing Cloves

Growing Cloves

Cloves in Magic

Cilantro:

How to Grow Cilantro

Growing Cilantro

The Trick to Cilantro

Do’s and Don’ts of Cilantro

Tips for Growing Cilantro

Cilantro in Magic

Cumin:

Cumin Herb Info

How to Grow Cumin

Cumin in Magic

[D]

Dandelion:

How to Grow Dandelion in Pots

How to Grow and Harvest Dandelions

Growing Dandelions

Dandelions in Magic

Dill:

Planting, Growing, and Harvesting Dill

Learn How to Grow Dill

Growing Dill

Dill in Magic

[G]

Garlic:

Planting, Growing, and Harvesting Garlic

All About Growing Garlic

How to Grow Garlic in 15 Steps

The Best Way to Grow Garlic

Garlic in Magic

[J]

Junpier:

Grow Juniper

How to Grow and Care for Juniper

The Best Soil for Juniper Trees

Juniper in Magic

[K]

Kale:

Planting, Growing, and Harvesting Kale

Beginner’s Guide to Kale

Growing Kale

4 Ways to Grow Kale

(I could not find anything about the magical associations for Kale, but personally I would associate it with cleansing, strength, and good luck!)

[L]

Lavender:

Your Guide to Planting, Caring, and Harvesting Lavender

Growing Lavender

3 Ways to Grow Lavender

Planting & Care

Growing Lavender in Containers

Lavender in Magic

[M]

Mint:

Planting, Growing, and Harvesting Mint

Growing Mint

Do’s and Dont’s of Growing Mint

How to Grow Mint

Mint in Magic

[O]

Onions:

Planting and Growing Onions

Growing Onions

Video- Growing Onions

Onions in Magic

[R]

Rosemary:

Growing Rosemary

How to Grow Rosemary in 11 Steps

Everything You Need to Know About Growing Rosemary

Rosemary in Magic

[S]

Sage:

Planting and Growing Sage

Growing Sage

Everything You Need to Know About Growing Sage

11 Steps to Growing Sage

Know Before You Grow - Sage

Sage in Magic

[T]

Thyme:

Growing Thyme

Everything You Need to Know About Growing Thyme

Video- How to Grow Thyme in A Pot

Learn How to Grow Thyme

Thyme in Magic

Turmeric:

Video- How to Plant and Grow Turmeric

How to Grow Turmeric at Home

Growing Turmeric in Pots

Turmeric in Magic

[W]

Wheatgrass:

How to Grow Wheatgrass at Home

Video- How to Grow Wheatgrass

Growing Wheatgrass Indoors

I could not find a reference for Wheatgrass in Magic, but personally I would associate it with health, cleansing, and strength.

[Y]

Ylang Ylang:

How to Grow a Ylang Ylang Tree

Complete Growing Guide to Ylang Ylang

I could not find a specific page for this, but Ylang Ylang is usually associated with calming, employment, love, magical ability, and anti-negativity. (source)

Litha Practices

Litha is a celebration of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Celebrations focus mainly on the power of the sun.

Before Litha - A time for growing

Focus on making decisions in your social and professional life that promote growth

Re-pot plants

Arts & Crafts

Make a besom decorated for Litha

Make a honey or sugar scrub

Make a pillow stuffed with lavender for peaceful sleep during the summer

Make a suncatcher

Cleaning & Cleansing

Do a house cleaning ritual

Pick up litter

Pull up the blinds and fill your home with sunlight

Cooking

Bake a cake

Brew your own mead

Eat outside

Hold a barbecue for family and friends

Decorating & Gardening

Hang up suns in your home and garden

Put a stone circle sundial in your garden

Spell-casting & Divination

Charge your tools in the power of the Litha sun

Go to the beach to perform some ocean magic or collect beachy tools to use later

Make Ogham staves

Other Activities

Attend a drum circle

Celebrate the season with a big bonfire

Do something for charity

Get up before the sun and go to bed after it sets to experience the entire day

Go hiking and bring a field guide to help you identify the wildlife

Learn a new skill

Meditate in nature

Spend as much time as possible outdoors

Watch the sunrise and sunset

Wear a flower crown

Wear warm colors

After Litha - A time for thriving

Be active 

Focus on goals and networking

Get away into nature

Go to the beach

Go hiking

Go swimming

Cementing their status as the most terrifying of all the birds, a new study has found that ravens are able to imagine being spied upon – a level of abstraction that was previously thought to be unique to humans. 

The ability to think abstractly about other minds is singled out by many as a uniquely human trait. Now, a study from the Universities of Houston and Vienna have found that ravens are able to adapt their behaviour by attributing their perceptions to others.

The study, published in Nature Communications, found that if a nearby peephole was open, ravens guarded pockets of food against discovery in response to the sound of other birds – even if they didn’t see another bird. This was not replicated when the peephole was closed, despite hearing the same auditory clues.

According to the study’s authors, the discovery “shed[s] a new light on Theory of Mind” – the ability to attribute mental states to others. A number of studies have found that animals are able to understand what others see – but only when they can see the head or eyes, which provide gaze cues. This suggests that these animals are responding only to surface cues, and are not experiencing the same abstraction as humans.

The ability to hide food is extremely important to ravens, and they behave completely differently when they feel they are being watched – hiding food more quickly, for example, and are less likely to return to a hiding place for fear of revealing the location to a competitor.

The study replicated this behaviour. Two rooms were connected by windows and peepholes, both of which could be opened and closed. The ravens were trained to look through the peepholes to observe human experimenters making stashes of food. Finally, both windows were covered while a single peephole remained open – and, though no bird was present, the ravens still hid the food as if they were being watched.

“We showed that ravens can generalise from their own experience using the peephole as a pilferer, and predict that audible competitors could potentially see their caches through the peephole,” the authors wrote. “Consequently, we argue that they represent ‘seeing’ in a way that cannot be reduced to the tracking of gaze cues.”

Although ravens may not seem similar to humans, the two species do have something in common – their social lives. Like humans, ravens go through distinct social phases, from fluid interaction with other birds as adolescents to stable breeding pairs in adults. “There is a time when who is in the pack, who’s a friend, who’s an enemy can change very rapidly,” said Cameron Buckner, lead author of the research. “There are not many other species that demonstrate as much social flexibility. “Ravens cooperate well. They can compete well. They maintain long-term, monogamous relationships. It makes them a good place to look for social cognition, because similar social pressures might have driven the evolution of similarly advanced cognitive capacities in very different species”.

It’s not the only thing ravens can do – they’ve also been found to mimic human speech, complete complex logic puzzles and show empathy for fellow birds, which Buckner says could “change our perception of human uniqueness”. “Finding that Theory of Mind is present in birds would require us to give up a popular story as to what makes humans special,” he said. “Completing this evolutionary and developmental picture will bring us much closer to figuring out what’s really unique about the human mind”.

Solar System 10 Things: Two Years of Juno at Jupiter

Our Juno mission arrived at the King of Planets in July 2016. The intrepid robotic explorer has been revealing Jupiter’s secrets ever since. 

Here are 10 historic Juno mission highlights:

1. Arrival at a Colossus

After an odyssey of almost five years and 1.7 billion miles (2.7 billion kilometers), our Juno spacecraft fired its main engine to enter orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Juno, with its suite of nine science instruments, was the first spacecraft to orbit the giant planet since the Galileo mission in the 1990s. It would be the first mission to make repeated excursions close to the cloud tops, deep inside the planet’s powerful radiation belts.

2. Science, Meet Art

Juno carries a color camera called JunoCam. In a remarkable first for a deep space mission, the Juno team reached out to the general public not only to help plan which pictures JunoCam would take, but also to process and enhance the resulting visual data. The results include some of the most beautiful images in the history of space exploration.

3. A Whole New Jupiter

It didn’t take long for Juno—and the science teams who hungrily consumed the data it sent home—to turn theories about how Jupiter works inside out. Among the early findings: Jupiter’s poles are covered in Earth-sized swirling storms that are densely clustered and rubbing together. Jupiter’s iconic belts and zones were surprising, with the belt near the equator penetrating far beneath the clouds, and the belts and zones at other latitudes seeming to evolve to other structures below the surface.

4. The Ultimate Classroom

The Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) project, a collaboration among NASA, JPL and the Lewis Center for Educational Research, lets students do real science with a large radio telescope. GAVRT data includes Jupiter observations relevant to Juno, and Juno scientists collaborate with the students and their teachers.

5. Spotting the Spot

Measuring in at 10,159 miles (16,350 kilometers) in width (as of April 3, 2017) Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is 1.3 times as wide as Earth. The storm has been monitored since 1830 and has possibly existed for more than 350 years. In modern times, the Great Red Spot has appeared to be shrinking. In July 2017, Juno passed directly over the spot, and JunoCam images revealed a tangle of dark, veinous clouds weaving their way through a massive crimson oval.

“For hundreds of years scientists have been observing, wondering and theorizing about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Now we have the best pictures ever of this iconic storm. It will take us some time to analyze all the data from not only JunoCam, but Juno’s eight science instruments, to shed some new light on the past, present and future of the Great Red Spot.”

6. Beauty Runs Deep

Data collected by the Juno spacecraft during its first pass over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in July 2017 indicate that this iconic feature penetrates well below the clouds. The solar system’s most famous storm appears to have roots that penetrate about 200 miles (300 kilometers) into the planet’s atmosphere.

7. Powerful Auroras, Powerful Mysteries

Scientists on the Juno mission observed massive amounts of energy swirling over Jupiter’s polar regions that contribute to the giant planet’s powerful auroras – only not in ways the researchers expected. Examining data collected by the ultraviolet spectrograph and energetic-particle detector instruments aboard Juno, scientists observed signatures of powerful electric potentials, aligned with Jupiter’s magnetic field, that accelerate electrons toward the Jovian atmosphere at energies up to 400,000 electron volts. This is 10 to 30 times higher than the largest such auroral potentials observed at Earth. 

Jupiter has the most powerful auroras in the solar system, so the team was not surprised that electric potentials play a role in their generation. What puzzled the researchers is that despite the magnitudes of these potentials at Jupiter, they are observed only sometimes and are not the source of the most intense auroras, as they are at Earth.

8. Heat from Within

Juno scientists shared a 3D infrared movie depicting densely packed cyclones and anticyclones that permeate the planet’s polar regions, and the first detailed view of a dynamo, or engine, powering the magnetic field for any planet beyond Earth (video above). Juno mission scientists took data collected by the spacecraft’s Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument and generated a 3D fly-around of the Jovian world’s north pole. 

Imaging in the infrared part of the spectrum, JIRAM captures light emerging from deep inside Jupiter equally well, night or day. The instrument probes the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter’s cloud tops.

9. A Highly Charged Atmosphere

Powerful bolts of lightning light up Jupiter’s clouds. In some ways its lightning is just like what we’re used to on Earth. In other ways,it’s very different. For example, most of Earth’s lightning strikes near the equator; on Jupiter, it’s mostly around the poles.

10. Extra Innings

In June, we approved an update to Juno’s science operations until July 2021. This provides for an additional 41 months in orbit around. Juno is in 53-day orbits rather than 14-day orbits as initially planned because of a concern about valves on the spacecraft’s fuel system. This longer orbit means that it will take more time to collect the needed science data, but an independent panel of experts confirmed that Juno is on track to achieve its science objectives and is already returning spectacular results. The spacecraft and all its instruments are healthy and operating nominally. ​

Read the full web version of this week’s ‘Solar System: 10 Things to Know’ article HERE. 

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