Practical Magic: Glamoury and Tealight Hearths

Charms, Hexes, Weeknight Dinner Recipes, Glamoury and Unsolicited Opinions on Morals and Magic

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Deborah Castellano

Deborah Castellano

Deborah Castellano's book, Glamour Magic: The Witchcraft Revolution to Get What You Want (Llewellyn, 2017) is available: https://www.amazon.com/Glamour-Magic-Witchcraft-Revolution-What/dp/0738750387 . She is a frequent contributor to Occult/Pagan sources such as the Llewellyn almanacs, Witchvox, PaganSquare and Witches & Pagans magazine. She writes about Charms, Hexes, Weeknight Dinner Recipes, Glamoury and Unsolicited Opinions on Morals and Magic at Charmed, I'm Sure. Her craft shop, The Mermaid and The Crow (www.mermaidandcrow.com) specializes in goddess & god vigil candles, hand blended ritual oils, airy hand dyed scarves, handspun yarn and other goodies. She resides in New Jersey with her husband, Jow and their two cats. She has a terrible reality television habit she can't shake and likes St. Germain liquor, record players and typewriters.
New Year, New You: An Experiment in Magical Radical Transformation

I’m reposting this because it’s getting to be that time of the year for starting to plan how awesome you’re going to be in the new year.  You can definitely do this course in a self-guided manner and all the prompts are now posted here.  

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  • Ashley Nicole Hunter
    Ashley Nicole Hunter says #
    I'm so glad you shared this! I'll definitely be giving this a try!
Fix Your Situation: One Small Thing

Last we spoke, I implored you to burn this place down.  You have some idea of what this looks like from watching me, I think.  The doubt.  How I freak when leveling up.  My obsession about not living like a filthy hamster but yet unable to break the filthy hamster cycle.  

But, like, we're doing magic to get out of our comfort zones because if we were living the lives we wanted to live in our comfort zone, we wouldn't be doing magic, no?

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Glamour Practical: Burn This Place Down

Gather ’round, Charmers.  First, as always, my litany of complaints: it is Heartbreak Hotel in my little corner of the woods which is every bit as depressing as you would expect it to be.  Not for me personally, my heart is currently as more-or-less intact as it’s going to be.  But for four people in my circle of friends, it is less so.  I try to be supportive, I try to be helpful, but no one wants to hear any of that noise whilst heartbroken.  Needless to say, it wears me down.  Working 40 hours a week in an accounting firm where there is no such thing as a small mistake because: accounting also wears me down.  Shopping for Yule gifts, keeping my head above water for the holidaze season as a crafter for my Etsy shop and at shows is exhausting, research and slowly, oh so so so slowly writing my book is anxiety inducing as well as also (surprise!) exhausting.

It’s hard to feel glamorous right now, Charmers.  Not in that (now nostalgic) new Mom-like way that nannying produced for me as a career path with endless amounts of physical labor, vomit, tears and poop,  but in that I am too tired to think let alone look polished and perfect as well as formulating wit and charm.  My brain is tired but my body is wired, the exact opposite of my not too long ago previous life.

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Advanced Glamour Practical: The Library is Open

A note: Yes, I am totally a feminist and have the degree to prove it.  Yes, I believe women should be good to each other and support each other.  As fellow humans we should all generally be good to each other.  But I also believe in operating in the world we actually live in vs the world we want to live in.  Operating that way with magic is what gives you the edge.

There’s a part of glamour magic that I haven’t been talking about because I’ve been festering on it for several years now.  Part of what makes glamour feminine guerrilla warfare is the fact that it resides firmly in GirlWorld.  GirlWorld is a place that is simultaneously terrifying and awesome and unless you strongly identify as a woman, it’s always going to be foreign and scary.  So much of what happens in GirlWorld happens on an incredibly primal ontological level.  Your Fetch lives there, generally speaking.

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[Books of the Dead] Crows and Giving Space for Grief

At a crossroads, I watched a crow had been hit by a car, laid to rest there on one side of the street. Crows descended from the trees, probably a hundred crows. In groups of maybe eight, ten, twelve, they would walk around that individual that was on the ground. And then they would fly off, and over a fifteen, twenty-minute period, eventually all the crows flew off, leaving that corpse of the crow in the road. Tony AngellGifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans

Crows have been yelling at me a lot lately.  I'd like to tell you that I can understand what they've been saying, but I don't know.  In my experience, it generally means that something is going to happen.  Sometimes good, sometimes not good, but more than daily life.  If he is feeling generous, Crow may show up in my dreams to elaborate.  But he has been silent on the matter, leaving the tiny cousins to chide me.  Or praise me?  Who knows.  I've never had a terribly strong communication connection with the goddesses, ancestors and spirits.  My logical brain is quick to tell me that I am just telling myself what I want to hear, so I try to rely on omens, portents, dreams and divination.  Sometimes that gives me a clear path, most of the time it doesn't.  Sometimes when it's particularly murky, I do as my friend JohnM, the psych guy, suggests and I assign reasons and explanation as it's as good of an answer as any.  A very Roman approach to things, but sometimes better than nothing.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

My mother prefers her visits to our beloved dead to be spontaneous, because that's just so MamaFran, who is also Our Lady of the Cemetery Hacks.  But I really don't much care for that.  Because if I can't go, I feel crummy about it, if I just don't want to go, I feel even more crummy about it and if I do go, there's that frisson of resentment that makes a two hour car ride that much more enjoyable.

When I got this job which now adds even more to my wheel of the year (which was previously "Craft Show Season/Not Craft Show Season", otherwise known as "St. Germain/Campari" and now reads something like "Extensions/Craft Show Season/ Extensions/Tax Season/Summertime Sadness" . . .but writing a book should be no big, right?), I decided to dedicate a weekend to cemetery visits and just rip it off like a band aid.  If others could keep me company, awesome.  If not, that's what audio books were made for. 

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  • Angela
    Angela says #
    Once every October I try to get my mother and sister together to decorate our grandmother's and stepfather's stones. It NEVER goe
[Manic Mondays] Current/Upcoming Publications: The Big Reveal/ An Open Love Letter to You

"I never did discover I was beautiful;I made myself beautiful." - Holly Madison

Current:

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