The witch is the water she walks. Salt-hag on the shore. Curse-cleaner by the brook. Omen-harvester at her reflecting pool. Every nephomantic cloud amplified in its floating. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #FolkWitchFriday

Paper on Lancashire Folklore writing by Simon Young. www.academia.edu/168834283/Yo...

What is folklore? Happy 11th birthday to #FolkloreThursday.

'... for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs... #WyrdWednesday 1/2

New article (open access!!) online now with Contemporary British History www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I don't worry too much about my pupils. I know they'll spend their holiday in the woods and fields, but they are wise children. They've been brought up on a diet of parental scarelore. They know a Wood Sprite's trap when they see one. – Joanna Vickers, 1982 #VOH

Just spotted this open-access text: Aniruddha Dutta's "Globalizing through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras, and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India" www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?do...

Thinking about mantras and Language goddesses.

Ghosts in the glass. Half-seen faces. Glimpsed shadows just beyond the pane. An unavoidable sense of being stared down upon. Rumours shade St. Wulfhere church, act as tourism magnet pulling in those hoping to ghost-gawp. Parishioners in constant tutting mode when visitors interrupt Sunday services.

Fox and stars and blossom 🖤🌘🤍 My first ever aquatint etching, did a workshop at a lovely printmaking studio in Brixton last Saturday #FoxFriday #FoxoftheDay

See, a proper book, (little book, but a proper one) with an ISBN number and everything. Cover reveal and ordering details coming soon-ish. And yes, there is an-anti piracy, anti LLM curse embedded in the text. It is Hookland – you'd expect nothing less.

Anyone out there have any suggestions for someone running magical workshops? I did a small ebook years ago but I guess its a bit dated now. docs.preterhuman.net/Running_Work...

New in open access: "Śaiva–Buddhist Encounters in Medieval India" www.fedoabooks.unina.it/index.php/fe...

I'm never sure if the pub sign at The Mariner is meant to depict one of the Salt Sanctified or one of the Drowned Dead. I suppose it is a question I am unlikely to get answered as it has been very clear that my custom is not welcome. – #MattAdams

Some of my colleagues use the term 'stone botherer' as slur. I refuse this. We might not view portal tombs as 'ley line hubs' or 'ghost-containment units', but we archaeologists are also stone botherers and I for one am proud of it. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday

Video for your Schadenfreud pleasure…

We are all animists below the surface. We are all future ghosts. We exist as a potential for strange encounters, as possible wanderers across mythic It is usually better if this truth is acknowledged early. - Dr. M. Benn

My suggestion that chaos servitors could be "programmed" using COBOL-derived conditional statements gets a brief mention in this essay on the intersection between internet tech and the occult.

From the archives: Daily Mirror, February 29, 1973. "Witchcraft's 'Royal Family'. More Alex Sanders, plus Pat Crowther and others.

Some words on how you all own Hookland and its spacemen and sprites. Some words on how the imagined England is often more real than the then and now. Some words on the warping gravity of nostalgia and the agendas of the county.

Now available via Amazon. Vijñānabhairava Tantra: with the Commentaries by Śivopādhyāya and Ānandabhaṭṭa translated by the late Dr. Mark Dyczkowski and edited by Manish Maheshwari. www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GZZTFHT...

What once sheltered the dead, now shelters rain-bullied hiker, unprepared stone-botherer. We live in the Long Neolithic and this means we rub against its spirits. The portal tomb as nexus between then and now. Dolmen as a place of ongoing conversation. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday

"In this act of magical transformation I recognize myself again. I am groundless and boundless movement. I am a furious flow. I am one with the darkness . . . And I am enraged." Karen Barad, "Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings" 2015.

A new blog post. A brief reflection on magical objects. enfolding.org/time-machines/ (image: Seven of Cups from "The Sexual Tarot" by Brother R.B.B.)

Currently revisiting Karen Barad. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4sM...

Keith Edward Cantú speaks with Gordan Djurdjevic, an independent scholar of global esotericism, yoga, tantra, and comparative religion. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkF7...

I used to be one of those witches who tidied away certain items before non-pagan friends came round. I've grown out of such nonsense. Our magic is in our relationships, including those of our tools. It is a duty to be proud of such things. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #FolkwitchFriday

We have copies back in stock. Voices from a remarkable decade

New open access: Astrid Zotter: "Flowers, Gods and Scholars The Puṣpacintāmaṇi, a Nepalese Digest on Flowers in Worship" hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/catalog/book...

The publisher has put it in. For those asking, it is a small booklet reproducing my recent talk with some additional fragments. The contents will be:

From the Archive. My favourite Psychic News front page. "Medium Caught Holding Trumpet" November 7 1992. Disclosure: I was working for Psychic Press (the publishers of Psychic News) at the time this was published. The company also owned The Atlantis Bookshop.

Some well-chosen words on recent events. open.substack.com/pub/sororali...

'Stormborn', a linocut that I carved a few years ago 🤍🐾💙 - in celebration of #WorldOtterDay

It’s my fundamental belief that uncommon things happen to common people. Those that investigate the paranormal and focus on the grand house, the aristocratic ghost, damage the subject. The strange surrounds us all, excluding the working class experience of it is vile and wrongheaded. –#CJosiffe

From the Archives: "Witch Wife in Razor Attack". Daily Mirror, October 20, 1976.

One for @cultauthor.bsky.social !

Happy World Dracula Day to those who celebrate! And if you've ever wondered whether there's any truth to the idea that Lovecraft's friend Edith Miniter was offered the job of editing DRACULA - well, here's a deep dive for you. deepcuts.blog/2024/01/31/d...

From the Archives: "King of the Witches is Sacked from a Nightclub" Daily Mirror, Thursday April 15, 1971.

Commentary | Muhammad Nawfal Saleemi argues that there is "an urgent need to mobilize a decolonial perspective grounded in indigenous genderqueer identities based on regional & cultural specificities" in response to protect legal rights of trans communities. criticalasianstudies.org/commentary/2...

Queer books in my library. An occasional series. Might do reviews. Possibly some overlap with the esoteric books thing from last year. "Men in Frocks" by Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Gay Men's Press, 1984. #Queer #QueerReading

1. Caste. Most people in the west don’t understand that the waves of engineers and doctors who immigrated out of India in the 70s and onwards were ‘high’ caste folks, who resented the Indian equivalent of affirmative action for caste. Caste solidarity is very powerful…/

Introduce yourself with 10 bands/artists you've seen live. The Cassandra Complex Hawkwind Motorhead Magazine Buzzcocks Blue Oyster Cult Rainbow Sex Pistols Steve Hillage SPK

New open access from Springer! "Grotesque Anthropocene: Disfigured Environments Across Media" link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

We cross the threshold of a stone circle and are engulfed by a sense of ongoing ritual. Engulfed by a sense of intimate lithic conversations, power dynamics unfolding across slow centuries. The Long Neolithic is palpable. The Long Neolithic is living. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday

Queer books in my library. An occasional series. Might do reviews. Possibly some overlap with the esoteric books thing from last year. Devdutt Pattanaik's "The Man Who Was a Woman and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore." #Queer #QueerReading

'Foxglove Dreams' - in celebration of foxglove season having arrived (at least in London) and #FoxFriday 🦊🌀🌿 #FoxoftheDay

For a witch, a path may not be important due to its destination, but rather for the quality of spirits she talks to whilst upon it. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Queer books in my library. An occasional series. Might do reviews. Possibly some overlap with the esoteric books thing from last year. Brooke Palmieri's "Bargain Witch: Essays in Self-Initiation". #Queer #QueerReading

Raindrops race the glass. Pylons march the land. The Hum throbs. Minute by minute, the world beyond the pane feels stranger. An enfolding sense of the future echoing back into the now. Some great, unknowable transformation is happening, All we can do is wait upon it. – #DAKilroy

Summer is coming, and most of the moss and grass shaping the labyrinth in London SE23 has already dried out and turned the same colour as the paths. I started using white/lighter-coloured pebbles on the sides of the paths to make them stand out more. Very Haensel and Gretel 🤍🌀🌿 #FairyTaleTuesday