#study › phoenix ⊹ this destruction will be your rebirth

[warborn-tragedy]

Thinking about the post-2017 timeline divergent aus for Pixie being the epitome of the saying 'no good deed goes unpunished' and slowly losing my mind over it.

#study › pixie ⊹ she wears a mask and her face grows to fit it #study › phoenix ⊹ this destruction will be your rebirth #study › revenant ⊹ the illusion of freedom #like holy shit #some of her worse timelines (status pending on the phoenix verse) really are the result of her genuine attempts to look out for others #awfully fitting as a character study tbh but /still/ #this is a hell of my own making and honey i'm burning

[ladyiristheenchantress]

Working with Fire

Welcome to the Second part of my elemental series! Today we will explore some aspects of working with fire like offerings, devotional activities, common lessons, aspects, and more! With all that said lets get started!

To preface: I am a devotee to water itself, I am a west witch practioner which means I work within the domain of water, the past, divination, and psyche! I also am a general elemental practioner and have experience working with all of the elements and their aspects!

What is working with fire like?

The verified gnosis will vary from culture to culture but some things remain consistent! Fire has aspects of destruction, control, warmth, light, and more! Whether its torches being used in studies to learn, the sun being honored as a ball of fire, or the destruction of a warring city being burnt down, fire is both volatile and chaotic but it also is controlled and helpful. Fire doesn't have a gender (Neither do any of the elements) so venerating the divine energy itself is a complicated and beautiful concept.

In general, Fire is considered primordial in its raging and free form, however it has modern connotations because of how it has interacted with mankind! Its more peaceful and loving traits stem directly from people. Some of the aspects include bonfire, forest fires, magma, lava, and torch! All of which have been venerated to some degree

Some of the lessons you learn will depend on how you interact with fire itself. Even in forest fires and after destruction there is this idea of rebirth and coming back together from the helpful ashes. The phoenix is a wonderful example of this, a bright bird rising from the ashes! Fire touches on anger issues, and in a torch form, control. Fire teaches us how to control and regulate our actions to create a really helpful and roaring spirit much like what we can learn from a bonfire!

Some things to note is fires personality is not set in stone, it can be loving and nurturing, manipulative and warring, and every emotion in between. The elements are not omnipotent nor omnipresent because they physically exist, so you may have better luck lighting a fire or keeping a dagger on the altar to represent the flame! Don't be surprised if you are called to fire if you have problems with anger, manipulation, or really deep rooted shadow traits. In a working relationship you may be called to cook with fire, enjoy bonfires, do spells using candles and knives, taking note of controlled bunings, and being pushed into new things. Note that to the elements we are animals like any bear, bird, or lion! Fire tends to be more direct than other elements.

UPG: In my experience, fire is really sporadic, I was doing a spell and all of a sudden my bedroom floor was on fire because the energy took control. Fire is very direct and my clairs have a really easy time hearing it talk to me in day to day life. Fire has a couple flaws when it comes to anger and manipulation often being considered a trickster spirit that messes with practioners to prove a point!

Another thing to note is fire does not have a direct birth connotation, instead a rebirth connotation! Fire itself cannot create life until after it has died via ash. Because of this rebirth connotation it can be really helpful when it comes to earthly transcendence or working with your witches eye!

What are common offerings?

Most people place an altar to fire in a bedroom, kitchen, or the hearth of the home! bedrooms can be warm and intimate spaces, kitchens often delve into heat and sometimes fire, but the hearth historically contained the fire in the home because it helped keep people warm! Fire can enjoy hand picked items however it especially likes a space to just be! Think candles, plenty of warmth, etc!

There is not a heavy emphasis on action, but rather feeding fire itself within spell works and offerings! Things like sacrificing herbs into flame, cooking and letting some of the food char if it falls out of the pan, and even setting up bonfires and gatherings outside!

Make sure that you are focusing on all aspects of fire safety!!! You need a fire safe altar (ceramic bottoms, fire repellant cloth, etc) and you dont do something like leaving a flame on, and unattendant, and more! For information of fire safety check out the resources below Fire safety 101 (smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, etc) Candle safety 101 Spiritual Fire safety 101

Some common practices include hosting bonfires, cleaning up and visiting controlled burn sites, lighting pinecones and using cool ash as a growth material, lighting candles and fire scrying in the dark, using tarot cards relating to fire, and even

Correspondence:

These are just some of many!

Crystals - Red Jasper, Carnelian, Fire Agate, Sunstone, Citrine, Red Opal, Orange Calcite, Amber, Aragonite, Lava Stone, Mahogany Obsidian, Mookite, Pyrite.

Herbs - Rosemary, Palm, Sunflower, Cinnamon, Chili, Pepper, Cloves, Ginger, Wormwood, Asfoetida, Marigold, Amaranth, Snapdragon, Dragon's Blood, Calendula, Sagebrush, Stinging Nettle, Holly, Cedar, Mace.

Colors - Red, Orange, Blue, Yellow, Gold

Energy Centers - Sacral, Root

Zodiacs - Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius

Tools - Daggers, Swords, candles, fire starters, tarot cards

Scents - Woody, Smokey, Spicy, Musky

Resources

Tip Jar

#witchblr #pagan witch #witch #magical theory #grimoire #witchcraft #spells #culturalexploration #baby witch #magick #elements #elemental magick #elemental magic #elemental work #fire #fire safety #candles #witchy #hearth #flame

[seeingteacupsindragons]

What are your thoughts on the Yuumori lighthouse/ship at sea imagery, considering that Sherlock and Liam met on a literal ship. Also, considering the fact that the Noatic was probably based of the Titanic, which was supposed to be unsinkable, how do you think the way the ship imagery is used now reflects character progression?

Well, this post wasn't just a joke. I do think it's really interesting how the authors warped the way people normally view a fire/water contrast and turned it into something reaching out to each other and two parts of the same story and the same whole instead of oppositional forces.

Of course, they've been doing that with their entire characters and the entire story the entire time, so it makes sense they'd do it with William and Sherlock's elemental motifs.

As for going all the way back to The Noahtic, let's actually take it back just a touch further: William's introductory chapter ended in fire and his rebirth in flames like a little phoenix, but also because fire is so strongly associated with all parts of him.

And so when Sherlock is introduced, it's surrounded by water so wholly Liam couldn't escape it if he tried--that's sort of how cruise ships work. And Sherlock's first arc On His Own shouldering the narrative himself was characterized by an awful lot of rain. I mean, it's London, but we don't actually see tons of rain most of the time. We see Sherlock get soaked in A Study in 'S', and that's about it for rain.

(There's also some fun things about how in A Scandal in the British Empire, Adler got soaked to the bone so badly that Sherlock had to loan her dry clothing, but later we see Bond singed with ash from a fire in The Final Problem. Good stuff)

Anyway, as most motifs, what they mean in a story really depends on how an author wants to portray it. And Fire and Water are both so well-worn ones that there's a millions ways those could be taken. Fire is heat and warmth and life and rage and anger and comfort and passion and love and light and uncontrollability and danger and purification and destruction and rebirth and incineration, and William is...all of those things. Water is tumult and chaos and danger and endless, unknowable depths and relentlessness and life and safety and peace and clarity and understanding and purity and cleansing and soothing and rebirth and baptism, and...Sherlock is all of those things.

And if you note those long lists, there's a lot of overlap between the two despite how oppositional they seem. Fire can evaporate water. Water can extinguish flame.

But this is fire and water, and you wanted lighthouse and ship.

I think what it really did with this new image is taking William's raging fire and putting it to a specific purpose. It has a calling and a use and a need. It's a signal of safety and shore. And a ship is something fighting through the tumult of water while using it to its own advantage, something which brings a fire what it needs to sustain itself all alone.

Ships and lighthouses need each other.

But it's also yet another twist--if Sherlock is the darkness of sea and ship, than William is the light of fire and shore. Sherlock is the one who presented that idea--William has always said the opposite, but it puts William as Sherlock's light, too.

The Titanic, ironically enough, was destroyed by ice (and carelessness and various other things). Water, without the warmth of fire to keep it liquid. Perhaps that could have been what Sherlock became without the fire in his life, who knows.

But I just like how their elemental motifs keep on giving and are being made full use of as the characters themselves reinterpret what they mean to themselves and to each other. Those ideas mean what they need them to mean. And those ideas change as they change as characters.

I don't know if I properly answered your question. I feel like I went off on several tangents here. Feel free to try again if I fucked up.

#Yuukoku no Moriarty #Moriarty the Patriot

[khaleesiofalicante]

an incomplete study of lbaf gang's tarot cards:

the magician - nicolas thorn

the empress - selena fairchild

the emperor - rafael lightwood-bane

the chariot - anjali rosales

strength - lexi herondale

wheel of fortune - david beauchamp

death - gabriel guzman

the devil - marcus devlin

the tower - mallory devlin

the star - camila alvarez

the world - georgia lovelace

the magician - nicolas thorn - Using all of your past experiences to create a new future, alchemizing your reality, taking confident action forward. - this is making me sad but also kinda foreshadowing omg? 

the empress - selena fairchild - ivine Femininity, receiving, creation, pregnancy, nurturing yourself or those around you or being nurtured and cared for. - this is super on point???

the emperor - rafael lightwood-bane - Divine Masculinity, stability, security, ambition, power, authority figure or stepping into a position of authority yourself, promotion - facts only???

the chariot - anjali rosales - Moving ahead, positive forward momentum, motivation, letting go of the past in order to step into the future, determination, fame, tapping into confidence and feeling self-assured in your path. - BAD BITCH VIBES.

strength - lexi herondale - Triumph over a difficult or long-standing situation, self-sufficiency, overcoming temptation or stagnation, internal mastery. - how very herondale hehe. 

wheel of fortune - david beauchamp - Drastic change, destiny, fate, good luck coming your way, things taking a 180-degree turn from what you are currently experiencing (or have experienced in the past), aligning with your higher purpose. - SCREAMING AT THIS. 

death - gabriel guzman - The cycle of life-death-life, phoenix rising from the ashes, increased self-awareness that is brought on by loss or endings, grief, letting go of attachments, rebirth, intense and sudden change. - kinda beautiful ngl.

the devil - marcus devlin - Obligation, hedonism, addictions, patterned thoughts and behaviors that need to be controlled, living in a state of fear, feeling trapped, needing to deal with the parts of your subconscious that are ruling your life negatively. - made me sad and I don’t like it!!

the tower - mallory devlin - Sudden destruction, breaking down old patterns and belief systems that no longer serve a positive purpose, sudden endings, danger, catastrophic events, renovation of your life, ripping everything apart to be able to start over from scratch, - cool way of saying she is unhinged. 

the star - camila alvarez - Keeping the faith, holding on to hope, new fertile ground, inspiration, believing in a better future, feeling blessed by the universe, fulfilled dreams. - only woman I love. 

the world - georgia lovelace - Completion, end of a cycle, successful conclusions, resting before starting a new chapter, a situation coming full circle, travel, endless possibilities. - UNPROBLEMATIC AF. 

Max is missing! Where is my son?

#okay lunch break over :( #lbaf #i LOVED THIS SM THANK YOU! #lbaf gang

[punkpandapatrixk]

The Kind of Magic Each Zodiac Sign Carries🧚🏻‍♀️ Pt.1

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

A Star was receiving punishment for horrendous crimes across the known Universe. The Star had disturbed the law and order of the Cosmos, so the sentence was for it to experience total Chaos for its repentance. It was decided the Star would test out different levels of consciousness to study duality and separation. A planet now torn apart by wars for its operation of Freewill was chosen as the Star's learning ground.

The Star, then, had to go through 12 cycles of birth and death on Gaia. Each time the Star was incarnate in a new form, it would take on a new name whilst retaining knowledge and memories from its previous incarnations. This is the birth, lives, and death of a Star through the zodiacal wheel.

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Here is a tiny myth (fictional tho) for new and old astrology students alike. This is meant to help you get familiar with the basic nature (or personality?) of each zodiac sign in a manner that allows you to see the more magical aspect of it—in both good and not-so-good ways.

Magic is impartial. There's creation magic and there's destruction magic. Rely on your own innate wisdom in regards to how you see creation and destruction as a positive or negative force.

[Back to Masterlist] [Part 2]

The SYNK between each zodiac sign's magic of creation and its corresponding Priestess card is hilarious it's literally killing me🤣

🐏Aries Magic

Aries is the first incarnation of the Star on Gaia. Here begins the Star's first lesson on the concept of duality, diverging from the singularity of All That Is. Having only momentarily been shot from Divinity, the Star still remembers its singular nature and struggles to connect with Gaia's duality. At this first stage, the Star is often seen as insufferably selfish and opinionated, cruel and childishly unforgiving. The Star gets into many fights and arguments with other inhabitants of Gaia and finds itself often feeling lonesome and misunderstood.

Aries magic of creation - Priestess of Rebirth

Like, I think my Spirit Guides are lacking creativity, seriously. As you can see🙄Aries magic of creation is the birth of a Star. Anything it thinks, it can create. This is why Aries (like Libra) is often called an idea bank. Aries's problem is coming up with too many novel ideas that it can't even catch up to see any of them through. Nevertheless, Aries is the world’s loudest motivator and most impressive source of inspiration for those who watch it in action.

Aries magic of destruction - 3 of Pentacles Rx

Aries is raw God power. Whether it is used for good or bad, the fact remains that Aries power is destructive. It can destroy as easily as it creates (remember that creation itself happens after a destruction, e.g.: big bang theory and phoenix theology). Rebirth is a small game for an Aries consciousness. Small personal transformations, or constant self-reinvention if you will, then, become a significant challenge in the Life of Aries.

Point of self-actualisation - Silver Magus (Merlin)

For better or worse, Aries magic is the kind that makes everybody else feel small, incapable, ineffective, and blatantly incompetent. Aries raw Cosmic power brings inspiration to motivated people but destroys relationships with those whose small ego refuses to grow. Just like Merlin himself was the most powerful and famed magician of his era (even today probably) he was feared as much as he was revered.

The Aries lesson is balance between exercising its raw power for good without straining its relationships with the rest of the worldly beings who have forgotten their connection with the Divine. The Aries actualisation is to become a teacher whose wisdom remains practical and easy for everyone to digest.

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

🐂Taurus Magic

The Star's second incarnation on Gaia takes on the form of a bull, a creature closely related to the Earth. By this time, the Star begins a lesson on energy containment. It is learning how energy can be generated, contained, and channeled through a physical avatar. In essence, the Star is learning what it means to be Human, at the very basic level. As it slowly assimilates into Gaia's environment, the Star becomes consumed further by the dubious duality of Human beings. And so it strays further and further away from Divinity. Taurus, yearns to be Human.

Taurus magic of creation - Priestess of Energy

Power generation. As well as power containment. The Fire of Aries can often be chaotic as it is way too Cosmic. The Star in its first incarnation had a difficult time containing such raw energies and channeling them in a constructive manner. In its second incarnation, the Star continues this pursuit of energy management. This explains why Taurus is known to be greedy, especially when it comes to FOOD, as well as bullishly selfish and unmovable: because it needs to continually generate power whilst protecting its core balance. -Tch, I still hate Taurus stubbornness tho.-

Taurus magic of destruction - 8 of Pentacles Rx

Really? 8 of Pentacles reversed? As if there wouldn't be any other card to scream excessive indulgence and laziness LMAO As well as strong refusals to learn from its mistakes? LMFAO I'm not even sorry, you guys🤣The Taurus destructive energy is its own refusal to acknowledge powers bigger than itself. This is mostly caused by fear rather than arrogance for in reality, Taurus has so many doubts. Taurus destructive magic is the obliteration of its own Divinity... drowning in fleeting pursuits of physical possessions and pleasure; and it's only just at incarnation two. Tsk tsk tsk...

Point of self-actualisation - Green Astrologer (Robert Fludd)

The most basic principle of good energy management control according to Taurus is this:

For me to create energy, there must be fuel. Fuel can be found in the elements of nature. It is now up to me what I do with these elements of nature. My task is to study them and use them to my advantage. Everything in nature belongs to me and exists for the sole purpose of satisfying both my curiosity and... hunger.

By this time, for it is only the Star's second incarnation, it still thinks of itself as God (because it remembers so) and its megalomania can be insufferable. However, if only it would realise sooner, Taurus's self-actualisation actually relies on it being charitable, full of joy and merriment, as well as living abundantly in harmony with Nature (Taurus after all is a feminine energy). If it tried hard enough, Taurus would still remember that the true nature of God itself is order and harmony (Cosmos).

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

👯Gemini Magic

The Star had a lot to reflect upon as it was entering its third incarnation. Determined to explore further the nature of duality, it took on the physical form of duality diverging from singularity itself, Twins. Now containing polar opposites within a singular avatar, the Star gets to learn about perspectives. The Star becomes more curious about other inhabitants of Gaia and what they like and think and value. The Star is now mature enough to listen and learn from others, as well as heed advice. But a Gemini's maturity, is indeed still a pretty childish variety. The Star thinks it knows everything there is to know about Humans and Gaia and can often be found flaunting a pretty conceited attitude of a manipulator. The Star gets very confident it's tricking everyone whilst everyone is realising how pathetic its attempts are. As such, the Star as a Gemini has garnered a reputation for being a jackass. -How come we don't have a donkey emoji?!?!-

Gemini magic of creation - Priestess of Contemplation

As you may have realised, the Star's first two incarnations were pretty dumb. Struggling with connecting with others as well as being fair and just. As Aries and Taurus, the Star simply lacked the refined art of thinking thoughtfulness. Arrogance got in the way of connecting with others. Gemini’s magic of creation is that willingness to be part of a group so one can gather information and learn. In a sense, Gemini is God’s first bridge towards connecting with the Human world and understanding Human nature.

Gemini magic of destruction - 10 of Cups

If I told you Gemini doesn't particularly understand emotional contentment, would you be disappointed? I mean, the Star has only been in Fire, Earth, and Air elements so far. Gemini has become curious about man’s notion of emotional fulfilment, but it doesn’t particularly understand how to generate that for itself. Gemini goes back to its Taurus knowledge when thinking about this acquirement of emotional contentment when connecting with others, but fails miserably because Taurus’s idea of contentment is pretty materialistic (on top of selfish, solitary, and uncharitable)🤷🏻‍♀️A negatively expressed Gemini energy, can be ridiculously envious of another's happiness. That's why with their trickery, they can have the desire to destroy another's happy relationship. Yup. Consider yourself slapped in the face with reality check.

Point of self-actualisation - Silver Alchemist (Ramon Llull)

Gemini... just... needs to focus on its studies on its own self-conceptualisation. The Life of a Gemini is one meant to be dedicated to personal studies and short distance travels to enrich its own mind—to broaden its knowledge on its own immediate environment. Gemini energy is not the kind suited to become a teacher—that's for later when the Star is being Sagittarius. Gemini should never be too deep in the way it perceives Reality nor should it live too seriously. The Star would finally attain emotional happiness when it decides that Life is okay with just having fun, being happy with learning, staying curious, courageously true and honest when communicating with others, and most of all, being charitable with their energy. To be a good friend whose cheerful disposition brings sunshine to another person's gloomy day.

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

🦀Cancer Magic

Entering its fourth incarnation, in the element of Water, feelings and love take precedence. The Star is about to learn the meaning of sacrifice. -I guess it's super important after the cold-blooded mass destruction the Star had caused somewhere in a galaxy far, far away...- After having three pretty self-centered incarnations, the Star gives Life its best attempt at being accommodating, loving, and nurturing. It's learning to put others before itself, but for the world is the way it is, the Star often gets walked all over by everybody. Suddenly, the world it thinks it's come to know has become a scary place. Now the Star is realising its own follies in the previous three incarnations. As such, the Star, as Cancer, now faces a lot of difficult thoughts and emotions about what it means to be Human. Relating with others in a confident manner becomes scary and when Cancer feels threatened, it resorts to violence to defend its place in the world. Cancer violence though, most of the time involves only words and a bad attitude LMAO The Star was just Gemini a while ago, after all~

Cancer magic of creation - Priestess of Patience

A sacrificial heart. Cancer's best magic is patience—compassion and empathy from understanding other people's reason for sorrow. When Cancer is at its best expression, it has the capacity to embrace everybody who's hurting. Meanwhile, having been Aries anyway, Cancer also has the knack for being your most earnest motivator and supporter. Remembering its incarnation as Taurus, Cancer will cook to nurture you back to health, it will be chatty a la Gemini as well just to cheer you up~!

Cancer magic of destruction - King of Wands Rx

Envious fucking emotional manipulator. Fuck you Cancer boys who can't handle your own feminine energy within. For being a feminine sign (also being Water), take it or leave it, Cancer is intuitive and has an innate ability to know how another person ticks just from analysing (Gemini smartassness) their vibe. If Cancer succumbs to its more negative expressions, it uses this capacity for empathy to trick and play and destroy another until there's nothing left to destroy anymore. Fuck you underdeveloped Cancer boys (and girls), y'all deserve a special kind of Hell.

Point of self-actualisation - Green Magus (John Dee)

-To think there's a Moon depicted in this card.- Cancer is the Star's first attempt at being a lover, a mother, a kindhearted Human. Which, as you can tell, is a rarity on this fucked up Planet. First of all, Cancer's element being Water itself is already difficult to navigate in this chaotic, war-torn, Earthy environment where most of its inhabitants deny and reject feelings. Think about it, Cancer feels so hopelessly lost in this frequency, y'know! Cancer is also a cardinal sign, so although it wants to appreciate originality and honesty, the world isn't showing friendliness towards that kind of attitude. So Cancer's very sensitive heart shrinks furthermore. At the end of its incarnation, Cancer would be satisfied to know it's been true to its own internal guidance system, tho. To know it's lived a good Life in opposition to society’s obsession with self-destruction Planet-destruction✌🏻🕊🦀

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

🦁Leo Magic

The Star has now gone through all of the four basic elements that hold up the Human world. Entering a fifth incarnation, in a sense, the Star is levelling up a cycle. It's now at Fire element stage two, Leo, with a better sense of control over its fire energy. Thus, a Fixed fire energy. Fire is a power of creation, as well as destruction. The Star is currently learning responsibility over having immense power. -Write that down, Leo, write that down!- This is learning disciplined leadership, contrasting Aries's chaotic can-do attitude that could be borderline irresponsible. Although Leo has many opinions and can have a bit of temper issues, the Star has now learnt plenty of lessons through the four previous incarnations, so it tends to hold back saying anything so as not to hurt another's feelings. Leo just wants to be friendly and helpful, seriously. But if you're not gonna worship it for its amazingly noble pursuit of holding its anger back, Leo's gonna sulk for days.

Leo magic of creation - Priestess of Protection

A brave leader. A strong protector. A loyal (hopefully) comrade. Leo is the kind of friend who will shout at another person who's talked shit about you. They're gonna be the avenger if you can't do it yourself. They'll teach you how to stand up for yourself and they'll ride the rollercoaster with you to make you happy even if they can't handle rides like that. For Leo to exercise being so accommodating and extravagantly royal with others, it works really hard to earn a surmountable amount of money. Yo, the world runs on money, anyway, so if Leo wants to have a good time (with others, too) it needs to have money. Big money, baby. Leo is responsible like that!

Leo magic of destruction - 6 of Cups

Hmmph... can Leo just... not reminisce about the past so much? What a fucking waste of awesome Fire energy. An unconscious Leo may think it's really good at burning bridges to the past, but it can't stop whining about things from the past. It's like that quote that says something like, 'You say you don't like something, but you keep giving it attention. How is that working out for you?!' Though fiery by nature, Leo was just Cancer a while ago. It was the Star's first experience with emotions and love. At this point, Leo is still not adept at handling the emotion of loss.

Point of self-actualisation - Red Physician (Galen of Pergamon)

Leo is pretty showy, isn't it? It loves drama and grand gestures; and it wants to be adored for being able to produce dramatic shit. The Star feels that it's the way to express its Fire energy within! But all it creates is a shadow play. Though beautiful, none of it is real. Leo must learn the balance between presentation and content. When underdeveloped, Leo can be a pretty empty shell. Like, a pretty empty shell. Sparkly and all but fake on the inside. Or $100 brand-name wallet with $5 in it. What Leo truly needs to grasp by the end of its incarnation is that actual health from the inside is more worthwhile to maintain than just the appearance of doing well on the outside. Whether it's physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, even financial, whatevericial, if Leo is healthy and balanced from the inside, it all shows effortlessly on the outside, too.

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

🧘🏻‍♀️Virgo Magic

Done being consumed by the intensity of its own passions, the Star now enters its sixth incarnation intending to dedicate itself to the service of others. Virgo is the Star's first attempt at being an altruist. Its main focus is other people's wellbeing. To some extent, Virgo shares a lot of similarities with Cancer (the Star's previous feminine incarnation) and this time around, it wants to redo whatever it failed to do amicably as Cancer. Virgo likes to nurture and care for others, even going as far as resolving other people's problems. -Kinda to show that they're a BOSS to watch out for, what a fucking show off!- But unlike Cancer who couldn't do anything when other people walk all over it, Virgo now has clearer boundaries. Exactly why it likes to show off that it's a force to be reckoned with—Virgo ain't gonna let others find a single reason to badmouth/underestimate it.

Virgo magic of creation - Priestess of Purity

A channel for Divinity's most potent feminine energy. Thus, Virgo's strong desire to be useful/helpful in the eye of another. Virgo wants to be capable and it's gonna be responsible about it (Leo life lesson). People with strong Virgo influences are gonna want to ease other people's stress and be a kind and gentle friend for those who are having a difficult time in Life. What Virgo is best at is being non-judgemental in their approach. They're just there to listen and take in all your whining and complains and wallows. Then, they give you fucking expensive advice on how you can improve your own Life. -You better fucking take that advice, losers!- Virgo's gone through a lot of shit to come up with actually useful advice!

Virgo magic of destruction - Queen of Cups

Smothering asshole who thinks it's the only one who knows how to do shit 'round the block. Ughh... Fiercely opinionated but lacks an actual grasp on how and why other people are having a difficult time with doing something the right way. Or, even if the Virgo in question isn't as much an asshole, the negatively expressed Virgoan altruism could make it a martyr who takes on the world's burden, automatically robbing other people of their chance to mature and learn from their own mistakes. This ain't a protective mother energy; this an asshole mother energy; hands down.

Point of self-actualisation - Silver Astronomer (Galileo Galilei)

Virgo shares a similar sense of sacrifice with Cancer, but unlike the chaotic and irresponsible Cancer, Virgo feels a deep sense of duty. Perhaps it's just the Star's phase of growing into maturity—Virgo is, after all, the Star's last incarnation as a child. Virgo wants to be an adult (Libra) and it wants to be capable and responsible, and that's why it tends to try too hard to prove its worth to anybody who cares to watch it in action. This desire to grow up quickly weighs down on the Star's psyche. Analysis-paralysis becomes its main enemy in this incarnation. Wanting to go in one direction, but wondering if the other is more profitable in terms of garnering it a good reputation (Leo stupid influences). Virgo would be happy to know it can slack off as long as its own personal business is taken care of. Now the bigger question is, can Virgo discern what's its own personal affairs and what's just other people's burdens?

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Feel free to support me on Patreon if you love this kind of content🍑I create stories and tarot readings that calm the mind & heal from within🍒

[Back to Masterlist] [Part 2]

#Punk Astro Tidbits #astrology tidbits #astrology notes #astrology observations #astro tidbits #astro notes #astro observations #astrology opinions #astrology #astrology on tumblr #astro #zodiac #zodiac signs #aries #taurus #gemini #cancer #leo #virgo #astroblr #tarotblr #witchblr #tarot witch #spirituality #personality #psychology #storytelling #amwriting #magick #starseed

[just-horrible-things]

Masterpost - Misc Writing

Things I have written on this blog that do not fit into any of my main stories, catalogued for my convenience and perhaps yours.

Falling 488 words How to mourn someone who has fallen from the Edge of the world

Night Without End 480 words Atmospheric, invitation to a world without sunrise

The Pursuit Of Understanding 719 words Engineered vampire studies medicine via a hands-on approach

The Dragon And The Musician 1071 words A musician is kept as part of a dragon’s hoard

The Spider’s Door 2455 words Cultist Simulator fanfic, a woman muses on her occult mistakes and their consequences

Phoenix 674 words Rebirth through flame

Blood By Moonlight 1,126 words A clawed, fanged monster hunts his nemesis across the junkyard

Seven Cages 822 words Seven caged prisoners play “In my grandmother’s shopping basket...”

Red Bracelet Please 354 words Attending whumper’s soiree as a whumper without intending to be one

Flotsam 416 words Monologue on the inhuman callousness of the sea

Cancer 517 words Nuclear horror. In the aftermath of the bombs, everyone has cancer.

Spite And Cold Water 2,051 words Forced to tread water in the dark inside a large water tank.

The Murder of Mara 321 words A family accused of allowing their grandmother to starve.

Cob And The River 1,361 words A man learns why he cannot cross the same river twice.

Cob’s Revenge 349 words Revenge fails to free a man from his ghosts

I Can Still Fight 2,762 words Soldier in a foreign jungle finds that he cannot die

Feeding The Dogs 648 words In the aftermath of a remote facility’s destruction, a surviving employee shares what little food she has with the dogs

Mind If I Cut In? 539 words Mistress-at-arms intercepts a suspicious young lady during a ballroom dance

I Don’t Want To 396 words BBU training. A reluctant pet learns to dissociate. Forcefeeding. Implied noncon.

Not Dead Yet? 343 words Mercenary provides perfunctory first aid to a collateral casualty

Beg To Differ 379 words Caged rebel defies captor even in defeat

Let Me Carry You 1,437 words Shen and her mother face the end of the world together

Don’t Hold Your Breath 347 words Kidnappee is probably a terrible person

Trust Doesn’t Enter Into It 392 words Pillow talk between dangerous people

The Storm To Come 563 words Top down view of a battle and the start of an invasion

Family 1169 words Career criminal sits a man down with a cup of chamomile tea

Dyad - 1, 2 2376 words Immortal tortured by his nemesis, Cultist Simulator fanfic

Did That Hurt? 517 words Demon hunter catches his prey

Can’t Sleep Like That 561 words Angst over unnamed character being unable to sleep in the bed with his partner

At Attention 2,819 words Soldier is left standing at attention overnight

Sky Stories Lean Times - 564 words Battle at the Empyrean - 491 words Tiny Sunless Skies fanfics

Atna 4,225 words Soldier in a fantasy setting brings a foreigner back to her camp to keep him from freezing to death. Both are quarantined, but he receives medical help.

Waiting for the High Hunt 1,896 words Cultist brings food for a prisoner who will be hunted as prey on the full moon.

Zack Marsh - 1, 2 1,504 words A phonecall from a life he thought he’d put behind him plunges Zack back into a criminal underworld

World Aflame - 1/10, 2/8, 3/5, tbc 4,279 words Science-fantasy revolution

Prisoner of War - 1, 2 1,984 words Defiant prisoner chooses dignity over amenities

Daphne’s Wings 1,695 words Angel wings are grafted onto a human’s back, in an age before anaesthesia

Feral Weapon 470 words Cyborg subdued by full system overrides

Nightmares 892 words Unseen overseers keep captive workers in line with the threat of nightmares

Masks 1,000 words Strangers flirt at a party

Barbed Wire Gag 325 words Description of damage done

Hibernation 1,433 words If humans hibernated, and could be forced into hibernation

Stitches 731 words Torturer stitches captive’s eyes closed

Ceasing to Be 579 words Condemned criminal’s execution by airlock, reflecting on identity and regret

Enthralled 716 words Telepath confronted about an infatuation

Halcyon Days 1,122 words Lives fallen to pieces after too much of the sex, drugs and music lifestyle

Camilla - 1, 2, 3, 4 3,791 words Inhuman protagonist shaped by the perceptions of others

Strain 7K 805 words Hero goes to villain for help after contracting deadly engineered plague

Weapon 1,747 words The making of a cyborg assassin, from childhood to escape

Tables Turn - 1, 2 2,037 words Revenge whump: first one way, then the other

Linked 1,278 words Thought-sharing telepaths get into a fight with aggressive soldiers

Sick At Night 489 words Unspecified illness causes nightmares, dysregulated temperature and nausea

Masterpost updated 05/10/2023

#masterpost

[aquariusfemme-blog]

Why Are Scorpios and Aquarius Such a Powerful Match?

Aquarius is exactly what Scorpio wants, and has always wanted. The Aquarius will always be mysterious to the Scorpio. The Scorpio will be perpetually on the hunt, always learning something new about the Aquarius. Scorpio is a strongly masculine sign, and loves to go after something it doesn't fully understand. Unfortunately, the water sign gets bored easily. Sometimes a pleasant match is too surface level for Scorpio. This sign desires a great deal of complexity, paradoxes, and affection. Aquarius's complex nature is enough to lure Scorpio. Scorpio is like the pipe organ of emotions and thought. They have a strong voice and are capable of arranging complex thoughts.

Scorpios are extremely powerful signs, but often misunderstood. They'll trail to the side and go on their own independent journeys. People don't always know what exactly a Scorpio is, so it'll fade from view without ever being fully realized. Fortunately, an Aquarius is capable of understanding the Scorpio better than any other zodiac sign. A mature Aquarius will know a Scorpio immediately just by their intense stare. A Scorpio's stare is enough to cut through titanium. No other sign has this.

What Happens When Water Signs Combine With Air Signs?

All water signs are representative of a certain amount of healing and creative power. Aquarius is a brilliant thinker with excessive creativity and intuition. When Scorpio and Aquarius meet, they make for a cleansing, healing panacea (or, if they are not mature enough, a tempest). All combinations have their healing and destructive powers. Either way, this combination is strong.

Monogynous relationships between these two signs tend to be stronger. Polygamous combinations tend to be weaker because the power is often not balanced between them. Monogyny works for them because a Scorpio can fixate on an Aquarius and help it to be more powerful. The two need to spend a lot of time getting to know each other. They also need to focus their attention on each other. There is a lot of unraveling they'll need to do as neither sign tends to be as open as a Cancer or a Sagittarius.

Scorpio is a magician, and often feels that the challenges around him or her are too dry. That many of the things around them are dull to a great extent until an Aquarius steps into their world. Aquarius is a visionary and will never bore the Scorpio. In fact, the water sign helps the wind sign's vision a reality. Meanwhile, the Aquarius takes a dormant volcano (the Scorpio) and makes it explosive, exciting their inner passion. These two can bring out the potential within each other.

They need to understand that they don't communicate like normal couples, nor should they. They're not like normal individuals either. Scorpio needs an Aquarius to gladly accept its affections. Aquarius needs a Scorpio to chase it (Aquarius isn't a huge fan of chasing). If done well, it's an incredible and beautiful journey and an amazing pairing. Unfortunately, many couples with this combination will move too quickly, leading to self-destruction.

Neither of these signs do well with zodiacs that are too simple or too controlling. They have to line up with each other naturally, sharing equal intelligence and desire or else the whole structure will fall apart before it really has the chance to grow.

What Are Scorpio and Aquarius Drawn To?

Scorpio

Aquarius

A banging body

Creativity

A charming personality

Loyalty

Intelligence

Intelligence

Good communication skills

Intuition

Aquarius is loving and intelligent. These are gifts the Aquarius employs with a fair amount of introversion or introspection (perhaps both). Scorpio can't unravel an Aquarius like it can most other signs. It sees that the Aquarius has more pure motives, a different range for ethics, and a massive capacity for love. Scorpio enjoys Aquarius, but it brings up a lot of insecurities from deep within Scorpio. Can the Scorpio possibly win the heart of the person who wants to take care of everybody's hearts? How can the Scorpio, which can be the lowest of creatures, win such a big heart?

Why You Should Consider this Combination

Embrace the calm of an Aquarius. The ease it has with life will match well with a Scorpio and its ever changing ways. Like ice, the Scorpio is the most solid of the water signs. Still, being the master of water, it can seamlessly drift into its liquid and gaseous states. (Pisces will always be the light waters and Cancer will always be the deep, troubled waters.)

Scorpio can go anywhere there is emotion, and Aquarius can go anywhere where there is thought. When they are together the two feel more complete, more like they can share their personal stories. They're not exact mirrors, or even in the same states, but they can explore each other and come to understand each other quite well. Don't force this kind of relationship. If it's not meant to be, then it's not meant to be. But when intellect and emotion try to replicate each other and understand each other, beautiful and crazy things can happen. Albeit, if the two are not mature enough in who they are, it won't work so beautifully. Just remember to know and understand yourself before you expect anyone else to do the same.

Personality Traits of Scorpio and Aquarius

Scorpio

Aquarius

Loyalty

Humanitarian

Resourcefulness

Progressive

Intensity

Affectionate

Jealousy

Friendly

Passion

Popular

Seriousness

Broad-minded

Protective

Frank

Secretive

Insensitive

Possessive

Unpredictable

Vengeful

Detached

What Does It Mean to Be a Water-Bearer and a Phoenix?

Scorpio feels awkward having to face its insecurities in the light of someone who is so lovely. Aquarius often shirks relationships, sometimes delving into very independent phases and being void of sex. Aquarius can confuse people. They can be virginal, bisexual, pansexual, and sexually straightedge. No one really knows how to label an Aquarius, especially when they are so private. They have a sexuality that is massively deep and insightful, and there are Aquarian types who really are protective and intuitive about their sexual life. However, some Aquarians are extraordinarily exploitative. Aquarius doesn't feel a lot of chemistry with many signs on a sexual level. It may feel like having true chemistry with a partner is difficult to achieve. Their invasive thoughts can distract them from the amazing things in front of them

The water-bearer symbolically and eternally gives life and spiritual food to the world.

The water-bearer symbolically and eternally gives life and spiritual food to the world.

The Scorpio is one of the few signs that can get inside an Aquarius's mind. They feel a certain chemistry with this sign that is absent in the other 11. Scorpio also finds something in Aquarius that others do not have. These two signs are like magnets and immediately connect well with each other. They want each other. This connection most-likely has something to do with how they mix as fixed signs. Their emotional palettes work well together, creating extraordinary exuberant colors. If these two meet too soon, it is a major hurdle to overcome. They won't have enough knowledge to understand each other. There is a certain amount of life fluency they need in order to bridge the gaps they'll have.

Scorpio is known for having a crazy amount of range to their emotions. They have three different morphological cycles: the snake, the scorpion, and the phoenix. The other signs will usually have only one totem. This sign is naturally complicated. Other signs just don't have enough power to study the world with the same intensity. If you're not paying enough attention, it's easy to lose sight of a Scorpio. They can change their mask so easily. They are malleable, quick-learners, and, most importantly, they can easily dissect someone else's personality.

The phoenix is a symbol of rebirth from the ashes of the past. It is also representative of the victory of life over death.

The phoenix is a symbol of rebirth from the ashes of the past. It is also representative of the victory of life over death.

What Scorpio and Aquarius Want in Bed

Scorpio

Aquarius

Scorpios have an endless sex drive.

Aquarius wants to get to know the partner through making love.

Expect a Scorpio to take any and all sexual encounters very, very seriously.

Fascinated by the choreography of making love.

You can't shock a Scorpio. Try many ideas out.

Wants to be taken on a journey.

Wants to have a deep, and almost telepathic mental connection with you.

Aquarius is primarily curious.

Your trust in him will turn him on because it means he has managed to connect with you on a mental level (which is essentially what he desires).

Aquarius is also interested in experimenting with new positions.

Inside the Minds of Scorpios and Aquarius

Scorpios have busy minds, easily distracted by the noise of life. However, once they've found their match, they love deeply and loyally. They are searching for the right person, and they do not settle. They believe deeply in a soulmate, they refuse to stay with someone who doesn't fully stimulate them. Although they can seem grounded when compared to Aquarius, Scorpios (regardless of whether they flat out say it or not) are looking for a supernatural connection as well.

Aquarius can come off aloof to them, but Aquarius is like Jean Gray from the X-Men. They are intuitive, quiet, and amazingly charming. Nevertheless, they can unleash the Phoenix within them. They have powerful emotions locked up inside them. Because their emotional capacity is like dynamite, they don't let those emotions out unless they find it completely necessary.

These powerful emotions are what tie them to the image of being water-bearers. Yes, they can skate above the water all day long with beautiful thoughts, but they are also the water itself. They are spring wells of emotion, with astute emotional control. If there were an Olympics for emotional control, Aquarians would receive every gold medal. They have a relationship with emotion and thought that is difficult for many to read, therefore, Aquarians are sometimes seen as misfits, odd, and different. Their high capacity for thought and emotion make them odd ducks, difficult to understand. However, they're usually so sweet that people accept them. This runs contrary to Scorpio, who has a tendency to be brooding, grumpy, and dark. If you're a Harry Potter fan, think of the Slytherins. They get a bad reputation in the books, but in actuality they are great and must take responsibility for that greatness.

Scorpio and Aquarius get along because they are both odd, highly creative, and secretly emotional. They need to take things slow. Taking things slow is the key to making this pair work. It's like a red velvet cake. Make sure to preheat the oven, follow all the steps, and make sure you have all the ingredients before you pop the pan into the oven. Otherwise, you'll end up with a gooey, inedible mess.

They can rush things by taking it physical. They need to create a great deal of space to build trust and communication. This will take awhile. Because this relationship takes patience, many will give up. First, this pair needs to understand how to talk to each other. This is going to take some time because they are so different and have to learn from each other. It's like a newborn learning how to talk, it'll take awhile, but will be very rewarding.

#aquarius and scorpio #scorpio love #aquarius love #aquarius #zodiac #astrology #compatibility

[pffets]

         hey , hi , hello friends ! it’s mars finally back at it again with my second & somehow even messier bab y , TINA ! now , forgive me in advance bc this intro may or may not be super long , just bc there’s so much less canon info on her than on rita & that got my creative juices flowin’ a little TOO much ; there’s definitely a lot i want to get out ! if u wanna plot then hmu or smash that ♡ & i’ll come to you ! without further ado ━━ MY SECOND CHILD !

* ╰    ( JENNIE KIM )┋have you met ( EGLANTINE PUFFETT ) ? ( she ) reminds me of ( sometimes a war can be fought inside yourself and no victor comes out ; beams of light find their way out of your body through your smile, but don’t get too close, don’t reach out and touch  —— girl burns just like the sun & the illusion of a good thing always fades out once you feel the smoke in your lungs ; eyes like a warzone after the battle’s ended, girl has always been empty / hopeful, cacophony incarnate ; girl is a match unlit, capable of beauty & destruction —— who can tell the difference? not girl / not anyone ; girl takes the form of phoenix and rises from the ashes in a mockery of a rebirth but a rebirth nonetheless ). a ( twenty one ) year old ( tenth ) year ( hufflepuff ), the ( illusory ) is known to be ( sanguine & quixotic ), yet ( selcouth & vexatious ). that explains why they’re majoring in ( spell creation ). rumour has it, ( tina ) is siding with ( the order ) in the solemn war that blazes just beyond the horizon.

⧼ ❀ ⧽  ONCE UPON A TIME . . .

a long time ago , there was no one named eglantine puffett. long , long before she’d take up her final name , a baby was dropped off in a wizarding orphanage with a note containing her very first one  ━━  kyung - mi. no last name.

later on , at age three , she would be adopted by a kind chinese wizarding couple , who’d been on the hunt for another child , having already adopted one. going to all kinds of orphanages until they found her. returning to china , she gained her second name , effectively erasing baby kyung - mi from existence ━━ and breathing life into toddler zhou yuyan. 

yuyan loved her parents & her new older brother , and though they changed her name , they still encouraged her to learn things about korean wizarding culture / korean culture itself mixed with their chinese wizarding traditions. for a while , they were happy !

here’s the thing , though. a war was brewing in wizarding china , much faster than anything in europe , something which made yuyan’s parents fearful. when one of the biggest chinese wizarding schools got attacked during the beginning of the school year , her parents panicked , shipping their children far away , off to beauxbatons  ━━ with the promise that they’d send for their return as soon as it was safe.

it was here yuyan met her future namesake , as both her & her brother were taken in by their parents’ friends , eglantine & corvus astier , who taught the children french & helped them fit in to their new situation better. 

yuyan always thought she’d go back , & made this opinion very clear , refusing to make many friends & focus more on her studies to impress her parents once she’d return. but her parents never did. eventually , a letter came ; the war was finished , and it took her parents with her. 

refusing to come to terms with their deaths , yuyan took off , leaving her brother & the astiers behind ; she began her final transformation , shedding behind the life she’d had as zhou yuyan , becoming eglantine puffett & adopting an entire new life , all lies sprinkled with the truth  ━━ she , a poor beauxbatons student who’s parents had gone missing , come to finish her education at hogwarts after needing a change of scenery. 

N E WAY , she got sorted into hufflepuff & she’s been here ever since , trying to forget her past ! and u can BET im hitting up that wc form for her brother who she hasn’t seen in FOREVER !

⧼ ❀ ⧽  NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT . . .

umm this is just gonna be some tidbits & extra info i think is cute / important !

in case u haven’t noticed , tina’s a liar. she lies. have u ever seen her without the eglantine puffet lie on ? MZMMXMX

prefers to be called TINA & will fight everyone over this.

spell making is her major & she’s especially interested in creating spells that’ll make housework easier.

knows french , mandarin chinese , korean & english , though she has a p distinct french accent after all her years at beauxbatons ! 

technically , tina has no idea whether she’s a pureblood or a halfblood or maybe even a muggleborn born to a squib ! she doesn’t really care , either. everyone thinks it’s this big mystery & she refuses to say the truth just to keep them on their toes , but she truly Does Not Know !

despite all her troubles , she really tries to be a lil ray of sunshine ! 

v dreamy & kind of otherworldly ? a lot like luna lovegood in that regard , where she’s just kind of in her own world most of the time & everyone else just happens to be living in a different one.

being ruled more by emotions than anything else , tina’s magic is very unpredictable. she’s prone to accidental magic at any spike of emotion ; once , during her first kiss , she was filled with so much emotion a lantern near them shattered !

#solemnly:intros #me ? give a throwaway mentioned character an overly complicated backstory ? #more likely than u thin k . . . .

[quakerjoe]

Americans’ attitudes about fascism have always been based on the assumption that fascism, as occurred in Germany when Hitler came to power, “can’t happen here,” that we love our freedom so much we would never give in to an authoritarian populist regime. We never stopped to consider what might happen if Americans’ conception of freedom became so twisted that it came to embody the “freedom” to deprive other people of their freedoms, while preserving your own. Fascism is not just a historical relic. It remains a living and breathing phenomenon that, for the generations since World War II, had only maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right. Its constant enterprise, during all those years, was to return white supremacism to the mainstream, restore its previous legitimacy, and restore its own power within the nation’s political system. With Trump as its champion, it has finally succeeded. It’s important, first, to understand just what fascism is and what it is not. The word “fascist” has been so carelessly and readily applied as a shorthand way to demonize one’s political opposition that the word has become almost useless: used to meaning anything, it has almost come to mean nothing. One commonly, and wrongly, cited definition of fascism is attributed to Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” According to the investigative reporter John Foster “Chip” Berlet, Mussolini never said nor wrote such a thing. And neither did the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, to whom it is also often attributed. “When Mussolini wrote about corporatism,” Berlet writes, “he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds.” The terms “corporatism” and “corporate” meant an entirely different thing in 1920s Italy than they mean today: “corporations” were not individual businesses, but rather were sectors of the economy, divided into corporate groups, managed and coordinated by the government. “Corporatism,” Berlet says, “meant formally ‘incorporating’ divergent interests under the state, which would resolve their differences through regulatory mechanisms.” In fact, says Berlet, this supposed definition of fascism directly contradicts many of the things that Mussolini actually did write about the nature of fascism. Another thing that fascism decidedly is not is what the right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg says it is: a kind of socialism and therefore “properly understood as a phenomenon of the left.” This notion is such a travesty of the idea of fascism that it functionally negates its meaning. George Orwell wrote that “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite.” Not only did Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, published in 2009, become a New York Times bestseller, but its thesis became widely accepted on the American right among Patriots and Tea Partiers in the years leading up to Trump’s ascension, who eagerly accused President Obama and liberal Democrats of being the real fascists. Historians of fascism were scathing in their assessment. For example, Robert O. Paxton, an American political scientist who is professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of seminal studies of fascism, wrote: “Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice.” In reality, fascism is a much more complex phenomenon than Goldberg’s or the “corporate state” definition would have it. Historians have for years struggled to nail down its essential features, partly because, as Paxton notes, fascism in the 1920s “drew on both right and left, and tried to transcend that bitter division in a purified, invigorated, expansionist national community.” In the postwar years of the 1950s and ’60s, political scientists and historians tried to define it primarily by assembling a list of traits common to historical fascists. The problem with this approach was that as historians examined the record more closely, they grasped that fascism was constantly acquiring and shedding one or another of these traits. It was a protean, shape-shifting phenomenon, and a simple list of traits failed to capture this dynamic quality. In response, some scholars, notably Roger Griffin, a modern historian and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University in England, have attempted to distill fascism into a singular quality, an underlying principle that remained constant all throughout its various permutations. Griffin ultimately zeroed in on what he called “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a revolutionary movement based on the belief that a nation can be restored to glory via a process of phoenix-like rebirth by activating, or creating, national myths of original greatness (“palingenesis” is the doctrine of continual rebirth). Griffin explains fascism further as a “modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths.” While Griffin’s approach is extraordinarily useful and insightful, it still fails to fully explain the dynamic nature of fascism. Robert Paxton’s 2005 book The Anatomy of Fascism, widely considered to be a definitive text on the subject, attempted to tackle that aspect of the phenomenon. His definition of fascism is placed in the context of the reality of its behavior: that is, fascism cannot be explained solely by its ideology; it is also identified and explained by what it does. By examining the historical record, Paxton has been able to describe its constantly mutating nature as occurring in five identifiable stages: 1. Intellectual exploration. Disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor. 2. Rooting. A fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage. 3. Arrival to power. Conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite the movement to share power. 4. Exercise of power. The movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates. 5. Radicalization or entropy. The state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did fascist Italy. Paxton explains that “each national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy … not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity.” He also examines the underlying principles that fueled the rise of fascism, and determines that there are nine “mobilizing passions” that have fed the fires of fascist movements wherever they have arisen: 1. A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions 2. The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it 3. The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group’s enemies, both internal and external 4. Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences 5. The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary 6. The need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny 7. The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason 8. The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success 9. The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess in a Darwinian struggle. This last “passion” was explored as an essential aspect of Nazism by the Norwegian social scientist and philosopher Harald Ofstad, whose interviews with former Nazis led him to write Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values—And Our Own (English translation, 1989). It described the logical extension of that Darwinian struggle against the “lesser” that pervades so much fascist literature: the deep-seated hatred and contempt in which all persons deemed “weaker”—ethnically, racially, medically, genetically, or otherwise—are held, and the desire to eliminate them entirely that it fuels. Paxton ultimately summed this all up in a single paragraph: “Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Fascism is both a complex and a simple phenomenon. In one sense, it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s made up of a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence and importance rise and fall according to the often fast-changing stages of development it goes through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human id upon the rest of humankind. Throughout history, it has only ever achieved real power when it was able to coalesce its many contentious and often warring factions under the banner of a unifying charismatic leader. The lack of such a figure at those periods when fascist tendencies were ascendant in the United States is one of the primary reasons historians believed that fascism never could obtain the “political space” required for obtaining power in the United States: “It can’t happen here.” That’s where Donald Trump comes in. Fascist elements and tendencies have always been part of the nation’s political DNA, even though many Americans cannot admit this. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of European fascism were borrowed from America, particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested in the form of genocidal violence toward indigenous peoples and racial and ethnic segregation. Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans; for the segregationist Jim Crow regime in the South, on which the Nazis modeled the Nuremberg Race Laws; and for the deployment of mob violence by the Ku Klux Klan, which was the inspiration for the murderous street thuggery of the German Brownshirts and the Italian Black-shirts. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German American who was a confidant of Hitler’s for a time, Hitler was “passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan … He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own.” And it was. Despite these tendencies, the United States had never yet given way to fascism at the national level. No doubt this, in the second half of the twentieth century at least, was due to horror at what ultimately transpired under the Hitler regime—namely, the Holocaust. We were appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism, because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced in Europe. We didn’t make the connection with our own piles of corpses, until the civil rights movement finally redressed our own national wrongs. However, that was a different generation, one that grew up in the shadow of World War II and experienced not only McCarthyism but also the civil rights struggle. Today, it is not uncommon to see Nazi regalia treated as a kind of fashion statement and outrageous genocidal racial sentiments tossed about like popcorn, dismissed as a kind of naughtiness. White nationalism and supremacism, nativism, misogyny, conspiracism, sexual paranoia, and xenophobic hatred, once embodied in German National Socialism, have experienced a revival in twenty-first-century America in the form of the alt-right and Patriot-militia movements. Relatively early in the campaign, a flood of observers began using the word “fascist” to describe Trump’s campaign. Not all of these concerns were coming from the left: in November 2015, a number of conservatives began sounding the alarm as well, especially in response to Trump’s vows to crack down on Muslim immigrants. “Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” the conservative pundit Max Boot, a Marco Rubio campaign adviser, tweeted in November 2015, after Trump had retweeted a graphic from #WhiteGenocide. Steve Deace, a Ted Cruz supporter and conservative Iowa radio host, tweeted in November 2015, “If Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump every conservative in the country would call it what it is—creeping fascism.” Even the staid, Republican-owned Seattle Times used the term to describe Trump in a November 2015 editorial: “There is a bottom line, and it’s simple: Trump’s campaign message reflects a kind of creeping fascism. It needs to be rejected.” Of course liberals, too, were alarmed: the historian Rick Perlstein, in a Washington Spectator piece titled “Donald Trump and the F Word,” explored the question of Trump’s fascist tendencies in depth, concluding that although Trump himself might not be a fascist, the phenomenon he was empowering was troublingly close to meeting Paxton’s condition of fascism at the power-acquisition stage. Trump was tapping into a wellspring of discontent: “If he’s just giving the people what they want, consider the people,” he wrote. “Consider what they want.” There is little doubt that there is a significant resemblance between Trump’s ascendance and that of previous fascist figures in history beyond Hitler, including Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Miklos Horthy, partly because the politics he engenders indeed fill out so many of the key components that collectively create genuine fascism, as we’ve come to understand it through deep historical scholarship. A careful examination of Trump’s campaign and post-election messages in light of Paxton’s definition reveals a raft of fascist traits: 1. Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign —the one that first catapulted him to the forefront in the race, in the polls, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow, and subsequent proposed program, to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (he used the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. The language he used to justify such plans— labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists”—is classic rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire group of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. Trump’s appeal ultimately is about forming a “purer” community, and it has been relentless and expansive: When an audience member asked him at a town-hall-style appearance when and how he was going to “get rid of all the Muslims,” he responded that “we’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.” He also claimed that if elected, he would send back all the refugees from Syria who had arrived in the United States: “If I win, they’re going back,” he told one of his approval-roaring campaign crowds. He told an interviewer that the Black Lives Matter movement was “looking for trouble” and later suggested that maybe a Black Lives Matter protester should have been “roughed up.” 2. Palingenetic ultranationalism, after race-baiting and ethnic fearmongering, is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming, “Make America Great Again.” Trump amplifies the slogan this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.” That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis: the promise of the phoenix-like rebirth of a nation from the ashes of its “golden age.” 3. Trump’s deep contempt for both liberalism and establishment conservatism allows him to go over the heads of established political alignments. The conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has noted, “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are … He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.” 4. Trump exploits a feeling of victimization, constantly proclaiming that America is in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world, and contends that this has occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians. 5. He himself embodies the concept of a lone male leader who considers himself a man of destiny. His refusal to acknowledge the lack of factual basis of many of his comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event. 6. Trump’s contempt for weakness was manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of John McCain as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his onstage mockery of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who has a disability. This list is thought-provoking—and it is meant to be thought-provoking—but as part of our exercise in examining the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy. For example, fascists have, in the past, always relied upon an independent, movement-driven paramilitary force capable of intimidating their opponents with various types of thuggery. In Italy these were the Blackshirts; Hitler imitated the Italian units with the formation of the Brownshirts, the Storm Division. Trump has no such paramilitary force at his disposal. Members of various white-supremacist organizations and bona fide paramilitary organizations such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percent movement are avid Trump backers. Trump has never made known any desire to form an alliance with or to make use of such groups. However, via wink-wink nudge-nudge cues Trump has on occasion encouraged or failed to condemn spontaneous violence by some of his supporters against both protesters at rallies and groups they consider undesirable, such as when “enthusiastic supporters” committed anti-Latino hate crimes. Encouraging extralegal vigilante violence can be classified as a fascistic response. Yet a serious fascist would have called upon not just the crowd to respond with violence, but also his paramilitary allies to respond with retaliatory strikes. Trump didn’t do that. Another perhaps more basic reason that Trump cannot be categorized as a true fascist is that he is not an ideologue who acts out of a rigid adherence to a consistent worldview, as do all real fascists. Trump’s only real ideology is worship of himself, “the Donald.” He will do and say just about anything that appeals to any receptive segment of the American body politic to attract their support. One segment of the body could be called the nation’s id—groups that live on paranoia and hatred regarding those different from themselves and also the political establishment. There’s no question that these supporters brought a visceral energy to the limited universe of the GOP primary, though I don’t know anyone who, in 2015, expected that such a campaign could survive the oxygen and exposure of a general election. Those observers, including me, were all proved wrong. Few observers had any clue how successfully the Alt-America worldview could become in muscling its way into the national spotlight. However, the reason why Trump has never yet called upon the shock troops of a paramilitary wing for support, and why he has attempted to keep an arm’s-length distance from the overtly racist white nationalists and neo-Nazis who have become some of his most enthusiastic backers, is simple: he isn’t really one of them. What he is, says Chip Berlet, is a classic right-wing nativist populist demagogue: “His ideology and rhetoric are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party, or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism.” Trump himself is not a fascist primarily because he lacks any kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology, nor has he agitated for a totalitarian one-party state. What he represents instead is a sort of gut-level reactionism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism. But that does not mean that the movement he has unleashed is not potentially dangerously proto-fascist, nor that he is not dangerous to American democracy. Indeed, he has now proved to be more dangerous than an outright fascist, because such a figure would be far less appealing and far less likely to succeed in the current milieu. What Trump has succeeded in doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, has been to make the large and growing number of proto-fascist groups in America larger and more vicious. In other words he is simultaneously responding to and creating the conditions that could easily lead to the genuine growth of fascism. The journalist Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–1945 (1955), describes how these changes happen not overnight, but incrementally: “You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty … “Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” We lose our humanity incrementally, in small acts of meanness. The Nazis’ regime ultimately embodied the ascension of demonic inhumanity, but they didn’t get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies. And this has been happening to America—in particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party—for a very long time. Donald Trump represents the culmination of a trend that really began in the 1990s. That was when we first saw the popular rise of eliminationist hate talk. It was first heard in Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 declaration of a “culture war”; it was then wielded with thoughtless glee and great regularity by an increasingly rabid set of right-wing pundits led by Rush Limbaugh; then it was deeply codified by a new generation of talking heads who have subsequently marched across the sound stages at Fox News. It surfaced particularly with the birth of the Tea Party, which became perhaps the single most significant manifestation of right-wing populism in the nation’s history, certainly since the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Trump aligned himself very early with the Tea Party elements, remarking in 2011, “I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party.” And indeed he does—in particular, its obeisance to the captains of industry and their untrammeled right to make profits at the expense of everyone else. Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they, too, can someday become rich and famous—because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It’s all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot. The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. One might be inclined to dismiss it as a kind of “sucker populism.” But that would be to overlook the reasons for its appeal, which run much deeper, and are really in many ways more a product of people’s attraction to an authoritarian system. Those psychological needs often are a product of the levels of general public fear, much more so than of economic well-being or other factors. That fear is generated by a large number of factors, including the spread of unfiltered social media, as well as the rapid decline in basic journalistic standards of factuality in the larger mainstream media, as well as the mainstream media’s increasing propensity to promote information that, producers say, reflects what people want to see rather than what responsible journalistic ethics would consider more important: what they need to know. That’s how Alt-America became so powerful a political force. This right-wing populism, largely lurking on the periphery and gradually building an audience, was whipped into life by Ron Paul’s and Sarah Palin’s 2008 candidacies, and then became fully manifest as a national movement in short order with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. Not only was the Tea Party an overtly right-wing populist movement, it soon became a major conduit for a revival of the populist Patriot-militia movement. Many of these “Tea Party Patriots” are now Oath Keepers and Three Percenters whose members widely supported Trump’s candidacy, and are now vowing to defend his presidency with their own arms. Most of these extremists are only one step removed, ideologically speaking, from the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists of the racist right, and both of those segments of the right lean heavily on nativist and authoritarian rhetoric. It’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism—they are closely related. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist. Thus, Donald Trump may not be a fascist, but with his vicious brand of right-wing populism he is not just empowering the latent fascist elements in America, he is leading his followers merrily down a path that leads directly to fascism. If the final result is fascism, the distinction between right-wing populism and fascism is not really significant except in understanding how it happened in the first place. The United States, thanks to Trump, has now reached a fork in the road where it must choose down which path its future lies—with democracy and its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism (if history serves as a example, the fascistic populists will eventually overwhelm their plutocrat sponsors). Trump may not be a fascist, but he is an authoritarian who, intentionally or not, is empowering the existing proto-fascist elements in American society; even more dangerously, his alt-right–Tea Party brand of right-wing populism is helping these groups grow their ranks and their potential to recruit new members by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making thuggery seem normal and inevitable. And that is a serious problem. How can you talk with a diehard Alt-American if you are a dedicated mainstream liberal? Many Americans confronted that question over their family Thanksgiving tables a couple of weeks after the election. The conversations often did not turn out well. But it is no longer a question we can pretend away, perhaps by choosing to stay away from those tables altogether. The American radical right is a real force with real power—both political and cultural—and it is no longer alarmist to point that out. Nor is it a problem that we can hope to attack head-on through blunt political force, though without question the barrage of attacks on Americans’ civil rights that very likely now await us in the coming years will require our most vocal opposition. It will be incumbent upon this political opposition to be totally dedicated to the principles of nonviolent resistance. During the anti-Trump protests that immediately followed his election, the liberal mainstream media characterized a handful of violent incidents as riots. That undermines the aims of the anti-Trump protest. Fascist movements have a long-documented history of converting any violence they encounter after having provoked it into a justification for further violence that far outpaces anything that the opposing left might be capable of mustering. The rise of the radical right is a symptom of problems more deep-seated than the purely political level. Fascism, at its base, is fueled by hate and the pure objectification of an utter lack of empathy for other human beings. Thus, the negation of this negative emotion is not love, but empathy. Confronting fascism—as J. K. Rowling suggests with a theme running through her popular “Harry Potter” series of children’s books—means first embracing humanity, both ours and theirs; from that embrace we can make the personal choices that define what kind of people we are. We need to be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, even if we do not agree with them, for our own sake as well as theirs. Harry’s experiences observing young Tom Riddle, the nascent Lord Voldemort, through the magical “Pensieve” gave these stories a surprisingly profound depth of meaning. Empathy as an essential political principle actually comes naturally to progressives as a policy imperative. Certainly the liberal social policies that have created wealthy liberal urban enclaves that were the base of the Democratic Party’s support in the 2016 election reflect that empathetic impulse, in the form of broad social safety nets, supportive urban-oriented programs, high-powered educational systems, and bustling economies. The impulse behind most modern liberal programs has been to raise the standard of living for ordinary people and to defend the civil rights of everyone, especially those who have not enjoyed them for much of the nation’s history. That’s a fairly empathetic agenda. Liberals’ dealings regarding rural and Rust Belt America, however, have over the past forty years largely been characterized by at best benign neglect, in terms of both economic policy and culture: wealthy urbanites do often look down their noses at rural and working-class citizens and consider their concerns and attitudes at best antiquated and at worst backward and stupid. This political disconnect emerges in all kinds of cultural expressions, from movie stereotypes to thoughtless remarks from liberal politicians. Which is perhaps why the conversations around our Thanksgiving tables were so deeply awkward, if not deeply disturbing, in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise election. And yet that is the kind of place where the deeper change that needs to occur in our relationships with each other as Americans can happen. One healing conversation at a time. If Americans of goodwill—including mainstream conservatives who recognize how their movement has been hijacked by radicals—can learn to start talking to each other again, and maybe even pull a few Alt-Americans out of their abyss along the way, then perhaps we can start to genuinely heal our divisions instead of relegating each other into social oblivion and, maybe eventually, civil war. Some kind of cultural or political civil war is clearly already on many minds. The bottom-line issue is really an epistemological one: how is a rational exchange possible when we can’t even agree on what constitutes a fact and factuality? Most liberals (certainly not all) tend to prefer traditional standards of factuality and evidence in which concrete information from reliable sources is accepted as fact, and scientific evidence obtained through peer-reviewed methods is considered the gold standard for presentable evidence in a discussion. Pretty much the opposite is true in Alt-America. Science and scientists are viewed with suspicion as participants in the “conspiracy,” and so their contributions are instantly discarded as worthless, as is the work of any kind of academic in any field, including history and the law. The only sources of information they accept as “factual” are tendentious right-wing propaganda riddled with false facts, wild distortions, and risible conspiracist hyperbole. Fox News—whose mass failures regarding factual accuracy are now the stuff of legend—is considered by Alt-Americans to be the only “balanced and accurate” news source, though even it is viewed with deep suspicion by alt-righters, Patriots, and Alex Jones acolytes. Breaking through that wall is at best difficult, and in the case of dedicated and fanatical Alt- Americans, probably not worth the personal costs in terms of the emotional abuse they like to heap on those with whom they disagree. But finding people who remain within reach—those for whom common decency and respectful discourse and Christian kindness are still important values, even though they may have voted for Trump—may provide an avenue for deeper social change. At some point, there will have to be a discussion about just what is a fact and what isn’t, because that eventually will determine whether or not you can ever come to a rational common ground. But getting there first will take a lot of empathy. The communications expert Sharon Ellison specializes in what she calls “powerful nondefensive communication”; she has developed an effective empathy-driven model that she has shown can be effective in at least breaking down the interpersonal barriers that modern politics have erected, and upon which the radical right thrives. The starting place, she says, is curiosity: "Instead of blasting Trump or insulting the morality or intelligence of his supporters, first, just get curious. You don’t have to agree; you’re simply gathering information and trying to understand where they’re coming from, even if you believe they’re deeply misguided. "Make it a dialogue, not a debate or an inquisition. No matter how true and rational your analysis is, force-feeding it will not go down well. Nor will a premeditated series of sugar-coated questions designed to subtly lead the person to “get it.” The right question, skillfully and non-aggressively posed, could prompt someone to gain unexpected insights, and when they realize something for themselves, they can more easily accept it. "Your questions should be very specific but posed in a non-judgmental way. (Note that I’m calling the questions “specific” rather than “pointed,” which implies that a question is a weapon.)" Ellison cautions against using general, open-ended questions such as whether people can ever learn to get along. Some of us gravitate toward these because they feel softer, but they can wind up serving as an invitation to rant. The key to understanding people who have become drawn into the Alt-America universe is the role that the hero myth plays in framing their worldview. Dedicated Patriots and white nationalists, just like the hate criminals they inspire, genuinely envision themselves as heroes. They are saving the country, or perhaps the white race, or perhaps just their local community. And so anything, anything they might do in that act of defense is excusable, even laudable. This embrace of the heroic is what ultimately poisons us all. The sociologist James Aho has explored this concept of the hero: "The warrior needs an enemy. Without one there is nothing against which to fight, nothing from which to save the world, nothing to give his life meaning. What this means, of course, is that if an enemy is not ontologically present in the nature of things, one must be manufactured. The Nazi needs an international Jewish banker and conspiratorial Mason to serve his purposes of self- aggrandizement, and thus sets about creating one, at least unconsciously. By the same token, the radical Zionist locks himself in perverse symbiosis with his Palestinian “persecutors,” the Communist with his “imperialistic capitalist running dogs,” the capitalist with his Communist “subversives.” Aho goes on to describe how the enemy is constructed as embodying “putrefaction and death,” is experienced “as issuing from the ‘dregs’ of society,” whose “visitation on our borders is tantamount to impending pestilence … The enemy’s presence in our midst is a pathology of the social organism serious enough to require the most far-reaching remedies: quarantine, political excision, or, to use a particularly revealing expression, liquidation and expulsion.” What Aho describes is a dynamic latent in all sectors of American society but finding a virulent expression in right-wing extremism. It is one in which both sides—the heroic exemplars of the far right and their named “enemies,” that is, Jews, civil-rights advocates, and the government— essentially exchange roles in their respective perceptions; the self is always heroic, the other always the enemy. Each sees the other as the demonic enemy, feeding the other’s fears and paranoias in an increasingly threatening spiral that eventually breaks out in the form of real violence. There is, as Aho suggests, a way to escape this dynamic, to break the cycle. And it requires, on the part of those seeking to oppose this kind of extremism, a recognition of their own propensity toward naming the enemy and adopting the self-aggrandizing pose of the hero: "As [the cultural anthropologist] Ernest Becker has convincingly shown, the call to heroism still resonates in modern hearts. However, we are in the habit of either equating heroism with celebrity (“TV Actress Tops List of Students’ Heroes”) or caricaturing the hero as a bluff-and-swagger patriot/soldier making the world safe for, say, Christian democracy. In these ways heroism is portrayed as a rather happy if not entirely risk-free venture that earns one public plaudits. Today we are asked to learn that, in the deepest and truest sense, heroism is really none of these things, but a largely private vocation requiring stamina, discipline, responsibility, and above all courage. Not just the ascetic courage to cleanse our personal lives of what we have been taught is filth, or even less to cleanse society of the alleged carriers of this filth, but, as Jung displayed, the fortitude to release our claim on moral purity and perfection. At a personal and cultural level, I believe this is the only way to transcend the logic of enemies." For all of its logic and love of science, modern liberalism as a social force is weighed down by its most consistent flaw: an overweening belief in its own moral superiority, its heroism, as it were. (Not, of course, that conservatives are any better in this regard; if one factors in the religious right and the “moral values” vote, they are objectively worse.) This tendency becomes especially noticeable in urban liberal societies, which for all their enlightenment and love of tolerance are maddeningly smug, intolerant of the “ignorance” of their rural and “fly-over country” counterparts. It’s not an omnipresent attitude, but it is pervasive enough that others’ perceptions of it are certainly not without basis. There’s a similar stigma attached to religious beliefs as well, especially among more secular liberals, and that in turn has given birth to a predictable counterreaction that is only partially a result of misunderstanding. If we look at the 2016 electoral map, and see all those red rural counties and come to terms with the reasons why none of them ever turn blue, it’s important to come to terms with our own prejudices and our easy willingness to treat our fellow Americans—the ones who are not like us—with contempt and disrespect. Simply beginning the change will require both humility and empathy. That’s not to suggest that we respond to racist or violent provocations with touchy-feely attempts at “reaching out” to the other side; these are always rejected with contempt, or viewed as a sign of weakness. Certainly it does not mean we need to “reach out” to the rural haters and the conspiracy-spewing Patriots. I grew up in rural America, and I’m all too familiar with the bullies and swaggering ignoramuses who hold too much sway in that culture, and whose politics and worldview are now ascendant beyond their wildest imaginings (and they are wild, trust me). There’s really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump. The only thing they understand, in the end, is brute political force: being thrashed at the ballot box, and in the public discourse. So it is vital for liberals, progressives, moderates, and genuine conservatives to link arms in the coming years to fight back against the fascist tide. It will require organizing, and it will require real outreach. And if this coalition wants to succeed, its members will need to break the vicious circular social dynamic that right-wing extremists always create, particularly in rural communities where their bullying style of discourse can stifle honest discourse. To do that, some self-reflection will go a long way. Respecting those from rural areas, those who hold deep religious beliefs, doesn’t force progressives to compromise their own beliefs or standards. It simply means being part of a democracy, which is enriched by its diversity. It means once again empowering the many rural progressives who have lived there all along, fighting the good fight against all odds, because they are the people who are best equipped to have those many dinner-table conversations. Certainly traditional rural values such as communitarianism, common decency, mutual respect, and respect for tradition should have a place among all that diversity that liberals are fond of celebrating. Because until urban progressives learn to accord them that respect, they are doomed to remain trapped in the vicious cycle being fueled on both sides. For liberals and moderates, breaking out may be a matter of survival—especially as the rabid right’s fantasies begin coming to fruition. Alt-America, thanks to Donald Trump, is no longer merely the stuff of these fantasies. It will take the best of us, the most decent part of us—the better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln invoked in his first inaugural address—to prevent right-wing dreams from becoming realities. David Neiwert

[onestowatch]

The Albums That Got Us Through School | Staff Picks

Life would not be the same without music. That sentiment holds twice as true when it comes to talking about one’s school years. At a time when you are going through seemingly-infinite transitional phases and overwhelming confusion is at an all-time high, music exists as both an escape and connecting force to the world outside your immediate purview; music can become something larger than yourself. 

Quite possibly the only thing in existence capable of connecting The Plastics and the rest of us, how would middle school, high school, and college us existed without those albums that quite literally defined teenage us? After all, we all didn’t grow up with lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to. So, we asked ourselves what one album served as our guiding light through those tumultuous school years. 

Avril Lavigne - Let Go

From the palpable agony in “Losing Grip,” to the innocent infatuation in “Sk8er boi,” to the tear-worthy loneliness in “I’m with You,” there’s no album that guided me through the early 2000s more than Avril Lavigne’s Let Go. Introducing an emo side of pop music, Lavigne’s dark and relatable lyrics undoubtedly rescued countless young women in the face of hormonal angst. Truth be told, I still bump it in the car more often than not.

-Yasmin Damoui

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

In terms of pure listening time, Panic! at the Disco’s debut or Green Day’s American Idiot likely takes the prize for scoring my school years. However, no album embodied the overwhelming teenage urge to grow up quite like Neutral Milk Hotel’s landmark album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Released over a decade before I would ever dare to play Jeff Magnum’s haunting fuzz-folk’s meditations over the school’s PA system (the result of a misguided initiative to allow students greater control over the lunch playlist) to this day, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea exists as a nostalgia-ridden reminder to days and nights spent trying to uncover a greater, hidden meaning behind all the noise.

-Maxamillion Polo

Drake - Thank Me Later

From late nights on Facebook writing statuses dedicated to my crush to "Shut it Down," to queuing up "Miss Me" on the bus to school so that it'd start playing as soon as I stepped off... damn. That album really has everything. The braggadocios, the late-night simp tunes, a fun, flirty track for the ladies. You name it baby. It shaped me into the versatile king that I am today, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

-Green Lee

Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

Masterfully melding the bellicose but anxious feelings of my wintery youth, the downward spiral lyrically guided me to the heights of teenage cliché. I stopped playing sports. I became deliberate and moody at house parties. I wrote terrible facsimile poetry to my much prettier and interesting girlfriends. I joined bands one week, quit them the next. All the bad decisions buoyed by this great album, my adolescence summarized succinctly, you could have it all, my empire of dirt.

-David O’Connor

Kanye West - Graduation

The album that got me through college was Kanye West’s Graduation. I was a junior in college when this song was out and it signified a lot of change in my life which coincided with Kanye’s progress in musical prowess. The nights we would drive around off-campus listening to “Flashing Lights” are some nights I’ll remember forever. Kanye’s legendary ‘Glow In The Dark’ tour was based on this album cycle. I remember driving two hours on a weeknight just to catch this show near my hometown with three of my friends. This moments I had around this album will always mean a lot to me.

-Malcolm Gray

Blink-182 - Blink-182

Blink-182’s self-titled album was undoubtedly the album that got me through my pre-teen and teenage years. Growing up in the Northshore of Chicago (yes the same Northshore that Mean Girls was based off of, and yes that movie was crazy accurate about the kids I was surrounded by), it was hard to find who you actually are in the midst of rumors, bullying and cliques. The album showed growth in maturity, while still sticking to individualism. Unlike most of Blink’s albums, this album showed a more mature side to their art. That was super important for me to remember, simply because it prevented me from getting warped into the egotistical bubble most of my peers found themselves in. It was also the album that really inspired me to get involved with music and touring, so I have to give those guys in Blink some mad props.

-Joe Leggitino

Bring Me The Horizon - Sempiternal

No band was able to simultaneously capture and validate the whirlwind of emotions I experienced on a daily basis in my early teenage years quite like Bring Me the Horizon. Their fourth studio album, Sempiternal, included songs such as “Can You Feel My Heart” and “Shadow Moses,” which contain brutally honest lyrics that related to my internal struggles in a way music had never done before. Furthermore, because of my newfound love for Bring Me the Horizon, I was welcomed into the punk/metal community with open arms. Gaining acceptance into this new community fundamentally changed my high school experience because as frontman Oli Sykes said, “Other hurting people can be the best therapy.”  

-Alissa Williams

Shania Twain - UP!

I got this huge purple boombox one year for Christmas and got really into CDs. I found this Shania Twain CD at a Best Buy clearance aisle one day with my Dad and had it on repeat for years growing up. I’d like to blame Shania for my love of country and fire of independence from men.

-Jenna Singer

Death Cab for Cutie - PLANS

PLANS hit me just when I got my driver’s license: my first legal stamp of autonomy. Driving – by myself – to these tracks gave me a hall pass to feelings I needed to feel, in my own space, in my own time.

-Alexa Schoenfeld

Kelela - Take Me Apart

When it comes to methods of surviving the emotional (and financial) rollercoaster that is college, never would I have thought to even consider the act of being taken apart to be one of the most important mechanisms for endurance. From the austere yet liberating lyrics of “Frontline” to the end-of-the-war melodies in “Altadena,” Kelela sends listeners on an emotional, intergalactic journey through the stages of dealing with a loss in her 2017 release Take Me Apart. If I learned one thing about surviving college from this album, it's that it is okay for things to fall apart sometimes, because destruction is often a conduit for rebirth (if only that also held true for the financial loss, though).

-Bianca Brown

Arctic Monkeys - AM

Nothing throws me back more than Arctic Monkey's album AM. From "Do I Wanna Know?" to "Snap Out of It," every song on that album makes me feel like an angsty tumblr teen again. Without that album, I doubt I would've been even half as edgy going through high school.

-Alison Wu

Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

I didn't know indie-pop music until I heard this album. It was the first vinyl I bought, the first real band I was obsessed with. At the end of 8th grade, I found their project on Youtube and listened to it up and down in the era before ads. It ushered me into high school where I'm pretty sure I saw the world in exclusively pastel colors and thought I was enlightened because everyone else was still listening to The Black Eyed Peas. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix made me an indie kid -- I started snowboarding, wearing a lot of grey, and only listened to blog radio after this. Phoenix is still my everything.

-Precious Kato

A Day To Remember - Common Courtesy

Ever since I first discovered A Day To Remember, they’ve remained one of my favorite bands and this record specifically got me through high school. Every track on this album has an important message and it’s definitely worth listening through in its entirety. Whether you’re going through a tough time or just needing some heavy-ish music in your life, ADTR gives it all to you.

-Alissa Arunarsirakul

#avril lavigne #neutral milk hotel #drake #kanye west #nine inch nails #Blink 182 #bring me the horizon #a day to remember #phoenix #arctic monkeys #shania twain #Death Cab For Cutie #kelea #soul #alternative #pop #folk

[warborn-tragedy]

the difference between the Revenant and Phoenix AUs is that, while they both regard "Pixie" as 'dead', Phoenix treats it as something that, while regretful, allows her to move on and start anew. Something that gives her a fresh start once she finally manages to 'move on'.

But Revenant? The death of "Pixie" is her damnation. The very thing that keeps her trapped in a hell she has no real escape from, preventing her from ever having a scrap of 'normalcy' again.

#study › phoenix ⊹ this destruction will be your rebirth #study › revenant ⊹ the illusion of freedom #yeah i'm perfectly normal over everything today what makes you ask-

[tarotlesbean-blog]

today i set a theme for the month of may. i’ve been thinking about it for awhile and meditating and today i did a monthly tarot reading which turned out to be interesting. i used my quantum tarot cards which i’ve been very drawn to lately. i’ve done dozens of readings with these cards but never drawn the two extra cards of the deck, the phoenix and the universe--until now! 

i forgot where i got this spread from but i thought it would be useful for the coming month. may’s theme will be me and my personal development, especially when it comes to relationships (which i’ve found to be very dysfunctional in the past few years, resulting in me feeling anxious and withdrawing from everybody). 

so here’s the reading. (behind a cut because of length)

1. what answer is right in front of me? (top left)

the phoenix. what does this card represent to me? rising from the ashes, shedding your skin, starting anew, rebirth. the quantum tarot deck comes with two extra cards, one of which is the mythological phoenix, a bird that rises from the ashes of it’s predecessor. as i’m not used to this card, i had to do a little bit of reading and reflecting, but even before that the card conjured up an image of rebirth and starting anew in a beautiful, fiery way. don’t be afraid of new beginnings. don’t be afraid of the ugliness and discomfort that growth brings because the end result will be something breath-taking. according to wikipedia, the phoenix is associated with the sun and the sun just happens to be my favourite tarot card. i do feel a strong connection to that card but my personal interpretation is that the phoenix is a destructive force--and destruction is sometimes needed for growth--while the sun’s energy is more harmonious and life-sustaining. 

the phoenix reminds me of one of my favourite quotes:

“nature grows through breaking things down, through cracking things open, through opening up, spilling out, and then blossoming. growth can feel like a destructive process. that’s because it is. you have to crack open your old self for new aspects to bloom.” 

- emily maroutian

according to the booklet that came with the deck the phoenix represents “[recommencing] the journey through the major arcana with the all the innocence and openness of the fool, but this time round we carry the memory of everything we have already learned.” 

“what has been reborn in you?” it asks.

2. how do i cultivate hidden truths? (top centre)

the star (xvii). the universal consciousness, healing, meditation, spiritual awakening, creative inspiration, the chakra system.. such a beautiful card. i consider it a card of healing energies, basically. i personally find meditation to be extremely healing and balancing and i feel like the card is advising me to continue with that habit. the star is connected with universal energies, the pool which all things draw from, and i strongly feel that energy in nature, so i probably should spend more time in nature as well. i think should meditate and reflect on things that are healing to me to best utilise the star’s advise, and focus less on material reality because to me the star is about the higher mind (even though i find meditation to be extremely grounding.. or rather a practice that harmonises the material and the spiritual). 

3. what limiting belief must i release? (top right)

the universe. yet another extra card of the deck, marked with the infinity symbol <3 i had to acquaintance myself with this card too as it’s completely new to me but the booklet that came with the deck describes the universe as “a higher vibration of the world” and it “asks us to expand our awareness still further”.

“it requires a paradigm shift in our thinking, a realisation that the reality we perceive is but a tiny component of all that is.”

“can you exist in a world without limits?”, it asks.

i’m finding hard to find words to describe how i feel about this card in this position. it feels extremely powerful. like something that i cannot grasp quite yet, but it is obviously asking me to think about the existence of limits to begin with.

4. am i willing to change? (centre left)

ace of cups. aces--beginning of a journey, the first spark of potential that hasn’t materialised yet. cups--emotions, spirituality. the spirit, the subconscious mind. there’s definitely potential for (emotional and spiritual) change but i have to make use of that creative energy that flows from the spirit. change won’t happen on it’s own. i have to do the work myself and it’s up to me to take that first step.

5. what would i embrace if i allowed myself to? (centre right)

the world (xxi). the end of the journey, involution and evolution, the superconscious--the final stage of the cosmic consciousness. on a material level i’m interpreting this card as a sign that it is okay to let go and move on to new things. it’s okay to admit that it’s the end of this certain journey i’ve been on and to embrace endings and new beginnings. i moved back to my home town (of my teenage years and early twenties) four years ago because i missed back, i missed my friends, and i felt like i had unfinished business here. now, while i love it here and it feels very much like home and appreciate a lot things here, i do yearn for new experiences--whether that means new experiences physically (like moving to a new location or something along those lines) or mentally/spiritually remains to be seen. i can let go and embrace new things that come my way. however, i do feel like there is a spiritual aspect to this card as well.. but that is something that i should meditate on to gain better clarity. 

6. can i look at myself and see what the universe sees? (bottom left)

three of cups. threes--growth, creativity, abundance. cups--emotions, spirituality. friends, teamwork, socialising, synergy between like-minded people. hmm, this is an interesting card. i’ve been worrying a lot about being all alone in the world while everybody else is connecting with each other, becoming friends, dating, getting married and all that.. some of which is not my thing (like dating + marriage, though i’m not “opposed” to love of course, ..plus i really struggle with friendship) but i worry about being the only one of my kind (on several levels of being). while i’m not lonely, i do sometimes wish i had people i could talk to and connect with (on a deeper level, more spiritually, more intellectually). three of cups is a positive card so i guess the universe sees me in synergy with like-minded people even though i’m not seeing that right now?

7. what possibility exists that i can’t possibly imagine or comprehend at the moment? (bottom right)

the lovers (vi). powerful attraction, the cooperation between the conscious and the subconscious, harmony, duality. i guess this card is traditionally read as, well, lovers, but i always see it as powerful force of attraction of some sort. a card of manifesting. it also represents profound harmony between two parts. i have to meditate on this card but there’s clearly a theme in this whole reading--healing, rebirth, new beginnings--and i guess the lovers is telling me that harmony is possible, and that powerful attraction is doing it’s work--ask and it is given.

+ i also drew two extra cards, as i often do, one from the top of the deck, representing the conscious mind, and the one from the bottom of the deck, representing the subconscious. 

my conscious mind, represented by the devil (xv), seems to be well aware of the stuckness and the bondage that i feel i am in right now. the devil is an interesting card because it can represent physical bondage such as addiction or financial limitations, but often it refers to the mental prison created by your own mind which you then enact in the material world, making excuses for yourself and staying stuck in situations where you could walk away from if you just took the initiative. the devil tells you are stuck but that feeling is often self-imposed. 

the subconscious, represented by the moon (xviii).. the word that first comes to my mind when i draw this card is fear. fear is a useful emotion in an evolutionary sense, it is there to protect you. however, it can play tricks on you and even keep you from doing things that are good for you. the moon is also linked to dreams and visions, which may mean that your fears are unfounded, not based on reality. the moon represents the mysterious and the unknown but it reminds you not to be bound by your fear, though a healthy dose of it is probably good for you.

the past few months i’ve been feeling like i’m stepping into a new way of being, starting on a completely new journey, though fearing it at the same time and feeling somewhat stuck in my current situation, so this reading feels pretty accurate and offers great insights. also, last month’s reading and this reading now were filled with major arcana cards so there’s a lot of potential and great opportunities for deeper growth. lots of powerful cards here guiding me on my journey.. i’m extremely appreciative and grateful <3

i have to study the cards and their synergies more but this is a pretty good start for may! can’t wait to see where the month leads me.

// ETA

i was examining the synergies between the cards and i think it’s interesting how the star (healing) crowns the ace of cups (beginnings) and the world (endings) and the two cards connect to three of cups (which is basically something that i really want: synergies between like-minded individuals). i’ve always considered the threes as foundational cards, like laying the bricks, because they are first cards after the harmonious and balanced twos. so there’s healing to be done with both beginnings and endings before the three of cups.

also, there’s a line connecting the phoenix (rebirth) and the ace of cups (beginnings) to the three of cups, and a line connecting the universe (the super charged world basically) and the world to the three of cups. so the left side is beginnings and the right side is endings. 

the line of cards at the top is the phoenix (rebirth), the star (healing) and the universe (a higher vibration of the world card). work to be done on a higher level of being.

the second line is the ace of cups and the world. manifestations in the more material realm. both require a human conduit to do/have done their work.

the third line is the three of cups, highlighted by the lovers as if it’s saying yes to all the harmony and attraction in this reading?

#tarot #monthly reading #personal journey #april 2018 #may 2018 #2

[warborn-tragedy]

ROMANTIC GESTURES

bold what applies to your muse. italicize if there's potential / it depends. cross if never applies.

holding hands · buying flowers · cooking · cuddles · writing a poem / song · holding door open · tying shoe laces · sharing a milkshake with two straws · offering their jacket when it's cold · kissing in the rain · publicly confessing love · long walks at the beach · doing the titanic pose on a boat · taking cute pictures in a photo booth · sharing a taxi / uber · kissing the back of their hand · slow dancing · getting tickets of their favorite artist / sports team /other · introducing them to their parents · lighting candles · flower petals on bed · love letters ·star gazing · brushing / doing their hair · picnics · teaching them to play an instrument / sport while gently guiding their hands · compliments · late night drives · taking selfies together · drawing them · self-made gifts · massages · proposing with a family heirloom ring · lending them their favorite book to read · paying for dinner / coffee · mixtapes / playlists · surprise birthday parties · feeding them · handing them keys to their apartment · making space in drawer for their clothes when they stay over · sharing a blanket · couple costumes · tucking a hair strand behind their ear · running after them at the airport / keeping them from leaving · moving cities to be together · blowing a kiss · breakfast in bed · defending them in a fight (verbally / physically) · joint bubblebaths · dropping the L-bomb ("I love you") ·dedicating a song at the karaoke bar to them · wearing their clothes ·yawning before putting an arm around them while watching a movie · granting them the last bite (from meal)

#study › phoenix ⊹ this destruction will be your rebirth #dash games › i've got your back #yes i'm doing au red before main verse but shush #this is my blog i make the rules /ref; lh