Welcome to my blog and website!

My name’s Eliza Marie (she/her), and I’m in my late thirties. I’m from Ohio, but I’m cursed to wander between America and Eastern Europe.

My interest in the occult began with Tarot in 1999. I started exploring magic a couple years later, and I never looked back.

This stuff takes you in weird directions if you stick with it. The road twists through amazing and terrifying places. I guess it isn’t called the crooked path for nothing.

I started this blog in autumn of 2014 to share my ramblings, read other ramblings, and meet new people.

Looking for something specific?

Below, you’ll find links to my article listings, organized in categories. I try to update these often, but I’m not as active as I used to be. Still, I want to keep this site as organized as possible.

• For Newbies
• Magic
• Divination
• Grimoire and Spells
• Book Reviews and Lists
• Tangential Topics

My askbox is (typically) open, along with other means of contact. You can find it here. Please read the page before contacting me, though.

You can find all my original content and commentary tagged as #eliza.txt.

Please check out my credits page for links to those who helped with this site in various ways, as well as bloggers I admire, on Tumblr and elsewhere.

When you read the articles on this site, please be mindful of their original publication date. I’ve kept this blog for nine years. I would hope I’ve grown and changed over the course of that decade!

Keeping this blog is a hobby for me, and I’m not a ‘professional’ witch, Tarot reader, or anything of that sort. I don’t make money from this. I’ve offered Tarot readings online in the (distant) past, but not now. I enjoy sharing my perspectives here, and I hope you enjoy reading them.

This pinned post was initially written on March 8th, 2023, and will (hopefully) be updated regularly. The most recent major update to the site’s layout and infrastructure happened on Groundhog Day, 2023.

If you’re having trouble viewing this site, please visit the mobile version here.

Thanks for visiting, and I hope you have a great day.

amerwitch:

traegorn:

breelandwalker:

brandnewcherryvapeflavor:

can a witch with more experience please help me understand why my curses work but my love spells don’t…

Let’s talk about it, witchling!

What are you trying to accomplish with your curses? What are you trying to accomplish with your love spells? Is one more feasible than the other? Is one more direct or focused than the other? Is one of them timebound, with a deadline built in? How much relative oomph are you putting into the spells?

I find that baneful magic often works more readily because of the amount of emotional energy behind it. Rage, sadness, pain, and spite can be powerful resources. Plus, with curses, there’s usually a fairly specific idea of what you want to happen and to whom.

Love spells can be more complicated. Sometimes circumstances must align before the desired result of a spell - any spell - can come to fruition. With romance and attraction spells, this may mean waiting until the right person is in close enough proximity, physically or socially, for you to meet. Even with spells for friendship or admiration, there may be a delay. And sometimes the circumstances just aren’t right and the spell won’t work.

It’s possible that your baneful workings are more visibly effective because the circumstances are already in place and there’s more emotional energy behind the spells. Your love spells may be just as sincere, but if the circumstances aren’t right yet, they may take more time, or you may just need to try again later.

(I’ve only cast one romantic love spell, but that was enough. I asked the universe to bring me the person that was right for me, and I made a list of what I wanted. It took a little while to work, but boy did it work.)

If you have more questions, ask away! Love spells aren’t my specialty, but I’ll try to help.

Or, in other words – It’s easier to poke someone in the eye than it is to get them to like you.

Unless their turn on is getting poked in the eye.

maddiviner:

A person can worship a goddess and still be a raging misogynist.

I see this all the fucking time, too, and the “b-but I’m pagan!” line does get trotted out.

Yeah, no. I don’t care how devoted you (claim you) are to Hecate/Freya/Babalon etc, I care how you treat flesh-and-blood people.

You can’t pretend that “worshiping a goddess” makes someone, by default, not a misogynist. I see guys who have a (weird) notion of “divine femininity;” a perfect nurturing caregiver of sorts. They then get irate when a woman won’t take that role for them.

They expect a (very narrowly-defined) goddess, and when they don’t get one, they get mad. I end up reading their rants online as a bystander. A lot of these guys will claim the woman has somehow betrayed them, isn’t pagan enough, or is an evil supernatural being?! Vampire? It’s sometimes something like that.

On another note? Many transphobes are also very loud about how they “worship goddesses.” They’re, of course, equally loud about their disrespect for women, though. There’s some “trad pagan” types, too (or whatever they’re now called) who believe in goddesses - but also believe that women belong in the kitchen.

So yeah. Don’t assume someone’s safe and not bigoted simply because they worship Demeter or whoever. Don’t let them claim that their goddess patron absolves any shitty behavior. This is a thing that keeps popping up, and I think people should be mindful of it. Don’t let people like the above act as if worshiping Minerva, Aphrodite, or Juno (or whoever) gives them a free pass to be a bigot.

Also? A whole fucking civilization can worship goddesses and still be a terrible place for women.

That doesn’t mean that those pantheons are misogynistic. It also doesn’t mean that those reconstructing the religions are misogynists. It means that it’s possible to have systemic goddess worship and misogyny together.

Don’t give me that “b-but in some very specific scenarios, rich women could even *gasps of joy* own property!” either. Don’t act like the mere existence of priestesses meant women there held great power, or even that the priestesses themselves necessarily did.

You can’t take that kind of thing to mean that your average woman had basic rights in some of these pagan societies. In some cases, that was the case, yeah, but it’s hardly been the majority. From what I’ve read over the years, a lot of it depended on wealth and status.

Even in Ancient Athens (pre-Pericles), women weren’t considered citizens, exactly. They could take part in some religious ceremonies, but not most. While they had some financial freedom, they were generally relegated to domestic roles.

Colette Hemingway from the Metropolitan Museum describes this as “extreme social restraint.” It doesn’t sound like I’d want to live in that kind of civilization, even if I had modern creature comforts. It’s similar elsewhere in the ancient world. Not everywhere, but enough places. Don’t pretend otherwise.

Much of our history has included misogyny. This isn’t a new thing. It was part of paganism. It unfortunately still is. Pretending “we were all considered equal before the Christians came” is disingenuous. And yeah, I’ve heard people make that exact claim in pagan places.

crazycatsiren:

I can tell how much schizophrenic people are hated, when schizophrenia can be thought of as an accusation.

A diagnosis or misdiagnosis isn’t a condemnation of character. Schizophrenia isn’t an insult.

Being traumatized isn’t a free ticket to being shit to mentally ill people.

evilios:

Speaking on internet safety, maybe you shouldn’t put things that genuinely deeply trigger you or send you into panic/anxiety attacks and/or psychotic episodes on publicly accessible carrds and bios. I’m saying it from a place of care because you know there are going to be people who will see that and take it as a cue to bully you, right? It especially applies if you’re a vulnerable person, aka someone with severe mental conditions, or are a part of a marginalized group that often deals with online harassment. You know, maybe sometimes it’s best to not let strangers know how to hurt you. Maybe sometimes having all the related tags blocked and not following clearly triggering pages is enough?

“When we talk about spiritual street cred we’re talking about the reputation you have amongst spirits. Do you have the juice to make it easier to see them and impact them in ways that make them inclined to listen? Do you have it and know how to use it enough that spirits know about you? Do you keep your promises? Do you give good offerings? Are you a good friend to the spirits with whom you should be friends? Do you have powerful spirit allies? In the human world our actions and our connections will impact and build our reputations, and those reputations will impact how others deal with us.”

Swain, BJ. Familiar Unto Me: Witches Sorcerers and Their Spirit Companions (p. 298). Kindle Edition.

runningwithfawns:

If we are not out here transmuting people’s jealousy into beauty glamours for ourselves what is the point of living

elminx:

Somebody just shared a post of mine with the tag “personal correspondences are always valid”…

and just…

it’s more complicated than that.

You generally need to know what you are doing to make a personal correspondence for magical purposes. And you need to test it magically, too.

You can’t just say “Lavender makes people angry” and then put it in a spell and it will make somebody else angry.

Most good correspondences have a REASON that they bring that type of energy to the spell. That reason may not work for you for whatever reason, and then, you wouldn’t want to use it in magic for that purpose. And that’s cool but that’s different than just willy-nilly making up your own correspondences for like funs.

Let’s get a bit nuanced here and use the very debated one: caffeine.

Some people have weird nervous systems where caffeine doesn’t wake them up, so using caffeine for its intended purpose wouldn’t be the best for them. Cool. But to then go “Caffeine makes me sleepy so I’ll use it for a sleep spell on somebody else…”

Do you see the problem there? If caffeine makes you sleepy, you might be able to use it in a sleep spell for yourself (I’m still skeptical there but if you’ve done this successfully, please lmk - I’m legit interested) but that doesn’t give caffeine the correspondence of “sleep” in a generalized sense.

To further complicate things, not all correspondences are created equal. Like, change any color correspondences you want - in my opinion. The Eurocentric view of color does not equal what color means to everybody. But that’s different than a plant that has certain inherent properties which will carry through into the magic. (And we could get very technical about the inherent properties of color - like black absorbing light and white reflecting light, but I digress)

To summarize, correspondence charts are shit and I encourage you to seek out and learn to understand how things work for you in magic. But that’s also sort of advanced practice and it takes a long time or trial and error to get right. If you’re just deciding something without that, you are probably playing make-believe.

Smart post. I came across this part of BJ Swain’s Familiar Unto Me last night and it kind of reminds me of this.

“Artists develop a visual vocabulary based on their life experiences and the art to which they’ve been exposed. Writers are influenced by the way in which people around them speak, the books they’ve read, and the words that form their daily speech. For everyone, the language we use informs how we think, and the experiences we’ve had inform how we understand new experiences. Mystics and magicians tend to interpret the spiritual sensations they experience through the lens and language of the mythology to which they have been exposed. Our personal histories matter, even in a world where spirits are real.”

Swain, BJ. Familiar Unto Me: Witches Sorcerers and Their Spirit Companions (pp. 301-302). Kindle Edition.

He’s talking about spiritwork and how entities interact with humans rather than how we do magic, though. I think the notion is the same - we all have a set of personal symbols that the unseen uses to communicate with us.

These symbols come from our past experiences, culture, upbringing, interests, and many other factors, of course. It’s much easier to work with them than against them in a willy-nilly fashion. In some cases, this does mean breaking with tradition, but in others, it can mean adapting to it.

maddiviner:

I’ve been working a lot with the fifteen fixed stars described by Agrippa, but this method can be used for planetary magic, too!

crazycatsiren:

“Failure is a choice” is just such a privileged way of looking at everything, like, where do I even start.

I hate the law of attraction/law of assumption people so much.

I’m not sure what to expect from this book. I just happened to run across it after work yesterday. It’s in my TBR queue, but I want to finish the book I’m currently reading (Familiar Unto Me, by BJ Swain) first. I also have some ARCs to worry about, but still, this one looks interesting. It could be a mess, but I’m willing to give it a go.

I have a (preprinted cause lazy) journal where I keep track of how often I read, etc. I was doing so well, reading every day, just prior to my most recent seizure. As usually happens after those for me, I’ve barely touched my Kindle for weeks. It takes about a month or so for me to get back at it, but there’s no time like the present.

Hey everyone! There’s been a lotta discourse on witchblr lately about Atlantis. Not really a fan of the concept as it works in the New Age movement, but I like (what I understand of) what it originally was.

My perspective? Atlantis was an allegory invented by Plato, but (thousands of years later) New Agers took it and turned it into a vehicle for spiritual colonialism (for lack of a better term).

Something occurred to me when I was trying to pick something to watch on my day off. How does everyone feel about Atlantis in fiction, such as in the seminal classic pictured above? The concept itself did originate in fiction, after all. All evidence points to Plato having invented the story.

Curious what others think, since a current WIP I’ve been playing with involves a temporal cold war between two empires, one of which is called Atlantis (it exists at the beginning of time). The other, of course, exists, at the end of time, and they’re both trying to wrest control of history from the other. I might abandon this.

serpentandthreads:

There’s an awful lot of practitioners that like to criticize Christians, Christian witches, Christopagans and the general usage of the Bible in numerous folk practices… while also rebranding + repackaging concepts that Evangelical cults teach.

witches-bottle:

I like using Wikipedia as a source because I can always go to the bottom and find the references, further reading and other… gives my teachers a fucking heart attack.

What else can you say? It’s a thing!

knightofhylia:

skimmed through my Dream Magic book by Sirona Knight and umm

I have seen Lilith called a lot of things but Wind Goddess??? Jewish mother of demons gets boiled down to Wind Goddess?????The author uses Hebrew and Jewish interchangeably, idk how accurate that is as a goy but still feels weird.

And consideeing how much went into keeping Lilith AWAY from sleeping children uh…. she’d be the last entity id call on for dream magic