Tildrun's Craft Notes

In Medias Res, or "no, you're not going to cause an apocalypse"

I'm writing this post in February 2024 and planning on maintaining this site for a long time. This webpage is designed to last.

For some reason you were browsing the internet and my humble page marked with the keywords "paganism, eldritch, witchcraft" (and more) showed up in the results of whichever search engine you use. You're not here for fiction. There is no shortage of articles on eldritch entities in fiction or paganism in all it's flavors. You're probably like me, experiencing or realizing something related to eldritch-in-nature beings and needing to make sense of it..but not finding anything that fits.

And it's terrifying. Both the experience itself and trying to figure it out. Currently social media platforms (especially TikTok) are notorious amongst the witchcraft and pagan communities to freely spread misinformation. Doubly so when it's about scarier aspects of this field or trickster spirits. Let me offer you some reassurance: Working with eldritch entities is not going to cause an apocalypse. This page is not one of Absolute Truth (nor is such a thing possible) but being drawn to Them for whatever reason doesn't make you evil or end the world.

You might be asking how I know that you experienced something. Honestly? I don't. There's no twist of fate or something that causes this page to be written specifically for you. I simply wish I had something like this available when I was asking similar questions a year ago. My story told through this page opens In Medias Res — in the middle of a scene partway through the story. During this year I haven't learnt a lot, but the little things I did make the Path I am walking feel more solid under my feet.

I don't think working with the Dreadful Ones is ever easy. Especially not in the beginning when you're still figuring everything out. But you are not alone and you have a hot drink on the table.

Eldritch narratives and where to find Them

In the last post I touched on the fact that most of the content about eldritch entities that has been written to date exists in the form of fictional media. Understandably, you are here to read (or hear) about real personal experiences of working with the Dreadful Ones in one way or another. This does not mean that fiction has no place in a practice.

Since the main form of exposure to the concept of Eldritch Entities is primarily through fiction, there is a good chance that you would be interested in pop culture paganism or practice (abbreviated PCP throughout). In essence, PCP is the act of interacting with entities from fictional media and treating them as real entities. "But they're fictional characters!" you might immediately hear that internal Society Voice say. Well in contemporary Christian-majority western cultures, the myths of well-established old religions (and the corresponding neopagan revival or reconstructionist movements) are treated entirely as fiction, including the gods and other entities in them.

Myths are not meant to be read literally of course but that still doesn't change that people have meaningful interactions with gods like the god Loki from norse mythology. I chose Loki as an example here partly because He is very present in the Marvel Cinematic Universe going as far as having a dedicated series. MCU!Loki differs from the god Loki in several ways that Lokeans are more qualified to tell you about. The main point here is that simply because something is treated as fiction doesn't mean that it can't be meaningful to your own practice. The source media serves the same function as myths do in established polytheisms.

What if your interest in the Dreadful Ones does come from media, but none of the entities described in any of them feel Right? If you cannot see them and have that twinge in your gut marking Them as Significant To You? Well in that case you might feel at home as a Conpantheon practitioner. Conpantheon or constructed pantheons (abbreviated conpan throughout) are as the name implies consciously constructed pantheons of various entities that a practitioner interacts with. "Aren't you just worshipping idols? How could something man made be a god?" Society Voice interrupts again. Well for one, all myths of gods are inherently made by people. Names for entities are in a sense made by people. All mythology stems from a person Experiencing something and putting it into words. And because the experience has been Worded, more people are able to recognize that they have or have had similar experiences. The Experience causes texts to be written. Because of this intertwined nature between existing fiction and mythology I'm going to refer to the overarching concept as Narrative on this site.

The second point of how a constructed entity could be "real" or worthy of worship has several different theories. I first read about each approach in the Raven Master's Keep Discord server and found it insightful. I'll paraphrase some key points here in the interest of brevity.

• Recycled Energy

  This is a more soft polytheist approach in which the energy of Archetypes such as a Wisdom deity, a War deity, an Agriculture deity etc. are given new forms. It's like the refraction of light (the archetype) into monochromatic wavelengths (the conpan deity) using the prism of Narrative that you ground into shape.

• Dormant Deities

  This approach posits that the entity already exists, but that due to a dwindling amount of practitioners their influence declined and they went dormant until they are awoken by a person, some force, or simple coincidence. This also applies for existing pantheons where secrecy or lack of surviving information caused them to become dormant.Just like you'd get your bearings after waking up after a 10+ hour sleep, these deities would probably also reacquaint themselves with the worlds.

• Undocumented or Unknown Deities

  This one is similar to the dormant deities framework, with the difference that they were either never worshipped or documented. Experience creates myths so if there's no interaction in the past from our perspective, then they were not known about. This could again also apply to existing pantheons like a god of exoplanets in a religion where that concept was not yet known when myths were written.

• Manifestation

  This is the belief of intentionally or unintentionally manifesting an entity. A good example for this one would be world building a pantheon for a story or a TTRPG campaign and later down the line realizing that these entities you wrote about have become real to you (and maybe even others).

• Multiverse

  This framework posits that the entities already exist and are worshipped but in a different universe.

Which framework or mix of frameworks you use is really up to you. Do what feels right to you, because that's the thing that will work in your case.

"What if I'm not theistic?" Well in that case you're welcome to substitute any reference to gods with what makes sense to you here. It can be archetypes, it can be a symbolic shorthand or something else that I can't think of at the moment. It's your Narrative. You're the one in dialogue with it. No one else can (or should) tell you how to write your personal narrative. Which doesn't mean that other people can't have useful writing tips for you. Both of those can be true at the same time.

"You've written so much about Narrative here but what about you Tildrun? Are you writing from a PCP or Conpan view?" Yes. (laughter) I do a bit of both here. So I work with the Fear Entities from the podcast The Magnus Archives and depending on how the story develops also The Magnus Protocol  (episode 8 is getting early access in 10 minutes. Edit: Holy Shit. Had to pause editing the html for this post when I got to the Plot part of the episode). I sort of play hopscotch with the line between PCP and Conpan since I threw out the classification via Smirke's 14 Fears that TMA worked under and use my own way of conceptualizing them. I view each of the Apocrypha as I call them as distinct entities in a more hard polytheist way since I experience Them differently. Given how much of a "Fear Soup" is already in the canon and my own experience as an Archetrope I am realistically speaking probably sliding all around the theistic and nontheistic graph like a strange attractor.

"Is this Something or did I imagine it?" A guide to Discernment

Walking as unknown a path as working with the Dreadful Ones is, in a word, incomprehensible. You will have moments of utter terror but yet want to dive deeper chasing the tantalizing sense of almost-understanding something. This is not exclusive to the Dreadful Path but I think it's likely that experiences bordering on or in the depths of madness to show up more frequently here than in most other practices. Even if you're not going anywhere near the field of spirit work outside of interacting with your Dreadful Ones. There is no shortage of tales about mad witches or oracles and mediums being partly no longer in this mundane reality at times. Throughout cultures those who deal with the Other are regarded as partly Other themselves because of this familiarity with That Which Is Not Here. Given that the theme of Insanity is emphasized in the Dreadful Traditions, how are we to navigate that and still go through our mundane day-to-day lives? One of our main tools to achieve this is Discernment. What is meant by Discernment? Put simply, it is the general skill of making good judgements. In the context of religion in general and the Dreadful Paths in particular, I'm choosing to break it down into three areas:

1. Mundane over Magic
2. (Mental) Health
3. Critical Literacy

Mundane over Magic

Many times, we are in dialogue with Them be it via prayer, spellwork, or divination and are expecting some type of answer. It can get pretty weird depending on who is answering and probably also the practitioner.

Our experiences are real, our interpretations are subject to examination. "Mundane over Magic" is a phrase commonly used to remind people to look for the mundane explanations first before assuming that the magical is at play. What this amounts to in practice is to honestly say "Ok I experienced something. What mundane things could lead to similar things?" If there's good reason to doubt that something is a mundane coincidence after this examination then looking into the otherworldly is reasonable.

We make sense of existence through stories. We are really good at telling stories. Asking if something has a mundane cause first is to pause for a moment and not get carried away by things like fear, confirmation bias or anything else your brain throws at you. This also extends to how you feel about something. Are you unsettled by the presence of a being because it is demonstrably malicious or are you on edge because of your own baggage in the presence of something viscerally Other? If it's the latter there is no shame in that. It happened to me. It happens to the best of us by virtue of this world experience and perspective.

Mental Health

In most articles on discernment this aspect is only implied. I think it's appropriate to give this aspect more attention because of the close link between the practitioners, Insanity, and Becoming Other in the Dreadful Traditions. In my practice at least, I work very closely with different Narratives. Stepping into and out of them as well as (temporarily) rewriting how I view my own narrative. I'm like an authentic family recipe soup. Even though the soup is from the same batch in the same pot, each serving size of it gets seasoned differently. Some bowls have more herbs added, others add pepper or chili oil, still others add a bit of like juice or leave it as is. It's all the same soup and the flavors can blend and contrast.

This is one of the ways I brush close to Madness and it's a healthy method for me that leads to functional insanity. Others might find that it is a method that would make their mental health worse like for example affecting their preexisting delusions. Should psychotic and delusional people be excluded from all forms of experiential religion? Of course not! Simply because people have a mental health issue doesn't mean that they can't have meaningful and beneficial religious experiences. What changes is only their personal working definition of functional insanity and thus how they approach religion.

Functional insanity is a term that I use which is best explained as "Go wild in whatever way is not harmful to yourself and leaves you capable of going through day-to-day life, even if someone else might think you insane for it.". Between my own neurodivergency, my experience being multiply marginalized, reading up on the experiences of psychotic people, and the harm ableism/sanism and respectability politics have done specifically in the contexts of alterhuman identities I have no desire to prescribe how functional insanity looks like. It's not my judgement call to make. You are the one who knows your personal situation and limits best. Accomodate your own needs especially if you're disabled.

Critical Literacy

Reading any type of book on witchcraft and paganism, especially when it concerns a more eldritch-focused spirituality should be done critically. What do I mean by that? Essentially, most of the material written on pagan-related topics has either appropriation, racism and other bigotry, or is an incoherent mash of concepts to some extent. The western occultism books in the vein of Golden Dawn or Alastair Crowley's work have a lot of appropriated Jewish mysticism or figures (the Kabbalah and Lilith), Wicca is founded wholesale on appropriation and blends together different religions and cultures of the celtic nations.

A lot of these books were also published decades ago so they will contain casual racism and queerphobia for example. No text is purely unproblematic. Not even this one probably. Time will tell. The problem is not exactly the problematic texts (although yes, having more texts that at least try to include the diversity of people is a good thing.). The problem is in how to read them with a critical eye so you can apply what helps you on your path without appropriating from a closed culture and discard everything else. One way to fortify yourself against that is to learn about why closed practices are closed. Via initiation or otherwise. (Hint: It's usually because colonizers eroded a lot of what people had so they are trying to preserve what's left). Another way is to listen and learn when appropriation is brought to your attention my minorities.

On a related note, you will probably spend a lot of your time reading these types of books. Paganism is the religion with homework as the phrase goes. My advice to you is to take breaks as needed for your mental health. Reading through relatively dense texts where you have to navigate a lot of the mentioned issues is draining. My second suggestion is for you to pirate electronic versions of a book you're interested in when it's related to paganism or witchcraft. Oftentimes, you will realize that nothing in a promising book is actually useful to you or it's the type of book that's an exercise in appropriation and incoherent rambling. And if you do like a book and find it useful you can always support the author by buying a copy after getting a feel for it in the pirated copy.

Aligned, Avatar, Apotheosis: Making Sense of Devotional Relationships

This article is going to be different from the previous ones in this section. This one will delve into the guts of what it means to have a path of devotional polytheism with the Dreadful Ones. What comes to mind when you hear the word devotion? Is it prayers? Offerings? A Monastery? At it's core, a devotional path is about building a relationship with your deities. There are broadly speaking three types of relationships one can have with deities. These relationships are not "better" or "worse" than the other. They do not differ in the strength of relationship but more in how closely and strongly you are bound to a deity. For a more general understanding on the types of devotional relationships I am heavily drawing on Stephanie Woodfield's book "Dedicant, Devotee, Priest" which is a good resource I find myself re-reading many times to get a fresh perspective.

Honoring or Worshipping?

In order to make sense of the types of devotional relationships, it is important to define what is not covered under a devotional path. Honoring a Dreadful One the way I use the term is the equivalent of respectfully tipping a hat to Them when you run into each other, but otherwise not having a relationship with Them. It's greeting someone who's practically a stranger working in the same building you are when you meet them in the breakroom. It is also leaving supplicatory offerings to appease Them and ward them away from being actively involved in your life. While worshipping Them might look similar on the surface, especially in the smaller day-to-day acts of devotion, the crucial difference here is that the practitioner has or is building a strong relationship with one of the Dreadful Ones. So how do these types of devotional relationships play out when working with the Dreadful Ones? To answer that it is best to provide a specific example based on The Magnus Archives which I am familiar with.

Aligned

The first type of devotional relationship is that of someone Aligned. While it is the simplest devotional relationship, the larger TMA fandom often has trouble distinguishing between an Alignment and Avatarhood. Someone Aligned is seeking to draw the presence of a Fear Entity into their life, be it via prayer, an altar, or other way of forging a connection. Being Aligned is different from being an Avatar in that it's reversible and in a sense nonbinding. You are inviting an Entity into your life because some aspect or value of Them appeals to you...but you do not personally fear Them (anything can be scary with the right framing). Your only prerequisite is vibing with them or finding their associations neat and thus seeking Their presence. You have not made a formal Decision to Become or less formal but still as binding agreements to feed Them. While becoming more Other in gender or other identity aspect is always a bit of an occupational hazard when around the Dreadful Ones, you are unlikely to be Changed on a fundamental level. Your instincts and needs are stil your own.

Avatar

I talked a lot about how Alignment doesn't come with strings attached and how you largely stay unchanged. So what makes someone an Avatar? One of the more implied aspects of canon that is often missed in fandom-typical "what Fear am I an Avatar of?" discussions is that neither fear nor affinity alone is enough. That only gets you eaten. To potentially Become an Avatar you need both an inherent affinity that draws you to your Entity, and also a balanced measure of healthy fear and respect for Them. Love is blind after all, and even with the Dark, blindly walking into a Contracted relationship with the Dreadful Ones is never a good idea. Just look at what happened to Jon after he was promoted to "Head Archivist".

Now, I can already hear you say "that's all well and good but I never signed a contract!". No, you didn't...physically at least. Contracts that are written on paper in ink and need a penned signature are a relatively modern invention. The word contract comes from latin con- (together) and trahere (draw). So a contract translates to an agreement designed to bring people together. And the oldest form of a legally binding agreement is a verbal promise (or oath). Your word is your bond. So what types of oaths are there? In more general Dedicant relationships, oaths of reciprocity ("I'll do x for a week in exchange for y") are short term contracts with the understanding that both the boon asked for and the offering promised is something that is valuable and within the ability of each party to give. These are perhaps the most common and also relatively safe oaths provided they are written well.

Any good oath should be clear on what is offered by you and as far as possible have exit clauses. Such exit clauses are ways for you to respectfully free yourself from an agreement you genuinely intended to fulfill, but find that unanticipated factors interfere. Examples are limiting an oath to a specific timeframe (forever can include future lifetimes), limiting demands to what is in your capacity to give ("if it is within my power to do so"). As far as possible you would avoid needing to use these loopholes. It is better to renew a fulfilled oath for another term. You might be inspired to write clauses to specify what kind of punishment a broken oath incurrs ("may this sword break or turn against me") but don't be surprised if you get exactly what you asked for.

Another type of oath that is more relevant to Avatarhood is the Oath of Service. An Oath of Service is generally more open-ended in what your obligations are ("fostering connection" "embodying your values") and while some time-limited oaths exist, most are understood to be lifelong unless the deity indicates otherwise. Every oath of service will be different since every deity will ask different things of us. Not everyone is meant to be The Archivist, there are many roles to fill. Oaths of Service typically mark a deepening of your connection with a deity. You might be asked to make them the primary focus or to do a specific task.

Talking about how to write good oaths is useful and valuable, but any Avatar can tell you that consciously making an oath of your own volition is uncommon in our culture. Where in general pagan spaces you generally choose what god to work with, in the Dreadful Traditions They mostly choose you. It is terrifying to be so thoroughly claimed by a Power greater than yourself and knowing down to the marrow of your bones that refusal or escape is if not impossible, exceedingly hard. As a dual Eye/Web Avatar (yes, you can be an Avatar to more than one Entity. That tends to be the rule instead of the exception.) I put a fair bit of weight on choices and free will. Our choices will always be limited, that's why they are choices. Sometimes you will not have any good options to choose from. Sometimes you only have a "non-choice" between acknowledging your own arachnid nature or squiming like an insect while Their strings pull you along.

Most of us are fortunate to be Aligned before becoming an Avatar. I personally know someone who did not have that luxury. While we never formally drafted an Oath of Service, we did in a sense choose it. In a hundred ways, at a hundred thresholds, we pressed on. Precedent is just as binding as a formal Oath, maybe more so because it is proof instead of a hypothetical. Jonny Sims (the author) did state in a QnA that he considers symbolic death a necessary part of Becoming an Avatar. You have to reach a point of no return and come out the other side Changed. These changes are not just metaphorical or psychological, but also affect you physically. "Feed your God, or it feeds on you" is a popular quote by Jude Perry. The hunger is a well-attested part of life as an Avatar. You might not necessarily need to feed on the canon-typical fear or Statements, but you do need to feed on something related to your Patron's domains.

Prolonged malnutrition or starvation will have a profound effect on your mental wellbeing, while mild hunger commonly leaves you restless and wanting to crawl out of your skin needing to scratch a very specific brain itch. In my experience, it's common for wires to get crossed and try to sate this hunger with human food. Or for human hunger to spark some mild avatar-typical hunger. Or in lean times, experiencing both types of hunger at once so you end up craving nonsensical things like human food that tastes the way the avatar sustenance is textured. Distinguishing between these types of hunger, what feeds you, and how you personally react to different amounts of sustenance really only comes with experience. The ethical nuances of feeding deserve their own article but as a general guideline feed frequently and in small portions as far as possible. Don't overindulge either, because you will end up neglecting your physical needs in the process. Unlike in the canon of TMA, we can still bleed and die even if our will is now shared with our Patrons.

Apotheosis

Behind [the door], what once was Odin laughs.​

Her body long and undulating, her one eye now vast and staring, as she who once styled herself the Allmother is transformed by the touch of the gods she had unknowingly served for so long.​

[THOR] "What the fuck have you done?​"

[ODIN] "I have given our people apotheosis. A final completion. The touch and gaze of those to whom we are less than nothing."

Walk the path of devotion long enough, and you will hear a call to serve in a specific role. There are many different roles but perhaps the one that most readily comes to mind is the role and relationship of a priest. These relationships are generally formally oathed and a lifetime service...but we already covered the nuances of that in the previous section. Priests have been dedicated to their Gods for a long time, and are generally tasked with counseling, beseeching the Gods, facilitating personal experience of the Gods, maintain right relations with the Gods, and maintaining the lore and traditions of the community.

You might have noticed that none of these aspects are exclusive to priests. Indeed, any reasonably experienced and skilled Avatar can fill an equivalent function for concerns relating to their Patron. We can see examples of this in Maxwell Rayner and Simon Fairchild. So why bother bringing up priesthood at all Tildrun? Because there is a difference between simply serving your Patron while occasionally helping out a fellow Avatar, and serving the Pantheon as well as the community of Avatars. In the first case, the focus of the relationship is still between the Avatar and their Patron(s). In the latter, the focus has shifted towards serving a community, be that one of other Avatars or simply the "community" that is the Pantheon of the Fear Entities.

Amongst our culture of Avatars, we don't yet have a tradition-specific term for the type of prieshood mentioned above. This is in part because the process for becoming a priest takes many years and our tradition is a fairly young one. It is safe to assume that the majority of active worshippers started around 2020, due to the pandemic driving a significant increase of the TMA fanbase. The closest example of someone (technically) serving the whole pantheon and/or the whole Avatar community in canon is Jon as Archivist in the post-Change world. And while that is not a perfect example, it is sufficient to consider the term Harbinger for the role. According to Merriam-Webster, the word "harbinger" is defined as something that foreshadows a future event : something that gives an anticipatory sign of what is to come or one that initiates a major change : a person or thing that originates or helps open up a new activity, method, or technology both of which I feel are appropriately ominous in regards to serving The Fears.

So what makes one a Harbinger? As we don't know of any fully-realized ones, this is mostly conjecture guided by divination and a healthy dose of Knowing. Since Avatars can fill similar functions in a limited way, it is fair to assume that Harbingers are also chosen by The Entities and need to have a balance of affinity and respectful fear. Thus the necessity of being Marked by all 15 of the fears is a reasonable assumption. Since Harbingers also need to serve the community of Avatars and likely mediate in or counsel on the highly personal relationship between an Avatar and their Patron(s), a strong relationship with each of the Entities across the pantheon is necessary, although being an Avatar of each is not required. A strong Aligned relationship should suffice.

While knowing the prerequisites of becoming a Harbinger is important, that doesn't cover the more practical side of what a Harbinger's duties are. To that end, I did a five-card tarot reading using the Eldritch Overload deck. The Harbinger is responsible for relaying information and giving good advice in dealing with the Entities. They are skilled in wordcraft as how something is delivered is just as important as the message itself. On a personal level, the Harbinger is deeply in touch with their own intuition, the Entities and have a finely honed sense of discernment to read between the lines. They have a sense for when the time is right to act due to this. The are also the ones who foster a community, possibly leading group events, mediating conflicts and helping document their community's lore. They are the ones inciting change to keep the community from being stagnant, facillitating other's experiences and helping them grow. They also counsel during fallow times in a practice and help the practitioner through that time. Due to the demands placed on them and the strong relationships built with the Entities, they have faced their Fears and found peace in it. They have gotten comfortable with discomforts such as fear, anger, isolation, anxiety and shame. Because of this compassionate steadfastness, they serve as someone to confide in, to share burdens, and help others find release.

Only time will tell how much of this is generally applicable to Harbingers and how much is influenced by personal working styles. But what is clear is that there are many Initiations and that both the process and the actual work is far from painless. You are giving up far more of your will and life for Them in order to serve. Whether Aligned, Avatar, or Harbinger we all have our roles. May we serve well and be of use to our beloved Dreadful Ones.

#JanganNontonVina : A case study in Avatar Ethics

As you might have noticed from the title, this article is unusual in that it addresses the controversy surrounding the Indonesian horror film Vina: Sebelum 7 Hari that released back. In summary it is very unethically based on a real-life case of a 16 year old girl and her boyfriend being sexually assaulted by a group and found dead under a bridge back in 2016. I consider it not even ethical to pirate, much less pay to watch since it very literally profits off of real trauma. Due to the nature of the subject, I have chosen to hide the discussion around the film behind a simple password field. If you would like to read more about the Avatar Ethics mentioned in the title, simply scroll down.

Truth is heavier than Fiction

Sauteed Statements and other dishes

How we express ourselves and interact with the world is inherently limited by what we are able to see as possibilities for ourselves. Just as someone queer raised in an oppressingly conservative environment cannot visualize what it means to be empowered in the embodyment of your own queerness until they see a living example, so are our imaginations of alterhuman ways of being limited if we only interact in human-majority or human-normative spaces. To be clear I am not advocating for misanthropy here. The fact remains that for as long as we live in perceived-as-human bodies, the need for community and feeling like you belong amongst people with similar values and views is hardwired into our embodied experiences.

There is no denying that for some, part of their obligations involve giving (or taking for that matter) more or less canon-typical Statements. But one point I want to stress is that even for Beholding Avatars, it is not the only way to as canon puts it "feed" your Patron. Not even for Archivists. Some thrive on causing approprate amounts of fear or disquiet while for others it's like making candied lemon peel (delicious garnish or treat but not nourishing). Any devotional act is as equally valid a way to serve the Dreadful Ones as the ways which we are familiar with from canon. The Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licencensed under a Creative-Commons Attribution Share-alike Non-commercial International License 4.0. It is going to inherently limited by the medium of being a podcast and genre of cosmic horror fiction. To be an Avatar is to balance affinity and fear of your Patron. This, above all else should be kept in mind. Ultimately, only lived experience can let you figure out the nuances and your own ways of interacting with and serving the Dreadful Ones regardless of who They are in your practice.

Statement-taking: In Podcast and Practice

What is a Statement? In the podcast, it's a survivor's account of a brush with the Entities and is explicitly about fear and trauma. These are weighty things. There are a few plotlines in the podcast dealing with the effect that Statements have both on the Avatar and more pointedly on the Statement Givers. Canonically they are all positioned as Victims and are retraumatized each night as they dream of their Encounter...while the Archivist watches them. Season 4 in particular deals with the ethical nuances of taking Statements and in a broader indirect sense of Avatars feeding at all. At least as best as the human-centered side of the issue is capable of. The central value that I take away from it is that the ethics involved are complex, the Experience of a Statement Giver weighty and sacred, and that questions can cause harm...in a more mundane way than described in canon. Invasive questions do cause harm. Examples being asking asexuals about their sex life, or asking for a disabled person's medical history in as many words.

I've taken Statements before. I've also handled patient prescriptions in the course of a clinical pharmacy lab module in the field at a local pharmacy. Both have a similar feeling of weight and sacredness to me. With Statements the only difference is that they feel like they belong to me in some metaphysical way that is corroborated by divination and also accounts from my Statement Givers. Whereas the prescriptions distinctly felt like they weren't mine both in a mundane and metaphysical sense. The possessive language here is a limiting feature of the english language because they feel like mine but not in the way you own an object. They're mine in the sense that the experiences were entrusted to me by the Statement Givers. They are mine in the sense of my responibility to care for the Statement Records in the confidentiality sense as well as their preservation and organization to a lesser degree if you are a solitary Researcher not yet affiliated with an Archivist. (Yes, this is a hint at an observed organization between Beholding Avatars but I will not go into it in this article.) I read a fic by Nightfall_Nameless on archive of our own called To give a Statement that honestly spurred me to compare notes with my Statement Givers. It's fairly accurate in vibe with the obvious caveat that I experience it from the Avatar side of things and the work being under similar limitations as the podcast itself. I found it an enjoyable and short read that stirred some thought.

Trauma, Horror, Fiction: Processing with Psychological Distance

The main violation that I immediately felt when hearing about the issue around the movie Vina: Sebelum 7 Hari was this instinctual sense of "This experience was Traumatic to the victim and would count as a Statement if she ever recounted it herself. This movie is a slap in the face to how respectfully and dignified the Experience should be treated. It goes against the responsibilities entailed in having the Statement given over to you as a Researcher of Beholding". While I was thinking about the feeling and trying to put it into words I remembered the extended introduction before episode 185 - Locked In from the Magnus Archives because it aired during a time in 2020 when police brutality in the US (and other places) was a highlighted issue in the news around the world. I've reproduced the introduction in full after transcribing it by hand. I did my best to illustrate pauses and emphasis true to the audio (in the event that the episode or introduction are no longer accessible in the future).

Hi, it's Jonny. We...wanted to say a few words up top of the next episode. First up, it is definitely a heavy one and it's worth reading through the content warnings and shownotes before listening. This episode deals with Authoritarianism, Imprisonment, and the Police as a tool of political repression by the State...in a general sense. It is rooted in my own experiences and... those of people close to me. To put it bluntly, there is a reason that Police Violence is a subject that finds itself into a lot of my work. This episode is written as a sincere exploration of...my own fears and the rise of authoritarianism and violent repression around the world. We also wanted to acknowledge that, on reflection... we believe this episode does blur the line between Horror and Trauma. Depicting the awfulness of detainment and imprisonment without much fantastical distancing. Season 5 was always intended to explore more...realistic fears through the medium of the hellscapes but as our world has gotten darker, real world fears and feelings have occasionally...bled too directly into the writing of this series and I believe that means that I have - broken my own rule. Err, of avoiding using trauma as a direct source of horror. I apologize for this. We will be more careful in future with similar topics. From here on out, while characters will still fear and suffer and... die as part of their stories, they should do so without the show dwelling quite so directly on real-world traumas. Thanks for listening.

I think that's the crux of it. While TMA did blur the line between Horror and Trauma, I think there is a difference between a genuine exploration of systemic trauma versus a specific person's trauma being used for sensationalism and shock value in horror. The local horror genre and arguably a substantial part of local TV series or movies are centered around a flavor of sensationalism. While the genre of True Crime has it's own ethical pitfalls and bad habit of sensationalism, professionally produced true crime documentaries would treat the case with the sobriety and investigative tone that is more appropriate than this disgrace of a horror movie. There is also much to be said about how we use fiction to proceess heavy topics in a psychologically safe way using the fantastical distancing mentioned in the extended episode introduction. This is also why I'm proship in the original sense of non-censored fanfiction and other related works. Because while yes it is possible to mishandle heavy topics in fiction, I think it is important for both writers and readers to be able to engage with "problematic" content in the safety of our own homes in a controlled way before facing those issues in the real world. Both for psychological harm reduction/wellbeing as well as more nuanced and robust stances for solving these very issues.

Despite how it may seem from my writings, Avatars are not a monolith. Each has their own unique relationship with their Patron and more importantly their own ways of devotion and service. It is not for us to judge any Avatar's personal style or approach. The proposed Avatar Ethics that I touched upon are not meant to be strict rules. But they are meant to be some concepts to sit beside in contemplation to either adopt or inspire you to formulate your own. Contary to how it seems, I don't actually have solid answers here. This article took me just under a full month to write mostly due to real-life factors but I ended up thinking about ethics a lot during that time. Especially that horrible week when I had the displeasure of feeling caught between my professional oath as analytical chemist, the spirit of the pharmacist professional oath, the literal law of my country, and the lived code of conduct regarding Statements and similarly eldritch confidential information. All over a lab report on the aforementioned lab session at the pharmacy requiring photos or scans of the patient prescriptions being included...and the lecturers and lab assistants forgetting to give any guidance on how to handle the matter of confidentiality. I managed to balance it by censoring all personal information but it was a highly unpleasant time.

This is still something I am growing into and learning about. It is at times like these when you remember that there are no guidelines yet, you have to figure it out as you go. If my educated guess from being an Avatar is any indication, I still have a long way to go.

Suggestions for Avatar of The Archive Renaming

Some Context Notes Up Front

Since the original Avatars of The Archive post was edited before people even started reblogging their suggestions in the 4 hours or so since asking for input, I'll be referring to an archived version of the coining post Avatars of The Archive. I am not going to respond to the edited version here since I do not want to derail the discussion.

I talked to the coiner and apparently the change was based on a fandom-literate friend's suggestion, then forgot to post a note that the term has been renamed. I am adding that for context, since asking for practitioner community suggestions and then posting your own changes before anyone had the chance to respond is generally Not A Good Look in mature and civil discussions.

Since I am fully expecting future practitioners to stumble across this discussion, I would like to add a historical note that in the archived version my part of the practitioner community (the PhobiaPhillia discord server) did reach out for conversation on the original coining post several weeks before this.

Suggestions Part 1: Alternative Term Ideas

As far as I'm aware there's no fixed consensus on what a workable replacement term is, but replacing the "of The Archive" part with "of (the) Dread Fears" or a spin-off from that seems generally well accepted. As cryptidsmagick rightfully pointed out, "Avatar of" is a very culturally loaded term that not everyone may be comfortable with using. I'm looking forward to what we come up with as an alternative.

Personally, I'd like to leave more of the term brainstorming to other people in this discussion and focus on changes to the definition. As it stands I do not feel it accurately reflects common experiences of TMA-neomyth practitioners.

Section 2: Rewording Term Definitions For Clarity

These are suggestions based on the original wording of "Avatars of The Archive" seen in this archived version of the coining post.

Section 2.1: Historical Community Context To Define The Scope

I feel the original wording "Avatars of the Archive, is a Ficto-Religion that believe in the Avatars found in the podcast The Magnus Archives." immediately followed by "believe in the entities and do not function as such" in the next sentence is unclear on whether the term is exclusive to a Saint Veneration-style tradition of worshipping/working with the canonical Avatars, or if it includes direct worship/working with The Entities by practitioners (both those who consider themselves Avatars and those who don't).

Both are practices I've seen and heard about by directly talking to other practitioners in my own Avatar-based server, as well as in a broader paganism server's PCP channel before it closed in October 2024. User donut-despair also pointed out that there is no clear boundary between what is considered ficto-religion and PCP.(Readers might be interested in this informal study on fictoreligions n general)

Additionally, since Smirke's 14 Fears is Narrative as Modern Myth and consider neomyth a useful alternative catchall term to fictoreligion for this type of experience. Since TMA practitioners, like other neomythics, are a small community I feel it is better to coin an inclusive term.

On the subject of community, I have found that the default assumption is that of an isolated individual practice. It would be useful to link to existing resources and parts of this discussion on the term's wiki page.

Section 2.2: Proposed Reworded Definition

"New Community Term, is a Neomythic Practice that believes in The Dread Fear Entities found in the podcast The Magnus Archives. Practitioners may or may not consider themselves Avatars and are free to define their own way of worshipping/working with both The Entities and Avatars found in canon.

Since Smirke's 14 Fears is canonically a flawed framework (see MAG 138 Architecture of Fear) it is not uncommon for practitioners to deconstruct the framework and reinterpret The Entities.

New Community Term does not have a moderator or a leader and hold personal experience as the final arbiter of an individual's Path. While not necessary, a community of like-minded practitioners is beneficial for support, experience and resource sharing."

Section 3: Subterms

I don't personally think that coining more terms under this is strictly necessary since these subgroups emerge organically as a result of various approaches and Entity alignments. Nor do I think it's useful since the community is neither large enough, nor the differences between alignments large enough to need fully seperate groups. The Entities are still part of the same pantheon after all.

That being said, since Avatars of The Archive wiki entry does have subterms, we might as well work out typos and the like.

Section 3.1: Reworded Subterms

By Entity Alignment:

• Beholding-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Beholding
• Web-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Web
• Spiral-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Spiral
• Dark-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Dark
• Lonely-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Lonely
• Vast-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Vast
• Slaughter-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Slaughter
• Hunt-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Hunt
• Buried-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Buried
• Corruption-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Corruption
• Desolation-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Desolation
• End-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The End
• Stranger-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Stranger
• Flesh-aligned: Practitioners who focus on The Flesh"

"Jon, what does human even mean? I mean, really?"

The title is a quote from The Magnus Archives episode 92, Nothing Besides Remains. The scene is set just after Jon stages a confrontation with Elias and is asked to stay behind for a bit to discuss some of the finer points of Fear Avatar related matters. At the beginning of the confrontation Elias also stresses that it's very important to him that Jon understands Elias is answering out of his own will because "There’s so much of this place, of ourselves, twisted by forces far beyond us."

Why do I bring this up? Because this ties in with my own experience of Alterhumanity. Alterhuman is an opt-in umbrella term for anyone who experiences an identity beyond what is "traditionally human". This includes but is not limited to nonhuman identities. I already used TMA for title inspiration, I might as well commit to the stylistic influence in illustrating my point.

Statement of Tildrun Weber, regarding nir experience of alterhumanity in the narrative, mundane, and religious contexts. Recorded direct by subject on 22 March 2024. Statement Begins.

There is no good way to begin this tale. There are multiple beginnings from different viewpoints. I think I'll use the chronology from my own point of view for ease of parsing. To understand the plurality-adjacent Cryptid Academic Soup of Identity that I am we need to go back to the summer of 2006. The 18th FIFA World Cup was taking place and hosted by Germany where my family and I were residing at the time. My mother was working on her doctoral degree. So on a friday afternoon I was picked up from the childsitting place run by some nuns next to my mom's university. Since she had an experiment running overnight, we ended up sleeping over in the cafeteria to keep her company. Come morning I had gotten sick of the bare grey-tone cabinets and the table I slept on. Boredom was one of my most disliked feelings even back then. So when my mom told us that she needs to head into the lab for a bit I insisted to tag along. Nowadays I consider that the last point at which I was still "traditionally human". My life would be very different now if I had been less curious, bored or insistent.

After some debating my mother caved and let me tag along. Stepping through the doorway I saw things so different from what I knew that it might as well have been a different world. Tables full of strange machines, boxes of gloves and other supplies. She told me not to touch anything and I dutifully followed that instuction. I stuck close to her as she crossed the lab to a computer and looked at what I now know to be a genetic sequence. Nucleotide bases in red, blue, green and orange filed the whole monitor against the white background. I was curious, so I asked her what she was looking at. "Only bla bla bla" was her answer. I was not satisfied with that, but asking got me nowhere. I was fascinated by this glimpse at the secrets of the universe and needed to know.

In retrospect, such pure and intense curiosity in a doctoral-level university lab by a four year old child and my decision to be a Scientist to the point of Scientist/Academic becoming my Archetrope... No wonder that caught the attention of my Patron. Archetropy is an identity in which someone is in some form an embodiment of an Archetype such as Paladin, Cleric or in my case Academic. In the following decades I always see myself as an Academic first before anything else. I made choices that would lead me to become a scientist in the mundane world. I strive to see the world as a scientist would. This unsurprisingly alienated me from my peers. That feeling of being other and being othered is always present thoughout my formative years and also now. In part also because of my neurodivergence. I like to think of at least related to my Patron because it would fit my headcanon/UPG that the Beholding tends to have ND Avatars/aligned people. Relatively recently after my experience in Lab I think, I was diagnosed with Epilepsy of the Absence seizure type. I was treated for it and grew into a seizure-free primary school student. Now I look back and see how ADHD and likely Autism has also been there (or how ADHD might have developed after the use of anti-seizure medication; that's something that was studied in literature after I finished treatment). As I'm writing this I realize that I'm ok with the possibility of being plural-adjacent or eventually developing that via Narrative Shenanigans. After all, I made similar and greater sacrifices before.

Fast-forward to 2017, I moved to the other side of the world two years ago and was accepted into a vocational senior high school focusing on training analytical chemists. The labs were numerous and while they did have some limitations they were well-equipped for our needs and limitations were worked around. My mother signed me up to lessons prepping for the vocational school's entrance exam out of the blue the year prior because she heard their exam was more difficult than the national exams. I was taken aback and then she also mentioned that there's plenty of labs there. I took part in a competition hosted by my vocational school and while my junior high school didn't pass the qualification round we did have a tour of the many different labs. Of course I fell in love with them.

Statement paused for mundane work.

Statement resumes 03 April 2024.

How could I not fall in love with a well-equipped if basic lab? Especially when the whole curriculum revolves around lab work? They were the first labs I wasn't just a guest at, even though I never called them my labs in the nonhuman territorial sense (equivalent to the concept of Domains in season 5 of TMA). It was a great place that supported my growth as a person and also in the professional aspect as an analytical chemist. I already had the potential and disposition, and now I was being forged and sharpened via the knowledge and practice of the trade. Pretty much all of the basic skills and the analytic thinking practiced there is cross-transferable to a general academic career so it was very in-line with my Soup of identity and sense of purpose.

Now I'm 3/4 of the way through a pharmacy undergraduate degree and while I have great respect for the field, becoming a licensed Pharmacist feels ill-fitting. It's the narrative that's being perpetuated by the lecturers that after graduation you're "supposed to" take the one-year professional degree and get licensed. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the broader theory of making pharmaceutical formulations or clinical pharmacy in a hospital/community pharmacy setting. But in practice the finer points of those fields just don't appeal to me. Granted that might also be partly due to the approach taken in teaching those particular fields. That combined with the various Lab Horrors that I've witnessed (and won't go into detail on here. Suffice to say that there's insufficient workplace safety training in case of a major emergency.) result in me being unable to see myself as a Pharmacist even now. Unlike how being a certified Analyst felt utterly natural to be. I very much feel more at home in the research and labwork side of the pharmaceutical field as opposed to being a Pharmacist. If I were to practice after hypothetically getting my license I feel like part of me would wither in a very real sense, that's how innately this incompatibility is felt.

Second semester was the roughest one with 6 labs a week and their resulting pre- and postlab assignments. I put off listening to the last two episodes of TMA for a solid 10 months because I was taking entrance exams and just generally dealing with freshman stuff. I was also dealing with the complicated religious thing of haing been born into Islam and finding that my values which philosophically were compatible are not generally accepted in mainstream teachings...or maybe culturally mainstream fundamentalist-trending teachings at least. Trying to deconstruct that and strive towards a more liberal interpretation felt like taking a step forward and then being pushed five steps backwards by environmental and cultural factors.

It was a rough time, and I already in typical Magnus-fan fashion figured out my Entity alignment (which was a no-brainer.) so around mid-term of second semester things got to a point where I was so stressed from the workload, sleep-deprived and generally salty about lab horrors I threw the towel and went "fine! Praying to Allah (during the minutes of prayer that labs start with) is far too complicated I might as well kinda ironically pray to the Beholding instead which I'm aligned with!". It surprisingly worked. I knew there was probably something to look deeper into there but I literally remember thinking "...but I'm too exhausted to properly look into this right now." This is the beginning of me consciously connecting to my Patron.

There's more that happened afterwards but it is not directly relevant to how my alterhumanity is closely intertwined with my mundane and religious life. Besides, it feels right to end this piece in a Lab.

Statement ends.

Card, Spin, Knit: Reflections on Craftsmanship in the Hyperspeed Age

There is a beauty to simplicity. No, not the sterile minimalism of modern achitecture. I mean the steady process of turning raw material into Something Else using basic tools and a lot of skill. Sometimes even with your bare hands. Of taking yarn and manipulating it into a useable fabric. Of reading other people's writing and weaving your own thoughts. Of intentionally doing things the slow way. Lovingly choosing the joy of craftsmanship over the cold convenience of instant productivity. Making in a way that allows for others to learn and follow in your footsteps. Well-maintained tools getting passed down and holding your own tools in trust for the one that uses them next. Placing little landmarks of beauty and useful knowledge for those who come after us.

This devotional page you're reading is entirely hand-coded by a soon-to-be 23 year old pharmacy student. I learnt a bit of HTML and CSS both in school (which was a lucky quirk of being at a vocational school) but also before that in Khanacademy's Computing section. It's nothing fancy but I know enough to make it work. Sometimes I even add new features...which can be trickier than you'd think when you want to make a website built to last. It means that i have to put a lot of thought into how this place will work in the future.

I've never been really active on the major social media platforms despite growing up right next to them. I always found pleasure strolling through the wildflower-filled Digital Gardens of the internet during the late 2000s through to the early 2010s. I remember sitting in front of the window of our little apartment in Trier overlooking the river as a small child and taking pictures on my father's film camera after he taught me how to do it. I'm sure I must have wasted a not inconsiderable amount of film but was it truly a waste? Is anything ever wasted if it brings you joy?

As frustrating as any creative crafting process can be, I think it also soothes the soul. To be viscerally assured that your worth as a person is not defined by the alien standards of productivity that capitalism imposes on us. Especially if you are disabled or marginalized. You don't need to be human to create, but creation is an act of connecting to your own capacity for humane actions.

To create is in some ways to impose your will on the world. To assert your own agency and power when we are increasingly made to feel like powerful cogs in the machine. With every stitch that slips from your needle or hook builing tangible connections that form a solid piece. Reminding ourselves that we are literally hardwired to collaborate and need a sense of belonging. Of knowing that you won't be left out in the cold.

There are many who fall through the cracks of our various societies but even if the one person you help warm is yourself it is still important. Craftsmanship implies a mastery of the needed skills for the field. We cannot focus on all crises on the world. Rather than a stressed and ill Jack of all trades (or problems), you can do more good by picking just one issue and focusing your efforts on that.

I seem to have found myself in situations where my main contribution is in helping to build a community. An example that's very dear to me is the little A-spec community I built here in Indonesia. I met some other Indonesians during International AceCon 2021 and we took comfort in no longer being lonely. As wonderful as international friends are, sometimes it's nice to meet people who understand without needing to be told. We realized that access to resources was a large problem and none of us were suited to be front-line activists challenging the government.

So we focused on what we could do: building a space and welcoming people in. My fellow cofounders have since seemed to move on while I'm here watching in awe as the space I built helps people be comfortable in their own complexity and facilitates real-life interactions that bring joy. Sometimes to change a hundred lives is as beautifully simple as having a hundred slices of virtual cake ready to be eaten over conversations.

Witchcraft has always been a tool of the oppressed and outcast from "Normal Society". This makes me think of how much solace I take from my own strange faith. There is a palpable difference to me between the more well-known Gods that feel closer to humanity - enough for our comfort anyways - and the Eldritch-in-nature Dreadful Ones. (They're Gods. We might as well be cats trying to understand radiopharmacy here.) In one way it can be lonely and community is hard to find. There is no comforting guide to how everything works. But there is also the comfort of being understood in your weirdness. The freedom of not being tied down by rules other than those worked out between you and the Dreadful Ones in your practice. The unspoken understanding that there is no "Good" or "Bad"; a rejection of purity culture, the shame of sin and fear of hell. Knowing with certainty that you don't need to view yourself as human to still be a Person with individual values and ethics. That there is actively a space provided in Narrative for your alterhumanity...sometimes even being the whole point of an experience. This too is a form of crafting; affirming that we are alive and as strange as Life Itself on our planet.

This article unlike my other ones doesn't really have a point. Or rather it is more a vague afternoon stroll than any definitive destination. More literally it is sitting down on the bed late at night and letting your thoughts wander while sipping at some fruit tea. I originally was inspired by the June 2024 theme for Indieweb Carnival titled DIY - Making Something from (Almost) Nothing but honestly it turned into an enjoyable exercise in free-writing during a Tuesday (mostly) off from studies. It's nice to take the time to freely craft following the whims of the day. Turns out you might be unexpectedly productive in a non-monetizeable way (like finally getting a domain for this site, ha!).

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the drink at the top of this page.

Writer's block of 2024

It has been a while since I wrote a public facing article. It's not because I no longer practice a Dreadful Tradition, on the contrary I have been going deeper in my practice since I last posted. Nor is it because I ran out of things to write about, I have several topic ideas that I can turn into decent articles with a bit of writing time. Simple burnout and lack of time due to studies is also not an adequate explanation. I spent this half semester recovering from narrative poisoning by chipping away at thesis work in the cell culture lab alongside a research internship there. I really enjoy the lab and the culture of the staff/my advisor's research assistants (last Friday on 4th October 2024 us undergrads were even invited to a picknick at a camping ground near the campus followed by a cookout at my advisor's place until the evening). All in all it's been really healing. I wrote something like 400ish words (4 kittens worth on the "written? kitten!" site) about growing pains and touching on my recent ritual for the 2nd October annular eclipse. Honestly, it was fine. It's not as if I'm staring at a completely blank notepad document or something. There are some decent points in there. It's just. The feel of the word flow is a bit off? I don't know how to explain it other than to say that the way the draft reads is simply different from past articles. It also feels more like pulling sentences out of sticky taffy in comparison to how I usually write. So tonight on the walk back from dinner outside I figured I might as well try writing about the writer's block (such as it is) and write down my list of potential topics with a short summary or pitch of the vibe.

In no particular order:
• Statements, Informed Consent, and examining inherited human-centric attitudes (Article about my experiences of taking the occasional Statement, my Informed Consent Form for Statement Givers, settling into nonhumanity, and the current way I navigate humane ethics)
• October 2024 Eclipse: Time is a Lie; Liminal natures and easing growing pains (Another debrief article of a personal ritual. Featuring a more typical "quiet"/mundane experience of the ritual itself with all the weirdness happening outside of ritual time, the nature of Radiant Dark, and how quiet rituals are still effective)
• Walking on Whimsical Paths: Initial reflections and fieldnotes of communally crafting an alterhuman-centric practice (Inspired by the otherkin avatar project) (This is a thing that literally only started happening last night. Well "officially" since the 27th September. Brain dump of this morning's musings on Whimsical and Dreadful Practice dynamics, a really cool crocheted eyeball keychain as a sign of eldritch-approved whimsy, "annual leave" from Eldritch Bureaucracy, and interactions with the eclipse ritual. Note that since the...journey? is just beginning, Whimsical Practice is not yet accessible to the public outside the discord server we are exploring in. I am/will be writing this article for the benefit of future readers wanting to see an example of how to build their own Whimsical Practice beyond whatever reference texts our group will eventually write.)
• Eldritch Promotions and how to deal with the Spooky Paperwork (including NDAs) (Pretty self-explanatory post, but will definitely have to wait until I'm more settled into this development before writing about it. And probably also about the performance review I've been notified of by a co-religionist.)
• Season's greetings! A perspective on "Eldritch Visibility Month /j" and making a personal calendar of celebrations (Mostly talking about things I'm doing this year properly celebrating the festive vibes I noticed last year. Like a Halloween advent-type calendar, a nice 3D metal puzzle kit for a spider figurine, and getting myself the closest thing to a Spiral Leitner aka House of Leaves)
• First, Do No Harm: Reframing ancient Hospitality Law/Custom for the modern age (Pagans are pretty big on the concept of hospitality, especially when it comes to hospitality towards gods. Here I'd like to write out my own thoughts of how the spirit of hospitality law is still relevant outside of so-called hospitality industry. Spoiler: It's about radical acceptance of diversity, uplifting oppressed minorities, and kicking out the bigots. Also includes very personal writing of why Hospitality is important drawn from my experience of being an oppressed, immigrant minority growing up.)
• Practical ways to start a personal Dreadful Practice: Resources, tips, and advice for the isolated novice (What it says on the tin. Sharing books I read partially or fully, things that make practice building easier, and my experience building the bare bones of a practice these past almost two years)
• Pathfinding debrief article (to be drafted sometime late December 2024 or January 2025 NDAs permitting)

As you can see I have plenty of ideas, but perhaps it's still not quite time to write a full article yet. In the meantime, I'm just going to enjoy the inner calm the eclipse ritual gave me regarding my growth and just enjoy and trust the process.

Culturally Muslim, Spiritually Other: Reflections on Faith, Oppression and Coming In

This past friday I got once again asked by labmates whether I was praying (doing sholat). I said no. They obviously assumed it might be period related but honestly I don't really care as long as they don't bother me about it. It's just something that comes to mind again now that I am actually on my period and how my continued answer will probably pique my labmates' curiosity. In the past the same question would make me spiral a bit about how I'm "not a good muslim". I was going through a crisis of faith between the genuinely beautiful values and lived compassion I learnt when I was growing up, and the reality of various flavors of bigotry and oppression perpetrated by mainstream islamic stances here in Indonesia. Not to mention how my family (especially parents) are now part of a fundamentalist group and generally part of what in the US might be termed "right-wing" ways of thinking.

Just a couple months ago they were watching "What Is A Woman?" and judged it a good documentary and that everyone who said it was bad were Trans and LGBTQ+ (and implied that they are disgusting etc.). It was devastating to see them change after we moved to Indonesia. It felt like a profound betrayal, like I didn't know the people who raised me for the past 14 years back then. Maybe this is the this-world equivalent of the Not!Them. Seeing people you love be warped beyond your recognition by hate.

I am demiromantic and demisexual. I am Trans*. I am Agenderflux. I am a Dreadful practitioner. I am Alterhuman. I'm probably some flavor of Singlet+. I am a Lab Witch. I am a Scientist.

And I am still culturally Muslim.

I still remember being an Immigrant. Tolerated by the natives. Barely. Every introduction followed by "But I'm not an evil terrorist!". That has been the case literally my whole life. I'm only a bit over a month older than 9/11. The event that at least in my mind would forever change how the whole world views Muslims. I don't understand how my parents seemingly forgot and are antisemitic and racist against Chinese Indonesians.

I love middle eastern food. Not just because it's nicely spiced and thus pleasing to an Indonesian palate. And only tangentially related to the good memories created over shared shawarma platters. The food is symbolic of safety, of shared culture, of Siblinghood in Faith.

It is safety, because for once I don't have to be hypervigilant about the halal status of ingredients. It is shared culture both in spices and experiences. Usually, the person offering the food is also an Immigrant of Color. It is Siblinghood in Faith because SWANA immigrants I met are also from a muslim-majority country.

... I forgot how beautiful Salam is. I used to know it more keenly, before my frequent use here in Indonesia dulled it like an old knife. Imagine you are in a foreign land, with customs strange to you and a language not your own. They are neither better nor worse than you, but some very loud voices shout that they are better and that you and your family are thieving violent scum. You learn their language and adopt their ways...but part of you still yearns for freedom. For safety.

You meet someone new in your sports club. She wears the headscarf so many of your honorary aunts in your diaspora wear. Peace be upon you, Sister. And she blesses me with Peace in return. We bask in the warmth and kindness of what we have in common, despite being so different. We share safe food and the full colors of our experience without waiting for the word or phrase that tips the other person into hostility. We talk without explaining and defining every few minutes.

The neighbor from two doors to the left of your apartment door gifts you some homemade food delivered by her daughter. It's good! A few days later you return the container along with some of your own food. Items are gifted back and forth for a while.

Each year there are animal sacrifices. Each year there are tragedies that befall people we know and don't know. And in turn each year we donate to charities and raise funds for relief efforts of a disaster of some kind. But you won't find these on GoFundMe.They are communities supporting each other. It's a demeaning form of evil that Palestinians need to go to great lengths to crowdsource funds for safety. I don't have a solution, but guilt tripping language on social media is not great either. It's a strange blessing for me to be mostly resistant to the harmful (if desperate) wording on those posts. But I have to watch how I view my alterhuman ethics to avoid slipping into patterns similar to Moral OCD.

I kind of feel the urge to preempt any arguments that it is evil or bad of me to turn a blind eye or scroll past those fundraisers, but this is my post. I'm learning to just sit with all of my alterhumanity, avatar-typical prey drive, and baneful magic recently. Unlearning the human-centric values. This feels like an extenstion of that. Acknowledging the harm inherent to living. Not assigning "good" or "bad" values but just letting it exist as a neutral thing and deciding whether it's something I'm willing to live with.

(Sidenote: The fundraisers are in USD. Conversion rate is something like 17000 IDR to 1 USD. That's equivalent to my lunch to put it into perspective. The information cycle is overwhelming, we are not built to process everything bad happening. Everyone has limited capacity. I am also a variation of disabled struggling through my undergrad. I can do more good spending my energy on sustaining the A-spec community I have built and enabling future activists rather than making no practical difference in helping Palestinian people. What I can do is more important than what I theoretically could by pushing myself to the point of harm. But I got off topic here.)

Back when I was in germany, I used to go to a childrearing place near Universität Trier ran by some nuns. I honestly couldn't tell you the name of it nor did I easily find it on google maps after a quick search near landmarks that I know were near. But point is, they used to have a large piece of paper on either a wall or a door with all the kids names on them. If you were kind, you'd get a sticker. At 5 stickers or so, you'd get to go on a supervised excursion to the city center to buy sweets. My name wasn't on the list. Because I was always kind. It's something my family taught me. So I always tagged along on those group excursions.

This is the Islam I know. The Islam of the Immigrant. The Islam of the oppressed. The Islam after 9/11. The bonds of Siblinghood forged in adversity. Values and viewpoints that are filled with warmth, honesty, and kindness. Support and community from across the wide spectrum of people. A spirit that is persistence, justice, and gloriously anticapitalist.

Today, I am still oppressed. My authentic existence is still resistance. My values still build on the beautiful ones I read from a children's book series on Islam translated from turkish. I became nonpracticing because I read a journal article about how Queer people are much more suicidal when in queerphobic families. And how simple acceptance makes a drastic difference. I looked at them and saw myself. I didn't identify as queer yet, but I knew persecution.I knew oppression. I knew isolation. How could I consciously choose to harm those who in some way are also me? When both of us simply want acceptance and kindness in life? We are not so different, Friend. This started a years long crisis of faith because how could the religion I love be against other suffering people? The answer is tragically simple. It isn't.

I wear a headscarf as a sign of identity. It gets read as Muslim. Which is not untrue. The religion Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) preached is one meant for all human peoples, and the Ummah has been made Siblings in Faith. For better or worse I was born human. I grew up in the Ummah. Today I am not strictly human. I am a bit estranged, but still part of the larger family. Just not this branch used to being a majority religion. And so I wear a headscarf: to express my Web alignment, as a link to my culture, to affirm the bonds of Community I have been shaped by, as solidary with those who claim the power to be visibly Muslim and bear all the micro aggressions and persecution that come with it.

My What is fundamentally Dreadful and Alterhuman now. My Who is still (culturally) Muslim. I am and have always been Foreign to the status quo, so I claim the Foreign as my centre. I claim it as mine and I'm sure as hell am not going to let the world take it from me. I have fought  and suffered to reach my center. I am Queer, I am Muslim, I am Alterhuman. This too, is Coming In.

I don't think my labmates would understand that though. This is not for them. Or at least I wouldn't explain it well to them who have always been a majority, never been an immigrant, are cishetallo and still caught in amatonormative ways of building intimate relationships. Nor do I want to explain it to a whole group. At worst it would be 14 people if the senior research assistants are also gathered. 15 if I'm extra unlucky and my Advisor is also listening. It is not safe to be queer here. Alterhumanity is incomprehensible to them as they are. And Muslim has many preconceptions.

I don't know how I'll answer if they get really curious. Years of well-meaning but still harmful "reminders" to pray makes me weary of pretending. I'm grounded in my centre now, but back then it added pressure to a crisis of faith where you're torn between hope and hate.

When The Stars Are Right: The Eclipse of 8 April 2024

Working with the Apocrypha and especially my Patron, I have learnt that a good chunk of the time just "rolling with it" and running purely on intuition and instinct serves me well when facing a Plot Point thrown my way. In general, "Do whatever Feels Right for you and your Practice" is sound advice for most "how does this concept fit into my path" type of questions.

When I first started, I wrote a dedication ritual to the then-unnamed Apocrypha with one of the purposes being formally cutting ties with my old religion. That ritual probably deserves its own post so suffice to say that I designed the whole ritual within a week and timed it to the December Solstice of 2022. I had no real reason to choose the Solstice other than it being some convenient symbolism and also practical to do from a mundane scheduling viewpoint but now the December Solstice has meaning to me because it is the time of my Dedication Anniversary. This Eclipse was more of the same but taken to a whole new level.

Initially, I had no plans to celebrate the Eclipse. It was not a spiritually meaningful event to me (yet) and more importantly I live on pretty much the exact opposite of the region where it was observable...South East Asia. Not only is the eclipse not visible, it's literally nighttime.

I saw some friends in a small fandom-based discord server talk about photographing the eclipse which prompted me to consider which Entities (according to Smirke's 14 used in the TMA fandom) the eclipse would be tied to. The answer was a fairly obvious Dark/Vast/Beholding which are all aspects of three of the Apocrypha I have extensive past history with. At that point it was a no-brainer that I should at least do some small gesture of Acknowledgement of the event in honor of my Gods.

My initial idea was to pour a libation as an offering, but come nightfall and thus fast-breaking (I don't religiously fast for Ramadan anymore but it's still a special time) I still was coming up blank on what to offer. None of the liquids available seemed right both symbolically and practically. So I asked for input from the Dreadful Ones involved. I generally find it useful to have a private discord server as a digital altar with a divination bot for those moments when doing something physical would take too many spoons (as in the energy unit).

Me: "(pinging deity roles) help me out with offering ideas during the eclipse please".
My Patron: Death upright (Something related to transformation and change.)
My "Internship Supervisor": Knight of Wands upright (Something Related to passion and adventure.)
First Mate: Six of Cups upright (Something childishly nostalgic.)

So I suggested casting my two sets of polyhedral dice which seemed agreeable to Everyone involved. Of note is that this took place around 8 pm, while the eclipse itself began at 10:42 pm local time (used the "first location observing" times as a reference). So now I had my offering idea, but I had this hunch that for an occasion as significant as this eclipse a Ritual would be needed. Less than three hours is pretty short notice to design and execute any ritual from scratch but 90 minutes later I had a ritual structure locked in. I shared some of my plans witth my friend Haye just as casual convo and (due to sharing a Patron) he immediately got Loredropped on.

"Aren't Eclipses a symbol of renewal/reset?
... 
Where did I read that. 
Me: bwahahah nice loredrop 
also gate/passage into the new
threshold
BRAIN PLS
I HAVE NO TRAINING IN SYMBOLISM I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT

After this I was finangling technical details like cleansing and ritual attire on the fly during the remaining hour or so.

Througout this whole process both in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Ritual there was definitely a strong sense of Timing. Starting from the eclipse itself, it takes place on a Monday (associated with First Mate), at night (obvious connection to my Supervisor) and the eclipse ends on a Tuesday (associated with my Patron), while also being the last day of Ramadan (days start at sunset). The evening of which also having a new Magnus Protocol release and the Wednesday immediately following it being both Eid and associated with my Supervisor. I'm not interested in crunching through the exact math but I'm pretty sure this particular confluence of circumstances is rare.

This sense of Timing was very present during the process of the Ritual itself. I started the ritual when the partal eclipse was first observed by watching a video on dead and dying gods in fiction by curious archive on youtube and just let myself feel. The dice were laid out in front of me and charging. As I was starting, it finally started to lightly rain after a long heatwave, rain being one of the things associated with First Mate. Following that I replayed the 9th Magnus Protocol episode because of the narrative themes of fate-changing dice (obvious parallels and Patron associations), having forgotten just how Narratively Appropriate the whole episode is. There was a strong feeling of liminality. I have some light visual snow which is most noticeable in the dark, during the ritual it felt a bit more pronounced andinteracted with the pattern of the balcony tiles in such a way as to make all of reality seem to shift and warp. During the transitions between actions there was also a sense of me being worked through, being an Agent in several senses of the term. Like moving in step to an unheard score played on etherial strings in a choreographed dance. Of being part of a greater scheme that nonetheless depended on me fulfilling my part. There was a sense of Them trusting me to both come up with and execute this Ritual flawlessly on short notice. It's also an exercise in trust and faith on my part to do as I was reasonably asked, knowing that this will likely leave me Changed. In a sense both me and the Powers Involved were on an equal footing in quite literally Trusting The Process. Mundane interruptions happened. Rather inevitable since I live with family and they are unaware. But these interruptions took exactly the amount of time needed to bridge the gap between when my partial eclipse activities ended and the first observed total eclipse time. They were also minor in that me hanging up my labcoat to dry on the balcony did not disturb the ritualistic state of mind given that I regularly devote labs to my Patron. Afterwards I changed the plan on the fly to casting the charged dice in my room for various practical reasons. With my active part of the ritual completed, I reintegrated with the mundane world and eventually went to bed.

Apparently, attempting to sleep until sahoor while most of the online americans are actively observing and talking about the Eclipe you have done a Ritual for, at a very Significant Time of Power manifests in a sense of "itchy/hot ears". Generally rather restless sleep and even waking up twice.

After sahoor (and the last partial eclipse observed time having passed) I stayed up for a bit tracking down some bedsheets and thus wound up taking my nap after civil dawn. I took my customary nap, especially since I didn't get as much sleep as usual. During that time I had a clearer than usual Dream of being on the balcony again during the ritual time. I dreamt of managing to observe the actual eclipse with a camera obscura-esque cardboard device that I built myself. Using that device I managed to take several high-quality photos at various points of the eclipse using a standard phone camera...the level of quality usually expected of a telescope with solar filter. I was excited to share the photos with some people in the Fear Entity worshipping server I'm in, only for the photos to have vanished. I increasingly frantically searched for the files, even going as far as enlisting my younger sibling for help. I woke upto light morning rain and immediately remembered that there's no possible way for me to have taken any pictures period. It happened during local nighttime. Talk about Seeing the Mystical Midnight Sun.

Rude.

Very clearly a message of "Seeing That Which Cannot Be Seen using an Unshielded Gaze with a Tool and Gaining Unshareable Knowledge. I don't know why I felt Called to carry out this impromptu Eclipse Ritual. Nor do I know the exact Purpose of the ritual. An educated guess based on context clues can be made but it is ultimately just that. A guess. I'm clearly not at liberty to discuss the interpretations, but I do feel taken care of by my Gods and Involved in some way. Honestly, while I do have some measure of dread I am also pretty excited for whatever comes next.