Meadowsweet Commission - By Maria Makovetskaya

This is potentially life saving information everyone should know.

Morning Light Calling; for my friend @silvaris

© riverwindphotography, August 2022

“Oh, what a sweet child,” cooed the god/goddess as they picked the crying child off of the floor. They cradled them in their arms, smiling softly. “How could anybody be so cruel to such an adorable little thing?”

The child began to stop sniffling as they looked up at the deity. There wasn’t any attention paid to the bodies of their attackers strewn about the room.

“Come now,” the deity said as they turned to leave. “You will be with me from now on.”

Elias Tigiser

Reblog this to prove your blog was made before the February 2022 tumblr resurgence

Jack-o'-lanterns have such a grab bag of lore, i love it

Fire, of course, has a long history of offering protection from evil forces. During the Celtic festival of Samhain (from which many Halloween traditions originate), the veil between worlds was considered thin, and ritual bonfires reminded the spooks to stay on their side of the lane.

Many a lantern has protected the lonely traveler on a dark moonless night. But lanterns can be dangerous too—especially the supernatural ones. in certain folklore 'jack-o'-lantern' was another name for will-o'-the-wisps, atmospheric ghost lights (or as legend has it, lost souls) that appear above bogs and lure unwise wanderers into sinkholes.

Then there's the 18th cent Irish folktale of Stingy Jack, a mischievous fellow who tricked the Devil twice, exacting a promise that hell would never claim his soul. So Jack goes on his cheerful way, and dies (as humans are prone to do), and ends up at the pearly gates. Now Heaven, it turns out, doesn't want a damn thing to do with him. So Jack jaunts on down and goes knocking on the gates of hell—only to have Satan slam the door in his face! How this leads to Stingy Jack being doomed to wander the earth carrying a hollowed out rutabaga lit by an ember of the flames of hell, I couldn't tell you. But that is how the story goes.

Whether the legend of Stingy Jack inspired or fueled or was created-by the gourd-carving practice, by the 19th cent, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh alike were annually carving jack-o'-lanterns out of turnips & rutabaga & beets & potatoes, and lighting them up to ward off Jack and other wandering spirits. Immigrants carried the tradition to North America, where pumpkins were indigenous and much easier to carve.

And so the modern Jack-o'-Lantern was born!

Not that gourd lanterns were anything new. Metalwork was expensive, after all, and gourds worked as-well-as and better-than-most crops when it came to carving a poor farmer's lantern.

As for carving human faces into vegetables, that supposedly goes back thousands of years in certain Celtic cultures. It may even have evolved from head veneration, or been used to represent the severed skulls of enemies defeated in battle. Or maybe not! Like many human traditions, jack-o'-lanterns evolved over multiple eras and cultures and regions, in some ways we can trace and others we can only guess at. But at the end of the day, it makes a damn good story, and a spooky way to celebrate—which is as good a reason as any (and a better reason than most!) to keep a tradition going.

In conclusion: happy spooky season, and remind me to tell yall about plastered human skulls one of these days 🎃

srcs 1, 2, 3

Werewolf songs about actual werewolves, not just metaphorical ones:

1. Werewolf’s Eyes by Birch Book

By far my favourite on the list, possibly my favourite song ever. This is a deeply poetic tale of werewolf torn between his lover and the call of the wilds. The instrumentals are simple (acoustic guitar and a bit of flute), and the singer has an amazing vocal range. I literally just want to write out these lyrics on everything, they’re so beautiful

Keep reading

Well I have woken up. Time to get back into the nonsense, I guess.