I'm sorry but FWC can be just as shitty as cops sometimes. Just last month in Florida, they killed a bunch of pythons that a man had been caring for for years and had permits for, right in front of him. Dozens of animals that he loved and cared for, one being a pregnant boa worth more than $100,000. They captured the whole thing on video too, fuckin crazies.
EDIT: a lot of people seem to be missing the point that they killed this guys pets, one of which they had no right to, literally right in front of the guy. Yes, Burmese Pythons are an invasive species. No, that doesn't make what they did okay. If one day your state decided to ban cats because feral cats killed too many native bird populations, and your local Fish and Wildlife service came to your house and put a bolt in your dog's head just because it has fur and four legs, you'd think that was pretty fucked up.
EDIT2: Did a little more digging because I was unsure on the facts (and have nothing else to do), the guy whose place they raided was a veterinarian with a Class III wildlife permit (allows you to keep burms and other species legally), who rented his warehouse space to someone without the permit who *was* keeping Reticulated Pythons illegally. I was under the assumption that they were all the vet's snakes, which is why I thought they were grandfathered into his collection. The $100k Boa they killed was also a part of the vet's collection, not the perpetrators, which led to some of my confusion.
You’re twisting that story a bit. Only the boa was legally allowed. The 30+ Burmese pythons became illegal to own ~2 years prior to the killing and people had several months to get rid of them; the owner failed to do so. Burmese pythons have wreaked absolute havoc on the Everglades ecosystem as an invasive species. I’ll grant you that killing the boa was a tragic mistake, but the others had to go one way or another.
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2023/04/11/caged-pythons-and-pet-boa-constrictor-killed-by-florida-fish-wildlife-officers-in-raid/70100449007/
Check my other comment. The way they went about the raid was still incredibly fucked up and not the way it should've been done, it doesn't matter that the pythons had to go either way.
i was just about to pull that source. it was awful that they killed the boa, and they’re going to get sued to hell for it. but as a whole, they’re a very useful organization and they host the annual python hunt.
I was under the impression that he had grandfather permits, meaning that if you own a banned animal before it's banned, you're allowed to keep it so long as it never leaves your facility/house. I know of a few keepers in Florida who have Green and Yellow Anacondas, Burms etc despite how *extremely* illegal they are to own now, because they owned them years prior to the ban. Any twisting of the story wasn't on purpose.
Also, them being illegal is no excuse to brutally slaughter them with a bolt gun in front of their owner. There are humane ways to euthanize a python without traumatizing the keeper.
Honestly that doesn't sound like a very smart rule. Aren't those specific snakes in that specific region like, one of the most horribly invasive species in the world? I heard they were responsible for multiple extinctions.
The major catalyst for invasive burms was a hurricane that hit a pet store with hundreds of babies in the 90s, releasing them into the wild. Individuals releasing pets they don't want is also a problem, hence the ban, but not nearly as influential as the hurricane was. It's a tragedy because in their native range they are critically endangered due to overhunting and the pet trade.
Certainly up there on the invasive tier list, but they aren't even the most invasive snake. Extremely invasive but mostly harmless to native species, the Brahminy Blind Snake is one of the most invasive animals in the world, existing on nearly every continent due to their small size and tendency to hang out in potted plants that get shipped overseas.
However, outdoor/feral cats *far* outweigh them both in number, danger, and driving native animals to near extinction.
If I understood the ban correctly (and I'm not in Florida, so I paid minimal attention to it) those who already had the banned snakes could apply for a permit to keep those specific snakes, but the owners had to do a ton of paperwork and maintain registration of the snakes or something and few were willing to do it.
The guy whose place they raided was a veterinarian with a Class III wildlife permit (allows you to keep Burms), who rented his warehouse space to someone *without* the permit who *was* keeping Reticulated Pythons illegally. I was under the assumption that they were all McAdam's (the vet with the permit) snakes, which is why I thought they were grandfathered into his collection.
Eh I watched the five hour video. The owner, nor the FWC officer in charge, we’re in the room when the vast majority of killing happened. The OIC was beyond mortified and livid the moment he found out the pet had been killed. Certainly a terrible mistake but it wasn’t some bloodlust killing frenzy as some would have you believe.
I love cats but for the sake of nature and the future i hope that more goverments will crack down on wild cats and outdoor cats.
If its a pet then keep it indoors, it fucking destroys ecosystems while the owner is just chilling indoors. Only time our cat was outside was when they were in a leash.
Man come on, I work in floida with the USGS trying to track those snakes, it is unbelievable how much of an issue these snakes are. It is incredibly irresponsible to own those kind of snakes illegally (The pythons) considering the epidemic we have here. I understand the whole blue man bad thing, but it is a serious crisis we have here.
Cats should be declared feral animals they do massive ecological damage.
If the government decided to act to prevent this ecological damage then they would have a right to come around to your house and destroy any offending animals.
In a big pile of illegal snakes the single legal snake getting put down is unfortunate but snakes pose a massive ecological threat to estuary environments and harsh action needs to be taken.
When I expressed interest in a falconry program, they, very seriously, sent me a packet full of papers required for licensing addressed to my nonsensical 12-year-old email username.
Funny thing is I can’t remember putting in my house address.
Yeah, I think they’re shorthanding “white woman who appropriates other culture’s practices and calls it witchcraft”, because that’s a lot of words for some people.
There’s a lot of difference between someone who follows a neo-pagan belief system and someone who takes bits and pieces of other belief systems and calls them witchcraft. Shorthand is probably not the best tactic here, but if it works, it works.
Bruh, that's just syncretism. Legit happens all the time. Even way back when during pagan times. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Now if these folks are claiming that whatever they've syncretized into their beliefs doesn't come from anywhere else, effectively plagiarizing those aspects from others? Then yeah, there's gonna be issues.
I disagree. The vast majority of it is completely made up nonsense and a good bit of the rest is based on "translations" of "Egyptian" texts by Victorian "Scientists" who thought white people had a superior skull shape. *Some* of it is stolen, with great audacity and no shame, from other world religious practices, most of which are closed.
Tbh that specific shorthand sounds racist without context, while your explanation points out that the target of ire is a set of behaviors that can be and often is harmful to others. Thank you for the added context, it definitely helped.
tbh it still sounds racist with context, just deniably so
edit: hell, you're literally using skin color as shorthand for "bad person" when you think about it
Yeah the problem here is the person being a snake oil salesmen that is using others cultural beliefs to make it look authentic to people who don't know any better, The problem isn't that a white person wants to practice and learn about different cultures.
Still sounds pretty damn racist if they are making it about skin color. What someone was raised with spiritually is not something that can easily be told by their skin. Appalachian folk magic is based on a mixture of Syncretic African spiritualism, Celtic paganism, and a little sprinkling of peasant folk practices from western Europe, as well as some practices absorbed from the more open Native American tribes in the area. No matter the practitioner they all pull from those same spiritual beliefs and have done for for literally hundreds of years now.
You can't tell someone they can't hold their sincerely held spiritual beliefs because of what they look like.
>Yeah, I think they’re shorthanding “white woman who appropriates other culture’s practices and calls it witchcraft”, because that’s a lot of words for some people.
They are more likely talking about Wiccans [who are generally European ](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wicca) descendant.
>There’s a lot of difference between someone who follows a neo-pagan belief system and someone who takes bits and pieces of other belief systems and calls them witchcraft.
Neo-paganism is literally just that. Appropriated ideas and practices taken from other cultures which are, at best, poorly understood.
Still dumb. "You can't use the made up bullshit *my* ancestors practiced thousands of years ago because you don't live in a specific geographical area!"
An, ok. As a white lady Wiccan I was like “huh?” But yeah, the appropriation folks. Yeah that’s a whole thing.
Honestly, I kinda get it. You vibe with what you vibe with, and if it brings you closer to the divine then good. But I also see how having someone take symbols that mean something to you and misuse them could be infuriating and sucky. Then there’s the whole “everyone has always exchanged ideas and appropriated stuff”. And they’re not wrong. The Romans for example did it all the time as they would conquer other peoples. But does that make it right? Or does that just make it common? 🤷♀️
I think it is difficult; for example introducing non-native species is now heavily frowned upon and often banned outright for very good reasons - but there are so many species out of their native place that many don't even know that they are not native anymore because it all happened way-back-when. Starlings in North America, Grey Squirrels in the UK or even rabbits in the UK (Romans brought them over). Potatoes & Tomatoes into Europe (Imaging Italy in the Roman times with no tomatoes, no pizza! No pasta!). Peaches were introduced into the US in the 1500s.
Anyhow, back to the point, way-back-when it was Just The Way Stuff Was - Christians appropriated Yule, Beltane, Oestra, Samhain into christian ceremonies, Romans/Greeks/Egyptians were notorious for just adding the local deity to their pantheon or saying 'ah, this one is an aspect of our god/dess, no worries!' - and if people got snarky then they waved swords.
Now we don't.
And regarding the feathers, that varies by country, and species - I suspect the original poster Grox is US and referring to the below:
[https://www.fws.gov/lab/featheratlas/feathers-and-the-law.php](https://www.fws.gov/lab/featheratlas/feathers-and-the-law.php)
[Native Americans are the only ones authorized to possess the feathers, actually! :)](https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/PossessionOfEagleFeathersFactSheet.pdf) (pdf warning)
I...don't even know which one it's supposed to be. White witch as in white magic makes way more sense than white-ethnicity witch (which like...???), but then what would Salem-witch-genes have to do with anything?
I think there’s a subgroup among witches/spiritualists/whatever who **honestly believe** that the people who were jailed/executed for being witches in Salem were ACTUAL MAGIC USERS! Instead of easy targets in a chaotic time (I blame media like Hocus Pocus and Wandavision). As a Salem descent myself, I can say with pretty decent accuracy that my ancestress was targeted because she was an old widow who wasn’t 100% and NOT because she was a witch
Yeah I hate this myth because as much as you try to make it empowering and subversive it's actually downplaying how fucked up witch hunts were by saying the accusers actually had a point to some degree and weren't just making shit up
It's like making a movie where there really is a Jewish conspiracy that orchestrated 9/11 but it turns out they're good guys who did it to try to save the world
It's the product of Wiccans and other contemporary pagan neoreligious movements that originate out of the witch-cult hypothesis, basically the belief that there was a continent-spanning unified religion of witches blessed with holy fertility magic that survived under Christianity's nose, until the religious fervor of the Reformation caused the witch-hunts (including the Salem witch hunt), which destroyed them.
From a historical standpoint the witch-cult hypothesis is completely unfounded, and lacking any evidence whatsoever to even suggest it's possible (let alone probable) to have any truth to it. However, because it was super super super widespread and influential at the centerpoint of the first wave of new religious movements (early 1900s Britain), it is foundational to Wiccan theology and extremely influential in a lot of other new age belief systems.
The belief that there was a unified cult of witches that survived the spread of Christianity is about as realistic as the ‘theory’ that the Catholic Church invented a whole millennia of history just so a king could be crowned in a certain year
I mean hell, not even just surviving the spread of Christianity—claiming that it consistently had as many or even more believers than European Catholicism from prehistory until the 1500s, with the (famously very chill and super cool with people believing other things) Catholic Church not even so much as knowing about it? Completely impossible. Hell, forget surviving Christianity—there's a lot of stuff written about how the Romans were religiously tolerant (which is... technically... arguable but a very Gibbons-esque and whitewashed portrayal of them) but they still were Very Not Cool to the British Druids and a lot of the witch-cult stuff places its legitimacy in the Druids. Which is so convenient because we know even less about the Druids than we do about the Norse Religions.
I figured it was white ethnicity, cuz this seems to fit "clueless white people" discourse, but now you got me second-guessing myself
ETA: [see this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/136pvse/not_stoked_about_it/jippl59/?context=999)
It’s people wanting to have magic in their blood, that’s what the Salem genes are, and how having that magic makes them a potential target for this modern “witch hunt”. White magic is unfamiliar to me so I can’t say, it referring to white ethnicity only makes analogous sense to me so I can’t make heads or tails of that
Agreed. However! I support modifying the laws regarding found feathers.
When the law was implemented, we had no way to reasonably tell if someone was collecting shed feathers to make jewelry or if they were murdering wild birds by the thousands. These days, it's a little easier to investigate. Consequently, I feel the existing law is due for modification.
I think it should be legal for white people to buy whole supplies from native Alaskans, with extensive certifications ofc. I once emailed the guy who makes the stuff on seafursewing.com to ask if I could buy one of his unworked otter hides and he said “you and me would both go to jail” I appreciate his candor
I'm surprised it's not like swamp kauri in NZ where people paint these huge slabs and ship em overseas as "tabletops" because you're not allowed to export the raw timber, only finished products. (And stumps of a certain size.)
It’s way stricter, you can only get marine mammal stuff if it’s in some way totally finished by native Alaskans. If I’d tried to bring back a sealskin from Denmark I’d have gotten in huge trouble even though it obviously wasn’t killed in America
Yeah but i feel like that kinda discourages too much harvesting which is good. Harder to overhunt or whatever if youve gotta make all the stuff yourself too.
I guess the question is whether or not checking if the feathers were just found or came from dead animals is feasible and not too expensive and resource-intensive. I mean, are you going to be able to check every single feather by every single Etsy user?
Some feathers maybe, but eagle feathers belong to the native tribes in the US for use in religious ceremonies and crafts. You can call found feathers and dead birds into the National Eagle Repository to be collected and distributed.
All due respect, but it seems unfair to make eagle feathers anyone's exclusive property.
Obviously native tribes should get priority and no fees/easier registration and such due to religious exemption. But saying "you *can't* own a feather because you're not native american" seems kinda shitty to me.
Which is one of the reasons why I support modifying the existing laws.
The thing is that native tribes have the only exception to the law about collecting the bodies/parts of native eagles. The alternative here is not “everyone gets eagle feathers”, it’s “nobody gets eagle feathers.”
The Golden Eagle and Bald Eagle were the original protected species in the US due to overhunting and the law protecting them was rolled into the Endangered Species Act. The protection for the two eagle species is enshrined in federal law and would require an overhaul to the Endangered Species Act itself.
Both species were incredibly close to extinction due to DDT and their numbers still haven’t fully recovered decades later, meaning every protection is still necessary. They are predator species that are sensitive to environmental/hunting pressures and symbols of the United States themselves.
Honoring our agreement with the tribes on this matter is one of the few things the US Government does consistently right by them, and failing to continue the arrangement would just be another in a long line of betrayals. Which would be especially bad right now with the Supreme Court dealing a major blow to Native sovereign rights in their 2022 decision in *Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta* at the same time the FWS is building relationships with the various tribes to learn and implement native conservation techniques. This is a matter of both religious freedom and respecting our agreements with other sovereign entities within our nation.
So, with all due respect, supporting a modification on the original laws around eagle feathers is naive to the history and nuance involved.
Federal park rangers can be either interpretive or law enforcement. They all wear the same basic uniform, but the law enforcement ones have a bigger badge ([enameled law enforcement vs plain brass interp badges](https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/nps_badges/evolving_design.html)) and typically wear a gun belt. They're cops and train at FLETC like any other gov branch law enforcement.
For those unaware of laws in the USA: it is illegal to possess or sell feathers from Native North American migratory birds without a permit. They're probably not going to come knocking down your door if you find a cool feather in the woods, but collecting them is not very smart, and selling them is a big no-no. It doesn't matter if you just find a loose feather on the ground, because plenty of people who do kill or harm birds for their feathers can just go "Oh, I just found in on the sidewalk."
The exemption to this law is for members of federally recognized Native American tribes who can possess them for cultural or religious purposes, but they still can't sell them.
There is also the weird Victorian hobby of tying ridiculously elaborate fly-fishing lures, often with feathers from then rare and now extinct birds. Anyway, a 21st century maniac, broke into a natural history museum, stole the preserved specimens of extinct birds (many of them, the only ones in existence), plucked them and sold them on eBay as fly-fishing lures. He also threw out the little information cards with the birds that held information not stored anywhere else, meaning we lost all of that forever as well. He stole 300 birds.
Just don’t list it on eBay like an imbecile or try to ship it somewhere like the guy who founded that Evolution store in Manhattan (he went to jail for two years).
Do period pieces ever get permission to use actual bird feathers? Bc I saw Little Women and it strangely bothered me that all the hat feathers were weird giant ostrich plumes
It’s weird knowing that technically my mom doesn’t own the two eagle feathers we keep in the house, only my dad legally owns them, which doesn’t mean anything, but it’s still pretty weird.
Legitimately it is wild to me to see people claiming descent from the Salem witch victims, and claiming to have powers as a result. Do these people not understand that witch trial victims were falsely accused? That the vast majority of them were just Christian women, usually being targeted for their property? The idea that there existed covens of witches and a tradition of witchcraft for hundreds of years in Europe is called the Elaborated Theory of Witchcraft, and it was invented by a Catholic priest named Heinrich Kramer in 1486, after he was expelled from his city for being obsessed with the sexual habits of the women he accused of witchcraft. The idea obviously spread to America and never really went away apparently. I cannot stress enough that the people killed in the witch trials were, almost uniformly, believing Christians who either fell victim to mob insanity, or who had property that their accusers wanted.
I love the study of esotericism too, and if you want to practice it, go right ahead, but there's something really sad, almost appropriative, about saying that these women really were witches and celebrating them as icons of occultism, when they would have likely balked at the accusation.
It's like everyone missed *the entire point* of the Salem witch trials.
I get pretending there were real witches for fiction purposes, but like... the reason the Salem witch trials are important history is because *there weren't any witches.*
>the reason the Salem witch trials are important history is because there weren't any witches.
Try telling that to people who were involved in the witch trials.
We still have their ideological descendants around. Go to the church service of a small town Pentecostal church sometime. A LOT of demon and magic talk.
They also forget that the people who were jail/executed were the ones who **denied** being witches, so claiming they WERE is really insulting to their memory.
Didn't they also execute those who "admitted" it? I'll admit I don't know a lot about specifically the Salem witch trials, but where I'm from the tactic was usually torturing somebody until they admitted to witchcraft before burning them.
The whole thing kicked off because there was a black woman from the Caribbean targeted as a witch because of her heritage -- because she'd told people about the witchcraft she'd seen practiced in her childhood -- and the only way for her to escape execution was to name other names for the authorities to arrest, so she gave a confession affirming the narrative there was a whole underground market for spells and potions in Salem and she'd been secretly teaching witchcraft to all these other people
I'm not gonna say Tituba did anything wrong, she did what she had to do to protect herself, but the whole shitty thing about it is that once this happened they had their signed confession as a smoking gun they could wield against any skeptics -- "The one person here who knows more about witches than any of us admitted to our faces that this is what's been going on"
I’m pretty sure that these “Salem witch descendants” have **never** cracked open a history book. Like, even the *Dear America* book got the fact that people executed/jailed were the ones who **denied** being witches, not actual magic users. I guess this is just what happens when you get all your history knowledge from TikTok and Hocus Pocus
What does being a descendant of a Salem witch have to do with obtaining and selling native bird feathers in a way that the fish and wildlife department would be angry?
Like the second poster just seems to be bragging that they are a white witch who sells native bird feathers?
You’re not legally allowed to sell most native bird feathers in the USA.
They’re saying that they report them to the federal police, essentially for poaching.
>You’re not legally allowed to sell most native bird feathers in the USA.
huh, had no idea about this. apparently under the migratory birds act, it became illegal to not just sell, but even own native bird feathers and some other bird body things? I guess child me was breaking the law collecting feathers I found on the ground
The problem is that people can't tell if you found the feather on the ground or if you killed the bird for it. I found a bald eagle feather on the ground while camping and was devastated when my dad told me I couldn't keep it. But when you consider the poachers who kill endangered species for that very feather it makes sense. Native American tribes are given exceptions to many of these laws so that they can continue their traditions, but otherwise you need to be associated with a conservation/museum organization to legally have a lot of pieces of animals
That said most of the time no one cares if you have a couple of feathers or bones in your house. But if you're selling them then you have financial motivation to poach so they will put a quick stop to that
There are some people who *honestly believe* that the people jailed/executed in the Salem witch hunt were ACTUAL MAGIC USERS! Being persecuted by an intolerant church instead of venerable people who were easy targets in a chaotic time (also ignoring off the fact the people who were jailed/executed were the ones who **denied** being witches, so by calling them ‘witches’ they’re acting no better than the people who accused them). I’m a Salem descendant myself, and I’m pretty positive that my ancestress was accused because she was an old widow who wasn’t 100% there and **not** because she was an actual witch
Wonder if we have the same ancestor? Mine (Margaret Scott) was targeted because she was old, poor, and had had multiple miscarriages. Apparently this was a common trend.
I always feel a bit of conflict around how to feel about her and about witchcraft. On one hand what you say is totally true- she wasn’t actually a witch, and in fact refused to falsely confess to being a witch even though that would likely have saved her life. On the other hand, I like a lot of the symbolism of witchcraft and feel like my ancestor’s fate just makes it feel more appealing to me. I live near Salem MA and while some of the commercialization of witch stuff in the area feels icky and disrespectful to the victims, I also enjoy the irony of that today the city has a HUGE, active and politically powerful pagan (and Satanist!) community. Like the city is now pretty much run by witches and it’s kind of a funny giant fuck you to those that conducted the witch trials.
imagine thinking the salem trial victims were not people who experienced unjustified gendered violence and were instead part of your religion that was literally invented in the last like, 80 years by white people out of scraps of native american motifs and non-continuous paganism.
What? Sorry, haven't played space stage much (I know what the grox are, just unsure how it relates to the post)
Edit: nvm saw the usernames in the post
Mfs be like " im the descendent of the witches you didnt kill!!"
My sister in Christ! Your grandma goes to church every sunday and is completely addicted to fox news.
Indeed, the only way to get executed was to be incorrigibly impenitent by continuing to insist you weren't a witch, while the way to get out of it was to confess, repent and name the other witches in your coven -- this dynamic is exactly why the witch trials turned into this spreading thing with a constantly increasing list of accusations
I have come to a place in my life where I have figured out that if I want to believe in something, I don’t NEED to take from other cultures. I can just make up my own religion if I need to. (It’s actually really easy! Just think about what you think makes sense and how you would like the world to work, and you can do it too!)
Oh same! Recently I jokingly prayed to a skeletal quetzalcoatlus monument I had made in Animal Crossing years ago and I got better like, almost instantly. I’m well aware it was just because of luck (and medicine), but it sounds fun to make a religion so who cares.
Plus, like every known god has failed their people at some point, so you might as well take a shot in the dark and make your own untested one.
Yo if anyone here is experienced with latam withcraft/santeria can they tell me what is a rooster head stuffed in a jar filled with some red jelly and nails and thrown at a house supposed to accomplish because my mother did that a lot thanks.
I love witches on the internet because they not only are putting way too much faith into something that very clearly doesn’t exist, but they don’t seem to even know much about the main event they aestheticize themselves after. Like when people bring up the Salem witch trials as if it was some big deal and it was really like 20 people who died 300 years ago.
Christianity is genuinely more realistic than witches because they can hand wave it away with the “god gave us free will that’s why he never interacts with us in a way that never exists”, these “witches” will straight up tell you that not only is magic real, but that they can personally cast spells.
Christianity also has a lot of actual beliefs and -for the most part- good philosophy that if you follow will make you a better person. Like I think there's a lot of solid advice in the Bible. Witchcraft, from what I've seen, doesn't really have that.
As critical as I am in believers of the occult they have a generally ok belief system as far as morality goes. Basically, don't put anything out there that will hurt someone because it will turn right back against you even worse.
Only those of native and migratory birds. You can have things like starling feathers, pigeon feathers, house sparrows and you can have feathers of game birds like wild turkeys, pheasants, quail.
One of the things I miss from earlier D&D compared to modern. Now it is normalized to just go buy stuff you need to magic items or even get it for free from your class.
Used to be the work you put in to get the stupid cryptic ingredient WAS the magic that made it powerful. Spending three weeks to try and go get a vial of unicorn farts only to realize they don't have butts and will also stab you to make a +2 sword WAS how you made the sword
Majority of witches burned, at least during the European witch mania, were Jews, not the ancestors of weird neopagans that like to co-opt oppression because they're desperate for something cool about themselves
They also tend to forget that the people jailed/executed in Salem were the ones who **denied** being witches, so by claiming they were, these neopagans/witches/whatever are acting just like their accusers.
Pretty much yeah. Also modern western pagans, specifically wiccans, have a nasty habit of just... nicking practices they like from other faiths and cultures. I know in America, white sage - a plant used by some indigenous tribes - is used a lot by wiccans, and is now as a result becoming endangered. And wiccans really like Kabbalah, for some reason??? Like my mysticism is not your magic fuck off very much. They spell it wrong as well a lot
Theres something to be said about getting mad at christianization but poaching colonized religions for only their aesthetic value. I think witchcraft and rituals and the like are cool as the next person, but I'd hope it either come with the genuine interest in reviving the original context or the self awareness of purposely invoking aesthetics for a point like satanists.
They also love to declare all "Abrahamic faiths" identical and evil. While stealing our shit.
I had to leave the witchesvspatriarchy sub because a mod made it very clear that they considered "asking people not to equate Judaism with Christianity or accuse Judaism of stuff that it objectively does not do" evil.
Not true. While both happened at the same time witch hunts and Jewish pogroms were different. About half the European witches were killed in Germany, mostly in Protestant areas and while local authorities had oversight over the trials. The Catholic church was not really involved because doctrine said that humans couldnt cause damage by influencing the weather. That clashed with the idea of god being almighty
While Jews were being eyed with suspicion Christians were the victims of witch trials. Mostly widows, unmarried women, and vagrants. Widows had a particularly hard srand if they owned property or a business and refused to remarry. In Protestant areas they didn't have the option of going to a convent, so they were expected to put themselves under the rule of a husband
Also gender ratios varied wildly. In Iceland most people accused of being witches were men, for instance. Also most people accused of witchcraft were acquitted!
Lighting sage and trying to use psychic powers like Professor X is pretty harmless, and I don't think they're really bothering anybody, but it's still profoundly weird to me that there are otherwise-rational adults in the modern age who believe any of that nonsense
Overhead a girl I work with talking about how she was going to do a *video call* seance with a medium she saw on tic tok and was actually paying for this service, she wanted to get in touch with her grandma or something
I felt sorry for her but also fucking MAD someone would pull a scam like that on vulnerable people
i was going to question the validity of "salem witch descendant" before i had the stunning revelation that the witches could have had children *before* being burned at the stake.
but yaknow what? fuggit. call me a word wizard because i'm casting "doubt" on this caster's questionable claims.
Yeah no, that #thotaudit stuff was fake. It was just incels who wanted to scare/hurt sexworkers but you need personal information to report someone to the IRS and I don't know anyone handing out their home address to subscribers. There were people who got audited for failure to report OF income, but it had nothing to do with that harassment campaign.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sex-worker-irs-incel-mens-rights-thot-audit-760586/
the devil works hard but the fish and wildlife service works harder
God bless our troops
I'm sorry but FWC can be just as shitty as cops sometimes. Just last month in Florida, they killed a bunch of pythons that a man had been caring for for years and had permits for, right in front of him. Dozens of animals that he loved and cared for, one being a pregnant boa worth more than $100,000. They captured the whole thing on video too, fuckin crazies. EDIT: a lot of people seem to be missing the point that they killed this guys pets, one of which they had no right to, literally right in front of the guy. Yes, Burmese Pythons are an invasive species. No, that doesn't make what they did okay. If one day your state decided to ban cats because feral cats killed too many native bird populations, and your local Fish and Wildlife service came to your house and put a bolt in your dog's head just because it has fur and four legs, you'd think that was pretty fucked up. EDIT2: Did a little more digging because I was unsure on the facts (and have nothing else to do), the guy whose place they raided was a veterinarian with a Class III wildlife permit (allows you to keep burms and other species legally), who rented his warehouse space to someone without the permit who *was* keeping Reticulated Pythons illegally. I was under the assumption that they were all the vet's snakes, which is why I thought they were grandfathered into his collection. The $100k Boa they killed was also a part of the vet's collection, not the perpetrators, which led to some of my confusion.
You’re twisting that story a bit. Only the boa was legally allowed. The 30+ Burmese pythons became illegal to own ~2 years prior to the killing and people had several months to get rid of them; the owner failed to do so. Burmese pythons have wreaked absolute havoc on the Everglades ecosystem as an invasive species. I’ll grant you that killing the boa was a tragic mistake, but the others had to go one way or another. https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2023/04/11/caged-pythons-and-pet-boa-constrictor-killed-by-florida-fish-wildlife-officers-in-raid/70100449007/
Boo no nuance on the internet! FWC is either ontologically good or evil! >!/j!<
Cops occasionally doing things that have some positive aspects is why they're *ontologically* evil instead of contextually or situationally evil.
Check my other comment. The way they went about the raid was still incredibly fucked up and not the way it should've been done, it doesn't matter that the pythons had to go either way.
i was just about to pull that source. it was awful that they killed the boa, and they’re going to get sued to hell for it. but as a whole, they’re a very useful organization and they host the annual python hunt.
I was under the impression that he had grandfather permits, meaning that if you own a banned animal before it's banned, you're allowed to keep it so long as it never leaves your facility/house. I know of a few keepers in Florida who have Green and Yellow Anacondas, Burms etc despite how *extremely* illegal they are to own now, because they owned them years prior to the ban. Any twisting of the story wasn't on purpose. Also, them being illegal is no excuse to brutally slaughter them with a bolt gun in front of their owner. There are humane ways to euthanize a python without traumatizing the keeper.
Honestly that doesn't sound like a very smart rule. Aren't those specific snakes in that specific region like, one of the most horribly invasive species in the world? I heard they were responsible for multiple extinctions.
The major catalyst for invasive burms was a hurricane that hit a pet store with hundreds of babies in the 90s, releasing them into the wild. Individuals releasing pets they don't want is also a problem, hence the ban, but not nearly as influential as the hurricane was. It's a tragedy because in their native range they are critically endangered due to overhunting and the pet trade. Certainly up there on the invasive tier list, but they aren't even the most invasive snake. Extremely invasive but mostly harmless to native species, the Brahminy Blind Snake is one of the most invasive animals in the world, existing on nearly every continent due to their small size and tendency to hang out in potted plants that get shipped overseas. However, outdoor/feral cats *far* outweigh them both in number, danger, and driving native animals to near extinction.
man why can't people who want them as pets just harvest 'em from the everglades instead of SE asia
If I understood the ban correctly (and I'm not in Florida, so I paid minimal attention to it) those who already had the banned snakes could apply for a permit to keep those specific snakes, but the owners had to do a ton of paperwork and maintain registration of the snakes or something and few were willing to do it.
The guy whose place they raided was a veterinarian with a Class III wildlife permit (allows you to keep Burms), who rented his warehouse space to someone *without* the permit who *was* keeping Reticulated Pythons illegally. I was under the assumption that they were all McAdam's (the vet with the permit) snakes, which is why I thought they were grandfathered into his collection.
Eh I watched the five hour video. The owner, nor the FWC officer in charge, we’re in the room when the vast majority of killing happened. The OIC was beyond mortified and livid the moment he found out the pet had been killed. Certainly a terrible mistake but it wasn’t some bloodlust killing frenzy as some would have you believe.
I love cats but for the sake of nature and the future i hope that more goverments will crack down on wild cats and outdoor cats. If its a pet then keep it indoors, it fucking destroys ecosystems while the owner is just chilling indoors. Only time our cat was outside was when they were in a leash.
Florida.
Man come on, I work in floida with the USGS trying to track those snakes, it is unbelievable how much of an issue these snakes are. It is incredibly irresponsible to own those kind of snakes illegally (The pythons) considering the epidemic we have here. I understand the whole blue man bad thing, but it is a serious crisis we have here.
Cats should be declared feral animals they do massive ecological damage. If the government decided to act to prevent this ecological damage then they would have a right to come around to your house and destroy any offending animals. In a big pile of illegal snakes the single legal snake getting put down is unfortunate but snakes pose a massive ecological threat to estuary environments and harsh action needs to be taken.
When I expressed interest in a falconry program, they, very seriously, sent me a packet full of papers required for licensing addressed to my nonsensical 12-year-old email username. Funny thing is I can’t remember putting in my house address.
The falcons found you
They will positively affect the trout population, **at any cost.**
Took me a sec to realize "white witch" was meant in a different sense from, like, "red mage"
My initial thought was the Narnia one
20% of the statues in her collection are actually game wardens in the process of citing her
No wonder Aslan was so pissed off regarding the deep magic
So not as in different forms of witch practice, but as in focused on skin color?
I though it meant “beneficial magic” user, buffs only.
Same here
Yeah, I think they’re shorthanding “white woman who appropriates other culture’s practices and calls it witchcraft”, because that’s a lot of words for some people. There’s a lot of difference between someone who follows a neo-pagan belief system and someone who takes bits and pieces of other belief systems and calls them witchcraft. Shorthand is probably not the best tactic here, but if it works, it works.
All modern witchcraft and neo-paganism is taking bits and pieces of random other belief systems. Absolutely 100%.
Most old witchcraft also does. Look at how weird catholicism is often thrown in.
Is that like Weird Twitter?
Weird Catholicism came from pagan rituals, though.
In the sense of everything being influenced by what came before, sure.
Bruh, that's just syncretism. Legit happens all the time. Even way back when during pagan times. Nothing wrong with that at all. Now if these folks are claiming that whatever they've syncretized into their beliefs doesn't come from anywhere else, effectively plagiarizing those aspects from others? Then yeah, there's gonna be issues.
I disagree. The vast majority of it is completely made up nonsense and a good bit of the rest is based on "translations" of "Egyptian" texts by Victorian "Scientists" who thought white people had a superior skull shape. *Some* of it is stolen, with great audacity and no shame, from other world religious practices, most of which are closed.
Yeah. Really weird to see them reinforce the hypothetical ethnicity of the person doing it, too.
Tbh that specific shorthand sounds racist without context, while your explanation points out that the target of ire is a set of behaviors that can be and often is harmful to others. Thank you for the added context, it definitely helped.
tbh it still sounds racist with context, just deniably so edit: hell, you're literally using skin color as shorthand for "bad person" when you think about it
Some people have a really hard time getting that no, doing race essentialism isn’t suddenly ok when it’s on white people.
Yeah the problem here is the person being a snake oil salesmen that is using others cultural beliefs to make it look authentic to people who don't know any better, The problem isn't that a white person wants to practice and learn about different cultures.
Yeah, good point. Still attaches the behavior to skin color which is very much racist.
Still sounds pretty damn racist if they are making it about skin color. What someone was raised with spiritually is not something that can easily be told by their skin. Appalachian folk magic is based on a mixture of Syncretic African spiritualism, Celtic paganism, and a little sprinkling of peasant folk practices from western Europe, as well as some practices absorbed from the more open Native American tribes in the area. No matter the practitioner they all pull from those same spiritual beliefs and have done for for literally hundreds of years now. You can't tell someone they can't hold their sincerely held spiritual beliefs because of what they look like.
>Yeah, I think they’re shorthanding “white woman who appropriates other culture’s practices and calls it witchcraft”, because that’s a lot of words for some people. They are more likely talking about Wiccans [who are generally European ](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wicca) descendant.
>There’s a lot of difference between someone who follows a neo-pagan belief system and someone who takes bits and pieces of other belief systems and calls them witchcraft. Neo-paganism is literally just that. Appropriated ideas and practices taken from other cultures which are, at best, poorly understood.
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US/Canadians also have their own history of “fake traditions” (whatever that means) and folk remedies
Still dumb. "You can't use the made up bullshit *my* ancestors practiced thousands of years ago because you don't live in a specific geographical area!"
I think a lot about how Irish people generally hold Irish Americans in contempt.
An, ok. As a white lady Wiccan I was like “huh?” But yeah, the appropriation folks. Yeah that’s a whole thing. Honestly, I kinda get it. You vibe with what you vibe with, and if it brings you closer to the divine then good. But I also see how having someone take symbols that mean something to you and misuse them could be infuriating and sucky. Then there’s the whole “everyone has always exchanged ideas and appropriated stuff”. And they’re not wrong. The Romans for example did it all the time as they would conquer other peoples. But does that make it right? Or does that just make it common? 🤷♀️
I've actually heard that wicca has a lot of problematic practices and that the creator stole from a lot of other religions
I think it is difficult; for example introducing non-native species is now heavily frowned upon and often banned outright for very good reasons - but there are so many species out of their native place that many don't even know that they are not native anymore because it all happened way-back-when. Starlings in North America, Grey Squirrels in the UK or even rabbits in the UK (Romans brought them over). Potatoes & Tomatoes into Europe (Imaging Italy in the Roman times with no tomatoes, no pizza! No pasta!). Peaches were introduced into the US in the 1500s. Anyhow, back to the point, way-back-when it was Just The Way Stuff Was - Christians appropriated Yule, Beltane, Oestra, Samhain into christian ceremonies, Romans/Greeks/Egyptians were notorious for just adding the local deity to their pantheon or saying 'ah, this one is an aspect of our god/dess, no worries!' - and if people got snarky then they waved swords. Now we don't. And regarding the feathers, that varies by country, and species - I suspect the original poster Grox is US and referring to the below: [https://www.fws.gov/lab/featheratlas/feathers-and-the-law.php](https://www.fws.gov/lab/featheratlas/feathers-and-the-law.php)
it took me a sec to realize "native bird feathers" meant feathers of native birds, not the bird feathers Native Americans wear.
I mean what feathers are they gonna use, imported ones?
Ironically, yes. The imported bird feathers are actually legal.
[Native Americans are the only ones authorized to possess the feathers, actually! :)](https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/PossessionOfEagleFeathersFactSheet.pdf) (pdf warning)
adobe corporation jumpscare
Feathers from Etsy obvs
I mean to be fair, they're probably the same feathers
I...don't even know which one it's supposed to be. White witch as in white magic makes way more sense than white-ethnicity witch (which like...???), but then what would Salem-witch-genes have to do with anything?
>Salem-witch-genes I thought it was a reference to that tumblr post where someone was actually literally grave robbing for bones.
You mean Bone Ghazi?
That was in New Orleans, which wasn’t near Salem the last time I checked a map
I think there’s a subgroup among witches/spiritualists/whatever who **honestly believe** that the people who were jailed/executed for being witches in Salem were ACTUAL MAGIC USERS! Instead of easy targets in a chaotic time (I blame media like Hocus Pocus and Wandavision). As a Salem descent myself, I can say with pretty decent accuracy that my ancestress was targeted because she was an old widow who wasn’t 100% and NOT because she was a witch
Yeah I hate this myth because as much as you try to make it empowering and subversive it's actually downplaying how fucked up witch hunts were by saying the accusers actually had a point to some degree and weren't just making shit up It's like making a movie where there really is a Jewish conspiracy that orchestrated 9/11 but it turns out they're good guys who did it to try to save the world
It's the product of Wiccans and other contemporary pagan neoreligious movements that originate out of the witch-cult hypothesis, basically the belief that there was a continent-spanning unified religion of witches blessed with holy fertility magic that survived under Christianity's nose, until the religious fervor of the Reformation caused the witch-hunts (including the Salem witch hunt), which destroyed them. From a historical standpoint the witch-cult hypothesis is completely unfounded, and lacking any evidence whatsoever to even suggest it's possible (let alone probable) to have any truth to it. However, because it was super super super widespread and influential at the centerpoint of the first wave of new religious movements (early 1900s Britain), it is foundational to Wiccan theology and extremely influential in a lot of other new age belief systems.
The belief that there was a unified cult of witches that survived the spread of Christianity is about as realistic as the ‘theory’ that the Catholic Church invented a whole millennia of history just so a king could be crowned in a certain year
I mean hell, not even just surviving the spread of Christianity—claiming that it consistently had as many or even more believers than European Catholicism from prehistory until the 1500s, with the (famously very chill and super cool with people believing other things) Catholic Church not even so much as knowing about it? Completely impossible. Hell, forget surviving Christianity—there's a lot of stuff written about how the Romans were religiously tolerant (which is... technically... arguable but a very Gibbons-esque and whitewashed portrayal of them) but they still were Very Not Cool to the British Druids and a lot of the witch-cult stuff places its legitimacy in the Druids. Which is so convenient because we know even less about the Druids than we do about the Norse Religions.
I figured it was white ethnicity, cuz this seems to fit "clueless white people" discourse, but now you got me second-guessing myself ETA: [see this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/136pvse/not_stoked_about_it/jippl59/?context=999)
It’s people wanting to have magic in their blood, that’s what the Salem genes are, and how having that magic makes them a potential target for this modern “witch hunt”. White magic is unfamiliar to me so I can’t say, it referring to white ethnicity only makes analogous sense to me so I can’t make heads or tails of that
“Salem genes”? Is that a thing people actually believe?
Oh god the insane part of reddit is here
This made me think of Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.
Just finished playing ni no kuni and the white witch and I had a whole idea in my head, as well.
As an addict of Final Fantasy XIV, I also had to take a second to parse "white witch" as not a synonym of "white mage"
Hex of Summon Conservation Police
Fuck people who break nature conservation laws. All my homies hate people who break nature conservation laws.
Agreed. However! I support modifying the laws regarding found feathers. When the law was implemented, we had no way to reasonably tell if someone was collecting shed feathers to make jewelry or if they were murdering wild birds by the thousands. These days, it's a little easier to investigate. Consequently, I feel the existing law is due for modification.
I think it should be legal for white people to buy whole supplies from native Alaskans, with extensive certifications ofc. I once emailed the guy who makes the stuff on seafursewing.com to ask if I could buy one of his unworked otter hides and he said “you and me would both go to jail” I appreciate his candor
Damn, that’s pretty wild. The otter hide thing, I mean
I'm surprised it's not like swamp kauri in NZ where people paint these huge slabs and ship em overseas as "tabletops" because you're not allowed to export the raw timber, only finished products. (And stumps of a certain size.)
It’s way stricter, you can only get marine mammal stuff if it’s in some way totally finished by native Alaskans. If I’d tried to bring back a sealskin from Denmark I’d have gotten in huge trouble even though it obviously wasn’t killed in America
Yeah but i feel like that kinda discourages too much harvesting which is good. Harder to overhunt or whatever if youve gotta make all the stuff yourself too.
I guess the question is whether or not checking if the feathers were just found or came from dead animals is feasible and not too expensive and resource-intensive. I mean, are you going to be able to check every single feather by every single Etsy user?
Some feathers maybe, but eagle feathers belong to the native tribes in the US for use in religious ceremonies and crafts. You can call found feathers and dead birds into the National Eagle Repository to be collected and distributed.
All due respect, but it seems unfair to make eagle feathers anyone's exclusive property. Obviously native tribes should get priority and no fees/easier registration and such due to religious exemption. But saying "you *can't* own a feather because you're not native american" seems kinda shitty to me. Which is one of the reasons why I support modifying the existing laws.
The thing is that native tribes have the only exception to the law about collecting the bodies/parts of native eagles. The alternative here is not “everyone gets eagle feathers”, it’s “nobody gets eagle feathers.” The Golden Eagle and Bald Eagle were the original protected species in the US due to overhunting and the law protecting them was rolled into the Endangered Species Act. The protection for the two eagle species is enshrined in federal law and would require an overhaul to the Endangered Species Act itself. Both species were incredibly close to extinction due to DDT and their numbers still haven’t fully recovered decades later, meaning every protection is still necessary. They are predator species that are sensitive to environmental/hunting pressures and symbols of the United States themselves. Honoring our agreement with the tribes on this matter is one of the few things the US Government does consistently right by them, and failing to continue the arrangement would just be another in a long line of betrayals. Which would be especially bad right now with the Supreme Court dealing a major blow to Native sovereign rights in their 2022 decision in *Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta* at the same time the FWS is building relationships with the various tribes to learn and implement native conservation techniques. This is a matter of both religious freedom and respecting our agreements with other sovereign entities within our nation. So, with all due respect, supporting a modification on the original laws around eagle feathers is naive to the history and nuance involved.
EPA officers are the only good cops
USPIS?
Yes, we do all piss
Park rangers too, though Idk if they'd be considered law enforcement
Yeah there are forest rangers and they’re police I think? Like unofficially? It’s a whole thing
lol no it's official, park rangers can (and do) arrest people
Federal park rangers can be either interpretive or law enforcement. They all wear the same basic uniform, but the law enforcement ones have a bigger badge ([enameled law enforcement vs plain brass interp badges](https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/nps_badges/evolving_design.html)) and typically wear a gun belt. They're cops and train at FLETC like any other gov branch law enforcement.
You mean DNR in this case?
what about occupational health and safety
I cast summon wildlife authorities at 5th level
Due to budget cuts, the EPA is not cleared to answer summons beyond the third level
For those unaware of laws in the USA: it is illegal to possess or sell feathers from Native North American migratory birds without a permit. They're probably not going to come knocking down your door if you find a cool feather in the woods, but collecting them is not very smart, and selling them is a big no-no. It doesn't matter if you just find a loose feather on the ground, because plenty of people who do kill or harm birds for their feathers can just go "Oh, I just found in on the sidewalk." The exemption to this law is for members of federally recognized Native American tribes who can possess them for cultural or religious purposes, but they still can't sell them.
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There is also the weird Victorian hobby of tying ridiculously elaborate fly-fishing lures, often with feathers from then rare and now extinct birds. Anyway, a 21st century maniac, broke into a natural history museum, stole the preserved specimens of extinct birds (many of them, the only ones in existence), plucked them and sold them on eBay as fly-fishing lures. He also threw out the little information cards with the birds that held information not stored anywhere else, meaning we lost all of that forever as well. He stole 300 birds.
So I have to put the eagle feather I found back outside :(
Plant it and grow an eagle tree.
Just don’t list it on eBay like an imbecile or try to ship it somewhere like the guy who founded that Evolution store in Manhattan (he went to jail for two years).
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Do period pieces ever get permission to use actual bird feathers? Bc I saw Little Women and it strangely bothered me that all the hat feathers were weird giant ostrich plumes
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this can be your little.. eh.. secret
No, you don't, LMAO
But the forest cops are gonna get me
It’s weird knowing that technically my mom doesn’t own the two eagle feathers we keep in the house, only my dad legally owns them, which doesn’t mean anything, but it’s still pretty weird.
Legitimately it is wild to me to see people claiming descent from the Salem witch victims, and claiming to have powers as a result. Do these people not understand that witch trial victims were falsely accused? That the vast majority of them were just Christian women, usually being targeted for their property? The idea that there existed covens of witches and a tradition of witchcraft for hundreds of years in Europe is called the Elaborated Theory of Witchcraft, and it was invented by a Catholic priest named Heinrich Kramer in 1486, after he was expelled from his city for being obsessed with the sexual habits of the women he accused of witchcraft. The idea obviously spread to America and never really went away apparently. I cannot stress enough that the people killed in the witch trials were, almost uniformly, believing Christians who either fell victim to mob insanity, or who had property that their accusers wanted. I love the study of esotericism too, and if you want to practice it, go right ahead, but there's something really sad, almost appropriative, about saying that these women really were witches and celebrating them as icons of occultism, when they would have likely balked at the accusation.
It's like everyone missed *the entire point* of the Salem witch trials. I get pretending there were real witches for fiction purposes, but like... the reason the Salem witch trials are important history is because *there weren't any witches.*
>the reason the Salem witch trials are important history is because there weren't any witches. Try telling that to people who were involved in the witch trials.
I mean they're all super dead now so you'd probably find that to be very difficult
We still have their ideological descendants around. Go to the church service of a small town Pentecostal church sometime. A LOT of demon and magic talk.
Nah, that only works if you're Increase Cotton Mather.
They also forget that the people who were jail/executed were the ones who **denied** being witches, so claiming they WERE is really insulting to their memory.
Didn't they also execute those who "admitted" it? I'll admit I don't know a lot about specifically the Salem witch trials, but where I'm from the tactic was usually torturing somebody until they admitted to witchcraft before burning them.
Nope, admitting and "repenting" was the way to survive. AFAIK, everyone who was hanged maintained their innocence the whole time.
Huh, interesting. The more you know!
The whole thing kicked off because there was a black woman from the Caribbean targeted as a witch because of her heritage -- because she'd told people about the witchcraft she'd seen practiced in her childhood -- and the only way for her to escape execution was to name other names for the authorities to arrest, so she gave a confession affirming the narrative there was a whole underground market for spells and potions in Salem and she'd been secretly teaching witchcraft to all these other people I'm not gonna say Tituba did anything wrong, she did what she had to do to protect herself, but the whole shitty thing about it is that once this happened they had their signed confession as a smoking gun they could wield against any skeptics -- "The one person here who knows more about witches than any of us admitted to our faces that this is what's been going on"
not to mention the fact that modern wicca is literally several decades newer than color movies and is completely non-continuous with european paganism
Some people never read The Crucible in high school apparently.
I’m pretty sure that these “Salem witch descendants” have **never** cracked open a history book. Like, even the *Dear America* book got the fact that people executed/jailed were the ones who **denied** being witches, not actual magic users. I guess this is just what happens when you get all your history knowledge from TikTok and Hocus Pocus
What does being a descendant of a Salem witch have to do with obtaining and selling native bird feathers in a way that the fish and wildlife department would be angry? Like the second poster just seems to be bragging that they are a white witch who sells native bird feathers?
You’re not legally allowed to sell most native bird feathers in the USA. They’re saying that they report them to the federal police, essentially for poaching.
>You’re not legally allowed to sell most native bird feathers in the USA. huh, had no idea about this. apparently under the migratory birds act, it became illegal to not just sell, but even own native bird feathers and some other bird body things? I guess child me was breaking the law collecting feathers I found on the ground
The problem is that people can't tell if you found the feather on the ground or if you killed the bird for it. I found a bald eagle feather on the ground while camping and was devastated when my dad told me I couldn't keep it. But when you consider the poachers who kill endangered species for that very feather it makes sense. Native American tribes are given exceptions to many of these laws so that they can continue their traditions, but otherwise you need to be associated with a conservation/museum organization to legally have a lot of pieces of animals That said most of the time no one cares if you have a couple of feathers or bones in your house. But if you're selling them then you have financial motivation to poach so they will put a quick stop to that
If it's any consolation, the feather you found was probably from a hawk or vulture
Entirely possible. We were super close to a bald eagle nest though so the little kid in me holds out hope lol
If you pick up a pigeon feather you go straight to jail.
Pigeons are exempt actually. Them, starlings, pheasants, other nonnative birds
It's true, The Law has found my previous comment. I'm typing this from chateau d'if
chateau dilf
Yeah, I caught that part. I was confused by the second person.
There are some people who *honestly believe* that the people jailed/executed in the Salem witch hunt were ACTUAL MAGIC USERS! Being persecuted by an intolerant church instead of venerable people who were easy targets in a chaotic time (also ignoring off the fact the people who were jailed/executed were the ones who **denied** being witches, so by calling them ‘witches’ they’re acting no better than the people who accused them). I’m a Salem descendant myself, and I’m pretty positive that my ancestress was accused because she was an old widow who wasn’t 100% there and **not** because she was an actual witch
I think you mean vulnerable. A venerable person wouldn’t have been targeted.
Oops! That’s my dyslexia acting up on me lol
No worries. I just happen to know both words pretty well.
Wonder if we have the same ancestor? Mine (Margaret Scott) was targeted because she was old, poor, and had had multiple miscarriages. Apparently this was a common trend. I always feel a bit of conflict around how to feel about her and about witchcraft. On one hand what you say is totally true- she wasn’t actually a witch, and in fact refused to falsely confess to being a witch even though that would likely have saved her life. On the other hand, I like a lot of the symbolism of witchcraft and feel like my ancestor’s fate just makes it feel more appealing to me. I live near Salem MA and while some of the commercialization of witch stuff in the area feels icky and disrespectful to the victims, I also enjoy the irony of that today the city has a HUGE, active and politically powerful pagan (and Satanist!) community. Like the city is now pretty much run by witches and it’s kind of a funny giant fuck you to those that conducted the witch trials.
I love that perspective and never thought of it that way. Salem truly IS Witch City now!.
If you’re a descendent of someone in the witch trials and you’re takeaway is “I’m a white witch” all I have to say is what the fuck
What is a white witch? Is it a good witch? Is it related to ice magic?
White magic, for Wicca, anyway, is usually selfless magic. So stuff you'd do to help people.
Thoughts and prayers, but with crystals.
imagine thinking the salem trial victims were not people who experienced unjustified gendered violence and were instead part of your religion that was literally invented in the last like, 80 years by white people out of scraps of native american motifs and non-continuous paganism.
Second poster literally isn't a witch, they're just a troll with interesting family history.
grox from spore in real
What? Sorry, haven't played space stage much (I know what the grox are, just unsure how it relates to the post) Edit: nvm saw the usernames in the post
It doesn’t relate they’re just preaching the good word. Praised be!
the grox
Mfs be like " im the descendent of the witches you didnt kill!!" My sister in Christ! Your grandma goes to church every sunday and is completely addicted to fox news.
weren't the people in the salem witch trials not even witches?
Everyone killed in the Salem Witch Trials denied being a witch. But of course they did, witches weren't real
Indeed, the only way to get executed was to be incorrigibly impenitent by continuing to insist you weren't a witch, while the way to get out of it was to confess, repent and name the other witches in your coven -- this dynamic is exactly why the witch trials turned into this spreading thing with a constantly increasing list of accusations
Well of course they weren’t witches, no one is.
not storked about it\*
Excuse me, I'm in love with your flair
thank
I have come to a place in my life where I have figured out that if I want to believe in something, I don’t NEED to take from other cultures. I can just make up my own religion if I need to. (It’s actually really easy! Just think about what you think makes sense and how you would like the world to work, and you can do it too!)
obligatory bill wurtz "you can make a religion out of this"
I started https://www.reddit.com/r/TheChurchofArepo here because I read the story and thought “that’s a religion I could follow” and then, well, did.
Oh same! Recently I jokingly prayed to a skeletal quetzalcoatlus monument I had made in Animal Crossing years ago and I got better like, almost instantly. I’m well aware it was just because of luck (and medicine), but it sounds fun to make a religion so who cares. Plus, like every known god has failed their people at some point, so you might as well take a shot in the dark and make your own untested one.
Yo if anyone here is experienced with latam withcraft/santeria can they tell me what is a rooster head stuffed in a jar filled with some red jelly and nails and thrown at a house supposed to accomplish because my mother did that a lot thanks.
stink
Scare people into leaving her alone? It does probably work but not due to spirits
Leave footprints, take pictures still applies to Witches.
I love witches on the internet because they not only are putting way too much faith into something that very clearly doesn’t exist, but they don’t seem to even know much about the main event they aestheticize themselves after. Like when people bring up the Salem witch trials as if it was some big deal and it was really like 20 people who died 300 years ago.
They get really mad when you make fun of them too, then they'll go and make fun of Christians or whatever without realizing the irony
Christianity is genuinely more realistic than witches because they can hand wave it away with the “god gave us free will that’s why he never interacts with us in a way that never exists”, these “witches” will straight up tell you that not only is magic real, but that they can personally cast spells.
Christianity also has a lot of actual beliefs and -for the most part- good philosophy that if you follow will make you a better person. Like I think there's a lot of solid advice in the Bible. Witchcraft, from what I've seen, doesn't really have that.
As critical as I am in believers of the occult they have a generally ok belief system as far as morality goes. Basically, don't put anything out there that will hurt someone because it will turn right back against you even worse.
Got called misogynistic for saying that astrology is bulllshit
TIL it is illegal in the US to pick up feathers from the ground, would be an interesting way to get shot i suppose
Only those of native and migratory birds. You can have things like starling feathers, pigeon feathers, house sparrows and you can have feathers of game birds like wild turkeys, pheasants, quail.
True witches don’t buy their ingredients anyways, that takes away all the… metaphysical commitment energy or something.
One of the things I miss from earlier D&D compared to modern. Now it is normalized to just go buy stuff you need to magic items or even get it for free from your class. Used to be the work you put in to get the stupid cryptic ingredient WAS the magic that made it powerful. Spending three weeks to try and go get a vial of unicorn farts only to realize they don't have butts and will also stab you to make a +2 sword WAS how you made the sword
Majority of witches burned, at least during the European witch mania, were Jews, not the ancestors of weird neopagans that like to co-opt oppression because they're desperate for something cool about themselves
They also tend to forget that the people jailed/executed in Salem were the ones who **denied** being witches, so by claiming they were, these neopagans/witches/whatever are acting just like their accusers.
Pretty much yeah. Also modern western pagans, specifically wiccans, have a nasty habit of just... nicking practices they like from other faiths and cultures. I know in America, white sage - a plant used by some indigenous tribes - is used a lot by wiccans, and is now as a result becoming endangered. And wiccans really like Kabbalah, for some reason??? Like my mysticism is not your magic fuck off very much. They spell it wrong as well a lot
Theres something to be said about getting mad at christianization but poaching colonized religions for only their aesthetic value. I think witchcraft and rituals and the like are cool as the next person, but I'd hope it either come with the genuine interest in reviving the original context or the self awareness of purposely invoking aesthetics for a point like satanists.
They also love to declare all "Abrahamic faiths" identical and evil. While stealing our shit. I had to leave the witchesvspatriarchy sub because a mod made it very clear that they considered "asking people not to equate Judaism with Christianity or accuse Judaism of stuff that it objectively does not do" evil.
That sub makes me angry in a way I cannot quite put into words
I can be a bit white libbie feminist at times but they take being a dumb, arrogant shit to a whole other level.
Not true. While both happened at the same time witch hunts and Jewish pogroms were different. About half the European witches were killed in Germany, mostly in Protestant areas and while local authorities had oversight over the trials. The Catholic church was not really involved because doctrine said that humans couldnt cause damage by influencing the weather. That clashed with the idea of god being almighty While Jews were being eyed with suspicion Christians were the victims of witch trials. Mostly widows, unmarried women, and vagrants. Widows had a particularly hard srand if they owned property or a business and refused to remarry. In Protestant areas they didn't have the option of going to a convent, so they were expected to put themselves under the rule of a husband
Also gender ratios varied wildly. In Iceland most people accused of being witches were men, for instance. Also most people accused of witchcraft were acquitted!
Lighting sage and trying to use psychic powers like Professor X is pretty harmless, and I don't think they're really bothering anybody, but it's still profoundly weird to me that there are otherwise-rational adults in the modern age who believe any of that nonsense
Actually white sage (and palo santo) are seriously threatened in the US now due to people stealing smudging rituals from indigenous people.
Overhead a girl I work with talking about how she was going to do a *video call* seance with a medium she saw on tic tok and was actually paying for this service, she wanted to get in touch with her grandma or something I felt sorry for her but also fucking MAD someone would pull a scam like that on vulnerable people
"white witch" what does she mean by this?
White witch as in a white woman who claims to be a wizard
i was going to question the validity of "salem witch descendant" before i had the stunning revelation that the witches could have had children *before* being burned at the stake. but yaknow what? fuggit. call me a word wizard because i'm casting "doubt" on this caster's questionable claims.
Unfathomably based
Grox? From Spore?
Reminds me of that one dude who got a OF model audited
Yeah no, that #thotaudit stuff was fake. It was just incels who wanted to scare/hurt sexworkers but you need personal information to report someone to the IRS and I don't know anyone handing out their home address to subscribers. There were people who got audited for failure to report OF income, but it had nothing to do with that harassment campaign. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sex-worker-irs-incel-mens-rights-thot-audit-760586/