And You Rise From The Unexplored Depths Of The Soul,in The Sweet Effluvium Of The Rain,in The Clangour

And You rise from the unexplored depths of the soul, in the sweet effluvium of the rain, in the clangour of lightning, You, relentless strength, Celestial Snake, Mighty Dragon, You rise and shine in a dark firmament while the world praises Your Name. Leviathan, the fruit of knowledge is in Your hands and you dispense it like honey. Lord of the waters, glorious is Your name.

Hail Leviathan!

I’m going to give you the best piece of Adult Life Is Hard advice I’ve ever learned:

Talk to people when things go to shit.

I don’t just mean get it off your chest, although that’s good. I mean: Something’s wrong with your paycheck/you lost your job/you had unexpected emergency car repairs and now you’re broke so your credit card payment is late. Like, not just 15 days late. We’re talking, shit got crazy and now you’re 90 days late with compounded interest and late fees and the Minimum Payment Due is, like, $390, and you’ve got about $3.90 in your bank account. Call the credit card company. 

I know it’s scary. I know you feel like you’re going to get in trouble, like you’re gong to get yelled at or scolded for not having your life together. But the credit card company isn’t your parents; they’re just interested in getting money from you. And you can’t squeeze blood from a stone or money from someone who doesn’t have any. So what you do is you call them. You explain you’re experiencing temporary financial hardships, and you’re currently unable to bring your account up to date, but you don’t want to just let it get worse. Can you maybe talk to someone about a payment plan so you can work something out? Nine times out of ten you’ll be able to negotiate something so that at least it’s not just taking a constant, giant shit on your credit score.

- Can’t pay your power bill? Call the power company.

- Can’t pay your full rent? Talk to your landlord.

- Had to go to the hospital without insurance and have giant medical bills looming in your place? Call the hospital and ask if they have someone who helps people with financial hardships. Many do.

- Got super sick and missed half a semester of class because flu/pneumonia/auto-immune problems/depressive episode? Talk to your professor. If that doesn’t help, talk to your advisor.

You may not be able to fix everything, but you’ll likely be able to make improvements. At the very least, it’s possible that they have a list of people you can contact to help you with things. (Also, don’t be afraid to google things like, “I can’t pay my power bill [state you live in]” because you’d be surprised at what turns up on Google!) But the thing is, people in these positions gain nothing if you fail. There’s no emotional satisfaction for them if your attempts at having your life together completely bite the dust. In fact, they stand to benefit if things work out for you! And chances are, they’ll be completely happy to take $20 a month from you over getting $0 a month from you, your account will be considered current because you’ve talked to them and made an agreement, you won’t get reported to a collections agency, and your credit score won’t completely tank.

Here’s some helpful tips to keep in mind:

1. Be polite. Don’t demand things; request them. Let me tell you about how customer service people hold your life in their hands and how many extra miles they’ll go for someone who is nice to them.

2. Stick to the facts, and keep them minimal unless asked for them. Chances are they’re not really interested in the details. “We had several family emergencies in a row, and now I’m having trouble making the payments” is better than “Well, two months ago my husband wrecked his bike, and then he had a reaction to the muscle relaxer they gave him, and then our dog swallowed a shoestring and we had to take him to the emergency clinic, and just last week MY car broke down, and now my account’s in the negatives and I don’t know how I’m gonna get it back out.” The person you’re talking to is aware shit happens to everyone; they don’t need the details to prove you’re somehow “worthy” of being helped. They may ask you for details at a certain point if they have to fill out any kind of request form, but let them do that.

3. Ask questions. “Is there anything we can do about X?” “Would it be possible to move my payment date to Y day instead so it’s not coming out of the same paycheck as my rent?” The answer may be “no.” That’s not a failure on your part. But a good customer service person may have an alternate solution. 

Anyway! I hope that helps! Don’t just assume the answer is “no” before you’ve even begun. There is more help out there than you ever imagined.

I think this is a really important article for a lot of people here.

Consider Christian biases before putting them on the gods.

John Beckett

Our Gods Are Not Jealous Gods: The Importance of Building a Pagan Worldview

Why do some people insist that their call to devoted service is a call to exclusive service? Because they’ve always been told that the Chris

The very term ‘the crooked path’ suggests at first glance that the path of witchcraft is the opposite path to that of Christianity. The term is in fact related to the tradition of ‘sacred walking’, of walking for meditative purposes by early Celtic Christians on pilgrimage. These tracks were laid out to connect sites of holy significance and being on the ‘straight and narrow path’ symbolised the meditative walkers adherence to God.[6] As an old Gaelic maxim tells us, ‘He who will not take advice will take the crooked track.’

But like with many seemingly ‘Christian reversals’ that have found their way into the witchcraft legacy there is more to this notion of the ‘crooked path’ than simply doing the opposite to the church. Like Hermes’ Caduceus the ‘straight tracks’ around Britain (and other locations) and the human spine itself, the straight path is always coiled around by twin serpent lines. In the case of these twining ‘serpent lines’ in the land numerous ancient pagan holy sites emerge along them. It seems that our ancestors set out these holy sites both to recognise the straight track down the middle and the crooked one that twined around it. Like the migratory path of geese, something often associated with the host of the dead in flight along the ‘ghost tracks’; these straight tracks are best appreciated from the air. The ‘crooked’ snaking paths around them however are very much the path of the walker, they penetrate the land with many a holy well and standing stone.

So we might say that in reviling the serpent, in reviling this crooked and snaking path, it was walking the path of the earth and its interior that the Christian saints were rejecting. It also implies that if we agree to walk this path we accept the ‘hooks and crooks’ of the road that may obscure what lies ahead and agree to follow the irregularities of the earth’s path and be guided by our intuition. We could even say that in the context of this book, itself an exercise in meditative walking, that the scholarly component of witchcraft lore is the ‘straight track’ and the path of experiential gnosis via occult practice is the ‘crooked road’ that winds and snakes around it.

Morgan, Lee. A Deed Without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft (pp. 7-8). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.