Old wives tales.

Old wives tales are stated to be superstitions or tales, but yet they are quite prevalent.  Basically according to me, they are folk magic that was prevalent and used by everyday folk.  That's right MAGIC!  Magic as in witches.  Some of you are shaking your heads at this point and saying, NO way.  But it's true.  Let's check a few  of them out.


Dropping silverware.  How many of you remember Granny saying when she dropped a knife or fork that she guessed she was going to have company?  That is divination. 


Spilling salt was a sign of bad luck, again divination.  But you could avert that by throwing a pinch of salt over your left shoulder, that is protective magic, or to break it down further, warding and banishing. 


Getting rid of warts.  There were a variety of ways to get rid of warts.  My own Mother, that staunch upholder of Christianity, told me three different ways to get rid of warts.  1- Steal an old dish cloth from someone, rub it on the wart, and then bury the dishcloth.  2-Take a string and make a big, open knot around the wart, then pick the string up and tighten the knot, do this for each wart, then bury the string in the dirt.  3- Take a dried bean for each wart, and rub one bean per each wart.  Then bury the beans.  That is called wart charming, it's a healing magic and a banishing magic.


Putting a piece of wedding cake under your pillow to see who you would marry.  Again, that is divination.


Carrying a 4 leaf clover for good luck.  One of the properties of clover in magic is good fortune and luck.  As for the number 4, that would equate with the 4 elements.  So it is basic charm magic.  Same thing goes for carrying a rabbit's foot.


So the magic of the local witch did survive to some degree, and the common folk insured it's survival and turned it into everyday old wive's tales.  What are some examples you can think of?

New Book in the works.

So today I started on the latest Garden Crone Book.  I got my template ready and started to format it.  I went oh, wait, now how did I do that formatting for the numbering?  Thought I remembered it, and nope, no dice. Finally the thought hit me, that I had installed updates to Word since Tough Magic, and I thought I better research it.  So I did.  Well, let me tell you, it took me over 6 templates and 3 hours to finally get it to work.  This was using the steps that Microsoft told me too.  I was thinking highly about throwing a hex at Microsoft by the time I got it to work.

This book will be about the properties of trees, shrubs and bushes.  It is a book that I had started previously, and then lost on the computer.  Not kidding you a bit.  I clicked save and it took me a year to find it.  But, something happened, and I have no clue what, because while I was trying to work on it, it poofed.  When I say poofed, I mean just that.  One minute it was there, and the next, completely gone.  So I had found my notebook with the notes I had made and had to start completely over.  I kept thinking to myself it was a good thing I wrote the notes by hand, or they probably would have poofed too!

This book Mark was really excited about.  So it will be dedicated to him.  I had told him that the last time I spoke to him before he passed to the Summerland, and he was quite pleased. 

So right now I am trying to put all the info into some semblance of order.  I am trying to limit stuff to one page per item.  Which is hard because, to put it frankly, I didn't know that I knew that much lore about trees and such.  Heck I found out just how much information I had floating around about this stuff and was amazed that I had that much.  But not wanting to write a set of encyclopedias, I have tried to limit myself.  I hope that you will find it useful in your workings.

It has been super cold here, and so I have been working away.  Hope everyone has been staying nice and cozy!!

Read the Bible? Which one??

So today I am going to discuss a subject, give you facts, not alternative facts mind you, but factual facts.  We are going to discuss a topic dear to the heart of the right wing Christians.  Specifically we are going to discuss the Bible, and narrow that down to the Old Testament.

Now the Christian religion sprang from the Jewish religion, which explains why the Old Testament is based on the Jewish Tanakh or Jewish Bible. Now in its infancy, Christianity, depending upon which sect, and NO I am not talking Protestant, Lutheran and so on here, but sects such as the Gnostics, Ebionites, the Pauline Christians and so forth, either continued to use parts of the Tanakh or not.

Regardless as time marched forward and Pauline Christianity began to gain power, and gain support of the reigning Political power of that time, they loosely begin to try and put together the Christian Bible.  We have the beginnings of the Catholic Church.  Eventually without going into a history lesson here, there was a schism and the Catholic Church divided into two branches.  The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church, each battling for supremacy.  The Roman Catholics gained the upper hand, but were not able to wipe out the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church as they had done over the centuries to other branches of early Christianity.  So to this day we have Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.   In the 16th century came the Protestant Reformation, where many split off from the Roman Catholic Church.

Now our right wing Christians love to tout the Bible to back up their world viewpoint and try and make the world dance to their tune.  They say things like, "The Bible, yesterday and today, it's never been changed", but it has.  Over the centuries, before the Protestant Reformation, there were many councils gathered to discuss what books were relevant to the prevailing opinion at that time and many previous accepted Books of the Bible were removed and others added.  There were huge fights over not only which New Testament Gospels were going to be in there, but the Old Testament also.  Not only that, Constantine the Great, who we can blame for all of this, had a mother Helena, who apparently was one of the very first right wing Christians.  So Constantine ordered, at the behest of his mother, and with the blessings of some of the early church fathers, to go through the Books of the Bible, including the Old Testament and remove ALL and ANY reference to reincarnation.  Over the centuries this adding and deleting of Gospels continues on.

So today we have the final edit of all this.  And it wasn't just the RC church doing it, but the Protestant branches and the EO.  Today there is a difference in the Bibles of all three branches.  And as I said we were just going to stick to the Old Testament, let's look at that.

In the Protestant Bible there are 39 books in the Old Testament.  In the Roman Catholic Bible there are 46 books in the Old Testament.  In the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Bible there are 50 books in the Old Testament.

So the next time you have one of these Bible Thumping right wingers telling you that you need to read your Bible, ask them which one.