I love when the witchy people of tumblr share their knowledge by creating incredibly useful masterposts of information. I made this “masterpost of masterposts” to act as a running directory of such resources. If you see any errors (such as credit or misinformation) please contact me and I will make any necessary changes.
Witchcraft 101 / Paganism 101 / Basics
The PunkGreenWitch’s Beginner Witchcraft masterpost
Windvexer’s Baby Witch masterpost
Windvexer’s Making Friends With Magic masterpost
Mysticism-n-magic’s witchy links masterpost
Thiscrookedcrown’s resources masterpost
Thepaganstudygroup’s author masterpost
Snwitch’s pagan 101 masterpost
Snwitch’s becoming a witch masterpost
Witchtip’s beginner witchcraft resources masterpost
Magicusersresource’s path directory masterpost
Witchbxbe’s witchy masterpost (a mix of useful posts)
Types of Witchcraft
Rainydaywitchcraft’s Types of Witches masterpost
Popculturewitch’s pop culture witchcraft masterpost
Miss mango’s secular witchcraft masterpost
Holidays / Rituals
Geekinglikeaboss’ blessed Yule masterpost
Naturalmagics’ Samhein General Guide masterpost
Natural-magic’s Yule general guide
Natural-magic’s Imbolc general guide masterpost
Natural-magic’s Ostara general guide masterpost
Natural-magic’s Beltane general guide masterpost
Natural-magic’s Litha general guide masterpost
Natural-magic’s Lamas general guide masterpost
Natural-magic’s Mabon general guide masterpost
Natural-magic’s Samhain general guide masterpost
Correspondences
Moonalmonds candle color and meaning masterpost
Thewitchesjournal herb masterpost
Witchtip’s stones and crystals masterpost
Thecatandthewitch’s magical correspondences of food masterpost
Satinsouled’s incenses by use (correspondences) masterpost
Artsy-witch’s magical waters masterpost
Tarigrove’s correspondences for luck spells masterpost
sirel-vemiel’s essential oil magickal correspondences masterpost
Spells / Charms / Crafting
Atypical pagan spell’s masterpost
Witchtip’s herbal amulet masterpost
Witchtip’s budget witchcraft supplies masterpost
Foresthoney’s magic knot masterpost
Magicusersresource’s prosperity & money spells masterpost
Recreationalwitchcraft’s bath magic, where to begin masterpost
Kitchen/Hearth Witchery
spell-of-the-month’s herbs and spices associated with money magic masterpost
Moonstonebeginning’s domestic witch tips, charms, and omens masterpost
foresthoney’s herbal remedy stress masterpost
herbalriots herbs for your medicine cabinet masterpost
Idontusemycauldren’s magical herbal teas masterpost
Protection
Windvexer’s shielding masterpost
Thesigilwitch’s protection and shielding masterpost
Energy work / Elemental work
Snwitch’s energy work masterpost
Windvexer’s shielding masterpost
Divination / Scrying / Communication
Arcanemysterie’s tarot masterpost
Theouijagirl’s Ouija FAQ masterpost
the-daily-diviner’s diviation masterpost
Satinsouled’s divination symbols masterpost
Sigils
Thesigilwitch’s FAQ masterpost (includes a lot of resource links)
Thesigilworkshop’s list of (sigil) resources masterpost
carpeumbra’s sigil masterpost (lots of gifs!)
Deities / Mythology / Fae
Vilarp’s mythology and deity resources masterpost
Gardenofthequeen’s resource list of all things faerie masterpost
Naturalmagic’s deities masterpost (a running list)
Astrology / Space witchery
Astrologymarina’s Astrology blogpost masterpost
Pastelastrology’s astrology blogs masterpost
secretsofthezodiac’s astrology masterpost
astrocelestial’s planets in astrology and what they represent masterpost
Reading lists / authors / books
Wiccanwolfe’s Witch / Pagan free ebook and pdf masterpost
natural-magic’s books and resources masterpost
Misc
Duskenpath’s poison research masterpost
Duskenpath’s otherkin masterpost
Asksecularwitch’s paradigm masterpost
Unmaskingthedivine’s shadow work masterpost
Stsathyre’s pagan posts of 2015 masterpost (a mix of pagan related posts)
Recreationalwitchcraft’s limited witchcraft masterpost
Hereditarywitch’s magic for anxiety/depression masterpost
rainydaywitchcraft’s sea witch’s guide to seashells masterpost
**Disclaimer: this is a collection of links that I thought would be helpful. I did not create any of the above content within the links. If you are confused or have concerns about any of the material please contact the original creator.
If you know of a link that would fit on this list please feel free to share. :3
do you ever have such a monumentally bad brain day that you just take away its mic?
like...... buddy, you are producing insanely bad thoughts today and believing them, I'll take it from here, get off the stage
Relax, Potter. Don’t you trust me?
There comes a time where many of us get bored of the plain old witchcraft 101 books, leaving us unsure of what to study next. I highly recommend looking outside of witchy/pagan materials from time to time. Understanding the science and fundamentals of your favorite subjects can add some depth to your practice. Below are a few links to get you started.
For Kitchen/Hearth Witches…
Cooking Resources by The Old Farmer’s Almanac
Science and Cooking by Harvard Courseware
New York Times cooking techniques
New Your Times cooking database (recipes!)
How cooking can change your life by Michael Pollen
The Four Hour Chef (free audiobook)
Stone Soup (easy recipes with minimal ingredients)
Flylady (cleaning and housekeeping)
For earthy/nature oriented witches…
Plants.us
Walden (ebook) by Henry David Thoreau
Free biology courses via KhanAcademy
Animal behavior by MIT Courseware
The old Farmer’s Almanac
Dictionary of Ecology
For lovers of sacred geometry…
Nature by Numbers (video)
Geometry, Nature, and Architecture
Fractals
For philosophical witches…
Science, Magic, and Religion by UCLA
Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Philosophy Etexts
BBC Religions
Patheos (religion library)
For psychologically oriented witches…
Smile or die: the perils of positive psychology
Positive Psychology by Harvard Courseware
Psychology Today
For space witches…
space.com
Cosmology and Astronomy classes via Khanacademy
Earth (video) by Michael Konig
Assorted Nasa ebooks
everytime i think im done with drarry (its been years..) i see a piece of art that makes me squeel and kick my feet and giggle
This little girl loves her human enough to follow him in places kittens don’t go.
both and im not afraid to admit it
no one will know which one it is.
Draco Malfoy's patronus is a stag.
Patroni are about protection. He doesn't know what it would have been if he had managed to cast one before 7th year, maybe a Horntail, or a blasted ferret.
He didn't even know that he could cast one. Cried the first time he did.
Cried harder the first time he made it corporeal and the antlered head came closer, like it was trying to sniff at him. He still says he can't cast a corporeal and no one questions it, most people are surprised that he can cast even the misty one.
Patroni are about protection, and Draco Malfoy would rather not have it thrown at his face who makes him feel the safest.
What did Andrew Lloyd Webber do to make Patti Lupone upset? Sorry, saw your tags and i was curious
Oh.
Oh honey.
You sweet child.
Anyway, get ready for one of the most infamous showdowns in all musical theatre history, with the guy who writes the straightest musicals on Broadway (derogatory) and the one and only, the matriarch, the queen, two three-time Tony award winner Patti LuPone.
So, Andrew Lloyd Webber was basically kind of a boy genius in his prime - he met his future collaborator Tim Rice when they were 17 and 20 respectively, he wrote his first big hit, Jesus Christ Superstar, at 22, with Tim Rice writing the lyrics. And it was kind of a big deal at the time because the topic was controversial (you know, the Passion with rock music), but also because Broadway wasn't that far off from its golden age and let's just say the music and style were very different from, say, My Fair Lady. Or The Sound of Music. Or Funny Girl. It was basically the Rent/Hamilton of its time. (Yeah, Stephen Sondheim was around at that time, he worked on West Side Story which was revolutionary in of itself, but he's kind of an oddball in this case. You'll understand why later.)
Their real follow up (I'm not counting Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for a variety of reasons) was a little musical called Evita, which you might know mainly because of a song called Don't Cry For Me Argentina. Or at least, your mom has probably heard it once at the very least. It's that song that's oversung from a musical while being out of context along with I Dreamed a Dream for Les Misérables. Or Memory from Cats.
Evita tells the story of Eva Peron, the wife of an Argentinian dictator, who basically screws her way to the top and ends up becoming the mistress of Juan Peron and the most beloved woman in her country through guile and deceit. Yes, I know the historical accuracy is very much debated but I know jackshit about Argentina's history except the bare basics so don't come at me. It was first produced in the West End in London, with Elaine Paige in the role, but because of Equity issues, she couldn't reprise her role for the Broadway production. So a Julliard graduate who was mostly starring in David Mamet plays got the part instead, and that was Patti LuPone.
Patti... did not have a good time during Evita, because the part is basically the kind of score where you can tell the composer is used to writing male parts, but most female singers have a two-octave range (yes, you got Julie Andrews who used to have a three-octave range, and many others, but they're exceptions), so she struggled a lot. That being said, if you listen to live recordings of her, you wouldn't be able to tell, and it got a lot easier later on. But she had this to say:
"Evita was the worst experience of my life. I was screaming my way through a part that could only have been written by a man who hates women. And I had no support from the producers, who wanted a star performance onstage but treated me as an unknown backstage. It was like Beirut, and I fought like a banshee."
This is from Patti's autobiography, which she wrote in 2007 - 8 years after shit with ALW went down. With all that said, she won a Tony Award for Evita, and she pretty much became a musical theatre household name from then on. She played Fantine in Les Misérables, Nancy in Oliver!, Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes. Meanwhile, ALW's next big hits were Cats (I'm not even kidding, Cats was a hit), and, you guessed it, The Phantom of the Opera, which he wrote in part to showcase his then wife Sarah Brightman's triple threat talents.
So, you need to understand before I continue that ALW, from my perspective, has always had a bit of an inferiority complex. He's basically associated to writing these commercially successful musicals that show a big spectacle but aren't ultimately substantial. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, but I do think that if he didn't have Hal Prince, Maria Bjornson, Charles Hart and Gillian Lynne backing him up for Phantom, it would have probably been a Rocky Horror Picture Show knockoff people would have forgotten about pretty quickly. This is what I mean:
Yep, that was Phantom before any of the people I mentioned above (and Michael Crawford) were really involved.
Remember how I said Stephen Sondheim was an oddball? The thing with him is that his musicals weren't always commercially successful, but in general, in part thanks to being Leonard Bernstein's protégé, he was generally pretty well-respected and it was considered that his work was bringing musicals to a whole other level. Without Sondheim, you wouldn't have Jonathan Larson, and you wouldn't have Lin-Manuel Miranda. I am convinced ALW is resentful of that, and when you stop and think about it for more than 10 seconds, it's so obvious he REALLY wants to be Sondheim or at least command the same level of respect, but that's a story for another day.
So, after Phantom, ALW had other musicals that followed that either got a meh reception or outright flopped. Then there was Sunset Boulevard, which is based on the movie of the same name with Gloria Swanson. Despite all of her griefs for Evita, Patti LuPone agreed to partake in the musical as Norma Desmond, for its production in London, with the promise that she would transfer to Broadway once that production would open. And overall, after a string of flops, Sunset was actually doing pretty well.
HOWEVER. One day, while reading the gossip column of a newspaper, Patti found out that contrary to what she was promised, Glenn Close, who was meanwhile starring as Norma in the Los Angeles production, was to play Norma on Broadway. That was a complete surprise for her since no one on the production team had bothered to tell her it was happening - and keep in mind that for the news to come up the way it did in a gossip column, it probably would have necessitated a delay of a few weeks between the producers and the newspaper, which would have given them plenty of time to break the news to Patti. And Patti kind of needed the leg up because she was pretty bitter that a) Madonna was cast in the Evita adaptation instead of her; b) they actually lowered the key to fit Madonna's voice range, and she still had to expand her own to be able to sing the (lowered) score. And trust me, Patti is mad about it to this day.
So of course, she trashed her dressing room, the cast and crew weren't even mad about it because they were as shocked and angered as she was by the news. Patti sued Andrew Lloyd Webber for breach of contract, namely for 1 MILLION DOLLARS (yup, those are the real numbers), won, used the money she got from the lawsuit to get a swimming pool, which she called (and I SHIT YOU NOT) the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool. Since then, Webber is dead to her, to the point rumor has it she had part of a building blocked during an event so she could get out of it without coming across Webber, because she hates him so flipping much she doesn't even want to be in the same building as the guy.
(There's also drama that happened with Faye Dunaway who was supposed to replace Glenn Close after she went from Los Angeles to Broadway, except they abruptly closed the show down after Close left, but that's a story for another day)
So with all the bad press, and with ALW forced to pay 1 million dollars for Patti's lawsuit, that led Sunset's productions to close earlier than expected. ALW has stayed around since, with... mitigated output, so to say. The lowest point for a lot of people is Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom, which some people love, and that's fine, but it didn't do well with either critics nor fans of the original show, which ALW is EXTREMELY BUTTHURT ABOUT. And like, there are so many stories I could tell about LND alone, but I will share my own crack theory about it, since it does relate to the ask.
Anyway, buckle up.
So. There have been jokes going around for years that the Phantom in LND is basically ALW's self-insert, where he displays to the world that he's totally not over Sarah Brightman leaving him (in part because making Phantom kinda ruined their marriage lmao), despite, you know, having married since. (Aaaaaakward.) So LND basically becomes this really uncomfortable therapy session where a man writes a self-insert musical about how his ex-wife made a big mistake of leaving a sensitive artistic soul such as himself. The characters from Phantom who appear in LND are all more or less unrecognizable as a result, and one who gets it worse (in my humble opinion) is Meg Giry, who was basically Christine's sweet and loyal ballerina friend who basically went into the Phantom's lair on her own to save her friend despite the danger. In LND, she's basically a bitter hag (because ALW hates women, guess Patti was right about that), who really likes the swim and even has a stripping vaudeville number about it, written in universe by the Phantom, no less.
For comparison, here's Don Juan Triumphant (the Phantom's opera in the original):
And here's Bathing Beauty (the vaudeville number):
Yeah, so... do you see why people hate LND already?
And that's not the only thing with Meg! She's also pining for the Phantom to pay attention to her and threatens to drown the Phantom and Christine's secret love child when he makes it clear that he's gonna love Christine for EVA AND EVA.
So, with everything we learned today about ALW, would someone like him view someone like Patti LuPone as some sort of crazy, bitter diva who's obsessed with him for whatever reason? Absolutely. Would he be petty enough to insert Patti LuPone into his self-insert musical, which gave us the version of Meg Giry we got in LND? Of course. Why does Meg love to swim so much and why does she drag Gustave out ostensibly for a swim? Is it a dig at Patti's Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool? Maybe.
I kind of hope we find out one day if that theory is true. And maybe start a kickstarter so Patti can add this painting from the 2004 movie in her collection.
Fun fact: during the process of casting for the 2004 movie adaptation of POTO, ALW allegedly suggested Patti LuPone to play Carlotta... only for Joel Schumacher to have to awkwardly remind him that they were not on speaking terms. The idea was therefore promptly dropped.
WHY DO PEOPLE STILL KILL BLACK CATS ON HALLOWEEN? ARE WE STILL IN MEDIEVAL TIMES OR SMTH?