LEMMINGS FOR LEMURIA, a just-say-no campaign

From the files of "I'm an older pagan and I've never heard of this newfangled shit before...enlighten me or get yer crystal ball off my lawn!!" ---I ask you:

WHAT THE HECK ARE 'LEMURIAN CRYSTALS'??!?!?

They're all over the internet, gang, and I'm going to tell you the gods' honest truth....they're a scam. They are just regular old quartz crystals with a good new age backstory. Maybe they have a better marketing team and some nice slick photos, but they are no different than the bulk stuff you bought already when you decided stones were good to have around for energetic purposes...or because they look really pagany, boho or hippie awesome.

Who was the marketing team that came up with the unfounded, unable to prove claim that these gemstones have the energetic frequency which links them to the "lost continent of Lemuria" or some dumb bullshit? Does the lazy intellectual pagan connoisseur realize that's like saying your buying seashells from Atlantis?

Are those sly Etsy sellers the same ones who are hocking chemically dyed geodes and claiming they're really that neon magenta color? Or slices of agate the color of peacock teal? Or the resin poured into perfect symmetrically-terminated points with 24k gold inclusions? I mean, Mother Nature makes some pretty cool colors all on her own. Why should we suffer the insult of having a lacquer spray on every stone make it as iridescent or man-made titanium clusters treated to look like an oil slick, just so that they can say they are energetically aligned with the ancient rainbow properties of Avalon/Narnia/Pleiades? No, my friends. We don't have to tolerate FAKE MAGIC and FALSIFIED TOOLS just because some jerk thinks we're too stupid to notice.

Aesthetics are nice, but nature worshipers should be able to forego the fugazi in favor of the real deal, served in all its realness yo.

Yet every few years we see these bandwagon jumping sellers with marketing degrees and slow moving stock, drumming up these dumb sales pitches so that they can repackage stuff to a buying demographic they only half-heartedly understand and about which they really don't give a damn. A sucker born every minute, or so says the astrological charts right?

Don't buy into the bullshit, man. 

Say no to the plastic amber with impossible inclusions. 

Skip over the too-perfect-to-be real resin replicas. 

Tell the hipsters on Etsy and the hawkers at HomeGoods that you're on to their scheme and you are savvy enough to know that crap, no matter how cleverly 'updated' is still crap. 

If you buy a Lemurian crystal point on Wish that is as big as your forearm, don't be surprised when you don't get an energetic chakra download from the ancient Akashic records but instead have a kinda cool doorstop.
Buy real. Be real.

All I want for Yule is...herbs that might kill me

So in my due course of getting to know the local pagan/heathen/witchy lay o' the land in my new homeland of Denver, I have been sleuthing out all the pointy-hatted retail goodness.

One such recent excursion yielded a surprise I was not expecting...finding a tiny little apothecary shop, tucked back in a mostly deserted multi-tenant building.

The usual containers with tumbled stones and crystal points
A bunch of books on chakra balancing, contacting spirit guides and herbal gardening
Random statuettes of various dashboard-mountable deities
and then...the ubiquitous wall of glass jars with herbs.

But this was different.

These had the Latin names and warning labels...not just descriptions of whatever Scott Cunningham or Paul Huson cited as potential holistic and magical uses.

And there, among the dusty glass containers of Dittany of Crete and Comfrey and homegrown white sage.  There.  In the jar at the tippy-top shelf:  amanita muscaria - the red cap!

This little bugger is NOT something to mess around with, and frankly, I was really shocked that it was available at all.   However, not much should surprise me here, in the land where every shopping plaza has a med/rec herb retailer and driving with the windows down on a Friday after work smells like a skunk farm. 

Fully dried caps that still retained something of their former telltale reddish hue with white spots.  The jar had three of them inside, the largest of which rivaled some portabella sandwiches I've eaten at swanky restaurants.  These babies are to be sold by weight, by the gram. 

For giggles, I asked for the price of the big fella...a whopping $80.00 for that guy.  I liked his smaller, better shaped and mostly intact brother for a $35.00. 

I've decided to make myself a little shadow box of fine specimens that are traditionally included in a flying ointment.  Kind of like one of those specimen boxes one would mount fascinating insect in for further study.  Goddess knows I'm neither suicidal nor foolhardy enough to try to concoct such a thing.

But imagine what a preserved collection of herbs like that would be, a unique conversation piece that fellow witches invited into my private office/library would find darkly humorous.

Now then, where to find some Datura and a full Mandrake root?  Maybe that hoodoo store I passed the other day on my way home from work can procure something for me?