Seven magical destinations for anybody fascinated by witches (Lonely Planet)

(The witches' cookery) Dec. 10, 2021: On the night from Dec. 21st to the 22nd, we are celebrating the winter solstice or "Yule," as many witches and pagans call it. Merry Yuletide!

In today's witch vlog, I am taking viewers through my winter solstice celebration to give inspiration on how to celebrate Yule, create some yule-themed kitchen witchery with yummy orange and cardamom cookies, show my simple winter solstice ritual, and conjure up a witchy winter brew in my cauldron.

Let's go back to pagan times and traditions

Of course, this Yule vlog is peppered with pagan history, green witch lore, and lots of information on Yule and the roots of modern Anglo-Saxon Christmas traditions. Hope everyone enjoys this bit of winter witchcraft!

What do you think of the Bavarian celebration of St. Lucia (Goddess of Light in Sweden, Catholicism, and German witchcraft)? It is a bit grim... xD How are we celebrating Yule?

• 00:00 Intro Witch vlog
• 00:23 What are we doing for the winter solstice?
• 00:54 Walk in Winter Wonderland
• 01:35 What is the winter solstice about?
• 02:31 Green witch lore & traditional plants of Yule
• 05:01 Gathering winter solstice greenery for a Yule ritual
• 05:53 Winter solstice celebrations around the world
• 06:44 St. Lucia Day in Sweden
• 07:28 St. Lucia Day in Bavaria (the awkward version)
• 09:07 Kitchen witchery: Flaming Solstice cookies
• 11:09 Cleansing smoke blend for the Yuletide
• 13:35 Winter solstice ritual idea
• 14:48 Gushing over my new witches' cauldron
• 15:13 Pagan history: Viking drinking festivals and making Kinderpunsch

#yule #wintersolstice #witchcraft

💕 Kinderpunsch

Scandinavian Sami family, Finland, 1936

(Science) Aug. 18, 2024: Girl football? Forest spirits? Living in tents with advice of female shamans? Sápmi is the Sámi (\sammy\) people’s own name for their traditional territory. The Sámi people are the Indigenous people of the northern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula and large parts of the Kola Peninsula. They live in what some used to call "Lapland" in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. There is no reliable information on the population of the Sámi people; they are, however, estimated to number between 50,000-100,000. The Sami – an ethnic group who are known as the last indigenous people of Europe (or Laplandia).

(Suzanne Joy Teune) Oct. 28, 2023: Hello! This month is the month of foraging. It is a full moon as I upload. I am calling it the "moon of colored trees." This is a very special moon, for this season does not last long. Foraging is something I began doing for art when I attended the Burren College of Art, Ireland. I have been doing it and incorporating items gathered into my art ever since. This video is to show that it's not just about gathering supplies from nature. It's far deeper than that. It's a sacred spiritual practice. This is why I am in awe and inspired by the Indigenous people of the Americas and their art. I don't know how to put this into words.

The Kammaṭṭhāna ("field of cultivation") Forest Tradition of Thailand (Pali kammaṭṭhāna, meaning "place of meditative work"), commonly known in the West as the Thai Forest Tradition, is a lineage of Theravada Buddhist monasticism.

It started around 1900 with Ajahn Mun Bhuridatto, who wanted to practice Buddhist wandering asceticism and its meditative practices like the Buddha, according to the standards of pre-sectarian Buddhism.

After studying with Ajahn Sao Kantasīlo and wandering through the northeast of Thailand (Isan), Ajahn Mun reportedly attained the stage of enlightenment known as non-returning and started teaching in Northeast Thailand.

He strove for a revival of Early Buddhism, insisting on a strict observance of the Buddhist Monastic Code known as the Vinaya and teaching the practice of meditative absorptions (jhāna) and the realization of nirvana (Pali nibbāna) in this very life.

Initially, Ajahn Mun's teachings were met with fierce opposition, but in the 1930s his group was acknowledged as a formal faction of Thai Buddhism, and in the 1950s the relationship with the royal and religious establishment improved.

In the 1960s, Western students started to be attracted to this back-to-basics movement, and in the 1970s branch monasteries of the tradition began to be established in the West.

Underlying attitudes of the Thai Forest Tradition include an interest in the empirical and verifiable effectiveness of Buddhist practice, the individual's cultivation and development, and the use of skill in practice and living. More

(Campfire Stories) Feb. 23, 2024: This film is part of a series called "Something Beautiful for the World,” which is a collaboration between Reflections of Life, Campfire Stories, and Happen Films.

Maria was a romantic, animal-loving, dreamy child who, growing up, had a hard time conforming to the demands associated with the trajectory towards a "normal" life. As a young adult she became depressed and was encouraged by her therapist to go for walks in the forest.

The myriads of funny-looking twigs and sticks she found along the way immediately put her on a path to recovery. Now, 25 years later, she's a celebrated "twig poet," whose art is shown in galleries throughout Sweden.

When a climate-related crisis strikes the forest where she lives and works, she's forced into a new type of creativity in order to save the place that once upon a time saved her.

Hi, we're here to rape and pillage

(Viking) Thanks to a rhyme we were forced to learn and repeat in grade school, many Americans believe that Crypto-Jew (Converso) Cristobal Columbus first discovered America in 1492, after sailing the ocean blue. But what if it were an Irish monk or Viking Leif Erikson who sailed the seas serene that were aquamarine?

This Viking Cruises® video chronicles how, nearly 500 years before the debt-ridden Italian (Jewish Spanish) explorer sailed the Atlantic, a 25-year-old Norse navigator named Leif Erikson and a crew of 35 men set sail to explore the seas west of Greenland.

When Erikson arrived on the shores of what he called “Vinland,” he became the first known European to set foot in North America.

Helgo Buddha is a Viking treasure indicating world trade

Helgö is an island in Ekerö Municipality in Stockholm County, Sweden, situated on the lake Mälaren. The island's greatest width is about 0.9 mi (1.5 km), it is about 3.1 miles (5 km) long and covers 119 acres (48 hectares). Excavations are ongoing on Helgö.

The island is perhaps best known for a major archeological area. The old trading town on Helgö began to emerge around the year 200 AD, 500 years before Birka at Björkö.

The first archeological dig in 1954 uncovered the remains of the early settlement, including a workshop area which attracted international interest. The most notable finds included a small Buddha statuette from North India and a christening scoop from Egypt, both dating from the 6th century.

The Indian Buddha statuette, the Irish crozier [1], and the Egyptian Coptic scoop found on Helgö are presently on display in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm... More

(June 25, 2024) GUEST: Gabriel Shipton, filmmaker (ithaka.movie) and Julian Assange’s half-brother.

Gay Pres. Obama vs. Chelsea Manning

UPDATE: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been freed from Belmarsh Prison in London, where he had been incarcerated for the past five years, after accepting a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors.

After a decade-plus of legal challenges, Assange will plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material for publishing classified documents detailing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan [serving as a negative model for many other countries to do so] on WikiLeaks [in massive data releases and websites the U.S. was desperate to have Americans avoid and not dare go near for fear of surveillance and prosecution, coercing service providers into pulling their platforms from WikiLeaks].

How can the System thank Obama for his service?

The Australian publisher is expected to be sentenced to time served and allowed to return home, where he reportedly will seek a pardon. Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton describes learning of his release as “an amazing moment.” He speaks to Democracy Now! about Assange’s case and what led up to the latest developments, as well as what he expects will happen next.

(Reuters) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty on Wednesday to violating U.S. espionage law, in a deal that will end his imprisonment in Britain and allow him to return home to Australia, ending a 14-year legal odyssey.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was at a location given as London, Britain, in a video released June 25, 2024. He is presumably in a British jail at the moment.

Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defense documents, according to filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.

The deal marks the end of a legal saga in which Assange spent years in a British high-security jail and in the Ecuadorean embassy in London and fought allegations of sex crimes in Sweden, while battling extradition to the U.S., where he faced [trumped up] criminal charges.

Portrayed as a villain by the U.S. government for potentially putting classified government sources at risk [by exposing them for their crimes by showing their own records to the world], he has been hailed as a hero by free press advocates for exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes.

On Wednesday, he is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, at 9:00 am local time (2300 GMT Tuesday).

The U.S. territory in the Pacific was chosen due to Assange's opposition to travelling to the mainland U.S. and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange set to be freed after pleading guilty to US espionage charge

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have succeeded in creating a system that can capture and store solar energy for up to 18 years and can produce electricity when connected to a thermoelectric generator. The implications of this breakthrough are major: with it, solar energy can be stored and sent anywhere in the world then converted into electricity on demand. More: