Thread by @morrismichaelj

A Thread on Astrology + Witchcraft as Practices of Kinship:

The longer I have been engaged in practices like witchcraft and astrology, the more I have come to recognize them as practices of kinship with the more-than-human world to which I already belong.
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As I track the movements of the planets, as I work with their qualities and significations, my felt sense of them grows and evolves. I can spend hours a day working on charts and talking with clients about how the planetary signatures show up in their lives.
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These practices constitute a sustained relationality, a persistence of attention directed toward the sky and these distant, ancient planetary bodies with which my body shares this cosmos.
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I supplement my astrological practice with daily meditations, devotional practices in order to feel the presence of the planets as I again bring my awareness back to them. These meditations are intended to cultivate familiarity, the making familiar or even making familial.
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Likewise, each day & every ritual in which I invoke the elements of air, fire, water, and earth, as I direct my attention to them as states of materiality that exist both within and beyond my own body, I not only affirm that connection between inner and outer worlds as sacred:
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I also nurture my sustained, conscious relations with these elements. These are practices of recognizing that in very real ways, we are part of one another—or even that our relations precede our perceived separation.
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It is similar to my ongoing relationships with stones, whether in the form of direct contact in meditation practices or in working with stone essences that introduce vibrational medicine from stones directly into my system. I come to rocks and stones as my elders...
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and I spend time with them in order to attune with them and learn from them, but also simply to sustain and deepen our familiarity with one another. Making time to be with rocks and stones is a way of allowing them to matter to me in their significant otherness.
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What if we understood these practices of sustained attention, devotion, and cultivating familiarity as practices of making kin? Can planets, elements, and stones be a chosen family of near and distant relatives from and with whom I am constituted in an ongoing way?
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And why does it matter?

I am thinking here of Donna Haraway’s slogan “Make Kin, Not Babies!” and the ways that population growth—particularly in wealthy, developed countries in the global north—is a primary contributor to climate collapse.

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Haraway writes, “Who and whatever we are, we need to make-with—become-with, compose-with—the earth-bound … It matters how we generate kin.”
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Indigenous scholars like @KimTallBear and Melissa Nelson have done amazing work accounting for human and more-than-human kinship relationships in Indigenous social relationships and eco-erotic oral literatures.
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@KimTallBear It matters that there have been and continue to be modes of making kin that are unrecognized and unthinkable in white settler colonial culture.
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@KimTallBear Ecosexual artists like @AnnieSprinkle and @ebethstephens have been generating kin-making practices with the more-than-human world for over a decade, through artistic practices of recognizing meaningful relationships with the planet.
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@KimTallBear @AnnieSprinkle @ebethstephens How would we practice astrology differently if we understood it as practices of making more-than-human kin and kinds-as-assemblages—rather than something like reading a story written in the sky?
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@KimTallBear @AnnieSprinkle @ebethstephens How would we practice magic differently if it was more about cultivating meaningful relations rather than transaction?
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@KimTallBear @AnnieSprinkle @ebethstephens Certainly the circulation of the term “animism” accomplishes some of this work. To understood ourselves living with-and-in a living world is significant. But does animism alone allow such living relations to matter as kinship when we desperately need more ways of making kin?
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@KimTallBear @AnnieSprinkle @ebethstephens These are parts of ideas I’m working through for both a forthcoming workshop and a longer piece of writing. Today felt like a day I wanted to share some of them.
💚☁️🔥🌊🌍💫
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