Mr Muldoon steers us to a tale of colliding make-believe:

A very modern headline, I think you’ll agree.

They have training courses, you know, and websites, and a federation. We’re all learning things today.

Ms Howard, it turns out, is a “second-generation witch,” following in the mystical footsteps of her mother, “a high priestess” who “ran a coven in the 1980s.”

A very modern heresy. Resulting in a revoking of membership and denial of access to witchcraft course materials.

The Pagan Federation, however, issued a statement insisting that the womanliness of cross-dressing men is obvious, unassailable and “not up for debate”:

Validity for everyone. Just tilt your head and squint. Apparently, we’re to be told what reality is by people who think they’re witches.

Ah, that Thing That Never Happens.

As these are terribly modern, immensely caring witches, Ms Howard was banned from the organisation’s Facebook page and from the website of the British Druid Order on grounds of being “unequivocally transphobic.” Thereby denying Ms Howard access to the arcane knowledge of “seers and healers,” along with the opportunity to purchase oracle cards, audio recordings of spells and invocations, and “hymns to the divine feminine.” Oh, and guides to coping with stress by wrapping a thick blanket around your head.

No more “walking between worlds,” alas.

At which point, readers may wish to ponder the implied rules of pretending, the hierarchy of make-believe, in which some people pretending to be something that they aren’t are deemed of much greater importance than other people pretending to be something that they aren’t. A world in which pretending one thing now seems to mean that all pretences, of any kind, must be observed.

Further rumblings on the matter, and photographs of uncanny goings-on, can be found here.

By all means consider this an open thread.

From the pages of Scary Mommy, where ladies of a progressive bent share their fever dreams,

Could Witchcraft Make You A Better Parent? Real Witches Say ‘Yes’

I suspect the word real is creaking under the strain there. Other creaking may occur during our travels. Still, the author of the piece, Annie Midori Atherton, is keen to entice us with the prospect of paranormal parenting:

As a new mom fumbling through the daily grind of work, caregiving, and what little social life I can manage to eke in, I often find myself wondering how other parents pull it off… Some days I’m so worn down… that I feel I’d need to summon supernatural energy to thrive — rather than just survive.

And so, obviously,

For a growing number of people — including many mothers — witchcraft doesn’t begin or end with Halloween. According to one scholar, the number of Americans who identify with Wicca or paganism has risen from less than 200,000 twenty ago to nearly two million today.

Uncorrected narcissism, or fears of being an uninteresting person, or both, will do that, I suppose.

Can you access a broader intelligence and gain quick information without having to use your logical mind?

From the pages of Everyday Feminism, an offer you can’t refuse.

Sharpen your sense of self-awareness.

Just $35.

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Time, I think, for a visit to the pages of Everyday Feminism, where Ms Ixty Quintanilla is turning her mind to matters ectoplasmic:

I spoke with several individuals who each channel their ancestral spirituality in different ways and asked them how to use spiritual practice as a form of healing and resistance, now during this difficult Trump era and beyond.

You see, when your preferred candidate loses an election, what you really need is some channelling of ancestral spirituality. As opposed to say, a sense of proportion. And so Ms Quintanilla lists some “spiritual practices” in order to enable fellow feminists to cope with the unutterable trauma that is their lives.

Suggestions include Call On Ancestors – which is to say, the dead – and Burn Herbs Mindfully. The latter is surprisingly fraught with complication, as we’re told, emphatically, that we must avoid setting fire to white sage and various endangered plants, and that it is “vital to recognise and respect the ancestors of the land you stand on.” Exactly how one fathoms the particulars of these things, at any given point in history, and how one should respect the relevant no-longer-living parties, assuming one has been able to identify them, is not made clear.

Other recommendations are more prosaic – feeling the breeze, watching trees grow, and, er, pushing up against said trees. No, I don’t know either. But apparently, if your psyche has been exploded and rendered unto dust by the election of someone other than Hillary Clinton, you should immediately find a tree and push up against it. It’s the feminist way.

Now hush and approach with caution: 

My magical practice is based in African Diasporic voodoo, herbology, and root-work. I came to these rituals by studying Black slave rebellions, and unearthing the ways in which enslaved folx used hexes and curses to thwart their masters.

Not entirely successfully, it seems, given the word masters.

I turned to these traditions most open-heartedly in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests circa 2014, when I started to feel hopeless and emotionally drained after regular violent confrontations with the police at demonstrations. By wielding these protective amulets, reciting these incantations, calling upon the Orishas, and working intimately with the plants, stones, roots, and bones of my environment, I began to feel more empowered.

Because when your behaviour is so appalling that you’re repeatedly getting into scuffles with the police, what you need, obviously, isn’t a rethink of your life choices, but a magical amulet.

Quickly, my focus in the Craft moved away from damning hexes against white supremacy to community care work and deep psycho-social-spiritual healing for Black and Brown people in the struggle. As a queer Black woman scientist activist, Queer Magic For The Resistance is what I’m always giving.

The lady sharing her deep, uncanny wisdom is named Iman, a sorceress of sorts, and an affiliate of Queer Magic For The Resistance, a “collective and political affinity group based in Oakland, California.” Because of course it is. Iman, whose “whole world is magical,” describes herself as a “scientist” and “emotional care provider,” a purveyor of roots, herbs and “emotional emergency response.” As when equipping the LARPing sociopaths of Antifa with herbal teas and “healing shields.” For her, she says, “magic is resistance.”

To reality, I’m guessing.