There is a Sacred Window Rescue Project. How freakin’ cool is that?
This would look great in my main workroom.
I mean, I’d have to basically knock down and rebuild an entire wall of the house, but really, that’s no big deal!
I send out various holy cards, prayer cards, and printed talismans with orders, and one of them is this Angelic Cross/Crux Angelica of St. Thomas Aquinas. The text on it says you can find out more at SeraphinStation.com, but after a customer wrote to ask about it, I realized the link is kind of buried and I probably need to make it easier to find. So I’m working on that, but if you’ve been wondering about the Crux Angelica, here you go, copied over from Big Lucky Hoodoo.
It’s no wonder. The story goes that when he was a little boy, lightning struck the tower in which he lay sleeping with his nurse. His mother ran in, frantic, at the noise. Thomas was unharmed but his little sister was dead, as were the horses in the stable below.
Later in life, he suffered terribly during a thunderstorm as he spent the night in an underground cave, and to help allay his dread, he is said to have traced the letters of the Crux Angelica, or Angelic Cross, on the cave wall.
Carried and recited with faith and devotion, it’s said to protect from sudden death, defeat in battle, disease, imprisonment, accidents while traveling, witchcraft, demonic possession, death during childbirth, and yes, storms.
The Latin translates as follows:
The cross to me a sure salvation.
The cross it is I ever adore.
The cross of my Lord with me.
The cross my refuge.
St. Thomas, the so-called Angelic Doctor, was one of the greatest minds of medieval Europe. It’s impossible to overstate how much his works of scholastic philosophy influenced Catholic doctrine. Due to his studiousness and incredible mind, he is also the patron saint of students and is known as the Angel of the Schools.
Read more about his life in this work by Fr. Placid Conway or in St. Thomas Manual: or Devotion of the Six Sundays in Honor of the Angel of the Schools, St. Thomas of Aquin.
Dusting off this article from 2013 because someone asked about St. Michael and punitive miracles.
I’m posting this as a blog entry 1. because I can’t seem to comment on Mama Cat’s blog (maybe she turned off comments or my browser is jacked up), and 2. I don’t want to take over her blog with my rambling anyway. Anyway, this is in response to her blog post here. I just want to chime in on the “saints punishing you” thing (if you read this whole thing, you’ll see that I am not disagreeing with her – I’m just elaborating).
People tend to think of saints as benevolent entities, close to God, involved in helping the devoted. Actually, there is an extremely long tradition of punitive miracles even in quite orthodox Catholic practice. I go into this a bit in this blog post. If you read the Old Testament, it’s full of them; God smote the hell out of all kinds of people, and…
View original post 1,817 more words
Saints of the month for October are St. Teresa of Avila (a mystic author and Doctor of the Church, invoked against headache and heart attack, feast day Oct. 15) or St. Jude (neglected apostle, invoked for hopeless causes, feast day Oct. 28).
Looking to spruce up your altars, add to your chaplet or holy card collection, or just learn more about saints and spirits in folk Catholicism? The Saint of the Month box gets you a hand-picked and handmade bundle of saints’ goodies selected for you and shipped to you.
Whether you’re just starting to learn about saints and spirits in the hoodoo rootwork tradition or you’ve been working with them for years, I strive to delight you with something new and covetable to add to your collection with every box. (I have some pretty neat stuff squirreled away.)
This gives you a chance to get something new for an altar or to be introduced to a saint you haven’t worked with before, and it gives me an excuse to do things I’m always wanting to do but end up putting off, like taking an afternoon to design a new chaplet I’ve been wanting to make for a while.
The standard box includes, at a minimum, a bottle of oil, a candle, a holy card or mini prayer booklet, brief history and recommendations for working with the saint or spirit, and a charm, medal, or curio. The deluxe box adds a fixed, dressed, and decorated glass-encased vigil candle and a handmade chaplet, rosary, or necklace. Very unlikely that any two will ever be identical or that all of this stuff would ever be available to purchase individually.
Saints and spirits may be chosen from the traditional Catholic “roster” or may come from various folk traditions. If you have suggestions or requests for particular saints or spirits to feature, I’d love to hear from you! Drop me a line from the contact form or just leave a comment somewhere.
Read more or order your Saint of the Month box at Seraphin Station.
An article I originally posted in 2011 wherein I explain why punitive miracles (i.e. saints smiting people) and coercion of saints (i.e. people smiting saints) are both things; briefly describe liturgical hours; cover the concept of intercession; and mangle an ut clause translating a 15th century Latin prayer to St. Michael.
I’ve translated a prayer to St. Michael from a mid-15th century Book of Hours, and I thought I’d share it in between typing light setting reports.
Books of Hours were very popular in medieval Europe. While few laypeople would be able to own, never mind read, a Bible for much of the Middle Ages in much of Europe, a lot of people owned Books of Hours (comparatively speaking). They are so named because they are built around the hours of the day – not the 24 hour setup we know, but the monastic and ecclesiastical hours that the day of a monk or nun or priest was divided into. These “hours” (sometimes called “offices” today) are Matins (basically the first chunk of prayers, at rising or dawn or however you have your day sorted), Lauds or Prime (about 6 am), Terce (about 9 am), Sext (noon), Nones (about 3 pm), Vespers…
View original post 2,317 more words
These little nicho ornaments are made with reclaimed post-consumer tinplate that’s hand-cut, hammered, and shaped to encase tiny print reproductions of antique and vintage holy cards. I embellish them from my stash of vintage, antique, and/or reclaimed fabrics, metals, beads, and trims. This particular shrine features an image from a French holy card of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and is embellished with resin rhinestones and pearls, reclaimed vintage brass rosary chain, silk ribbon, a silver-tone heart pendant, pearlized glass beads, and satin roses.
This handmade ornament is intended to evoke the Blessed Mother’s elegance and grace but without removing all the rough edges and scuff marks that are part of this icon’s history and that characterize the fabric of her devotees’ genuine lived lives.
7.25″ long including chain and pendant.
Available at Seraphin Station.
This one of a kind chaplet bracelet is handmade with 5mm ruby red glass beads, an ornate crucifix with a bronze-toned antiqued patina imported from Italy, a chain extension and lobster clasp if you want to wear it or secure it around a statue or rearview mirror, and a holy medal of St. Michael handpainted in bright and durable enamels.
The saintly protector par excellence, Michael is called on to defend against dangers both spiritual and physical and from enemies both known and unknown.
Unclasped, this chaplet’s length from end to end is 8.75″. Will fit a 7.5″ wrist, but I’m happy to customize it if you need it shorter or longer. (Just allow a few extra days handling, please!) Medal measures 1″.
This style of chaplet is called a “niner” and is a popular and very portable way of doing a novena for a saint, of keeping your prayer beads close to hand when you’re traveling or need to be more discreet than a full-size rosary might allow, or of having a set of prayer beads the perfect size for wearing as a bracelet or keeping on your car’s rearview mirror or the door knob of your room or home.
One way of praying with a niner chaplet is to call on the saint’s aid on the medal, pray the Our Father x3, the Hail Mary x3, and the Glory Be x3 on the beads, and then the Apostle’s Creed on the crucifix.
Read more about St. Michael (and other saints and angels) in the education section at Big Lucky Hoodoo. And if you’ve never been sure how St. Michael can be a saint and an angel at the same time – and he most certainly is – you can get a little crash course in Catholic ontology at Seraphin Station.
This St. Michael piece is available at Seraphin Station or Etsy.
Descendant of a Saxon king and wife of a German one, St. Matilda (aka Maud) lived in the last quarter of the 9th century. She and her husband, King Henry the Fowler, were parents of Otto, who became the emperor of Germany; Henry Jr., who became the duke of Bavaria; Bruno, who became the archbishop of Cologne; Gerberga, who as a woman didn’t get much ink devoted to her in the historical record that wasn’t mostly about her politically important marriage (to Gilbert of Lotharingia, then Louis IV of France); and Hedwig, ditto (to Hugh the Great).
When the king died, Otto succeeded him, but Henry contested the succession. They fought about it off and on for years, with Henry even plotting Otto’s assassination at one point. Matilda was instrumental in their eventually making peace with each other, but no sooner were they reconciled than they teamed up and went after their mother’s property from her dowry, which she’d been frittering away (to their minds) by building a bunch of convents. They seized her goods and she fled into exile to a convent in Westphalia.
They were eventually reconciled through the efforts of Otto’s wife, Eadgyth, after which Matilda continued to help the poor, found hospitals, and build churches. She’s remembered as a pious and generous friend of the poor and of the medieval church who founded many important monasteries. Her sons went down in the history books as key figures in Western European history.
And they were. But they were also entitled little shits.
(Officially, St. Matilda is the patron of large families and widows. Her feast day is March 14.)
Sources
Butler, Alban. “St. Maud, Queen.” Lives of the Saints. New York: Benziger Bros., 1894. pp. 107-108. Available at Internet Sacred Text Archive.
Englebert, Omer. “St. Matilda or Maud (d. 968).” The Lives of the Saints. Christopher and Anne Fremantle, trans. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1994. pp. 101-102. First English ed., 1951.
Kampers, Franz. “Otto I, the Great.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. Available at New Advent.
Further Reading
“St. Matilda” at Saints Feast Family: Exploring Catholic Patron Saints of the Day & their Feasts. It has pictures, a link to a video showing off the collegiate church St. Servatius where St. Matilda is buried, and recipes for those who remember that saints’ days are called feast days, after all!
I very frequently see folks online say things like this: “Though technically speaking Archangel Michael is not a Saint [sic], sometimes this entity is venerated as one.”
I’m not linking to the source for that because my goal is not to single anyone out for being wrong. Thing is, this is not an uncommon misperception. It’s pretty easy to find multiple websites and blogs that say something to this effect – even those of folks who are otherwise pretty well-versed in folk religion and/or folk magic. If this were just a couple of blogs and not a pretty widespread point of confusion and error, I wouldn’t be going to the trouble to write about it.
I get that not everybody comes from a Catholic background. But if you’re going to write about saints in the context of hoodoo and folk religion, you should do your research before you make assertions. And if you do your research, you’ll see that in a hoodoo context, when you’re talking about saints, you’re nearly always talking about the definition of saint as used by the Catholic Church.
Some Protestant branches define a saint as basically anyone who is a Christian, a member of the body of Christ by virtue of being a member of the church. Others use the term to designate someone who is “born again” and/or someone who has been baptized (at least into their particular branch of Christianity). Some reserve the term mostly to refer to widely recognized holy figures, such as the biblical patriarchs or those who were martyred for their adherence to the Christian faith. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints considers its members to be saints (but not the members of other churches).
But those are obviously not the operant definitions in traditional hoodoo. While the overwhelming majority of hoodoo practitioners historically have been Protestant Christians, there were always little geographical and cultural pockets of Catholicism (and folk Catholicism), and when rootworkers talk about working with saints, a quick survey of those saints and an understanding of the context in which they are petitioned make it clear that we’re talking about an understanding of sainthood from a Catholic perspective. We aren’t just talking about the biblical patriarchs and your very pious great aunt Emma, who is obviously a vibrant and committed member of the Body of Christ and brings the best potato salad in three states to the church picnic but is obviously not who you light a candle for on a few consecutive Tuesdays when you’re asking for her help.
Non-Catholic folks tend to think of saints as formerly living humans, maybe ones who led especially holy or exemplary lives, maybe performed a few miracles and now hang out in heaven doing various odd jobs for God and letting us bend their ears occasionally when we petition them. But that’s not how it works in Catholic ontology. According to the Roman Catholic Church, to put it as simply as possible, a saint is basically someone who’s in heaven, or to put it another way, if you’re in heaven, you’re a saint. But the actual fabric underlying all of this stuff is just a little more complicated. You can read more about it at the Catholic Encyclopedia, but it’s a concept called the communion of saints:
The communion of saints is the spiritual solidarity which binds together the faithful on earth, the souls in purgatory, and the saints in heaven in the organic unity of the same mystical body under Christ its head, and in a constant interchange of supernatural offices. The participants in that solidarity are called saints by reason of their destination and of their partaking of the fruits of the Redemption…
So you’re part of the communion of saints, the mystical body of Christ, even while you’re still living and even if you’re not quite living perfectly. This isn’t exactly the same thing as being an actual confirmed saint, but you have the potential, and as long as you can stay out of hell, you’ll keep that potential. After you undergo “purification” (or “remedial training” or “detention” or however you want to see Purgatory), then you’ll head to heaven to join the actual community of saints. In other words, as long as you don’t do something that goes down on the Big Permanent Record and lands you in hell, all roads lead to heaven eventually. So you are part of this spiritual economy and you can pray, receive blessings, ask forgiveness, ask a saint to intercede for you, say prayers for the souls of your ancestors, etc. More on this spiritual economy in a moment, but the key point now is that all of these spiritual actions have spiritual results, so things can always change. It ain’t over ’til it’s over.
To paraphrase from later on that same linked webpage, then, saints are basically those who are in fellowship with God the Father and Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Scholastic philosopher and foremost theologian of the Catholic Church, who was known as the Angelic Doctor and the Angel of the Schools [1], writes in Summa Theologiae III:8:4:
Where there is one body we must allow that there is one head. Now a multitude ordained to one end, with distinct acts and duties, may be metaphorically called one body. But it is manifest that both men and angels are ordained to one end, which is the glory of the Divine fruition. Hence the mystical body of the Church consists not only of men but of angels. Now of all this multitude Christ is the Head, since He is nearer God, and shares His gifts more fully, not only than man, but even than angels; and of His influence not only men but even angels partake, since it is written (Ephesians 1:20-22): that God the Father set “Him,” namely Christ, “on His right hand in the heavenly places, above all Principality and Power and Virtue and Dominion and every name that is named not only in this world, but also in that which is to come. And He hath subjected all things under His feet.” Therefore Christ is not only the Head of men, but of angels. Hence we read (Matthew 4:11) that “angels came and ministered to Him.”
So the angels, at least the ones who didn’t rebel, are members of the communion of saints, which the Catholic Church characterizes in that linked article as “that reciprocal action of the saints, that corporate circulation of spiritual blessings through the members of the same family, that domesticity and saintly citizenship.” They are under Christ’s power and thus receive his grace, so they’re part of this same spiritual economy that the living and the dead are active participants in. Yes, the dead, which is another big difference between Catholicism and Protestantism and is probably another blog post… but yes, your prayers can help your dead reprobate uncle Joe who’s doing time in Purgatory. And your saintly Grandmother Bosworth, who worked her fingers to the bone and never deserved any of the grief that Joe brought her and who is hanging out in heaven with the other saintly grandmothers, well, she can help you, too, with *her* prayers.
And angels, some of whom Grandmother Bosworth is doubtless rubbing shoulders with at the right hand of God — or at least in a pastoral courtyard just cattycorner to the right arm of God’s comfy chair, but don’t nitpick Grandmother Bosworth! — can hear us and help us. They are part of this same system of reciprocity that extends beyond the borders of life and corporeality, the same spiritual economy in which we might petition a saint and promise a certain “payment” or offering in return, in which working with graveyard dirt or ancestors is not seen as “disturbing the rest of the departed” at all. That idea is totally alien to a Catholic worldview. The dead aren’t gone in the sense of being beyond our ability to interact with in any meaningful way. Grandmother Bosworth is still your grandmother and she’s listening. She made the transition to the afterlife with her personality intact, as it were — her memories and willpower and agency. She can choose to help you (or choose not to, if you’re taking after Uncle Joe).
And so with angels. They are our guardians on this earthly plane. Angels guide individuals (Genesis 28-29, Exodus 32-34, Tobias 4 ff), a chosen people (Exodus 12:13), even a specific geographical region (Deuteronomy 32). And they can serve as psychopomps when we’re leaving it, leading us past the snares of the devil and the gaping mouth of hell so we can make our way to heaven – assuming that’s where we’re headed. [2]
Now that’s not to say they’re all sweetness and light or they have the same tolerance for your bullshit that Grandmother Bosworth does. Don’t waste an angel’s time whining and don’t make the mistake of thinking they are all hanging around looking like Precious Moments figurines worrying about your love life or your chakras. There’s a reason angels who show up in the Bible often start off with “Don’t be afraid.”
But in the Catholic conception of the communion of saints, angels are 100% active participants and on the same team. And they are absolutely saints.
So yes, St. Michael IS a saint. And an angel. At the same time. The angels who did not rebel are all members of the mystical body of the Church and the communion of saints. People who say otherwise but claim to be talking about hoodoo just don’t have the slightest idea what they’re even talking about and didn’t bother to do their research before they opened their mouths. But the bottom line is that St. Michael can be both a saint and an angel because the Roman Catholic definition of a saint is not the same as the kinda vague concept of sainthood that is floating around in culture more broadly.
And so this in turn should help you see how folk saints fit into all of this – figures who have *not* been formally recognized or canonized by the Catholic church but who are nonetheless venerated by the faithful and seen to have an ability and willingness to respond to the petitions or prayers of the faithful.
That’s how there can be so many darned saints and the Catholic Church doesn’t even pretend that there’s a list anywhere of all of them — because the Church does not *make* saints or grant that status to people or entities. In beatification and canonization, the Church merely formally recognizes the status of sainthood that that person has already attained whether we knew about it or not, and outlines the proper observance of their veneration by the faithful. So there are tons of saints that aren’t formally recognized by the Church with their own feast day or series of statues or whatever. And among the forgotten virgin martyrs and the soldiers of Christ whose names we never knew, we also have figures of folkloric status, both human and not, who are also very active participants in their devotees’ lives: Santa Muerte, Jesus Malverde, Yevgeny Rodionov, Marie Laveau.
Maybe even your pious great aunt Emma one day. Patron saint of the perfect picnic potato salad.
Read more about St. Michael in folklore and vernacular religion, from medieval Ireland through to 20th century Louisiana, at Big Lucky Hoodoo.
[1] Yeah, did you catch that? Among his several venerable titles, St. Thomas Aquinas is referred to as an angel. Here’s a quick tidbit excerpted from an old children’s schoolbook and here’s a student’s prayer to St. Thomas as the Angel of the Schools. This epithet would need a whole separate blog post to properly unpack, and we’d have to start with etymology, and I can feel some of your eyes glazing over already lol…
But please let all this serve for now just to demonstrate the extent to which God’s creation, and by extension the various available modes and categories of being, are much more complex and dynamic and perhaps even unruly from a Catholic perspective than a non-Catholic might be prepared to appreciate without dropping some highly problematic assumptions and doing some serious digging. So don’t listen to ignorant people talking about the saints, not even if they’re generally well-informed on other aspects of magic or mysticism or religion. There are a lot of folks out there holding forth about saints and angels and who’ve set themselves up as experts who don’t actually know what the hell they’re talking about, not to put too fine a point on it.
[2] This has always been one of St. Michael’s preeminent roles, in fact. Here’s an 11th century prayer to St. Michael that is fairly typical of its ilk:
I therefore beseech and entreat, archangel Saint Michael, that you [who know those of the accepted souls to be received] deign to take up my soul when it leaves my body and free it from the power of the enemy, so that it may bypass the gates of hell and the ways of darkness, and the lion or dragon who is accustomed to receive souls in hell and lead them to eternal torments may not obstruct it.
(Te ergo supplico et deprecer sancte michael archangele qui ad animas accepiendas accepisti postestatem ut animam meam suscipere digneris quando de corpere meo erit egressa et libera eam de potestate inimici ut pertransive possit portas infernorum et vias tenebrarum ut non se deponat leo vel draco qui conseutus est animas in inferno recipere et ad aeterna tormenta perducere.)
Quoted from Oxford Bodleian Library MS Douce 296, fol. 122v, cited in Kathleen Openshaw, “The Battle between Christ and Satan in the Tiberius Psalter,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989):14-33. Translation is mostly Openshaw excepting the bracketed segment, which she did not translate, so if it’s messed up, it’s my fault.
A simulacrum is a life-sized wax figure of a saint that serves as a visually compelling reliquary for the saint’s relics. St. Martha’s Guild was part of the restoration process for an 18th century simulacrum of St. Lucy, and they document the process with lots of photos. I don’t have permissions to repost and this was all within the last couple of years, so copyright is intact – you’ll just have to click through to see.
And you should click through if you’re into saints, art restoration, embroidery, vintage/antique fabrics, sculpting, dollmaking, or even just plain weird stuff. It’s weird. Maybe even a little unsettling. But truly incredible restoration work and the final result is beautiful, even if it is a little creepy.
Now available at Seraphin Station.
Earn 2X rewards on all purchases made through midnight. Read more.
Recently Added:
Chuparosa formulas made their way into hoodoo from south of the border, and this delightful oil is named for the hummingbird as a symbol of serious, committed, faithful love. The hummingbird has long history in Mexican folk magic, one that once involved using actual hummingbirds. The hummingbirds didn’t come out the other side of this intact. Read more.
This handmade ornament is intended to evoke the Blessed Mother’s elegance and grace but without removing all the rough edges and scuff marks that are part of this icon’s history and that characterize the fabric of her devotees’ genuine lived lives. Read more.
“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.”
– John 11:5
The Gospel of Luke tells us how Martha invited Jesus to her home in Bethany. She cooked and cleaned and catered while her sister Mary sat at Christ’s feet and listened to him speak. Martha pointed out that Mary wasn’t pitching in.
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41, NIV)
Christ’s point is that in the grand scheme of things, your eternal soul is more important than social conventions and what people think about your housekeeping. But we need to understand this in context. It’s not that Martha had no imagination or faith or respect or that she was too small-minded to want to sit at Christ’s feet, too.
In Martha’s mind and in her culture, these were her duties, and her performance of them comprised her reputation, value, and trustworthiness as a member of her culture — in a society that valued hospitality quite highly, that in fact didn’t even work as a society without hospitality as a huge part of the glue that held it together.
She wasn’t saying nobody should value hearing him teach. She also wanted to hear him speak; she was also his disciple and believed in him. She was just pointing out that people needed to eat and wash and sit, and somebody’s efforts had to make that happen. (You can imagine that Jesus was accompanied by an entourage, too, all of whom also needed to eat and wash and sit.) She was determined to do her duties well for such an esteemed guest as Jesus, but she wasn’t a doormat. She was pointing out that she was not the only one who could be doing these things, that she *could* be sitting at Christ’s feet right now, too, if she just gave off doing the less glamorous stuff. But somebody has to do it. Dramatic events are unfolding, but somebody has to make the setting they’re unfolding in happen.
In John 12, Christ is in Bethany again before Passover at a dinner in his honor. Lazarus is reclined at the table with him. Word of his resurrection has spread like wildfire; Jesus’ followers are increasing and so are the machinations against his life. Mary makes a spectacle of herself pouring half of liter of precious perfume on Christ’s feet – worth a year’s wages – and wiping them with her hair. Christ is constantly, increasingly aware of the massive cosmic drama he’s part of and what’s right around the corner, his every action and word heavily symbolic. Every step he takes is under the weight of prophecy and its fulfillment, is part of a massive dramatic ritual. In this play, Christ has simultaneously the perspective of the main character and the omniscience of the author. The drama in John’s portrayal is thick indeed.
Martha during all of this? John writes only, “Martha served” (John 12:2).
Did you know there was a very active St. Expedite Society in Independence, Louisiana up until very recently? I didn’t. Read more at Folklife in Louisiana: “St. Expedito’s Role in South Louisiana Catholicism, in New Orleans and in the Italian-American Community near Independence, Louisiana,” by Karen Williams.
Hindu deities on vodun altars: Rush, Dana. “Eternal Potential: Chromolithographs in Vodunland,”African Arts vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 60-75+94-96. Also helpful more broadly, imo, for any student of folklore/popular religion who’s ever encountered an argument about whether Abre Camino is “real hoodoo” or not, wondered what to think about the development of the seven-colors school of approach to Santisima Muerte, or pondered the relationships between figures like Legba vs. Ellegua.
Giffords, Gloria Fraser. The Iconography of Mexican Folk Retablos. Thesis. University of Arizona, 1969. I tend to assume everybody immediately sees why stuff like this is so interesting. I tend to be wrong. But basically the iconography had never been studied before this, so this was a big deal, this work. And if you like to understand what you’re looking at when you see a candle in a botanica or grocery store, you’ll encounter plenty of stuff that had its origins here whether you personally work with that imagery/tradition or not.
I read Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South years ago, and even then, before I’d really started *studying* this stuff in any consistent and applied way, I felt like everybody I knew ought to read it. I knew they wouldn’t – people think this stuff doesn’t have anything to do with them if their families weren’t the ones being described in these stories – but they’d be wrong, ’cause this is part of how we got here. And the impact of it doesn’t just disappear suddenly when it’s no longer fashionable or feasible or *whatever* to have domestic employees. This is part of Southern culture, y’all, and it’s part of how your role in it, as whatever sex, race, class, gender, family role stratum you occupy, got constructed and defined.
I still feel the same way in 2020. I think Southern folks should read this book — especially white folks. Especially white women. Here’s a review with a useful summary at the Washington Post.
New page on St. Anthony, how to work with him, and where to find resources up at the Karma Zain blog site, which seems to be holding the “deeper dive,” rootwork-specialty, theory-and-practice type of information while this Seraphin Station one seems to be… mostly about chickens and me screaming at HTML so far (grin). But we are working on some new/different things, too, a couple of which *might* be ready soon…
Anyway, the St. Anthony post is part of what I was calling “FAQ Index by Topic” but was really more of a directory to where to find collected posts that serve as a primer on various common spiritual work concepts. I need to update it with links to the WordPress URLs instead of the old Livejournal URLs, but that’s on my extremely long list of things to do. In any case, it’s on the Karma Zain blog and might be worth a look if you’re new to all this.
In store/stock/the future news:
I’m about ready to place an essential oils order and start making and stocking some oils again. So now I just need some money to fall out of the sky somehow so I can do that. That’s what hot honey jars and St. Expedite are here for, though.
So if you have a preference for formulas you’d like to see first, speak up!
I found a lot of the 2015 records for customers/clients whose stuff got caught in the cracks. I believe I found the last chunk of physical product ones a couple of hours ago. It’s pretty bad, and in a few cases it’s especially godawful. I’m really sorry, y’all. I’m gonna start with the smaller amounts, get in touch to confirm address, and refund as soon as I’m able to manage the amount. Yeah, this means that people who placed larger orders get repaid last. It’s not fair and I’m sorry.
We were able to rehome one of the white roosters (Carl Jr.), which was messy, loud, complex, and slightly traumatic but ultimately a relief. No more roosters fighting – well, not much/badly anyway, and now Joe will be king of the coop again (for teh most part – Glenn has a run at him every once in a while but overall seems uninterested in doing all the work a rooster has to do to be king of the coop.)
This means once we rehome Pretty Boy, though, white feathers will be harder to come by around here. I have not had anyone express special interest in them, just black ones, but on the off chance you do have a use for white feathers, now would be a good time to say something so I can be setting them aside!
Oh, and if you are interested in black feathers, I have plenty of those – let me know how you want them (one or two or a bag full? small ones or large ones?) and I can get them listed for you.
Remember, if your stuff got caught in the cracks in 2015 but you do still want any of that stuff, or if you don’t want the old stuff but you think you might want something in the future, we can apply any of the previous order amount to store credit and you can get first dibs on whatever new creations hit the shelves.
Or I can make you something custom/bespoke. I’m working on a rosary for that kind of situation now. I’m also making some customized protection door rosaries with certain patron saints to suit a given family’s particular situation. I love to do this kind of work and I’ve really missed it, so I’m really grateful for the opportunity to do it again.
Hope all you moms had a happy Mother’s Day.
Seraphin Station 