magical practises in the alterhuman communities: a curated bibliography

this list highlights some of the magical currents in the alterhuman communities - the practises that are unique to, or uniquely expressed by, our kinds. not all of these sources are useful to us as contemporary practitioners, but they're all strands in the braid of our culture and have value as historical works.

some of these pages display sigils or otherwise have magic imbued in them by the author. links to those are marked with a spiral emoji (🌀) for folks who are concerned about spells automatically executing to take the appropriate precautions.

awakening & past life work

grouped together because for people who Do Magic About It, they're often the same or closely connected.

🌀 Jarandhel Dreamsinger's Otherkin Reiki Series - Jarandhel creates seven sigils to guide a person through the process of Awakening, numbered to parallel the steps of classical alchemy and the points of the otherkin star.

The Lostkin Project - a site dedicated to aiding otherkin in recovering memories and magical potential related to their phenotype. techniques included meditation, ritual and dream work.

Magic for The Other Soul - a sadly incomplete, but still decently long, book of useful techniques for nonhumans and fictionfolk. includes divination for insight into one's identity; inducing, controlling and working with shifts; and rebuilding practises from other-life memories. this could've gone in multiple sections, so i put it up at the top.

empowerment

workings that are intended to reconnect an alterhuman to their own identity and power; or to strengthen the culture and bonds of the communities themselves.

Claiming the Heritage of the Elder Folke - a litany composed by Arethinn aTinderel, designed to be used as the core of a ritual for claiming one's power as a fae.

🌀 Come Away - a servitor built by Jarandhel intended to revitalize the otherkin community and draw unawakened folks towards it. it's connected to a number of invocations which are also linked to in the post.

🌀 The Otherkin Avatar Project - a ritual designed by michelle belanger to close out KinVention north 2004. the ritual invoked seven entities said to represent the various species of otherkin and implored the community to rise to the challenges of increasing visibility. it spawned a lot of commentary and further experimentation, like, for example, clan nautilus' post.

glamourbombing

the art and science of weirding up the world. probably one of the biggest magic movements the communities have had. much of the lengthier writings on it are critiques, particularly regarding how radical it's supposed to be.

Glamourbombing: Intro & FAQ - an FAQ created for the glamourbombing livejournal community, by nalissi, one of the term's originators.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism - Hakim Bey's concept of poetic terrorism is acknowledged by many as the inspiration for glamourbombing. an important historical document and reminder of the ever-present anarchist undercurrent of the alterhuman communities.

The Death and Rebirth of Glamourbombing - Jarandhel Dreamsinger's well known and much discussed polemic against the state of glamourbombing in the late 00s and early 10s. he criticizes the otherkin side of the movement for not using enough actual magic and aligns himself with what he percieves to be the much more effective DKMU.

Ceremonial Glamourbombing - reflecting on Jarandhel's post, a friend of his weighs in on more effective glamourbombs using elements from chaos and ceremonial magic.

Glamourbombing - an explicitly anarchist critique, long after the "death" of the community, and a call to reinvigorate the movement - by yours truly.

🌀 DKMU Oistar Guide 2.1 - an introduction to the history and methodology of this notorious band of chaotes. these are the people Jarandhel said were doing it right, and they're still doing it today.

Glamourbombing on Mythsong - general directory of glamourbombing resources, including lots of suggestions and ways of evaluating the effectiveness of such.

The Faerie Glamour Archives - a well put together, modern(!) website on the theory and practise of glamourbombing. tons of examples and suggestions.

open source reiki

a school of reiki developed for and by otherkin and plurals which ended up incorporating a lot of chaos magic elements as well.

Open Source Reiki Wiki - woefully incomplete, but most of the info we still have from the developers of this practise lives here.

🌀 Jarandhel's reiki tag - includes the previously mentioned otherkin reiki series, but also other musings on the nature of reiki energy, including his experiments combining it with chaos-inspired sigil magic.

Attuning Multiples - elsewhere, Jarandhel writes about the specific challenges of working with plural energy bodies, one of the things open source reiki was adapted to address.

shifting

particularly in the early days of the therian (or were, or shifter) community, shifting was for many the primary, the characteristic feature of their experience. to wit, there's been a lot written on controlling them - to stop them popping up when it's inconvenient or dangerous, and to wilfully induce them for everything from stress relief to high ceremonial magick.

The Magic of Shapeshifting - make no mistake: this book is bad. but it's interesting as a view to attitudes around shifting at the time it was written, including a much more liberal belief in p-shifting, which was seen as the ultimate goal of the techniques herein. it also claims that therians all exist in a heriarchy of closeness to god which bears are at the top of and sharks at the bottom. make of that what you will, i guess.

Shifting, Shamanism and Therianthropy: Magical Techniques For Your Therioside - lupa's approach to managing shifts involves a lot of pathworking to speak to your therioside. her goal in this work is to attain total integration of the human and nonhuman animal, and be able to slide along this scale at will as needed. while not written for therians, her other book on animal magic, Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone may also be of interest.

The Therian Bible - controversial even in its time, this document argued that "true therians" are posessed of a unique magic. they espoused a code of vegetarianism and spending prolonged periods in nature in order to gain what they called The Knowledge. their end goal was also physical shifting - however, this did not refer to a change of species as much as heightened senses, strength and the supposed ability to commune with animals of one's theriotype.

spiritual daemonism

the predominant view of daemonism today is a psychological one, but people still approach it through a spiritual lens, and have since the beginning of the community.

The Daemon Page (2007) - Okibi, the person who established the modern daemonism community, held that daemons were an objectively measurable paranormal phenomenon. the original daemon page website presented what they considered factual evidence of the existence of daemons, and related them to socrates' daimonion.