Tl;dr: It should be made known that I do not sell products and services at this time. If you receive any solicitation for goods, spells, readings, or witchy contraband, walk away immediately. Block and report the bloke who is trying to impersonate me.
—REAL socials—
These are the ONLY social media profiles I have.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faaumu
Instagram: @longhouse_cat
Twitter: @longhouse_cat (not active)
Linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/faaumu
TikTok: All TikTok profiles that purport to be me are FAKE.
Tinder: I do NOT see people online.
It’s 2022, and what better way to kick it off than with a serious topic: scams. I had experiences on the receiving end of scams, from those terribly written Nigeran 419 schemes (discussed also in Fast Facts for Free Agents, a fictional document in Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor) to the so-called ‘pigeon-drop‘ my mum fell victim to in my first year of uni. I personally never fell victim to the scams, because I listened to radio news as a child, and they’re always exposing new schemes left and right. By high school, I had a pretty good idea of what emails to filter and how to prevent my family from becoming a victim to illegal mail. After my mum got scammed, I vowed to exact revenge on scammers by calling them myself and wasting their time (for an example of a bloke who does this for a living, see Jim Browning).
I discuss this because due to my affiliation with witchcraft and with pagan communities in the Twin Cities (as well as being an up and coming academic), sooner or later, you may receive an unwarranted solicitation for paid products and services. If you have been following me closely, you know that I’ve only been practicing witchcraft for three months and that therefore, my skills and practices are rather elementary. I’m not a medium. I do not want to use magick just so you can get back at your ex-partner for some petty **** they did to you. Scams have become a literal curse in the witchcraft community—and by extension, in communities of independent artists, small business owners, and BIPOC-led movements, just to name a few.
Regardless of your relationship with me, I need to remind you not to accept solicitations for paid products, readings, spells, etc. Walk away (see Tl;dr above for more info). That’s all most of you folks ever do anyway, and I trust that how you respond will make the difference between you getting scammed and you being able to laugh at my face. I find that most reputable artists and small business owners will not reach out personally and sell me **** (those utilizing paid adverts and known public accounts are notable exceptions rather than norms). If you find a fake social media profile, report it to the social media company.
Now that the issue is out of the way, let me talk briefly about witchcraft. I don’t have a lot to say on the topic itself other than to assert that what has become my own practice is also sacred and personal. Hence this is why I do not intend to go out of my way and sell anything at this time. That is not the point of my practice and livelihood. As with anything I do—and let me make it clear that I will never allow academics to compromise the sacred space I create for myself through my practice—I am always learning, revising and innovating. I found very quickly that although the core of witchcraft is attunement of oneself to the cycles of natures, the cosmos and the spirits, each individual witch is ideally empowered to make decisions over their personal practices and beliefs.
Witchcraft is both the practice of magick and a pluriverse of practices. The book Queering Your Craft by Cassandra Snow is good QTBIPOC-centred introduction for those who are curious about witchcraft and some of its basic principles (anyone can be a witch and you don’t have to be a witch or a QTBIPOC witch to understand or practice what’s on the text). In my recent article about 2021, I also slid in a dedication that explains why I’m practicing witchcraft. That is probably the only personal religious text that I’ll craft. Although there are terms with definitions that come from specific genealogies of paganism, I also crafted my dedication with an eye towards making the gist of my spiritual axiology accessible to anyone who is reading it.
That’s it. See you.
Incognito Transit 