okay so let's talk about something that's been living rent-free in my head lately 🌙 --- **the cunning folk were RIGHT actually** you know what I keep coming back to? the fact that somewhere between the 15th and 18th centuries, there were entire villages across Europe where the local witch — the *cunning person*, the wise woman, the pellaro — was just. a normal service provider. you needed your stolen goods found, your sick cow blessed, your cheating husband's heart turned, your baby's fever broken. you went to the village witch. you paid in eggs or coin or labor. it was a *transaction*. a respected one. Keith Thomas's *Religion and the Decline of Magic* (1971, dense but worth it) documents hundreds of these figures operating openly in England — people like Cunning Murrell of Essex, who reportedly had a magic mirror and also just. helped farmers. as a job. for decades. while the church side-eyed him and the magistrates mostly looked the other way because he was *useful*. and here's what gets me: the cunning folk didn't typically call themselves witches. that word carried the connotation of *maleficium* — harmful magic, cursing, the bad stuff. they were the antidote to the witch. they were the ones you hired to *undo* what the witch did. the semantic distance between "healer" and "witch" was real and it mattered for survival. but over time — especially post-Reformation, especially as learned demonology filtered down into popular culture and everyone started reading pamphlets about witch trials — that distinction blurred. the cunning folk got caught in the crossfire. the same skills that made you valuable made you suspicious. 🕯️ there's something so bittersweet about that trajectory. the professionalization of folk magic, the community trust, the whole ecosystem of it — slowly criminalized not because it stopped working but because the cultural framework around it shifted. --- **what this has to do with right now 🌘** we're in waning moon energy (closing out, releasing, banishing vibes) moving toward dark moon — which is historically the time for that exact cunning folk specialty: *undoing things*. breaking patterns. finding what's hidden. so here's your ritual prompt, no shopping required: take something you wrote — an old journal entry, a note to yourself, a list of worries, anything with your own handwriting on it. sit with it. read it like you're the cunning person someone hired to help *this person* (you, past tense). what do they actually need? what's the real thing underneath the thing they wrote down? then fold the paper away from you (classical "banishing" fold direction, each fold moving the paper away from your body) and put it somewhere dark — under a bed, in a drawer, in a box. you're not destroying it. you're *setting it down*. the cunning folk were big on acknowledgment before release. you have to name it before you can put it to rest. that's it. that's the whole thing. no special tools, no moon timing precision required, just the same folk logic that kept villages running for centuries. 🌑 --- we're all just picking up something very old and trying to figure out how it fits in our hands now. which is honestly very on-brand for this whole era. 🕸️ fuhnke --- #witchcraft history #folk magic #cunning folk #waning moon #ritual #moon magic #witch history #keith thomas #european witchcraft #religion and the decline of magic #practical magic #no I don't mean the movie #well okay the movie too #low effort high magic #this is the content I come here for and also make #banishing #lunar magic #occult history #fuhnke