Glamourbombing | Miscellaneous | Forums

I’m more than a little fed up with tumblr’s interface at the moment, so moving this discussion here.  The relevant threads on tumblr are:

• https://www.tumblr.com/jarandhel/32472934112/lair-of-the-glitter-eater-swanblood-jarandhel

• https://www.tumblr.com/jarandhel/32746832877/a-realm-under-hill-jarandhel-that-leaves

• https://www.tumblr.com/silveth/32704805527/jarandhel-that-leaves-glamourbombing-which-is

• https://www.tumblr.com/silveth/32757872929/a-realm-under-hill-jarandhel-that-leaves

• https://www.tumblr.com/jarandhel/32861482436/glamourbombing

• https://www.tumblr.com/silveth/32884133108/glamourbombing

I think that’s all of them, though if someone replies to more than one post in a single thread, you can only see the most recent one in the thread itself.  Sometimes you can get lucky and see it on your dash if you follow the person, but it’s one of the reasons I’m fed up with trying to have a real discussion on tumblr.

Anyway, to kind of pick up the discussion from where it left off –

I think the Marauder Underground has one of the clearest and best descriptions of glamourbombing I’ve ever seen in their manifesto, even if they don’t use the term themselves (they do use the term “glitterbombing” in places, though, so there may be some degree of influence):

We are the Marauder Underground. Our primary activity is attacking what is commonly known as consentual [sic] reality, the dominant paradigm, the mundane world, whatever you want to call it. We cast spells, scribe sigils, summon spirits, and open gateways. Anything that can be done to influence reality towards our goal. We use chalk to tag buildings & sidewalks with sigils and goetic summonings. We conjure up spirits and set them loose, leaving in our wake freshly haunted sites. We infect the population with the power of chaos, and watch as random magick explodes into the lives of unsuspecting citizens. We are reality deviants in the truest sense of the word, as we pry open the eyes of a sleeping humanity to the terror and wonder of the worlds beyond.

Compared to that, most of the descriptions of glamourbombing in the otherkin community don’t really stand up.  The Glamourbombing FAQ on wildmuse.net, created by Nalissi the former owner of the Darkfae list and current owner of the Glamourbombing Livejournal Community, speaks of stage magic or “prestidigitation” as “real acts of magic”.  She also speaks of the hoax of the Cottingdon Faeries as “the original ‘ur-glamourbomb'”.  While there are some allusions to real magic – “Initial glamour bombs were intended to take place at significant times, such as solstices and equinoces (at such moments when the veil is thinnest)” – they’re very few and far between and glamourbombs are treated more as a way to trick people into believing in magic/fae than as magical acts in their own right.

Tangentially, she also makes a point of saying that the practice is not really connected to otherkin and that two of the originators of the practice, herself included, do not identify as otherkin.  Forgetting of course that, at the time, she did.  She wrote a whole article about growing up fae: http://web.archive.org/web/19990117033227/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dimension/5313/dffrnt.htm

The most explicit description of glamourbombing as a magical act in the community is probably found on Arethinn’s website:

Glamourbombing, in a nutshell, is faery poetic terrorism. It is acts of enchanted art or performance intended to raise ambient magic levels and crack people’s heads open a little to admit the idea that Faerie exists and might even be interacting with them. It isn’t random acts of kindness (but do those anyway!), making people feel warm and fuzzy or cheering them up, or just “inspirational” platitudes with glitter added. While these things can have a subtle glamour to them, glamourbombing should above all be magical, and as intense as you can make it be – and magical and intense doesn’t necessarily mean happy or comforting!

Remember that faery folk are not the cute, sweet, giggly things the modern popular imagination portrays. A glamourbomb is meant to make someone (or someones) wonder, to feel the magic in the world, to raise the world’s ambient glamour levels. Don’t just make a pretty piece of craft – invest some actual enchantment into it. “Program” it to implant the suggestion that magic is real or that faeries exist into the mind of whoever happens to touch it or get in the “blast radius”.

And honestly, it’s easy to overlook.  Just saying that something should be “magical and intense as you can make it be” doesn’t necessarily tell people that something occult is implied.  I think people often get too hung up on the appearance – that it *looks* magical, rather than *is* magical.  The second phrase is clearer to those who are already practicing occultists and know what it means to program a charged object, but I wonder how it reads to those who are not and do not.  Do they understand the distinction?  And do most people in the otherkin community who practice glamourbombing actually enchant the objects or such that they leave?  It’s been some time since I last did glamourbombing with a group of otherkin, and all but one of those were younger and less experienced in the otherkin community than I was, but that one person was helping to coordinate the 1999 glamourbombing campaign and she seemed genuinely surprised by my use of Reiki and the True Form symbol in conjunction with the glamourbombing.
  Despite list of glamourbombs containing some of the most explicitly magical ones, from Tiernan’s suggestion about being Out as a magical act (and I swear somewhere she had a longer essay in a similar vein that I’ve been hunting for) to Eric from TNO’s various suggestions about glamour and ritual (which Arethinn’s also contains) to Eyovah and Arhuaine’s suggestions to charge objects.

I compare that to the work of the Marauder Underground, and I find our community has been outdone magically on nearly every level.  They’ve created a sigil to link all of their random acts of magic, spells, haunted places, places of power, etc together.  They’ve worked with this sigil to the point that it’s taken on an intelligence and life of it’s own as Ellice or Alice or The Red Queen, etc.  To the point where it is advisable for one to sit down and get to know this entity before using the sigil in their work.  They have worked to open portals, to create haunted sites, to have real and tangible magical effect on the world.  I see this as part of the “deeper fae touch” that Rialian talked about in his Beyond Glamourbombing essay.

I’ve begun experimenting with the Ellis sigil.  I’ve tagged a bus stop near where I work in the evening, and I can say I felt a tangible shift in the energy after doing so.  I’m there every day during the week, so I can continue to monitor the site.  I’ve also been doing some other work with the sigil in my own life:

I am still reading through much of the rest of the Marauder Underground’s material, sifting for the useful bits.  Unfortunately it seems that much of the original discussion of creating haunted sites and opening portals was lost.  I’m considering joining the DKMU forums to ask about that aspect, specifically.