About
Hi This Melanie, Jesse, and our fluffy familiar, Ruffles
If you like things that are occult, pagan, witchy, esoteric, folkloric, or just generally interesting, you’re in the right place. The Remaining Ember is run by us: Melanie and Jesse under the supervision of our fluffy familiar, Ruffles. Most of what we make or write about starts with one of us going, “Wait, that’s interesting,”. Candles, incense, folklore, old rituals, arcane symbols, herbs, saints, spirits, folk magic, seasonal customs, weird historical rabbit holes...if it catches our attention, it usually ends up here in some form. We view things very differently though. Jesse has degrees in physics and maths, practices martial arts (Baguazhang/Tai Chi), codes, and tends to look at things through structure, movement, force, patterns and whether something can actually be felt. He usually does not buy into things that are just an idea but rather looks for something that can be perceived in an unmistakably real way within the body, mind, or in the way the atmosphere changes in a space. Melanie practices yoga and is more on the herbs, folklore, folk magic, old stories, seasonal traditions, and “I better not upset the tree spirits” side of it all. Before She started making ritual candles, she spent her days making her way through the bureaucratic red tape of the corporate world. Which, as you can imagine, was very difficult to drag herself away from. So this place is a bit of both of us: handmade ritual candles, incense, articles, practical experiments, and whatever else we’re currently on about.
The Site’s Artwork
For those who are curious, I (Jesse) make the site’s artwork. I mostly work in Inkscape and use elements from free stock images, photographs taken by either Melanie or me, and images rendered with some custom fractal generation and ray tracing programs that I wrote from scratch years ago before the time of AI coding agents. Below is a screenshot from when I was building the two triquetra versions seen on the homepage. Which one you see, as well as the homepage background color, depends on whether you first access the homepage during the day or at night. You can click the homepage triquetra to switch to the other color.
