Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What's going to happen?
Speaker 2: What a.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the cults rejects. This episode, I got a
Speaker 3: very special guest, very excited to have her on. She
Speaker 3: does own a shop near my house, so I'm happy
Speaker 3: to get somebody on that's local and that's actually into
Speaker 3: the community. But before we introduce her, we will be
Speaker 3: introducing the other rejects on the show.
Speaker 1: We got the Loon Judith with us today. What is
Speaker 1: going on? How are you hey?
Speaker 4: I'm alone? You can catch me on YouTube as the Loon.
Speaker 4: I just dropped the most recent buddy check and you
Speaker 4: can catch me also on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you very much for joining. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: And we got Arrows Up. What is going on? Errows?
Speaker 4: How wire you doing well?
Speaker 5: Happy to be here, Happy to talk with Haron. We
Speaker 5: always have such fantastic guests, so it's always a good time,
Speaker 5: always exciting. You can find me on YouTube at Arrows Up,
Speaker 5: and you can find me on Twitter at arrows to Ethos.
Speaker 6: I post a lot of Platonist and metaphysics and astrology,
Speaker 6: so if you're interested in any of those topics check
Speaker 6: me out.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you so much. I was always appreciate what
Speaker 1: you need to make the show and.
Speaker 3: Last minute least my boy, Headless Giant, how are you so?
Speaker 1: How you doing?
Speaker 7: You can find me at the Headless Giant on YouTube
Speaker 7: and on x and on Instagram as well, so check
Speaker 7: those out. And I have shows pretty much every day,
Speaker 7: at least it has been so far, so you can
Speaker 7: check out my Alchemy Mondays with Arrows and my seven
Speaker 7: seven seven Tuesdays with Nick. And I do another show
Speaker 7: called The Trialogues with Ethan Indigo and Ricardo on Sundays,
Speaker 7: so check those out ten thirty on Sunday, seven thirty
Speaker 7: on the rest of the time.
Speaker 1: So thank you, thank you very much, sir.
Speaker 3: Yes, today we have with us Michelle. No, sorry, I
Speaker 3: forgot to herod Michelle. Sorry and again I was telling
Speaker 3: people prior to the show and here now, yeah I was.
Speaker 3: There was a couple of metaphysics, so I don't know
Speaker 3: how you want to call them, which shops which stores
Speaker 3: out up by me and I stopped and all of
Speaker 3: them wanted to drop off some stickers and kind of
Speaker 3: introduce myself. But for some reason when I got when
Speaker 3: I walked in there, I had the feeling like I
Speaker 3: don't know. I wanted to ask the lady on. I
Speaker 3: just feel like she had something to say. And then
Speaker 3: she mentioned that she had books and she even had
Speaker 3: them with a Welle, so I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: so and I saw Elemental Witchcraft and that was something
Speaker 3: that I was looking to cover on the show kind of.
Speaker 3: I was going to go through a book and try
Speaker 3: to cover it myself, and it was gonna be a
Speaker 3: lot of work. So when she mentioned that, I was like, oh, perfect,
Speaker 3: We'll just get her on to talk about.
Speaker 1: It, save me up a lot of trouble in time.
Speaker 1: So I think it worked out well.
Speaker 3: She does have a shop to so Joanna, and she
Speaker 3: does have a book that we're going to be talking about,
Speaker 3: which is Elemental Witchcraft, A Guide to living a Magical
Speaker 3: Life through the Elements. And yes that is again that's
Speaker 3: out on Llewellyn recently. I just contacted them, so I'm hoping,
Speaker 3: hoping that they will send me authors because I was
Speaker 3: already have any tradition than Weiser sending me.
Speaker 1: So I'm going full well and let's see what happens.
Speaker 3: But please, Michelle, let everybody know where they can find
Speaker 3: your stuff if you want to advertise the store. Anything
Speaker 3: you would like to plug, please let people know.
Speaker 4: Okay, well, thanks for having me on again. In this world,
Speaker 4: I move about as Haron Michelle. You can call me
Speaker 4: either or both, and I do publish through Llewellyn. I've
Speaker 4: got one book out in a three book series, the
Speaker 4: Pinnacle Path series is what I call it. It was
Speaker 4: pitched as a three book series, but who knows. You
Speaker 4: know the word pinnacles, and it'll probably be in the end.
Speaker 4: I've got lots to say. I also have been blogging
Speaker 4: on the Pathios Pagan channel since twenty fifteen as Witch
Speaker 4: on Fire, and I now do a sub stack under
Speaker 4: heron Michelle and all the other places. You know, YouTube,
Speaker 4: which I don't do very much with anymore, but you
Speaker 4: know all the social media places. If you're looking for me,
Speaker 4: I'm under heron Michelle and also I teach my book
Speaker 4: in a eighteen month long course on Harronmichelle dot com,
Speaker 4: which has got all the information about my work. And
Speaker 4: I do graphic art to support my occult and witchcraft
Speaker 4: practices and to help others to visualize and make that
Speaker 4: magic real in their lives. So I have art, poetry, blogs, articles, books,
Speaker 4: and I'm now working on pushing the second book, Lunar
Speaker 4: Witchcraft after the series through Llewellyn. It's been submitted, but
Speaker 4: it's in progress. And the third book I'm working on
Speaker 4: now in first draft will be Solar Witchcraft. So I'm
Speaker 4: basically working Middle World with the elemental witchcraft first, and
Speaker 4: then Underworld and Lunar Witchcraft working with the goddess forms specifically,
Speaker 4: and then Solar Witchcraft will be the god forms, the Sabbats,
Speaker 4: the seasons, et cetera, and the upper world.
Speaker 3: Wow. Nice, I love it sounds great. How long has
Speaker 3: your shop been around for?
Speaker 4: We are about to celebrate our seventeenth anniversary of being
Speaker 4: open on four to fourteen Evans Street. But we actually
Speaker 4: started our business as more of tent vending and whatnot
Speaker 4: at Pagan Prie Days and other conferences and festivals and things.
Speaker 4: We started a Tumnal Equinox in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 4: so eighteen seventeen years.
Speaker 1: Nice. Good for you, Good for you. Have you become
Speaker 1: kind of like a staple in Greenville.
Speaker 4: In Greenville, I guess you'd say that, I mean.
Speaker 3: Not knocking the other stores, but I mean you just
Speaker 3: when it comes to witchcraft, you're much more better off
Speaker 3: going to you.
Speaker 4: As I think, well, none of the other stores focus
Speaker 4: on which, yeah, I guess right, I think they. I
Speaker 4: think they purposely avoid that.
Speaker 1: So I wonder what they thought about me when I
Speaker 1: walked in.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean those, but well, my biggest competitor, the
Speaker 4: Crystal Shop in town, has been here since way before
Speaker 4: I was and I used to go, oh yeah, and
Speaker 4: I used to go in there and shop and ask
Speaker 4: for witchcraft related things to support my practice. And let's
Speaker 4: just say that the message was pretty clear that that
Speaker 4: was not we were not a community. They were interested
Speaker 4: in cert Wow. Really pretty specifically.
Speaker 1: Is that the one that looks like a house. It
Speaker 1: looks like a house. It doesn't even look like a business.
Speaker 4: Okay, they're pretty new, they're not. They're nice folks. I
Speaker 4: don't know them very well. But no, that's that's there
Speaker 4: a crystal shop. No, I'm talking about the one that's
Speaker 4: over in Arlingtonville. Oh okay, yeah, yeah, they're the they'd
Speaker 4: like to do the new age thing, but a long
Speaker 4: time ago they decided that they weren't interested in witchcraft, occultism, paganism.
Speaker 4: So I actually opened my store as a direct reaction
Speaker 4: to being rejected by those people.
Speaker 1: That's nice. Yeah, that's uh yeah.
Speaker 3: If I don't know how many listeners I have in
Speaker 3: North Carolina or anywhere near Greenville. But if you're into
Speaker 3: this stuff, I highly suggest to go to her store.
Speaker 3: It's a really nice.
Speaker 4: Place downtown on Evans Street, opened seven days a week now.
Speaker 3: And it isn't a great spot too, tell you the
Speaker 3: truth of you. A lot of stuff in that area,
Speaker 3: very nice area of Greenville. So, Michelle, when was it
Speaker 3: that you realize like, this is what I'm going to
Speaker 3: be into, Like this is my deal, witchcraft or whatever
Speaker 3: you call whatever you're into.
Speaker 1: When when did that happen?
Speaker 4: I think, like most folks who are into this, we
Speaker 4: always sort of knew, you know. I think I think
Speaker 4: it's an orientation. It's like you just come into the world.
Speaker 4: You just know things, and it takes a while maybe
Speaker 4: to figure out what it is that other adult human
Speaker 4: beings call it. But once you find out that it
Speaker 4: is a movement, that it is, you know, and I
Speaker 4: do mean occultism, I mean the people who understand that
Speaker 4: there is the mysterious underlayer of everything and you're aware
Speaker 4: of that and what you're being fed is what is reality,
Speaker 4: the consensus reality of culture. And I mean I was
Speaker 4: a little kid going nah, nah, that's not it. But
Speaker 4: of course I was raised in the Southern Baptist Evangelical
Speaker 4: Christian where you know, there was only the one right way.
Speaker 3: I was going to say it was that an influence
Speaker 3: and you kind of looking all the ways.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I mean that's how you find that's why
Speaker 4: you go looking for what are what else is out here?
Speaker 4: Because I was so depressed as a kid, I was like, man,
Speaker 4: if this is the way, if this is the truth,
Speaker 4: if this is the only one option I've got, I'd
Speaker 4: rather just check out now because I cannot participate in this.
Speaker 4: And so, you know, you get old enough you can
Speaker 4: go to the library by yourself or whatever. And of course,
Speaker 4: mind you, I'm talking about the seventies in the eighties,
Speaker 4: there's no internet there, you know, so well, you know,
Speaker 4: you finally found out what else is out there? And
Speaker 4: I'm like, oh, now, that was the one right thing.
Speaker 4: I knew. That was the thing I knew all along.
Speaker 4: I just didn't know what it was called. And you know,
Speaker 4: it seems like reincarnation because I was one of those
Speaker 4: weirdo kids that remembers my past life. I always have,
Speaker 4: and I I would have like PTSD like reactions as
Speaker 4: a small child to as if I had been in
Speaker 4: a terrible cataclysm some some traumatic thing. And I remember
Speaker 4: dying in World War Two. I didn't know it was
Speaker 4: World War Two until I got old enough to study
Speaker 4: those things and recognize things. But I died being crushed
Speaker 4: under the rubble of a building that was bombed out.
Speaker 4: And so I have PTSD like reactions to similar situations,
Speaker 4: you know. And so it took me a while to
Speaker 4: figure all that out and then do the actual spiritual
Speaker 4: journey work to discover it more specifically. But I'm also clairvoyant,
Speaker 4: just naturally. There's lots of things about me that made
Speaker 4: me very weird as a child and rejected for my
Speaker 4: weirdness as a child. And then I finally find out
Speaker 4: what it's all called. You know, the words reincarnation and
Speaker 4: the word you know, things that make sense. And so
Speaker 4: I started pursuing this and knowing what it was at seventeen. Oh, Okay,
Speaker 4: to answer your question. Originally, it took me a while
Speaker 4: to get there. Until then I thought it. I just
Speaker 4: called it the religion of Michelle. And then I found
Speaker 4: out that it already is an established thing, and it
Speaker 4: was just you know, occultism really well something.
Speaker 7: That's an interesting aside. Like we talked to Ronnie Pontiac
Speaker 7: yesterday and he was talking about Manly P. Hall and
Speaker 7: his interactions with him, and it seemed like Manley PA
Speaker 7: Hall's journey was because the Internet didn't exist and he
Speaker 7: couldn't find these sources really readily. Is the Internet taking
Speaker 7: adventure out of the self discovery process?
Speaker 4: That's a good question. I'll tell you what it was
Speaker 4: a lot harder to find this stuff is. I was
Speaker 4: raised in Taylor, South Carolina. I didn't really find this
Speaker 4: stuff till I got out of South Carolina. I went
Speaker 4: as far away to college as I could possibly go,
Speaker 4: and I had it in my head that if you
Speaker 4: wanted to find witches you had to go to New England.
Speaker 4: Mind you, I was seventeen. What is a girl from
Speaker 4: South Carolina who was raised under her Southern Baptist rock.
Speaker 4: I had no idea I got to go to New England.
Speaker 4: So I go to college in Vermont and the very
Speaker 4: first things I'm looking for and I find this really
Speaker 4: awesome hippie dude who's wearing a pinnacle and I like
Speaker 4: attack him. I'm like, oh, tell me everything you know.
Speaker 4: And he's still a friend of mine to this day.
Speaker 4: But I was finally able to get some books. I
Speaker 4: was able to order some titles of things from my
Speaker 4: school bookstore that I had not been able to get
Speaker 4: my hands on in South Carolina that I couldn't have
Speaker 4: had in the house because of my mother basically being,
Speaker 4: you know, the security forces for Jesus, you know, and
Speaker 4: making sure that nobody thought a free thought otherwise. So anyway,
Speaker 4: once I got away, I was able to figure it out,
Speaker 4: and that's really when the journey began. But man, it
Speaker 4: was hard to find it. And you mentioned mainly, p Hall,
Speaker 4: I have got a treasure right behind me where I
Speaker 4: can grab it. Look at this. This is the Secret
Speaker 4: Teaching of All Ages, the fiftieth anniversary edition about one.
Speaker 4: This is one of my treasures of my of my library.
Speaker 4: I love this thing I found. Oh I do bibliomancy
Speaker 4: with this when I'm like, oh, I'm bored, let's learn
Speaker 4: something new today.
Speaker 1: Just fit nice.
Speaker 4: Oh and hey, look the elements in their inhabit So
Speaker 4: that would be how I first discovered that and then
Speaker 4: ultimately wrote a book about it.
Speaker 1: That's awesome.
Speaker 3: So I guess I know you kind of mentioned did
Speaker 3: anybody have any questions or ask anything before I go?
Speaker 4: You wanted to ask, are you solitary? Is there a
Speaker 4: particular tradition that you follow within witchcraft? Good question. Uh, well,
Speaker 4: it's kind of a both in that I wasn't trained
Speaker 4: in any particular tradition. I've had many mentors through the
Speaker 4: years who were also more like solitary at that point
Speaker 4: and taught me a lot, but never in that formalized
Speaker 4: teacher mentee where I was ultimately initiated, because everybody I
Speaker 4: studied with, regardless of if they had their own like
Speaker 4: old school priestess initiation, were choosing not to do that
Speaker 4: at that point, like they felt like the initiates should
Speaker 4: go to directly to Divinity, should received their initiation directly
Speaker 4: from Divinity. They would teach me everything they need, but
Speaker 4: they left that stuff between me and the gods. And
Speaker 4: so ultimately that's how I got there, is me being stubborn,
Speaker 4: just banging on the door of the mysteries until I
Speaker 4: was let in one one way or another, and then
Speaker 4: I I kind of rallied all the rest of the
Speaker 4: folks who were looking for information. I passed on what
Speaker 4: I had been taught by individuals and what I had
Speaker 4: been reading. But as it happens, because just about everything
Speaker 4: in my astrological chart has to do with mercury virgo here,
Speaker 4: you know mercury there, I teach. That's what I do.
Speaker 4: I talk about things. I am very analytical. I can
Speaker 4: then summarize and communicate it. That's one of my strengths.
Speaker 4: And I was called to share that by my guides,
Speaker 4: like do what you gotta do to share this? So
Speaker 4: I have been teaching about it for so long that
Speaker 4: eventually you get other folks around you, and now we
Speaker 4: all consider ourselves self initiated solitary witches who then want
Speaker 4: to team up. And then that became a coven, which
Speaker 4: then became a formal training program which went on for
Speaker 4: more than a decade, which now has second degree people
Speaker 4: who've chosen to initiate to the clergy status and then
Speaker 4: third degree. And it's just like self made, so so
Speaker 4: the no and that I was a solitary eclectic self taught,
Speaker 4: which then I taught that so long that it became
Speaker 4: its own codified tradition with its so many initiates that
Speaker 4: then hung around together and continued to teach and bring
Speaker 4: you know, we coagulated all this information together into what
Speaker 4: became known as the Sojourner Tradition of modern witchcraft, and
Speaker 4: then that was formalize. We had a coven that operated
Speaker 4: for over a decade. I was the founding high priestess.
Speaker 4: I served for five or six of the ten or
Speaker 4: twelve years that it operated. It most recently decided to
Speaker 4: go on. We went on a hiatus after the whole
Speaker 4: COVID thing shut down the teaching program, and we did
Speaker 4: continue on for a long time, but a lot of
Speaker 4: our main members moved away and we kind of the
Speaker 4: core group was a little small, and we just decided
Speaker 4: to take a break for a while. So it's not
Speaker 4: currently operating, but it does still exist, and there are
Speaker 4: initiates all over the country that self initiated us through
Speaker 4: our training program. And then that training program that I
Speaker 4: taught for those ten years became became part of this book.
Speaker 4: The program is ultimately going to be revealed through all
Speaker 4: three of the books in the Pinnacle Path, but only
Speaker 4: some of it. And then of course once I wrote
Speaker 4: the books, I add so much more, because you know,
Speaker 4: when you teach Wika one on one or witchcraft, it's
Speaker 4: not really wika. When you teach witchcraft one oh one
Speaker 4: for ten straight years, your soul just is dying to
Speaker 4: get into deeper stuff and go other places. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's important to teach the beginning stuff to new students.
Speaker 4: But it was in my private work and then my
Speaker 4: private work with the coven later on in those who
Speaker 4: stuck around, and we really taught each other a lot,
Speaker 4: and we continued to just move forward in the mysteries,
Speaker 4: each person bringing their own interest into the pot. It
Speaker 4: was like a cauldron of ideas. And the books themselves
Speaker 4: are very different than the program was when I taught it.
Speaker 4: But we had to shut down the teaching program on
Speaker 4: Thursday nights out of the shop. We had to shut
Speaker 4: that down in March of the well, actually I think
Speaker 4: we made it through May online and then we just
Speaker 4: stopped the teaching program and it's not been I've been
Speaker 4: held in person since then. But I'm getting ready to
Speaker 4: reopen my classroom again. I'm really excited about that.
Speaker 1: And you used to do that right out of the
Speaker 1: store or no, oh yeah, oh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would pack twenty people into that big central room.
Speaker 4: Mind you you saw it well after it had been
Speaker 4: turned mostly into retail space. Its original concept was that
Speaker 4: it was a community center, a teach a place where
Speaker 4: people could have meetings, and we held rituals and community
Speaker 4: events and meetups, et cetera. And it just had a
Speaker 4: store in the front. After the whole COVID thing shut
Speaker 4: down all the in person meetings, we really expanded the
Speaker 4: retail to take up those spaces, because even after we
Speaker 4: tried to reopen things in like twenty two or twenty three,
Speaker 4: nobody would come. People were still too nervous. But I
Speaker 4: think we're finally there and I'm reopening the old classroom
Speaker 4: and so now it's a private reading space and I
Speaker 4: read Taro every other Sunday out of the store, and
Speaker 4: I do read the the Alistair Croley Deck, the Toat Deck,
Speaker 4: which I know is something that you talk about a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's that's that's what I do.
Speaker 3: I did notice you seemed interested when I did mention
Speaker 3: to you, I was I used to be in the Oto.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I know you were like, oh oh okay, definitely.
Speaker 4: I mean when you told me that I knew what
Speaker 4: I was dealing with.
Speaker 1: I get it. Yeah, it goes yeah, that's funny.
Speaker 4: I mean I mentioned the OTO in my book all
Speaker 4: the time because I think people need to know where
Speaker 4: these concepts come from. And even if you never study
Speaker 4: the OTO, you don't know anything about Alistair Crowley or
Speaker 4: nothing about Filema. You if you are in witchcraft, any flavor,
Speaker 4: especially Wicca, it is all flavored up with that. That
Speaker 4: is the major spice in the soup. And even if.
Speaker 7: Way I was going to cover Gerald Gardner and how
Speaker 7: much he was taking from the OTO uh in a
Speaker 7: in a program, but we never got a round to it.
Speaker 7: But this is the perfect example. It's you know, it's
Speaker 7: right there. Once you compare the two, you know Witchcraft
Speaker 7: and OTO are pretty much inseparable.
Speaker 4: It's so well had he got a charter directly from Crowing.
Speaker 1: You said that in one of your episodes. I heard it.
Speaker 3: I had it playing on my TV and I was
Speaker 3: like talking about Gardner. I was like, I haven't heard
Speaker 3: too many people. I don't know a lot of witch grist.
Speaker 3: People don't like admitting that stuff for some reason. So
Speaker 3: I was like surprised, I hear you say it.
Speaker 4: Gardner was the number one eclecticus of his time. I mean,
Speaker 4: he just went around pulling what he found to be
Speaker 4: relevant and interesting and useful from all of these places,
Speaker 4: and to say otherwise is just ignorant of his story.
Speaker 4: I mean, I've read his biography. I know where he got.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 7: And uh, what a friend I met way back in
Speaker 7: the nineties, a guy named Isaac Bonowitz. He's he's a
Speaker 7: legend and legend. Yeah, well he he started his whole
Speaker 7: pursuit of druidry based off of what he was experiencing with,
Speaker 7: you know, the Gardenerian witchcraft. So he was trying to
Speaker 7: do a more accurate historical approach as opposed to the
Speaker 7: eclectic approachship of Jerald Gardner.
Speaker 4: Oh sure, I mean, I'm definitely an eclecticist. I mean,
Speaker 4: and that became an ugly word not you know, in
Speaker 4: which current Oh you're an eclectic that's not to be
Speaker 4: taken seriously. And I'm like, yo, I learned from the best,
Speaker 4: you know, Daryl Gardner and Dreene Valiante, all of them.
Speaker 4: You know, let's just say that I've taken lesson from
Speaker 4: their example, if not by their creed, of how to
Speaker 4: go about hobbling together a meaningful personal practice without being
Speaker 4: a slave to dogma. Because look, I came up in
Speaker 4: the Southern Baptist Church. Anything starts to smack or oh
Speaker 4: there's only one right way, or you're not allowed to
Speaker 4: change anything or think a different thought, or you know,
Speaker 4: I just immediately reject that, reject it, because.
Speaker 1: Yes, I love it.
Speaker 3: Well said, I know you kind of got into it
Speaker 3: a little bit already, but like, I guess maybe you
Speaker 3: want to talk a little bit before we get into
Speaker 3: the book about like when did you have the idea
Speaker 3: for the store?
Speaker 1: I mean, I know you kind of shy.
Speaker 4: Two thousand and seven, my mother died passed away, and
Speaker 4: it was it was right after my first initiation into
Speaker 4: the craft, and in the second year of my studies,
Speaker 4: at the suggestion of my mentor, I dedicated my great
Speaker 4: work of magic that year to exploring elemental fire. I
Speaker 4: don't know if I recommend that for the second year
Speaker 4: out of the gate to totally anyway. Lots of very
Speaker 4: fiery things happened immediately talk about a tower year. Everything
Speaker 4: that had held me back was script away, and of
Speaker 4: the most challenging of those things was the sudden death
Speaker 4: of an unexpected death of my mother. That's the tragic part,
Speaker 4: the happy part of that story is the minute that
Speaker 4: she crossed into spirit, so not like so she died,
Speaker 4: she was brain dead, but she's still physically alive. Her
Speaker 4: soul instantly came to me and started to speak to me.
Speaker 4: And like I said, I have a sort of a clairvoyant,
Speaker 4: just natural clairvoyance that was pretty untrained at that point.
Speaker 4: And the minute she was in the spiritual world, released
Speaker 4: from her mortal coil, all the biases and the bigotry,
Speaker 4: all of the evangelical just madness fell away, and she
Speaker 4: came to me and haunted me basically until I planned
Speaker 4: her funeral the way she wanted it planned, and I
Speaker 4: gave her eulogy. It said what she wanted to have
Speaker 4: said at et cetera. And she haunted me for the
Speaker 4: next five years, trying to help guide me from the
Speaker 4: spiritual realm. So she became a spirit guide who completely
Speaker 4: accepted my witchiness. I ended up taking what I had
Speaker 4: gotten from her, her estate. She had a life insurance policy,
Speaker 4: and I got some money. And you know, you play
Speaker 4: everybody plays that game. What would you do if you
Speaker 4: suddenly had a pot of money.
Speaker 3: I would open a metaphysical store, you know, No, Lie,
Speaker 3: I was thinking, but I was like, I don't want
Speaker 3: to take it to her to take this the wrong way.
Speaker 3: But I was even wondering if this was the situation
Speaker 3: that she came into money that gave you the chance
Speaker 3: to actually do this.
Speaker 4: I did. But moreover, she encouraged me to live authentically
Speaker 4: as my true self, you know, the whole Christian thing.
Speaker 4: Don't lie hide your light under a bushel, you know.
Speaker 4: And of course they mean you should let people know
Speaker 4: you're Christian or what you know, shine brightly who you
Speaker 4: are and your faith, et cetera. Well she meant, only
Speaker 4: if it's Jesus all day when she was alive. But
Speaker 4: in spirit it was, I know who you are. You
Speaker 4: need to shine. You need to be yourself. You need
Speaker 4: to get out of your oppressive marriage. You need to that.
Speaker 4: And she wanted me to take that money and become myself,
Speaker 4: become happy, to pursue relationships that support who I am
Speaker 4: as a person who accept me fully as I am,
Speaker 4: allow me to be sovereign, et cetera. The person she
Speaker 4: was would have never preached those things ever, but in
Speaker 4: spirit she did, and so she guided me and we
Speaker 4: opened the store, and she basically was a resident spirit
Speaker 4: at my store. Seen by countless mediums. People I don't know,
Speaker 4: don't know anything about me, would come and go. You know,
Speaker 4: there's the ghost of like a matronly mothery person around you, right,
Speaker 4: And I'm like, yeah, yeah. Eventually, with the help of
Speaker 4: a medium, I helped her realize that it was okay,
Speaker 4: she could go into the light. And she did move
Speaker 4: on and has sense gone on onto her next adventure
Speaker 4: and is no longer reported around me very often unless
Speaker 4: I go and seek her out or call her in.
Speaker 4: But uh yeah, my mother helped me. My evangelical mother
Speaker 4: helped me open that store. But it really was just
Speaker 4: a bid for my personal sovereignty. And I was so
Speaker 4: lonely in my feeling like I couldn't talk to anybody
Speaker 4: about this. So there's no one to There's nowhere to go,
Speaker 4: there's no places that cater to my interests. Where do
Speaker 4: I find the people of like mind in Greenville, North Carolina?
Speaker 4: And so I was like, you know, I don't want
Speaker 4: to be lonely like that. I don't want to feel isolated,
Speaker 4: and I don't want other people to feel isolated. So
Speaker 4: I opened the store and I was like, it's got
Speaker 4: to be on basically main Street, you know where we
Speaker 4: are downtown on Evans Street is basically yeah, main street,
Speaker 4: middle of town. I want it to be fully visible,
Speaker 4: open the way a church stoor is open. People can
Speaker 4: come in, talk to talk, find a book, find people
Speaker 4: of like mind, find acceptance, and we try to cater
Speaker 4: also to making sure that anybody that doesn't tread the
Speaker 4: well traveled path, you know, which is that's our motto
Speaker 4: is equipping the pathless traveled based on the Frost poem.
Speaker 4: You know, I took the pathless traveled by and it's
Speaker 4: made all the difference anybody who's on a different path,
Speaker 4: whether that be their lifestyle or sexuality, or their religion
Speaker 4: and philosophy, et cetera. I want those folks to know
Speaker 4: that they are accepted as the divine beings that I
Speaker 4: know they are, and we can just we can just
Speaker 4: sort of band together a big rainbow parade, you know
Speaker 4: of weirdos going down the road and broad daylight. So
Speaker 4: that's been and so far it's been, it's gone.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: I've only had a few protesters before. Really well wow,
Speaker 4: I've had a couple of funny stories, but really nothing
Speaker 4: that you would expect you to. I mean, I know
Speaker 4: that there are whole Sunday school groups preaching that we
Speaker 4: are of the devil and everybody should should avoid us.
Speaker 4: But let me tell you what. The reason why I
Speaker 4: know that is because people in those Sunday school rooms
Speaker 4: or Bible studies or wherever they heard that at whatever church,
Speaker 4: they come directly into the stores. Like I just found
Speaker 4: out you were here because of my Sunday school told
Speaker 4: me I was to boy caught you, and I'm so
Speaker 4: excited you're here.
Speaker 1: I had to go see. I know that is funny.
Speaker 1: It was working out wrong.
Speaker 7: They're not doing themselves any favors on the spiritual warfare
Speaker 7: in front.
Speaker 4: No, no, anyway, I got magic and all the rest.
Speaker 4: I mean, they might have yahweh on their side, but
Speaker 4: I got all the rest of the guys online.
Speaker 1: That's funny, all right.
Speaker 3: So what was uh? What was the first book you
Speaker 3: ended up ever writing? What made you decide to start writing?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 4: I am I've been writing since high school. I went
Speaker 4: to a fine arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina
Speaker 4: for creative writing.
Speaker 1: So then he moved to Greenville, North Carolina.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love Greenville.
Speaker 1: Apparently there's one in Tennessee too. You can check that
Speaker 1: one out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's one in every state of the Union.
Speaker 3: All right, so what would you I guess you forget
Speaker 3: into the book? Where do you want to start with that?
Speaker 3: I guess, well, what what was it with this book
Speaker 3: that you thought the community is missing? And I'm going
Speaker 3: to give this to one with this book?
Speaker 4: Okay?
Speaker 1: That to put you like, I know, that might be
Speaker 1: a tough question right away.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, no, no, because you're not the only
Speaker 4: interviewer to ask me that question.
Speaker 1: Good. Good, that's a good that's a good thing.
Speaker 4: I have got I have got an answer written out.
Speaker 3: Can I just yeah, go for it?
Speaker 4: All right? On the why did I write this book?
Speaker 4: The book came out of a sense, my sense that
Speaker 4: Western occultism had spent the last two hundred years perfecting
Speaker 4: what I would I perceived of as division. It's the Coagula,
Speaker 4: I mean, the salve salve at Cowagula. You know, let's
Speaker 4: divide it, let's analyze it, let's put it in little
Speaker 4: rows in a correspondence boxes. Let's figure out what planetary
Speaker 4: sphere it belongs to, you know what I mean, like
Speaker 4: to break it down, break it down. It was a
Speaker 4: you know, it was with the swing into the patriarchy
Speaker 4: that the last you know, two three thousand years have
Speaker 4: been and that's a necessary phase. You know, that is
Speaker 4: a part of that pendulum swing. It had been that
Speaker 4: uh it was you know, they wanted to perfect division
Speaker 4: and subclassification and the individual power. You know, how do
Speaker 4: I apply my will you know the whole to will
Speaker 4: you know, to know, to will, to dare to be
Speaker 4: silent the whole thing. But that's perfecting your own your
Speaker 4: own power, your own will. I just it's incomplete. And
Speaker 4: my work individually, I was like, okay, well, I'm because
Speaker 4: I study hermetics, I consider the kind of witchcraft I
Speaker 4: I practiced to be hermetic witchcraft. And I was like,
Speaker 4: all right, well, but there we have to restore the
Speaker 4: other side of the swing. There's the coagula, you know,
Speaker 4: there's salve a, there's coagula. There's there's this balance between
Speaker 4: the polls that we have to come back. We have
Speaker 4: to come back over away from the sexism that was
Speaker 4: so died in the wall of the occultist Western esoterism
Speaker 4: and occultism for the last couple hundred years. So anyway,
Speaker 4: my work an Elemental Witchcraft is my attempt to answer
Speaker 4: the next turn of the cycle, to return to integration,
Speaker 4: to return to cooperation. I call it the cooperative culture
Speaker 4: of witchcraft. I'd like to get back the magic, back
Speaker 4: into embodied oneness with Divinity and the world, not a
Speaker 4: separateness from the world the way you know, and Christianity
Speaker 4: really wants to separate you from the world. Wiches are
Speaker 4: of the world. We are the ones here in the
Speaker 4: middle loving the material world looking sideways, you know. Some
Speaker 4: religions look up all the heavens all the time, angelic beings,
Speaker 4: the gods, the god's gods. Others want to look down
Speaker 4: into the underworld and get all deep into the shadows
Speaker 4: and the spirits and the ancestors, et cetera, which is
Speaker 4: really do balance these There's a time and a place
Speaker 4: for all of that. But we're trying to live right
Speaker 4: here in the middle world and enjoy this, enjoy embodiment.
Speaker 4: So I see the move into the Aquarian age needs
Speaker 4: a new approach to all of these things, a new embodied, lived,
Speaker 4: practical lifestyle type philosophy that serves a modern world as
Speaker 4: opposed to looking backwards and trying to figure out how
Speaker 4: the ancients did it. I do want to be informed
Speaker 4: by what we know about how the ancients did things.
Speaker 4: But I don't want to slavishly recreate that like an anachronist.
Speaker 4: You know, I'm not. That's not what I'm interested in.
Speaker 4: So I was trying to apply everything I know about,
Speaker 4: all that ancient tech, all that philosophy, all the things
Speaker 4: we knew before the what I call the invasive orthodoxies
Speaker 4: marched through the world, and you know, at the edge
Speaker 4: of a sword or a torch or a pitchwork or whatever,
Speaker 4: force the old ways, the old knowledge that was more
Speaker 4: nature based, force that underground. I want to excavate that,
Speaker 4: but I want to find a way to meld that
Speaker 4: in an alchemical way with with the modern world to
Speaker 4: make a meaningful, fulfilling, happy, pleasurable modern life. That's a
Speaker 4: very long answer, but that's why I wrote the book.
Speaker 1: No, I've even been saying on the show, well, I
Speaker 1: think we all said it here in different ways, Like
Speaker 1: it does seem like it's just I think the old
Speaker 1: way of looking at this stuff just isn't it's not working,
Speaker 1: or I think it could work better.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, these are snapshots of time that the people
Speaker 4: that were thinking about them, and they're important, But you
Speaker 4: got to keep it in historical context.
Speaker 1: That's a good way to put it.
Speaker 4: I mean, I look at the things that like Alistair
Speaker 4: Crowley or Gerald Gardner or Alexander Sanders or whatever, and
Speaker 4: and and then the women that they were counterparts to
Speaker 4: those movements during Valiante and Maxine Sanders, et cetera. And
Speaker 4: you know, there are jewels there, things that they were
Speaker 4: really figuring out that though that's good, that's good, and
Speaker 4: it might be in a whole pile of shit that
Speaker 4: was just patriarchy and sexism. And you know, old rich
Speaker 4: white dudes, you don't have any idea how it really,
Speaker 4: you know, is for the rest of the world. And
Speaker 4: you have to sift all that out to get the
Speaker 4: jewels that are worth keeping in the modern world, and
Speaker 4: also understand the context of where they were living and
Speaker 4: how they their perspective, their their lived experience. And you know,
Speaker 4: those were not necessarily better times, so we can we
Speaker 4: can adjust. I think we need to adjust.
Speaker 7: Even in what mostly consider like a patriarchal Viking era,
Speaker 7: you know Heathen read context, women played a much more
Speaker 7: important role within the functions of society that a lot
Speaker 7: of people don't recognize. It's it's a different way of
Speaker 7: looking at it from a pagan perspective. And I think
Speaker 7: we're just tired of the division.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 7: It's it's there are better forms of authority, Yes, and
Speaker 7: handed exactly.
Speaker 4: Well, you know the what I so I liked. I
Speaker 4: love words, words, and my thing, like I said, it's
Speaker 4: if you if you look at my astrological chart, I
Speaker 4: lean so heavily towards mercury and air. And so I
Speaker 4: will make up a word. I will make up a term.
Speaker 4: I'll coin a term, and here we are. So rather
Speaker 4: than referring to the the baneful aspects of religion by
Speaker 4: a specific religion's name, because we know you can't paint
Speaker 4: one group or one philosophy with one broad stroke and
Speaker 4: apply like they are all bad. This was all damaging.
Speaker 4: That's not fair. So rather than saying the Abrahamic religions
Speaker 4: or Christianity or whatever, I will say that any group
Speaker 4: that invades the minds the lands where they are not native, threatens,
Speaker 4: does harm, It stills fear and tells people that there's
Speaker 4: only one right way. It is their way, and if
Speaker 4: they do not comply with their way and they're thinking,
Speaker 4: et cetera, that they will be harmed. That's extortion. I
Speaker 4: call those the invasive orthodoxies. They tend to be patriarchal.
Speaker 4: They tend to use the technologies of fear, domination, violence,
Speaker 4: fear of death, et cetera. They they weaponize their philosophy.
Speaker 4: I call those the invasive, invasive orthodoxies, and they have
Speaker 4: done terrible damage to the world over the last thousands
Speaker 4: of years. However, there is an other way. It is
Speaker 4: a more egalitarian way. It's some of the ancient cultures,
Speaker 4: especially what we have to dig up from way way
Speaker 4: way back, like go Beckley Teffe and that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Anthropologies digging back up. It's not like they were matriarchal cultures.
Speaker 4: They were God is revering, but they tended to be
Speaker 4: more egalitarian, and they focused on the technologies of creation,
Speaker 4: of agriculture, building, of bringing people together, et cetera. And
Speaker 4: they venerated life as opposed to venerating death. And so
Speaker 4: they focused on the mechanisms of creation and creativity and
Speaker 4: art and et cetera. And those are what I call
Speaker 4: the cooperative cultures or partnership cultures. And there's lots of
Speaker 4: anthropologists who have studied these things from the ancient world.
Speaker 4: It's where we get a lot of our understanding of
Speaker 4: the ancient, know, the really the really ancient cultures. And
Speaker 4: people want to call them matriarchies, but they weren't. They
Speaker 4: weren't they They revered and respected, and they were more egalitarian,
Speaker 4: not perfect though there was. There's nothing in the past
Speaker 4: we can be like, Oh, that's the perfect utopia, we
Speaker 4: should go back to that. I don't think we should
Speaker 4: ever go back to anything. I think we should move forward.
Speaker 4: So that's what I'm trying to do. It's like, all right, well,
Speaker 4: understanding all that, we're going to need to have a
Speaker 4: new ethos We're going to need a new tech of
Speaker 4: how do we embody and live this this magical, this
Speaker 4: philosophical way. How do we live that every day in
Speaker 4: our regular lives, as we parent our children, as we
Speaker 4: go to work, as we I don't know, drive around town.
Speaker 4: How do we take care of our lives now and
Speaker 4: build a better world. To me, that's the great work
Speaker 4: of alchemy.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: We're supposed to be evolving towards our oneness again while
Speaker 4: also exploring and revering our individuality, our diversity. We're here
Speaker 4: to be diverse, to have diverse experiences to bring back
Speaker 4: to the woodenness. But there just doesn't need to be
Speaker 4: all this divisiveness. And that's what I'm working on, is
Speaker 4: just figuring out who we are as people with these
Speaker 4: philosophies informed by hermetics and alchemy, and then applying that
Speaker 4: to a real world, Middle world magic and lifestyle, which
Speaker 4: is the witchcraft part.
Speaker 5: So is that where the Solar Book comes from. This
Speaker 5: recognition of this creative principle being so important right now, Well, I'm.
Speaker 4: Working on that now. I'm just at the beginning phases
Speaker 4: of that, but it will touch on the seasonal sabbath
Speaker 4: cycles and how this sort of agricultural themes that we
Speaker 4: think of in paganism and the Sabbots, how those are
Speaker 4: played out in our ritual forms and our mythology. But
Speaker 4: it does bring the focus back to the God. We're
Speaker 4: not you know, the witchcraft that I practice is not
Speaker 4: solely about the goddess. We have to have the God
Speaker 4: in there too, but it brings it's a focus on
Speaker 4: the yang side of things, whereas Lundar witchcraft is a
Speaker 4: focus on the yen side of things. Elemental was the earth, air, fire, water,
Speaker 4: and spirit like a pencacle to get this middle world
Speaker 4: self is to get our middle world self all in
Speaker 4: balance and empowered so that we can then handle dealing
Speaker 4: with divinity individually.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: So I don't know if that answers your question, but
Speaker 4: it does reweave it back in but without focusing on
Speaker 4: it first. Does that help answer your questionnaires?
Speaker 1: Aertributed Yes, thank you.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm just starting my work on that. I wanted
Speaker 4: to ask too.
Speaker 5: I know, like we're really late into it for this,
Speaker 5: but could you define elemental magic?
Speaker 1: I was going to ask you, so it's not too late,
Speaker 1: thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay. So you know, the five points of the pinnacle, earth, air, firewater,
Speaker 4: and spirit, microcosm to macrocosm. Right, the world, the middle
Speaker 4: world that we know of, woven together by the essences
Speaker 4: of the four elements. This is very platonic. This is
Speaker 4: definitely you know, from the Old Greeks and then how
Speaker 4: they came into Alexandria Egypt and blended with the Egyptian
Speaker 4: ideas which became hermetics. What goes way back to all
Speaker 4: of that, but the notion that in the world has
Speaker 4: made up of five elemental essences, the spirit of that
Speaker 4: also has a material component. So the elements are the
Speaker 4: spirit of water, the spirit of air, the spirit of earth,
Speaker 4: the spirit of fire. Then there are the material aspects
Speaker 4: of it too, that which we can see and learn
Speaker 4: from here in the Middle World. But when Divinity passes
Speaker 4: down through the seven celestial spheres of influence, which is
Speaker 4: the way of bringing in astrology to become something new
Speaker 4: in the Middle World, it passes through those five planes
Speaker 4: of you know, the elemental planes, and then that gets
Speaker 4: cast into form here in the Middle World as the
Speaker 4: physical thing. And at the root of hermetic alchemy is
Speaker 4: the notion that everything that exists in the cosmos has
Speaker 4: a spirit, has a soul, has a body, and those
Speaker 4: things are woven together as they pass through these elemental essences.
Speaker 4: So the Middle world is the casted projection, kind of
Speaker 4: like a hologram, hologram being like a projection of light
Speaker 4: that seems like it's three D. That's the casting into
Speaker 4: the illusion of our separateness as individual things. But what
Speaker 4: makes them are these elemental essences. And the reason why
Speaker 4: the Pentacle star is the symbol for the perfect balanced
Speaker 4: integration of all five of those things, and we call
Speaker 4: that like a symbol of the microcosm and the macrocosm,
Speaker 4: and they reflect like a mirror image of each other.
Speaker 4: And so the magic that WICCA employs, as well as
Speaker 4: alchemy and well any magical system it has to is
Speaker 4: is focused somehow on creating this reality and accordance with
Speaker 4: our will and tapping into these forces in various ways
Speaker 4: with various techniques to weave together what it is that
Speaker 4: we desire in the world. And so it's the very
Speaker 4: foundational building block elements of both the world and magic.
Speaker 4: Which is a long answer, but that's why so many
Speaker 4: people will call on earth, air, firewater, and spirit in
Speaker 4: their magic and then relate them to cardinal points or
Speaker 4: points within the circle, because you have to have all
Speaker 4: of those essences working together in alignment with each other
Speaker 4: and flowing in accordance to your will to create that change.
Speaker 4: Was that too much or not enough of an answer? No,
Speaker 4: that was such a good answer. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: You're welcome. So yeah, that's and to me, it's the
Speaker 4: middle world reality. Like it's also, fire is your will,
Speaker 4: Air is your mind or your mental state, Water is
Speaker 4: your emotional state in your relationships. Earth is obviously the
Speaker 4: physical body, the physical needs of the body. Spirit is
Speaker 4: that in that part of you that is eternal, that
Speaker 4: is part of divinity, that spark of divinity within you,
Speaker 4: and that is net cannot be destroyed ever, all right.
Speaker 4: So that's who we are. And so I start with
Speaker 4: elemental witchcraft because if you're going to be a magical practitioner,
Speaker 4: and my God, if you go back and read anything
Speaker 4: from Eliphas Levi, who is the one that you know,
Speaker 4: the French occultist, the Cobblists that gave us the idea
Speaker 4: of the four powers of the sphinx. You know, to know,
Speaker 4: to will, to dare, to be silent, you have to
Speaker 4: master the four elements in your own life first before
Speaker 4: you can do any of the higher level things of
Speaker 4: interacting with angelic beings or spirits, are you know, individual divinities,
Speaker 4: et cetera. You have to make yourself strong and balanced first. Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: so many folks want to go straight to the psychism,
Speaker 4: the clairvoyance, the working with higher angelic beings, et cetera.
Speaker 4: And if they don't have their own shit straight, they
Speaker 4: don't have the head on turned on straight, they don't
Speaker 4: have their hearts straight. If they're emotionally immature or so
Speaker 4: physically decrepit because of the toxins or the poisons or
Speaker 4: the illnesses of the body. They just blow a fuse
Speaker 4: when they try to do the higher level things. So
Speaker 4: I start in this middle world, like, just figure our
Speaker 4: lives out, figure out who we are, figure out what
Speaker 4: we think, figure out what our personal will is, what
Speaker 4: is our divine will? What is our sacred purpose? Here
Speaker 4: that's the fire. Figure out our relationships and to divine
Speaker 4: love that is the cosmos. How do we figure out
Speaker 4: how to be a human being here in the middle
Speaker 4: of an adult, mature human being before we start doing magic.
Speaker 4: There are a lot of emotionally immature occultists in the world.
Speaker 1: Have y'all noticed, Oh yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Mean there's a fair view just saying and yet they're
Speaker 4: doing They might be doing some really powerful work, but
Speaker 4: I don't know that their lives are improved by that work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's one thing that should happen. My life should
Speaker 3: get better. Everything to an extent, hold like what are
Speaker 3: you doing for?
Speaker 4: So anyway, I just try to start there, like, you know,
Speaker 4: get yourself straight. And then the next work, the one
Speaker 4: that I'm so excited about working on now is the
Speaker 4: Learner witchcraft. That's the deep dive into the underworld, the
Speaker 4: astral realm, psychism and past lives and divination and working
Speaker 4: with the goddess and really getting it deep into the
Speaker 4: fields feelings. You know, it's like a taking a deep
Speaker 4: swim and the cauldron of the goddess. Man, you really
Speaker 4: got to have your life straight before you start doing
Speaker 4: that shadow work. So that's the second book, and I work.
Speaker 4: I've been appealed to twelve different goddesses, one for each
Speaker 4: zodiac sign to be called in during the various lunar
Speaker 4: phases when the moon is in those signs, to help
Speaker 4: bring those powers to balance out the the let's see
Speaker 4: the benefits and the challenges of each element during those
Speaker 4: lunar phase because in the moon being associated with water
Speaker 4: so heavily, and so the calling a goddess in to
Speaker 4: help to balance that out and to really fine tune
Speaker 4: the balances we have within ourselves. That's what I've been
Speaker 4: working on this year, and I'm so excited about it
Speaker 4: about that work coming out. Again, I ramble, Sorry, i
Speaker 4: think I've left the point long ago.
Speaker 1: No, you're good, You're good, thank you.
Speaker 3: Anyway, One thing I did want to ask when you
Speaker 3: get into, you know, doing your own stuff, if you
Speaker 3: were to do elemental magic, do you do like ritual
Speaker 3: work and stuff?
Speaker 4: Oh sure, yeah, wickens are all about the ceremonial magic.
Speaker 3: All right, So I didn't want to kind of maybe
Speaker 3: put you on the spot. But like, if let's say
Speaker 3: you were to work with the element of fires, since
Speaker 3: you brought it up, would you kind of give people
Speaker 3: an idea like how everything would be set up for that?
Speaker 3: Oh sure, like even like maybe like I don't know,
Speaker 3: like for me, like depending on what I used to
Speaker 3: work with Planetaria elemental you know, I'd have the herbs
Speaker 3: that match, at the crystals that match, and maybe even
Speaker 3: change my old the cloth which wearing something, you know,
Speaker 3: get extra all that stuff. You know, I'm wondering if
Speaker 3: you did the same or however you did it. However,
Speaker 3: if you can maybe give us just a little bit of.
Speaker 4: An idea, okay, sure, So just as an example in
Speaker 4: my book, I have five paths that you walk during
Speaker 4: the certain seasons of the year, and you work specifically
Speaker 4: with that element very heavily. And so while you're working
Speaker 4: with fire, just use that as an example. Planetary stuff,
Speaker 4: any of the stuff that comes from the old occultist
Speaker 4: correspondence tables, et cetera. All the ALcom obile with all
Speaker 4: that stuff is yes, yes, pull all that in so yes,
Speaker 4: red orange, yellow on your aldercloth. Things that have to
Speaker 4: do with salamander, dragons, et cetera, very you know, very fiery,
Speaker 4: desert y. You want the stones that associate with the
Speaker 4: sun or mars, the herbs that want to associate that
Speaker 4: way also, so I would have oh gosh, if I'm
Speaker 4: burning incense, and I do a lot of formulary, I
Speaker 4: provide all these recipes and everything is I mean, I
Speaker 4: create candles and incense blends that you burn on charcoal,
Speaker 4: so I'd have cinnamon and orange and clove and oak,
Speaker 4: et cetera, frankincense that all have those fiery things, and
Speaker 4: you're layering it up. And each time that you employ
Speaker 4: one of these material allies, you tap into the spirit.
Speaker 4: Because again we get back to that ol chemical notion
Speaker 4: that everything that exists in the world has a soul,
Speaker 4: a spirit, and a physical body. So it's not just
Speaker 4: that I've got the body of a frankincense nugget. I
Speaker 4: need to tap into, awaken and partner with the spirit,
Speaker 4: the soul of franking sense, which is aligned on another
Speaker 4: cosmic level with the celestial sphere of the Sun, or
Speaker 4: I could do the same with anything having to do
Speaker 4: with Mars, and that would get me closer to fire. Also,
Speaker 4: we work heavily with the elemental beings in which in
Speaker 4: Wick and Witchcraft, so the God, I mean not the God,
Speaker 4: the elemental king, gen and the salamanders are the elemental
Speaker 4: beings that that embody, that essence, that do the work
Speaker 4: of that essence in the world. They would spur energy physical,
Speaker 4: the physical exercise, aspects of things, the ecstasy of passion
Speaker 4: and sexuality. They would really get shit done. And so
Speaker 4: that whole time you want to be tapping into the
Speaker 4: power of your muscles and the Sun and the fire
Speaker 4: and the Mars and them, and you would call upon
Speaker 4: those beings to help reveal what is the work of
Speaker 4: your will. Let should be the sacred work of your
Speaker 4: will at that time. And we work heavily with this,
Speaker 4: you know, to will on the whole sphinx or the
Speaker 4: pyramid of power, depending on your tradition. But also because
Speaker 4: I'm restoring the goddess's tools, the receptive tools, back to
Speaker 4: the old patriarchal occultism, in heavily heavily, heavily. In my book,
Speaker 4: we talk about the jewel of power in old witchcraft
Speaker 4: from fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, or the
Speaker 4: wick from you know, pretty recent times, they would talk
Speaker 4: about the pyramid of power, to know, to will, to dare,
Speaker 4: to be silent. But there are receptive powers also that
Speaker 4: were first named by a Wickan, a Guarnerian Wickan high
Speaker 4: priest who's also a psychoanalyst in his day job. His
Speaker 4: name is Timothy Roderick, and he taught that there were
Speaker 4: the receptive lessons of each element. Also because everything has
Speaker 4: yin and yang. So the pyramid of power that we know,
Speaker 4: or the sphinx of power from ELFs Levi, was all
Speaker 4: the masculine aspects. They were all project the projective aspects
Speaker 4: of the elements. But what's the opposite of to know? Well,
Speaker 4: the goddess's tool for that is to wonder, to release knowing,
Speaker 4: and to ask new questions. What's the So then there's
Speaker 4: to will that's applying your will to the world, like
Speaker 4: you're the fire being applied as the catalyst to the world. Well,
Speaker 4: what's the opposite of that is to surrender? You are
Speaker 4: the fuel on the fire. What's the opposite of to dare,
Speaker 4: which is the water overflowing the emotion. I'm going to
Speaker 4: dare to be courageous and go out there and apply
Speaker 4: my will and my feelings on the world. What's the
Speaker 4: opposite of that? It's to accept the emotional conditions or
Speaker 4: accept the situation that you're in. And then what's the
Speaker 4: opposite of just to sit still, to be silent and
Speaker 4: to wait in expectation of the outcome. The opposite of
Speaker 4: that is to resonate, to set the new tone for
Speaker 4: the world. So the Goddess's tool for Earth is to
Speaker 4: resonate a new intention and then to draw something new,
Speaker 4: create something new into the world. Okay, so we work
Speaker 4: heavily with those things too. So while I'm working with fire,
Speaker 4: I would not only try to figure out what is
Speaker 4: my will in the world, what is the sacred divine
Speaker 4: purpose for me that I should be applying my individual
Speaker 4: will to accomplishing, but also what do I need to
Speaker 4: surrender to those fires? What no longer serves me impedes
Speaker 4: me in the same way that when a sword is
Speaker 4: in the forge and it's being purified in the fires,
Speaker 4: and all of it's the impurities, the weaknesses of the
Speaker 4: metal are burned away, and what is what emerges from
Speaker 4: those fires should be sharper, more finely honed, more rarefied,
Speaker 4: better able to be wielded to for your will. So
Speaker 4: I would work both angles there while also appealing to
Speaker 4: the planetary sphears the gods that are very firing, like Mars,
Speaker 4: et cetera. So that is a big long answer. But
Speaker 4: when I but I would do those rituals in a
Speaker 4: sacred circle and I would only call that element in
Speaker 4: and then I would do a lot of deep journey
Speaker 4: work with those ideas while layering up the crystals, the herbs,
Speaker 4: the colors, the stones, et cetera, the full ceremonial magic gambit,
Speaker 4: and I would I would ask to you to know
Speaker 4: those questions. You know, how should I apply my will?
Speaker 4: But also what do I need to give up and
Speaker 4: then let myself surrender to those fires? Not an easy task.
Speaker 7: Well, I think what you've done there is you've shown
Speaker 7: your teaching method because you would be explaining the principles
Speaker 7: behind why choosing these elements are important and then letting
Speaker 7: people use their own discretion on how they want to
Speaker 7: form the motif for themselves.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's all about free will. It's all about you
Speaker 4: designing your practice. I do. I do encourage folks who
Speaker 4: who haven't done this kind of thing before to follow
Speaker 4: the recipe at least once to see what it's supposed to.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: It's kind of like the map, you know, following a
Speaker 4: map that some other explorer from one hundred years ago
Speaker 4: left you, or even five years ago left you see
Speaker 4: where it took them. But you have to acknowledge that
Speaker 4: the landscape is different, their perspective is different, what they're
Speaker 4: there to learn is different, and so you've got to
Speaker 4: be able to, you know, make your adaptations to suit
Speaker 4: you and your your needs. The whole point being to
Speaker 4: remain open, receptive to the divine will in your life
Speaker 4: and to your guides, your ancestors, et cetera, and how
Speaker 4: they're nudging you along, remain in wonderment so that you
Speaker 4: can form your own opinions, your own beliefs.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you. I appreciate that answer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's been times where I've kind of gone on
Speaker 3: about that how I would get that extra But I
Speaker 3: just wanted other people to know that that's not unusual,
Speaker 3: you know, and you know, when they're only hearing it
Speaker 3: from me constantly.
Speaker 1: You know it helps. They have somebody else as well.
Speaker 3: So what is there anything any of you? Just have
Speaker 3: questions or anything you want to ask anybody else here?
Speaker 1: I wrote? So Judith, he list nothing, all right?
Speaker 2: Can you hear me?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Okay, So then you're you're kathonic. Sorry, your lunar book
Speaker 2: not just kathonic.
Speaker 4: I just oh, it's definitely cathonic.
Speaker 2: I guess could could you speak on that a little bit?
Speaker 2: Is that? Uh? I imagine a lot of deep diving
Speaker 2: into the subconscious and maybe heckita hmm.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So you want to know what goddess is I
Speaker 4: picked for which for the signs?
Speaker 1: If you don't mind, Oh no, I don't mind.
Speaker 4: This is my jam and done devotional art for each
Speaker 4: of them. Let me just give an example, okay, So
Speaker 4: in my book, like this is an illustration from my book.
Speaker 4: The idea is to make candles. Right, this is my
Speaker 4: triple Goddess one. I've got like a maiden mother crone
Speaker 4: thing going on here because an elemental I try to
Speaker 4: keep it just to the archetypes, into the yen and
Speaker 4: the young. I've got a triple god one too, all right, so,
Speaker 4: but for a lunar witchcraft, what I suggest doing is
Speaker 4: creating a sanctuary candle for each divinity that you're working with.
Speaker 4: And I've selected well, I've appealed to various goddesses and
Speaker 4: asked if they would help to balance that. So it's
Speaker 4: not like this is me making a choice of saying, Okay,
Speaker 4: I think that the strengths of this goddess helped to
Speaker 4: balance the weaknesses of this sign. Does that make sense.
Speaker 4: It's not like they're necessarily the embodiment of the sign.
Speaker 4: I just feel like they'd be helpful in overcoming the
Speaker 4: challenges of each sign.
Speaker 3: You know, I used to just real quick, I used
Speaker 3: to like with it was kind of like planetary magic
Speaker 3: or maybe a little bit more into kabbala, but I
Speaker 3: would use like venus and net sock to kind of
Speaker 3: combat my over mars and areas. Yes, you know what
Speaker 3: I'm saying, because I'm definitely in aries like I need
Speaker 3: to combat that.
Speaker 4: I get into the kabbala a lot in lunar witchcraft.
Speaker 4: I don't I hardly mention it directly in elemental but
Speaker 4: it's still it's there if you know it's there, but
Speaker 4: it's I finally mentioned it broach the subject of how
Speaker 4: this is, how this layers up in the Kabbala. But anyway, okay,
Speaker 4: so for let me start at the beginning Aries, I
Speaker 4: call on Athena, but I'm also working in the book
Speaker 4: works on the six axes that are formed across the
Speaker 4: zodiacal wheel of the year, because whatever is opposite works
Speaker 4: in tandem, so there are six pairings, and in astrology
Speaker 4: those are referred to as the axes. There's some axis
Speaker 4: of human consciousness that must be balanced and is paired
Speaker 4: across the zodiacal wheel. Aris is paired across the wheel
Speaker 4: to Libra. I chose to stay for the most part
Speaker 4: within Pantheons. So I call Athena for Ares, hopefully bringing
Speaker 4: her wisdom as a means to offset the sort of
Speaker 4: violence of Mars. I guess in the potentially in Ares,
Speaker 4: offset to that is Libra. And I call Aphrodite as
Speaker 4: a goddess, because you know, Libra is ruled by Venus.
Speaker 4: But I chose her Greek form for that sort of
Speaker 4: grace and beauty and relationship. And so I've got Ares
Speaker 4: in Ephrodite.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 4: Then for Taurus, I've I've got Venus, the Roman sexy Venus,
Speaker 4: paired with across the wheel. In Scorpio, I've chose I
Speaker 4: wanted to appeal to Persephone as how I normally think
Speaker 4: of her, but because I'm using the Roman name Venus,
Speaker 4: I've chosen the Roman name Proserpina as queen of the underworld,
Speaker 4: to help guide the Scorpio side of that. And then Gemini,
Speaker 4: I go into the Celtic goddesses. The ones that appeal
Speaker 4: to me for Gemini is Caroduin and her cauldron and
Speaker 4: the wisdom of her cauldron and the little bits of
Speaker 4: analytical sort of knowledge that go into her cauldron that
Speaker 4: ultimately feed into wisdom. But then on the other side
Speaker 4: of the wheel we have Sagittarius that balances that, and
Speaker 4: for that I choose the goddess Brigid at the forge,
Speaker 4: the very fiery forge aspects of the Celtic Goddess Brigid.
Speaker 4: Then we get down into Cancer and Capricorn that lie
Speaker 4: across from each other. This is where, in a little
Speaker 4: off script, I had to do because it's not the
Speaker 4: same pantheon. When I first thought of doing this, the
Speaker 4: very like ooh I could do, I could I could
Speaker 4: approach the lunar work this way The very first goddess
Speaker 4: who barreled into my consciousness about blew me over is
Speaker 4: the Arisha goddess Yamaya for Cancer. I have a relationship
Speaker 4: with Yamaya that I don't think about as often as
Speaker 4: some of the others because I'm I'm I'm, I'm a
Speaker 4: dedicand to Aphrodite and Hermes personally. But Yamaya wanted to
Speaker 4: be there. She's powerful now, But who wants to be
Speaker 4: on the other side of that. I don't really have
Speaker 4: a relationship with any of the other Arisha's not in
Speaker 4: the same way. But the goddess that came barreling in
Speaker 4: for Capricorn was Khalima of Hinduism, and the two wanted
Speaker 4: to work together there, at least for my perception. So
Speaker 4: I've got Khalima as this sort of Saturnian goddess of
Speaker 4: time creation and destruction right there where winter Solstice crosses,
Speaker 4: you know, from Sagittarius and the Capricorn. We've got her
Speaker 4: as that liminal character, a mother and destroyer across the
Speaker 4: wheel there. So that's Cancer and Capricorn. And then for Leo,
Speaker 4: I end up in Egypt. I have a very special
Speaker 4: relationship with the goddess Bastet. She was originally seen in
Speaker 4: a very lion leonine sort of way. She was a
Speaker 4: warrior protector for the god rab So very Sun, very Leo.
Speaker 4: But as Egyptian, as time went on in Egypt and
Speaker 4: she came more associated with domestic things and protection of
Speaker 4: children and joy and music and dance and sexuality and
Speaker 4: all of that sort of happy pleasure stuff, her name
Speaker 4: shifted to Bastet. So I'm specifically going with Bastett for
Speaker 4: Leo and joyfulness and creativity and music and dance and
Speaker 4: family and home and hearth, et cetera, with Leo across
Speaker 4: the wheel for Aquarius. And this is inspired by the
Speaker 4: Crowley and Frieda Harris Toath deck their Aquarius. The star
Speaker 4: card is said to be nut and using specifically that
Speaker 4: that Crowley spelling of nut as nuit, which is the
Speaker 4: French word for night, for that goddess who is the
Speaker 4: vault of heaven, the the connecting constellation of stars for
Speaker 4: which we're all apart, that helps to ferry you into
Speaker 4: the afterlife, et cetera. So another other like fear. So
Speaker 4: those are my goddesses, my twelve goddesses. I also have
Speaker 4: a Gaya as just like a general all purpose to
Speaker 4: work with that planetary system of Gaya and the moon.
Speaker 4: But if you notice, it's lunar witchcraft, but none of
Speaker 4: those are specifically lunar goddesses. There's enough books out there
Speaker 4: about lunar goddesses, there's plenty, there's thousands. I feel like
Speaker 4: he was covered.
Speaker 7: So I've been noticing a lot that people just sort
Speaker 7: of pass over the idea that space is feminine, right,
Speaker 7: So you've got father time and mother space, and like,
Speaker 7: we talk about space goddesses all the time, and it's
Speaker 7: really at the heart of the understanding of this duality
Speaker 7: in our cosmosis, that the interaction between time and space,
Speaker 7: and everybody focuses on this sort of yaoistic Saturnian character.
Speaker 7: It is this Chrono, but very rarely do they match
Speaker 7: that up with Raya. Like you just hear about Cronos,
Speaker 7: very little about ray and Raya goes back through Kayballei
Speaker 7: and back to the very very agent past and it's
Speaker 7: right there as the space goddess. And then you see
Speaker 7: that as Nix and knew it and all these other
Speaker 7: very very early representations.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I do have in lunaritchcraft and mind you,
Speaker 4: this is only in first draft. It's with my editor
Speaker 4: right now, so who knows what it'll be when it
Speaker 4: comes back. But right now I do have a deep
Speaker 4: look at all the goddesses that are associated with the
Speaker 4: moon and all those ancient texts, and I do go
Speaker 4: very deeply into rayas and that role there. Yeah, so
Speaker 4: it's interesting. Even in my own process of writing the book,
Speaker 4: I ended up the section three is all the practical
Speaker 4: magic stuff sections one and two or you know, information
Speaker 4: and et cetera. But the third part art is time
Speaker 4: to astrology. You know what phase of them, what phase
Speaker 4: of the moon, but also what sign is the moon
Speaker 4: and what season, et cetera. And really looking at the
Speaker 4: mechanism of our cosmos has this magical It's like a
Speaker 4: machine and it's moving in these predictable ways, and there
Speaker 4: are times when certain things are so much easier to
Speaker 4: accomplish because the whole cosmos is flowing with that purpose
Speaker 4: at that time. And it's interesting to me that as
Speaker 4: I was writing the book, I can think and work
Speaker 4: academically and like, oh, look, historically, these are all these
Speaker 4: goddesses and ideas and mythologies and stories that associate with
Speaker 4: these ideas. But then when I got to section three,
Speaker 4: who do we actually work with? Who's the actual magic
Speaker 4: with ended up being a whole different thing because I
Speaker 4: just sort of let spirit flow through. That's the clairvoyant
Speaker 4: thing too. It's kind of like everything I do at
Speaker 4: some point becomes almost like automatic writing, because once I
Speaker 4: tap in and just going, it just flows through. And
Speaker 4: it's that image of the star card I think about.
Speaker 4: You know, she's holding the arth or touching this divine
Speaker 4: access to information that is everything and everywhere, and then
Speaker 4: she's flowing through and she's pouring it out on the earth.
Speaker 4: I think about that a lot. I've got a lot
Speaker 4: of Aquarius in my chart obviously, but I see that
Speaker 4: as as my job when I write, And like I said,
Speaker 4: I do have a close devotional relationship with Hermes. It's
Speaker 4: just always been the way. And so I get to
Speaker 4: go in and he sort of takes over hermeis take
Speaker 4: the wheel. I don't mean for it to be like that,
Speaker 4: but I'm his priestest, so what can I say. That's
Speaker 4: what happens. He'll get his moment in solar witchcraft. He's
Speaker 4: one of the gods. I do the same thing in
Speaker 4: solar I'm assigning a god to help with each of
Speaker 4: the signs, and then the Sabbaths, of course, would either
Speaker 4: be with the god that's the fixed midpoint of that
Speaker 4: sign or the transition the diad of two gods working
Speaker 4: together to help transition from one to the next. So
Speaker 4: I'm doing the same there, and Hermes is definitely on
Speaker 4: that list too.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 3: I like how you did use like like I was
Speaker 3: saying before, sometimes I wouldn't always kind of work on
Speaker 3: that sphere of that idea, but that I thought I
Speaker 3: was having problems with that we use something else like
Speaker 3: you're saying. You were using the opposite basically, you know.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 3: That's very interesting. I haven't seen too many people and
Speaker 3: not bringing because I did it that way. I just
Speaker 3: didn't see too many people do it like that.
Speaker 4: We have to you have to continuously remind yourself that
Speaker 4: everything has a yen and a yang, everything has the
Speaker 4: outward flowing the inward flowing. Everything that has a light
Speaker 4: cast a shadow. So even so, there's nothing in the
Speaker 4: cosmos that's all easy or all challenge, or all good
Speaker 4: or all bad. It it has to be balanced. That's
Speaker 4: its point. And so when I work with the sabbots.
Speaker 4: This is part of my ceremonial magic practice. It's not
Speaker 4: just the Sabbat I'm in. I acknowledge that on the
Speaker 4: other side of the wheel there are the opposite is
Speaker 4: what is going on. And I call this the philosophy
Speaker 4: of the poison and the antidote, and I work with
Speaker 4: this in all of my things. The poison from one
Speaker 4: the moment you're in. The antidote to that poison is
Speaker 4: found in the strengths of the thing on the opposite
Speaker 4: side of the wheel or on the other side. If
Speaker 4: I'm dealing with one of the poisons presented by a
Speaker 4: very projective or masculine energy in something, how do I
Speaker 4: balance that? I have to find what is the strength
Speaker 4: of the goddess that helps to nurture that. If I'm
Speaker 4: dealing with the negative of the goddess something or the
Speaker 4: receptive aspect that is challenging on this side, how do
Speaker 4: I cure that that poison? I got them distill an
Speaker 4: antidote from the opposite side. So what does the God
Speaker 4: bring to this situation at his strength? It's the you
Speaker 4: know what I mean? And so that's how I do everything.
Speaker 4: If I'm working so like when we're working the lunar stuff.
Speaker 4: You know this, When the sun is in one side,
Speaker 4: the full moon will be in the opposite. The full
Speaker 4: face of the goddess is reflecting the light of the
Speaker 4: God at that moment, So you'll have and it's always
Speaker 4: the same mode. So it'll either be cardinal, fixed or mutable.
Speaker 4: It'll always be a projective or a receptive element. So
Speaker 4: air and fire is always paired, water and earth is
Speaker 4: always paired. If I'm the challenge of the moon full moon,
Speaker 4: people get crazy the full moon. Why because there is
Speaker 4: the opposition, But there's a from the poison that we
Speaker 4: are presented. It's like it's it's unveiling this thing that
Speaker 4: we have to work on. How do we do that?
Speaker 4: We need to look where the sun is. What's the
Speaker 4: strength of the sign. And the sun is in right
Speaker 4: now that needs to be pulled as the antidote for
Speaker 4: the poison that you're being forced to reconcile right now.
Speaker 4: And that's how I do everything. That's how I do everything.
Speaker 4: I look to the other side, and I tried to
Speaker 4: seek the balance and acknowledge that again there's nothing all
Speaker 4: good and there's nothing all bad. We've all had our
Speaker 4: we all have our moments. Everything in the under the sun,
Speaker 4: everything in the cosmos, it's not just the solar system.
Speaker 4: Everything in the cosmos has got strengths in its weaknesses,
Speaker 4: challenges and.
Speaker 2: Ease.
Speaker 4: And so that's the crux of my magic. It's identifying that.
Speaker 4: And that was all mapped out for us, thankfully by
Speaker 4: the alchemists and the occultist who came before us, Agrippa
Speaker 4: and Levi. And even if I don't believe everything they
Speaker 4: believed and I really can't stand reading that, I've read
Speaker 4: it so that you don't have to, and I've distilled
Speaker 4: it down in my book and given you the good
Speaker 4: parts version. Yeah, I find that challenging. But anyway, those
Speaker 4: guys did a lot of good work to help figure
Speaker 4: out those things like this. Right, here's one of my
Speaker 4: favorite books. I told you the Anikey Hall. I love
Speaker 4: this three books of a cult philosophy, but I love
Speaker 4: it with the Donald Tyson.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Oh it's good and there's a lot of good stuff
Speaker 4: in there. It's or the Manly p Hall. You know,
Speaker 4: it's not like every word is something I want to
Speaker 4: carry the torch for. Like I mean, if any occultist
Speaker 4: starts to look like a Bible thumper, you know, like, oh,
Speaker 4: this is the undeniable truth of God and every word
Speaker 4: in here is exactly perfect. Well, I just don't listen.
Speaker 4: I don't listen to much more after that. Frankly, in
Speaker 4: a lot of ways.
Speaker 7: I think they've put to bed the idea of associations.
Speaker 4: Right, the ancient.
Speaker 7: Man had this vast list of associations in his head
Speaker 7: that he would use as a tool to remember things better. Right,
Speaker 7: the mnemonic device. All of the stuff about the gods
Speaker 7: and the goddesses and their associations and all of this
Speaker 7: stuff with nature has to do with creating a mind
Speaker 7: map that that everything in the world can fit into
Speaker 7: through associations. Yeah, I think we've lost that connection. But
Speaker 7: you know, when you talk to other occultists, it's like boom,
Speaker 7: I get it, I get it, Like all of these
Speaker 7: things are fitting into place. So once you have the
Speaker 7: mind map, that's where your will can then go. And
Speaker 7: that's kind of what we're making is through all of
Speaker 7: these thoughts and stuff, it's a mind map for the
Speaker 7: will to absolutely reality.
Speaker 4: Absolutely I agree with you one thousand percent. And the
Speaker 4: mind map or the cosmic map, and you've got to
Speaker 4: figure out where you are on your map, and you've
Speaker 4: got to you've got to figure it out, like make
Speaker 4: me your own map maker, really where you're at. And
Speaker 4: it is very helpful to at least look at the
Speaker 4: maps of the occultis who came before us, you know,
Speaker 4: but that's their map. They can be informative. I've been
Speaker 4: creating mnemonic devices. The reason why you excite me with
Speaker 4: what you just said is the associations the mnemonic devices.
Speaker 4: So to remember the those six paths well, by the way,
Speaker 4: I so the pinnacle path. Each element has a name
Speaker 4: of the path that you are walking while you're studying that.
Speaker 4: That's what I call it. And it says, if you're
Speaker 4: on your cosmic map, and you're laying out your own
Speaker 4: cosmic map, right, but you've got to explore the territory.
Speaker 4: So while you're walking the path of fire, I call
Speaker 4: it the path of power. Where you're walking the path
Speaker 4: of water, I call it the path of love, Air,
Speaker 4: the path of truth, Earth, the path of sovereignty, spirit,
Speaker 4: the path of completion. All right, But once I got
Speaker 4: into lunar, now it's basically six paths that have each
Speaker 4: have a direction. Right, I'm either working on the Aris
Speaker 4: towards Libra or I'm working the liver towards Aries. But
Speaker 4: it's the same path, right, So it's like six or
Speaker 4: is it twelve? But how do you remember this shit?
Speaker 4: The word beacon, beacon like at the moon. It took
Speaker 4: me a while to figure this out. B is the
Speaker 4: path of becoming. So while you're figuring out the mysteries
Speaker 4: of Aris to Libra, you are figure. You are working
Speaker 4: on the path of becoming. And so the magic is
Speaker 4: the magic of becoming. E is embodiment. When you're working
Speaker 4: Venus to Scorpio, you're working on this embodiment within the
Speaker 4: balance of earth and water. There A is awareness. When
Speaker 4: you're working Gemini to Sagittarius, you're working your awareness, your
Speaker 4: perception of your world, your awareness of your place within it,
Speaker 4: et cetera. C is cultivation, the path of cultivation. So
Speaker 4: between Cancer and Capricorn, you're cultivating the sense of security
Speaker 4: within yourself and in your outer world when you're home
Speaker 4: and your your public life. Oh is the path of offering.
Speaker 4: How do you offer your light? How do you offer
Speaker 4: your spark? So between Leo and Aquarius, it's how you're
Speaker 4: offering both as an individual, but also within like an
Speaker 4: individual star, we are all at a star? Or how
Speaker 4: am I offering my light within the greater constellation of mankind?
Speaker 4: And then n is the path of nourishment.
Speaker 7: So between I was gonna let her finish, but I
Speaker 7: was going to show you this. It's go ahead.
Speaker 4: Guess what I'm me seeing?
Speaker 7: Oh so this is the art of memory by Francis Yates,
Speaker 7: where she's going on over the memory palace techniques of
Speaker 7: Georgano Bruno. Oh yeah, Bruno. Right, he was this metaphysician
Speaker 7: that was absorbing all this knowledge from the ancient world,
Speaker 7: and he was passed around within the church and everything
Speaker 7: because he was seen to be like a mystic because
Speaker 7: of his memory powers that he absorbed from all of
Speaker 7: the ancient Greek manuscripts.
Speaker 1: Interesting on that.
Speaker 4: Awesome, I just realized I left off two of my goddesses.
Speaker 4: Because my path, my end, my path of nourishment is
Speaker 4: between Virgo and Pisces. I forgot to mention those two goddesses.
Speaker 4: Virgo is Demeter, Pisces is Hecate. So yes, we bring
Speaker 4: it back to Hakat again. But the nourishment of uh,
Speaker 4: you know, it's the whole that is again the salve
Speaker 4: at Kawagula, the virgo is breaking it down and do
Speaker 4: its parts. Kuwaigula is bringing it all back together again.
Speaker 2: Hecitate or Pisces needs hekita for sure.
Speaker 4: Absolutely right. There's a couple of there's a couple of
Speaker 4: those that I mean, of those goddesses that I feel
Speaker 4: like it could have been a number of a number
Speaker 4: of them, Like for Capricorn, it could be Khalima, it
Speaker 4: could be Lilith. I've been working with both. I guess
Speaker 4: it just came down to Khalima demanded to be in there,
Speaker 4: and Lilith was passive about it. So I was like,
Speaker 4: all right, well Kalima wins. But yeah she's she's very
Speaker 4: Capricorn to me. But yeah, that's so my nomadic device.
Speaker 4: There was beacon follow the moon like a beacon anyway.
Speaker 7: You said, uh, Pisces really needs hecate, And that got
Speaker 7: me thinking about the three face Jesus. Yeah, the three
Speaker 7: face Jesus was actually banned from church. They couldn't do
Speaker 7: that anymore. The Father's said, and Holy Spirit could be
Speaker 7: depicted in a single face. Really, yeah, it could be
Speaker 7: something there.
Speaker 6: M hm.
Speaker 2: That's such a fun association.
Speaker 4: Man, You dig deep enough. Just about every divinity has
Speaker 4: got multiple faces, don't they. People love to do a
Speaker 4: triple something with any of these divinities.
Speaker 3: Was there anything else about the book or anything else
Speaker 3: you wanted to maybe talk about.
Speaker 4: Well, I do offer this as a course if ever,
Speaker 4: I was to try to market something. My online course.
Speaker 4: It took me years to develop. It's over one hundred
Speaker 4: hours of video, so many additional pieces of art and otherwise,
Speaker 4: you know, visual aids, graphics, additional documents, additional things that
Speaker 4: I've created over my career teaching witchcraft that are provided
Speaker 4: an addition to what's in the book, all the things
Speaker 4: that I was forced to cut from the book. And
Speaker 4: the book is a chunk. I mean, look at this.
Speaker 4: I mean it's say, over four hundred pages, and I
Speaker 4: had to cut a bunch of stuff. So that's all
Speaker 4: back in the course. It's all just self paced study
Speaker 4: as you go. It's not like you meet at a
Speaker 4: particular time. I've created it as part of my sacred work,
Speaker 4: and I've put it into the world so that it
Speaker 4: can be found, you know, long after I'm no longer here, hopefully.
Speaker 4: But it's a course on that starts at the very
Speaker 4: beginning So if you know nothing about paganism or occultism
Speaker 4: or witchcraft, but you want to know, it starts at
Speaker 4: the very beginning of the story, tells you where all
Speaker 4: of this stuff came from. Where do we get these
Speaker 4: notions from alchemy and from paganism and from gardener or
Speaker 4: wherever to make and it emits that it's relatively new,
Speaker 4: it's less than one hundred years old, and it's current configuration.
Speaker 4: But we're trying to create something that will grow with
Speaker 4: the people as time progresses and not just be some
Speaker 4: static thing that, like I said, like an anachronism, like
Speaker 4: we're not trying to recreate the Renaissance or whatever. So
Speaker 4: I do teach that this starts at the beginning, but
Speaker 4: relatively quickly it gets into more deeper, more intermediate level
Speaker 4: personal work. But it's meant for the solitary practitioner, or
Speaker 4: if a group of people wanted to do the course
Speaker 4: together and use it like a curriculum for a coven,
Speaker 4: that works too. But it is available on Heronmichelle dot com,
Speaker 4: and it is as like a once you buy the
Speaker 4: way into the course, it's there for you forever. You
Speaker 4: have lifetime access to it. You can go back and
Speaker 4: do it every year if you want. And all of
Speaker 4: the art my illustrations for like the candle wraps and
Speaker 4: whatnot are in the book. Those are available by download
Speaker 4: and color you know, things like that. There's so much
Speaker 4: good magic in there, and it really has been well
Speaker 4: received by all the people all over the world have
Speaker 4: taken it at this point, I've had students all over
Speaker 4: Europe and Australia and all over America for sure, but
Speaker 4: it's been really well received. So I would really hope
Speaker 4: for if my life work is anything, that as many
Speaker 4: people as possible take advantage of the content that I've
Speaker 4: created there with a team of excellent witches who've helped
Speaker 4: me create a really beautiful, high quality video product. But anyway,
Speaker 4: it's at Haromichelle dot com and so I would welcome
Speaker 4: everybody to go check that out. Also, my website is
Speaker 4: Thesojo dot com for my store, and I do sell
Speaker 4: my Goddess art products through my store.
Speaker 3: Also, one thing I did want to ask real quick
Speaker 3: because we kind of talked about it, and I think
Speaker 3: I saw you mentioned ben cheering on your show. I
Speaker 3: was playing this stuff earlier. I think you brought up
Speaker 3: like charge at the artist, M have you ever show
Speaker 3: a kind of a little bit of commonalities between that
Speaker 3: and I think I think it might be in the
Speaker 3: Book of the Law when is going on about the week.
Speaker 4: I think it was inspired by that, wasn't it.
Speaker 1: That's what I had assumed.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I believe that's what Duren Valiante says in
Speaker 4: her her book, uh Rebirth of Witchcraft. She's the one
Speaker 4: that refined the pro's version of what we would we
Speaker 4: call the charge of the Goddess. And she began that
Speaker 4: if I'm if, I don't want to tell her story wrong.
Speaker 4: But she got the material from Gerald Gardner, and because
Speaker 4: she had read Crowley, recognized where he had ripped it
Speaker 4: all from. And I forget exactly which speech it is,
Speaker 4: but it's it's equal parts from a Rodia and a
Speaker 4: segment in something C one of Croley's books, and you
Speaker 4: went in and massaged it. She actually called it decrollifying
Speaker 4: it or something like that, or the she actually removed
Speaker 4: somewhat of that language so that it obviously wasn't a
Speaker 4: rip off. I think Joel Gardner expected Duren Valiante to
Speaker 4: not be an intelligent, well read woman, but she read
Speaker 4: his shit and was like, dude, I'm a better read
Speaker 4: occultist than you. I know where you got all this,
Speaker 4: But she she massaged it and created some parts of you.
Speaker 4: But yes, it's definitely a conglomeration of many of several
Speaker 4: ancient texts or older texts. But yeah, Aradia and some
Speaker 4: crawly stuff and then some of her new stuff. I
Speaker 4: think she wrote the the parts that get into you know,
Speaker 4: I'm the beauty of the green earth and the white
Speaker 4: moon among the stars and the dust of you know,
Speaker 4: the feet of heaven, you know whatever, that all those
Speaker 4: parts were her.
Speaker 3: But yeah, no, I just thought that it seemed to
Speaker 3: be a common some common alitis in there.
Speaker 1: Oh, definitely, since you were open to that, off, I
Speaker 1: figure that.
Speaker 4: Sc I'm very open to that. But I mean I
Speaker 4: do like a credit, you know, a credit the proper source,
Speaker 4: you know, and so I do a lot of that too.
Speaker 4: But that's another thing that I really enjoy doing in
Speaker 4: my lunar witchcraft, because my original love is poetry. And
Speaker 4: when I tapped into doing just the lunar work, just
Speaker 4: the stuff with the goddess for as long as it
Speaker 4: took me to create the manuscript, talk about a cathonic
Speaker 4: gear but oh, so much poetry, so much art and poetry.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's just the way the goddess flowed through me.
Speaker 4: But I've written many charges, you know, like I tap in,
Speaker 4: like I would like to work with this goddess. Is
Speaker 4: the what is the poetic language or the ritual the
Speaker 4: liturgy of this right, because there's twenty four different rituals
Speaker 4: just for the lunar work in my new book coming out.
Speaker 4: There's many more others also to get ready for it.
Speaker 4: But there's a full and a dark moon with bo
Speaker 4: with all twelve goddesses. That's twenty four major rituals right there,
Speaker 4: the aspets that are in the book, and each one
Speaker 4: of them there are charges, you know what the goddesses delivering.
Speaker 4: I can't other than just saying I wrote a lot
Speaker 4: of poetry. I think it's channeled a lot of poetry,
Speaker 4: for better or for worse. It's things that wanted to
Speaker 4: be said by those goddesses, and so it's like spoken
Speaker 4: as if they are speaking it to you in the rituals.
Speaker 4: So it's a lot of liturgical poetry in my new
Speaker 4: work that I'm very excited about. I'll write a charge,
Speaker 4: I'll write a charge, But I'd like to think that
Speaker 4: it was what those goddesses want wanted me to write
Speaker 4: at that time. I hope so. I hope so, and
Speaker 4: I hope that when other people read it they're like,
Speaker 4: they don't go, oh my god, this want is so
Speaker 4: full of our shit, it's full of herself. I really
Speaker 4: I try as a priestess. I tried to bring forth
Speaker 4: what Divinity asks me to bring forth without my ego
Speaker 4: stepping in the way, and unfortunately, my ego suffers a massive,
Speaker 4: massive helping of what do you call that? Do you
Speaker 4: feel like a fraud? You feel like, you know, like
Speaker 4: I can't say that I pasture syndrome, that's it. I'm like,
Speaker 4: oh my god, I can't do that. And then I
Speaker 4: get that that's your job, Chika, just just write it down,
Speaker 4: and so I do. I do try to do that,
Speaker 4: and it's not really about me, but it is something
Speaker 4: beautiful that I am excited to be part of. So
Speaker 4: I can't wait for the new book to come out.
Speaker 4: I can't wait.
Speaker 7: I love your enthusiasm. It's awesome, it's infectious.
Speaker 4: I would like to think it's infectious as opposed to irritating.
Speaker 4: But you for thinking.
Speaker 2: So, when does your book come out.
Speaker 4: I don't know, okay. So usually with ll well And
Speaker 4: after you submit the first draft, they come back with notes,
Speaker 4: and then after you get the next draft to them,
Speaker 4: it's about a year from then. And I haven't heard
Speaker 4: back yet on the first round, so it'll be at
Speaker 4: least a year, if not longer.
Speaker 1: You're funny. If they have an email me about you
Speaker 1: and ask me to have you on a year from.
Speaker 4: That, well you need to get with Wellen. Find Marcus Robinson,
Speaker 4: not Robinson. Marcus said his name is Marcus Robinson's not it.
Speaker 4: That's a different Marcus. I know and write this minute.
Speaker 4: I'm having a brain I'm having a senior moment. You
Speaker 4: remember his last night.
Speaker 3: A lot of these places have like authors that are
Speaker 3: like people that I want to have on the show.
Speaker 3: I just have no way of contacting them or it's
Speaker 3: like they ain't gonna listen to me. So it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, that's why other reasons that I like for
Speaker 3: Lon Milo Duquet, I want to get him on.
Speaker 1: If I ask Lill Wellen, they'll ask me. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, They'll ask him myself.
Speaker 4: So I love Lon Milo Duquette. He's one of my
Speaker 4: favorite writers, about the Toad Deck and about Kabala.
Speaker 3: I just got David Shoemaker to come on in the February.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he actually cold me. What did I
Speaker 1: talk to me on the phone. I was like, oh fuck,
Speaker 1: I talked to him.
Speaker 3: I was like, oh my god, it sounds like I'm
Speaker 3: listening to Living at the Lima podcast, Like I like
Speaker 3: hearing his voice in my head. It was so weird.
Speaker 3: It was actually I was nervous too, I don't know,
Speaker 3: but yeah, cool cool, Uh, thank you so much for
Speaker 3: coming on. That was really an amazing talk. I really
Speaker 3: had a great, great time with you. Hopefully, hopefully we
Speaker 3: can maybe have you on again in the future.
Speaker 1: That would be great.
Speaker 4: Sure, well, especially once I know when the new book
Speaker 4: is coming out and I can actually do some more
Speaker 4: about that. I'll let you know.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah for sure, for sure. Yeah, well sure I'll
Speaker 3: come down at the shop too and see you again.
Speaker 4: So yeah, yeah, come down to the shop.
Speaker 3: Definitely. Was there anything else that you wanted to plug
Speaker 3: and remind people about. I know you kind of already
Speaker 3: just did it.
Speaker 4: I am definitely focusing my my were regular writings on substack.
Speaker 4: Substack is a great way to be able to get
Speaker 4: a newsletter or writings and whatnot that do not have
Speaker 4: ads every which way. It's so nice. I do offer
Speaker 4: every two weeks or so at least, but before each
Speaker 4: of the auspicious times for my lunar witchcraft work, so
Speaker 4: about ten days before every full moon, every dark moon,
Speaker 4: about ten days before every Sabbat. I'm posting an article
Speaker 4: with sort of a preliminary look at the way that
Speaker 4: I'm approaching these lunar events in my new book. But
Speaker 4: I'm also providing some additional ways things that are not
Speaker 4: in the book of Celebrating are that would be for
Speaker 4: just an individual. Like, for example, coming up, we have
Speaker 4: the full moon and Leo, which would be with Bastett,
Speaker 4: but it's also the weekend right before Emulk, so that's
Speaker 4: the high winter Sabbat. And so I was like, well,
Speaker 4: it's a good time to do sort of a combo thing, right,
Speaker 4: so you could do the full moon with Bastet and
Speaker 4: make some emilk vals for your great work for the year.
Speaker 4: And so I gave three recipes for Bastet inspired incense
Speaker 4: blends if you wanted to add that, And I say,
Speaker 4: why everything's in there, including like a riff on an
Speaker 4: old ancient hea fee recipe which is you know, well
Speaker 4: documented from Egyptian practices. Yeah, and rituals and stuff you
Speaker 4: know with ideas, and I do a lot of poetry there.
Speaker 4: There's usually a chant or a blessing or an invocation
Speaker 4: or something that I write new just for the substack,
Speaker 4: and I always do it where there's a lot of
Speaker 4: really good, juicy stuff before the paywall. But honestly, I
Speaker 4: am trying to support myself with my priestess work, which
Speaker 4: is a challenge. So I do have some additional things
Speaker 4: beyond a paywall for paid subscribers, and if anybody's got
Speaker 4: a couple of bucks they want to throw my way
Speaker 4: every month to see a couple of articles with all
Speaker 4: this stuff. And I also premiere all my new goddess
Speaker 4: artwork and whatnot there. So you know, I'm trying really
Speaker 4: hard to make a lot of information available to anybody
Speaker 4: of you know, good intention and to find you know
Speaker 4: that doesn't cost a lot of money, because I want
Speaker 4: people to have access to these things, but I also
Speaker 4: am trying to live, so you know, if anybody wants
Speaker 4: to buy me a coffee as they say, with a subscription.
Speaker 4: That's where I'm posting my stuff now.
Speaker 3: Awesome, awesome, I'll uh if you don't mind the after
Speaker 3: the show, if you can email oh your links, I'll
Speaker 3: make sure I edit.
Speaker 4: I will do that, don't you worry. But seriously, if
Speaker 4: you just go to Heronmichelle dot com, you will find
Speaker 4: all the things, sign ups for my newsletter, all the
Speaker 4: links will be there. So great, thank you for this opportunity.
Speaker 4: It's been fun to talk about these things, and this
Speaker 4: was great.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed the show. Thank you very much for
Speaker 1: coming on. Let it showed up and asked me too.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Greendal, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: Judith.
Speaker 3: Would you like to let everybody know real quick again
Speaker 3: where they can find your amazing show?
Speaker 1: Oh you're muted?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 3: Sometimes some reason you yeah, like on your end something. Yeah, no, no,
Speaker 3: it doesn't sound right.
Speaker 1: It's been doing this a lot, yeah, some reason. Streamyroad
Speaker 1: is like, what the audio lately has been bad? It's
Speaker 1: really bad. Yeah, and you'rre muted still? Uh? All right, Headles,
Speaker 1: why don't you go let everybody know what's.
Speaker 7: Up with you so you can find me at the
Speaker 7: Headless Giant on YouTube, on Twitter and on Instagram too.
Speaker 7: Occasionally I get on there so you can find me there.
Speaker 7: And I've got shows that are at around seven thirty
Speaker 7: pm every weekday and then one on Sunday that is
Speaker 7: ten thirty which is the trilog. So check them all out.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much, very busy man Arrows.
Speaker 1: Everybody know what's up with you.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Haron for coming on.
Speaker 4: This was awesome view Arrows.
Speaker 2: You can find me on YouTube at Arrows Up, and
Speaker 2: you can find me on Twitter Arrows to eat those
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: Nick, It's great. I'm glad. I'm glad you O could
Speaker 1: make it. And again, Michelle, that was a blast.
Speaker 3: I really really thoroughly enjoyed here and your you know,
Speaker 3: your take on things and very uh. I like I
Speaker 3: like the mix of like kind of like ceremonial and
Speaker 3: witchcraft together, you know.
Speaker 1: I think I think you balance it out well.
Speaker 4: Throw some folk witchcraft from Europe and all the ceremonial
Speaker 4: magic and alchemy into one cauldron and you get you
Speaker 4: get wicked.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I like it. I dig it, so uh yeah, everybody.
Speaker 3: Eventually her links will be in the bottom if you
Speaker 3: want to check your stuff out and Judith I'll make
Speaker 3: sure I include Joe Lincoln there as well, so people
Speaker 3: you know, because you have a mic problems right now,
Speaker 3: sorry about that, and everybody in the chat that's what's up.
Speaker 3: Thank you all very much for joining in and commenting
Speaker 3: and watching the show. That's why we go live. And
Speaker 3: until the next one, everybody be well later