This week, I had the privilege of joining Tess Whitehurst and Natasha Levinger on the Magic Monday podcast, to talk about Hermetic Qabalah, the Tree of Life, and how to make an often impenetrable subject accessible and relevant for magical practitioners outside of the Golden Dawn paradigm. (And, of course, to promote my book, which […]
Read more "My Appearance on the Magic Monday Podcast"With Pride month coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about family in all its forms: Chosen family, biological family, spiritual family, and so on. Pride is, historically, an interesting time for me; my High Priestess had to drag me kicking and screaming to my first Pride, because I was still processing a great deal […]
Read more "Family in the Tens of the Minor Arcana"I have two confessions to make. First, I love chess. I always have. When I was in elementary school (I don’t remember exactly when, but probably second or third grade), I signed up for my school’s chess club. I loved—and still love—the cleanness of it, the elegance, the strategy. My second confession, however: As much […]
Read more "Using Chess for Divination"Numerologically, we connect the Major Arcana to each other by their numerical values. You take the number associated with a particular card (e.g. Justice is 11), add together its digits and reduce to a value between 1 and 9 (in this case, 1+1=2). Although I, personally, have a pet theory that we should be using […]
Read more "The High Priestess, Justice, and Judgment: Awakenings and Initiations"The New Chapter Tarot is an 80-card deck from Kathryn Briggs, published by Liminal 11. It’s a reflective, meditative deck that’s well suited to quiet contemplation of the cards, and each image contains a great deal of imagery and symbolism waiting to be unpacked. Some of the cards in this deck clearly draw on figures […]
Read more "A Review of the New Chapter Tarot"I made some bad decisions recently. I got in a fight and said some things I had no right to say. I spoke out of anger and spite, and even though I was right in that moment I was an ugly version of myself that I’m not proud to have been. I like to think […]
Read more "The Three of Pentacles and the Three of Wands, or, The People We Choose To Be"In my previous post, I talked a bit about Erich Neumann’s book The Great Mother and how, despite the various problems with it and the need for context-sensitive critical reading, it can provide a great theoretical framework in which to understand the Wiccan Goddess. Wicca is about experience, not theory, and a theoretical perspective like […]
Read more "The Horned God, Schematized"Erich Neumann’s book The Great Mother is fascinating and maddening. Neumann was a Jungian psychoanalyst, and his book is subtitled An Analysis of the Archetype; understandably, then, it presents a Jungian approach to world mythology in the aim to establish an overarching cross-cultural archetype of the Great Mother. As a work of comparative mythology, the […]
Read more "Erich Neumann and the Wiccan Goddess"I was doing some meditative work recently with the suit of Cups. Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am not, by nature, a Cupsy person, and this has always been the suit I’ve struggled most to connect to. So I did some intensive reflection and writing exercises to try and establish a […]
Read more "Mirror Images: Cups and Swords"“If you don’t mind my asking, do you intend to go on the market?” I’m not prepared for the question. The “market” in question is the academic job market, a spectacle of dashed hopes in which any newly minted Ph.D has to participate in order to have any hopes of a career as a professor. […]
Read more "The Chariot Takes You Places You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Go"