As the nights grow longer and colder, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about descents to the underworld. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the hero’s journey, the prototypical underworld descent myth laid out by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. This book is flawed, and I hesitate to bring […]
Read more "A Hero’s Journey Tarot Spread"I’m picking up this tag from Benebell Wen, who in turn got it from Kelly Bear. It’s originally a YouTube tag, but Benebell did it as a blog post and I’m going to follow in her steps (although my post won’t be nearly as aesthetically pleasing). The challenge: To list 5 Tarot decks you love, […]
Read more "#54321Tarot"I consider myself a halfway decent astrologer. I’m by no means an expert in astrology, and I’m certainly not a professional, but I know more astrology than most people in a given room, I have a preferred house system (Placidus, and yes, I have heard of whole sign houses, but thank you for asking), and […]
Read more "Applied Astrology: Life After Grad School"In a video last weekend, I talked about the rub that exists between philosophy, which seeks truth through reason, and mysticism, which seeks irrational ecstatic communion with the divine. As it turns out, I have more that I want to say on the matter. Specifically, I want to talk about the survival of the soul […]
Read more "Philosophy and Mysticism: Malkuth, Yesod, and the Underworld"I’m a philosopher, a mystic, and a magician–but those things don’t fit together as neatly as you might expect. In this video, I talk through a fundamental incompatibility between philosophy’s demands for rigorous reasoning and mysticism’s need to suspend reason in favor of direct ecstatic experience of the divine. And just to top it all […]
Read more "Video: Philosophy, Mysticism, and Magic"I’m a fan of the Dungeons & Dragons (and occasionally other TTRPG) show Dimension 20, which airs on CollegeHumor’s streaming service Dropout. In this season, the players are a group of cognitive functions belonging to the mind of a scientist named Elias Hodge—his impulsiveness, his curiosity, his conscience, and so on. Over the course of […]
Read more "The Eights of the Tarot: What We Do When We’re Threatened"I’ve previously discussed novels about witchcraft on this channel–but what about novels specifically written about traditional Wicca? Here, I discuss five novels that take traditional (initiatory, lineaged, coven-based) Wicca as a setting for their characters and plots. Although I’m critical of them, I try to pull out the things I find significant in each book, […]
Read more "Video: Novels About Traditional Wicca"In my previous post on the Tarot de Marseille, I admitted that the system I was building wasn’t working for me and I wanted to start all over. Since then, I’ve been working my way through getting to know the deck again, using Camelia Elias’s book Read Like the Devil as a guide. And honestly? […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: Three Career Readings"For those of you who have been following along at home, I’ve committed myself to exploring the Tarot de Marseille in depth in 2023. I’m interested in this project for a couple of reasons, which I explored when I first began it: TdM is the system of Tarot that I’m least familiar with, and as […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: Rebooting"As a witch, I believe and do things that most people would consider ludicrous. From the outside, people generally don’t make much distinction between witchcraft and a range of other beliefs–including lots of things that I consider absolute nonsense. How, then, do I make the distinction between the beliefs I do and do not consider […]
Read more "Video: A Witch’s Guide to Spotting Nonsense"
Jack Chanek 