Episodes
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Ancestral veneration is a key function of winter rituals, a way to put our lineages in good order, encourage harmonious relations with the spirits of the ancient dead, and appease the restless dead who roam at night. On this night, we tell scary ghost stories that might include child-devouring crones, beer-stealing werewolves, dictator dogs and violent Santas. It's also a good day to honour the animal familiars who help convey gifts and goodness including flying goats, female deer, and horse skeletons.
There are also lighter aspects to the day including the reverence of Freya, hanging wreaths, and sacred spinning, weaving and fibre work.
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This is one of my favourite episodes because cultivating intimacy with the land I live on and the Spirits of Place is one of my favourite things to do. It also addresses, briefly yet deeply, how we can attend to the impacts of imperialism, colonialism and patriarchy in our spiritual work, especially4 at wintertime.
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Episodes manquant?
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It all begins with the Mother. Tonight on the longest night of the year, we honour our matrilineages and the spiritual lineages of prophesy, blessing, abundance and nurturance passed down through the ages through myths concerning Crones.
Source materials for this miniseries:A Brief History of Christmas Tradition
Apple Tree Lore, druidry.org
A Visit from La Befana, JSTOR Daily
Bärbeletreiben
Biedermeier period
Berserks In History and Legend, M.Speidel
CHRISTMAS GIFTS AND THE GIFT-BRINGER, LESLIE D. JOHNSTON
Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices, C.Lecouteux
Deutsches Weinachsmuseum, All About Christmas Glass
Doe A Deer A Female Deer, Danielle Prohom Olson
Feasts and Feasting in the Fourteenth Century, Jon Mackley
foodtimeline.org
Frau Holle in Legend
HiddenGlen.org, Michael Newton's courses are chock full of Gaelic lore and language. Highly recommended.
Industrial Revolution, Chocolate Revolution
Lucy of Syracuse. Patron saint of eye disorders, Carlos Ortiz-Hidalgo
Marzipan Pigs Christmas Tradition
Notes on Italian Folk Customs, Stanley Gee
Otto Hofler, Wikipedia
Perchten and Krampusse: Living Mask Traditions in Austria and Bavaria, Molly Carter
Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead, Claude Lecouteux
Roast Beef, The New Poor Law, and the British Nation, 1834-63, N.Durbach
St. Lucia's Day: An Italian saint, a German child and a female demon all play a role in the story of 13 December, ScienceNorway.no
St.Lucy, Brittanica.com
Shedding Light on Saint Lucy, Aubrey Minshew
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Unknown author
Some Ancient and Modern Yuletide Customs (Dec.1939), L.Johnston
Sugar Past and Present
The Kissing Bough
The Ancient Jus Gentium of the Aryans (1899)
The Feast of Saint Barbara with Pagan Traditions
The Krampus in Austria: A Case of Booming Identity Politics, Gertraud Seiser and Matthäus Rest
The Lussekatter
The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year, L.Raedisch
The Pomander: A Brief History
The Problem of Mysteriousness of Baba Yaga Character in Religious Mythology, Evgenia V. Ivanova
The Rowan Tree and a Rowan Cross
The Scots Kitchen (1929), F.McNeill
The Silver Bough, Volume 3: A Calendar of Scottish National Festivals - Hallowe’en to Yule (1961), F.McNeill
The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices, C.Lecouteux
The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, B.Walker
Unwrapping Yuletide: A Century of Icelandic Traditions, Gudrun Jonina Gunnlaugsdottir
We Don't Know The Origin Of The Candy Cane But They Almost Certainly Were Not Christian, Smithsonian Magazine
Witches, Werewolves and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages, Claude Lecouteux
Yule: The Pagan Holiday of Light, The TROTH | Education and Service for Inclusive Heathenry
Yuletide Monsters: Christmas Hauntings in Medieval Literature and Modern Popular Culture, Medieval Studies Blog Hosted by the University of Notre Dame's Medieval Institute
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Antifascism for the holidays!
Buy The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes & Rituals for the Wheel of the Year
Pre-order Spells for the Apocalypse: Practical Magic for Turbulent Times (publication date: Jan.14, 2025)
The Krampus in Austria: A Case of Booming Identity Politics by Gertraud Seiser and Matthäus Rest
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What's the deal with dead bird on Victorian holiday greeting cards? Plus, a rundown of some of the Yuletide bestiary.
Buy The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes & Rituals for the Wheel of the Year
Pre-order Spells for the Apocalypse: Practical Magic for Turbulent Times (publication date: Jan.14, 2025)
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A look at Victorian holiday postcards and the botanicals of winter.
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NOTE: This episode contains a 7 minute guided meditation – do not listen while driving or operating machinery! We begin the Yuletide season by grounding into our values and prioritizing just a few rituals, crafts or special foodstuffs. Then we can relax and release pressure to have or provide perfect holiday moments; instead we can deepen into rhythm of winter's work of ritual, ceremony, reflection and restorative pause.
Himmeli straw can be found at The Straw Shop
Buy The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes & Rituals for the Wheel of the Year
Pre-order Spells for the Apocalypse: Practical Magic for Turbulent Times (publication date: Jan.14, 2025)
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Learn about Fumbulvinter, the 12 Days of Yuletide and their themes, and the stories of European Yuletide folklore in my annual program, now available for free!
Buy The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes & Rituals for the Wheel of the Year
Pre-order Spells for the Apocalypse: Practical Magic for Turbulent Times (publication date: Jan.14, 2025)
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This episode is about the four intuitive tools I use to plan my year ahead, incorporating divination, dowsing, and more.
Before I dive in, I take a few minutes to stand on ceremony as I cross and important threshold with this podcast. It felt important to take some time to mark it well. I hope you find the Canadian Heritage Minutes interesting! limləmt to the Syilx Okanagan people for accepting us here on this land.
In this very full episode, I'm sharing about:
electional astrologywater witchingpendulumsFamily Constellationswrestling with cultural appropriationtrancework as a form of death workThe Hellenistic concept of virtue ("arete")working with your daemon (your good spirit of destiny)guidelines for pulling an Oracular calendar readinga special announcement about a new format for The Spirit of Yuletide this yearPLUS!
a preview of New Year happenings including a price increase for The Numinous Networklive monthly rituals from my forthcoming book Spells for the Apocalypsea new Network event coming this spring: the Soft Sober Jam!Referenced in this episode:
Chief Walking Grizzly Bear
Fur Brigade Trail
Syilx Language House
TNP226 Wild Horses of the Chilcotin with Wayne McCrory
The Divining Rod: A History of Water Witching, Dept. of the Interior US Geological Survey
About Family Constellations and generally all round awful person, Bert Hellinger
TNP229: What It Feels Like For A Girl with Emelia Symington-Fedy
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Welcome to the final episode of my Witches New Year Podcast Retreat! As you likely know by now, I have a new book coming out in January 2025 called Spells for the Apocalypse: Practical Magic for Turbulent Times. In this episode, you'll get all the tea on how this book came to be, learn what advanced readers like Colette Baron-Reid and Asha Frost had to say about it, and hear excerpts from two chapters: a ritual on facing Fear, and an invocation for Wholeness.
Referenced in this episode:
The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman
Colette Baron-Reid's Enchanted Map Oracle Deck
You Are The Medicine: 13 Moons of Indigenous Wisdom, Asha Frost
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🎉 This episode is for all the collapse nerds! 🎉
🛑 Content warning 🛑: Frank discussion of near-term scientifically accepted and expected climate crises. For all the folks who feel fragile and might be tipped into a downward spiral, maybe skip this one, yeah?
I've invited collapse astrologer, Hummingbird Star, from @astrologyfortherevolution to join us for Witches New Year to do our year ahead overview. 👏🏻
Given where we're at in the grand scheme of things, I asked Hummingbird to scan the medium-term horizon to help us understand what the Hermit year might be preparing us for on a collective scale. We're not only touching on topics we may want to contemplative in our collective Hermit year, but also the personal question of what role we wish to play in the revolution.
In this episode, we touch on the Neptunian shifts we should be tracking and much, much more.
Check out Hummingbird's website: www.astrologyfortherevolution.comInstagram: www.instagram.com/astrologyfortherevolutionYouTube: www.youtube.com/@collapseastrology
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NOTE: In this episode, we talk about the potential failure of the AMOC (Atlantic meridional overturning circulation) and since I was speaking off the cuff, there's a danger that this could be spread as misinformation.
So to be clear: Here's a really nice, succinct and digestible explanation of what the AMOC is, and a nice, succinct, and conservative interpretation of what the shutdown would do, from The Guardian (Oct 23, 2024):
"AMOC, or the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, is a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic. Warm surface water from the tropics flows north and releases its heat in the subpolar Atlantic, south of Greenland and west of Britain and Ireland. Then it cools and sinks to a depth of between 2,000m to 3,000 metres before returning south as a cold current. Amoc is one of our planet’s largest heat transport systems, moving the equivalent of 50 times the human energy use, and it has a particularly strong impact on the climate in Europe, affects the ocean’s CO2 uptake and oxygen supply, as well as rainfall patterns in the tropics."
"The effects (of a shutdown) include a cooling of the northern hemisphere, particularly northwestern Europe. There would also be a shift of the tropical rainfall belt to the south, which is bad because the rains will move away from the rainforests to regions that are not used to so much rainfall. So this will mean droughts in some regions and floods in others.
AMOC collapse would also have a major impact on the northern Atlantic sea level, which would rise by half a metre or so, in addition to the rise caused by global heating. It would also reduce the CO2 uptake of the ocean because AMOC sinking in the northern Atlantic takes a lot of CO2 down into the deep oceans where it is safely locked away from the atmosphere.
AMOC collapse would also change the nutrient supply and reduce the oxygen of the deep oceans. This would have a massive effect on marine biology and the entire ecosystem of the northern Atlantic."
Generally speaking, what climate scientists in the past had predicated would not happen until after 2050 is happening now, 30 years earlier. It's not that much of a stretch then, to say that what they predicted would happen *before* 2050 will occur a decade earlier. So the possible range of hitting a tipping point to an AMOC shutdown was predicted to be somewhere between 2030 and 2075, or the end of the century as the very outside possibility of it taking that long.
So that puts the tipping point to shutdown right around... now.
Learn more about the AMOC shutdown from collapse expert, Sharon Astyk
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We're preparing for a soul-searching kind of year with the Hermit card overlighting our path. In the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck, Key 9 (in other words, card number 9) is the Hermit card. In numerology, next year is a 9 year (2+0+2+5). So we look to the lessons of the Hermit card for clues about our developmental task on the spiritual level for the year ahead.
In this episode, I share a brief overview of the Fool's entire journey through the Major Arcana, using Rachel Pollack's Three Cycles of the Majors before I dive deep into the lessons of the Hermit.
Plus we'll notice some patterns when it comes to some intensely disruptive historical events that occured the last time we experienced some of the major outer planet transits that will be happening again in 2025, (which, when taken altogether, are really giving Hermit vibes).
Plus! I offer a 5-card spread to help you interpret the Hermit card and how you can apply its lessons in 2025.
Referenced in this episode:
Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy by Chris Marmolejo
Holistic Tarot by Benebell Wen
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{Witches New Year Podcast Retreat} In this very special episode, we're doing a deep dive into the Eleusinian Mysteries and the cults of Demeter and Persephone, including a special trance journey to walk the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis, as the ancient initiates did.
Referenced in this episode:
Eleusinian terracotta figurine
Dr.Cyndi Brannen
Jean Shinoda Bolen
Marija Gimbutas
Charlene Spretnak
Dr.Mara Keller
Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries
The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries by R.Gordon Wasson* (I have concerns about super shitty and extractive research methods here - not sure I recommend but am citing for proper attribution of research I accessed for this class and subsequent podcast)
Present-day Eleusis from Google Earth
Present-day Athenian Agora
Trance music: "Adrift 2" by Christopher Lloyd Clarke
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We're back with another class from The Numinous School archive: Trancework Fundamentals. Here you'll learn:
• what is trance? • how does it work?• what is it good for?• is it safe? • what qualities should we look for in a guide to signal that we can trust them with this process?
I'm giving you this information now so you're well prepared in advance of the next episode which will feature a richly evocative trance journey to participate as an initiate in the Eleusinian Mysteries, a 9-day rite of devotion to Demeter, Persephone, Hekate and others, one of the most famous rites of the Hellenistic world performed annually in the autumn.
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Prism Magic Mushroom Tea from Sero (affiliate link - Canada only)
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The ritual craft for this year's Samhain Wheel of the Year is a perennial favourite: Witch Ladders! I never get bored of them. And I rarely get rid of them, but when I do you'll learn in this episode what I do with them when the magic is finished. You'll want to consult your copy of The Spirited Kitchen for help in deciding which Magical Correspondences will fulfill your intention and make this an effective spell for you. Or simply listen to this episode in full and let the spirit move you towards the materia magica that intuitively works for you!
Mentioned in this episode:
Witch ladder inspo 1
Witch ladder inspo 2
Witch ladder inspo 3
Witch ladder inspo 4
Witch ladder inspo 5
Witch ladder inspo 6
Somerset Witch Ladder: Witches' Ladder: The Hidden History
Knot of Isis
Gordian Knot
Trinity Knot/Triquetra
Buddhist Endless Knot
Constrictor Knot
In the Bath House at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia by W.F. Ryan
The Power of Words in Miracles, Visions, Incantations and Bewitchments by Klaniczay Gabor
Carmina Gadelica
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Check out my Gut-Directed Hypnotherapy program in The Numinous Network
Prism Magic Mushroom Tea from Sero (affiliate link - Canada only)
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In this essay I will show how Thomas Aquinas, due to his early life attachment ruptures and abandonment wound, and under the influence of the violent toxic masculinity of the Inquisition and Aristotle's writings, became a 23 year old incel who went on to drive an 800 year wedge between intuition and the mind for people of European descent.
Enjoy!
Mentioned in this episode:
Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches in the Western Tradition with Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Why Evil Exists with Professor Charles Mathewes, Ph.D., University of Virginia
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Check out my Gut-Directed Hypnotherapy program in The Numinous Network
Prism Magic Mushroom Tea from Sero (affiliate link - Canada only)
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Happy 49th birthday to me! Here's my gift to you: This is the first episode of a personal retreat podcast miniseries! Half of the episodes help you prepare for the season of the witch, the other half offer a guided day of ritual, trancework, self-care, and divination for 2025. It's a party at your own pace! A party for introverts! We're all doing similar things but inside our own homes on our own time. Huzzah! 🎉 🥳 🎂
I'll be honest, I've got a lot going on right now so this is probably the most off-the-cuff episode I've ever produced. But if you can put up with all my side quest, stories and tangents, there's a lot of good instruction here, especially for folks who are new to working with altars or ancestors.
Here's a shrine I made for Isobell, my grandmother
Mentioned in this episode:
Crafting Personal Shrines: Using Photos, Mementos & Treasures to Create Artful Displays, by Carol Owen
YouTube: AirDry Clay Shrines by CraftyChica Kathy Cano-Murillo
TNP99: Monsters and Magical Beings with John Michael Greer
AstroMagic Miniseries
Try the Gut-Directed Hypnotherapy program in The Numinous Network
Prism Magic Mushroom Tea from Sero (affiliate link - Canada only)
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Did you know that matrescence – the process of becoming a mother – takes approximately 2-3 years? It's far from the 3, 6, or 12 month process we've been made to believe. In fact, 20 years after giving birth to my child, I'm still grappling with how it changed me, how I want to mother, and what this identity means to me.
My guest for this episode is Jessie Harrold, coach, doula, educator and author of Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage. We're talking about:
• Who goes through "matrescence"? Who is a mother?? What is mothering???• Should postpartum depression (or postpartum anxiety) an expected part of matrescence?• How do we manage the grief, rage or ambivalence that often comes with motherhood?• How are mothers specially equipped to disrupt social norms like capitalism?
Please do pre-order Mothershift before November 11 – get your own Mothershift journal as a bonus gift!
On November 20th from 6-7p.m. Atlantic Time, Jessie will be hosting a virtual launch party with Q&A, giveaways, and practices. Sign up for her newsletter to learn more.
Follow Jessie on Instagram
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Jordan Pickell is a Vancouver, BC-based a trauma counsellor. Issues centred in her work include boundary setting, making friends and building community, and the impacts of trauma, violence and oppression. She's our hype woman today for building better boundaries with our parents.
I happened to see on Instagram that Jordan is once again offering her 2hr online workshop, Build Better Boundaries, on Friday, November 15, 2024. It's recorded in case you can't make it live, and it’s less than $40 Canadian!
In that workshop, you’ll map your current relationship dynamics, you’ll uncover your personal boundaries blueprint, and craft a personalized boundaries action plan. In other words, you’re going to get yourself out of the freeze response, and lay the critical groundwork for success so that when you actually do the thing, you are mobilized and confident and ready to handle whatever happens next.
Enjoy this conversation as a warm-up: You'll hear me share about my own journey of setting boundaries, more than a decade of estrangement from my mom, and repair with impacted family members. Jordan shares about her family's style of "enmeshment", the experience of being a first daughter, and cultural factors as a person of mixed race.
It's an honest and tender conversation, and I'm happy to hear how it lands for you: Click here to leave me a voice note or written message!
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