Back from the Borderline

Are we thinking ourselves into a new dark age?

We’ve spent the better part of seventy years trying to understand ourselves through psychology. We know about attachment styles, childhood trauma, unconscious motivations, and all the reasons we supposedly behave the way we do. We’ve diagnosed our exes, analyzed our childhoods, and built an entire industry around the promise that knowing ourselves better will help us live better lives. And yet, despite everything we’ve learned, we seem increasingly unsure about what makes life meaningful in the first place.

In 1957, an American psychologist called Ira Progoff wrote an introduction to a medieval Christian mystical text called The Cloud of Unknowing. He was troubled by how readily modern psychology dismissed centuries of knowledge about the human mind simply because that knowledge came from religious traditions. Reading his observations nearly seventy years later, I was struck by how little some of our underlying assumptions have changed, even as psychology has gained so much influence over the way we understand ourselves.

His writing got me thinking about the history of psychology, the decline of Christianity’s influence in the West, and something I’ve been describing as spiritual homelessness. We’ve gained considerable freedom to decide what we believe and how we want to live. But we’ve also inherited the responsibility of figuring out what any of it is for. Psychology has offered us ways to understand our suffering, while the bigger questions about meaning and how we ought to live remain unsettled.

Meanwhile, self-understanding has grown into a very profitable business. There’s now a psychological explanation available for almost every uncomfortable feeling or disappointing relationship, usually followed by a book, a course, or another video promising to help us understand ourselves a little better. And the more time we spend searching for answers, the more money there is to be made from keeping us searching.

This episode explores why we’re so uncomfortable with uncertainty, how psychology came to occupy such a central place in Western life, and whether our endless search for explanations is making us any wiser.

There’s a certain irony in all of this. We tend to look back at the Middle Ages as a time when people understood very little about the world. Yet medieval Christian mystics were already asking questions about the limits of human knowledge that our own culture seems increasingly reluctant to face.

We know a great deal about how the human mind works. We seem far less certain about what makes a life worth living. I wonder whether the next great intellectual revolution might involve revisiting some of the things we were so confident we’d outgrown.

STUDY COMPANION | RECOMMENDED READING

• The Cloud of Unknowing — Anonymous, translated by Ira Progoff (1957)
• New Seeds of Contemplation — Thomas Merton (1962)
• Open Mind, Open Heart — Thomas Keating (1986)
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind — Shunryu Suzuki (1970)
• The Book of Not Knowing — Peter Ralston (2010)
• The Interior Castle — Teresa of Ávila (1577)

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EXPLORE MORE ON PATREON: Back from the Borderline is an independent podcast exploring depth psychology and mysticism. My Patreon archive contains hundreds of exclusive episodes, including extensive investigations of the subjects explored with Anne. Browse the Collections tab to explore the archive and support future conversations. Check it all out at https://www.patreon.com/c/backfromtheborderline.

WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS →https://www.moods.world/ MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at go.moods.world/podcast.

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We’ve learned so much about healing, but have we learned how to love?

After eight conversations with 95-year-old Jungian analyst and author Anne Baring, I found myself questioning some of the beliefs I’d spent years defending, including my own understanding of spiritual development.

In this deeply personal epilogue, I’m reflecting on our generation’s hunger for spiritual wisdom, the temptation to romanticize forgotten traditions, and a culture increasingly fascinated with extraordinary experiences while struggling with the much quieter work of personal transformation. We’ll explore the spiritual ego, the sacred marriage, and why understanding ourselves so thoroughly can sometimes prevent us from being changed.

These conversations with Anne have affected me in ways I never anticipated. Some of the most meaningful lessons came from experiences we never recorded.

This episode stands on its own, but I recommend listening to the full series for a deeper understanding of the ideas explored here.

LISTEN TO THE COMPLETE ANNE BARING SERIES

This is the ninth and final installment of my series with Anne Baring. Across eight conversations, we explore the history of the feminine divine, Sophia, Mary Magdalene, Christian mysticism, and the sacred marriage.

If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK

This series draws primarily on Anne’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

Listen to Anne’s complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself.

Explore Anne’s books and research on her official website.

FURTHER READING

For listeners who’d like to investigate some of the ideas discussed in this epilogue:

• Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism
• Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life
• Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective
• Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul
• Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance

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EXPLORE MORE ON PATREON: Back from the Borderline is an independent podcast exploring depth psychology and mysticism. My Patreon archive contains hundreds of exclusive episodes, including extensive investigations of the subjects explored with Anne. Browse the Collections tab to explore the archive and support future conversations. Check it all out at https://www.patreon.com/c/backfromtheborderline.

WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS →https://www.moods.world/ MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at go.moods.world/podcast.

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For seven conversations, Anne Baring and I have been investigating the forgotten feminine face of God. We’ve explored Sophia, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, and the religious traditions that preserved aspects of the sacred feminine. Now, in our eighth and final conversation, we’re asking what all of that knowledge is supposed to do to us.

We start at Chartres Cathedral in France, where a medieval labyrinth invites pilgrims to walk toward its center before returning to the world. From there, Anne and I explore the neglected wisdom of the heart, the relationship between childhood wounds and religious ideas about guilt, and the sacred marriage, or hieros gamos, as a way of understanding the divisions within ourselves.

After months of investigating religious history, we find ourselves confronting a much more personal question. How do we allow these teachings to change the way we live?

This is Part 8 of an eight-part series. New listeners are encouraged to start with Part 1. Next week, I’ll return with a personal epilogue reflecting on how my own thinking has changed throughout these conversations.

EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK: This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at https://www.annebaring.com/.

MY TWELVE PART SERIES ON CHILDHOOD EMOTIONAL NEGLECT: Click here to start episode 1.

BOOKS & FURTHER READING

• Anne Baring & Jules Cashford: The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image
• Banafsheh Sayyad: Dance of Oneness: Embody Love and Luminosity to Transform Your Life
• Peter Kingsley: In the Dark Places of Wisdom
• Neale Donald Walsch: Conversations with God (audiobook edition discussed in the episode)
• Charles Spencer: A Very Private School

PLACES & PRACTICES

• Chartres Cathedral: Medieval labyrinth and rose windows
• HeartMath Institute: Heart-focused contemplative practices
• Sufi whirling: Sacred dance tradition discussed by Anne

ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED: Ubiquity University | Humanity’s Team | The Shift Network

EXPLORE MORE ON PATREON: Back from the Borderline is an independent podcast exploring depth psychology and mysticism. My Patreon archive contains hundreds of exclusive episodes, including extensive investigations of the subjects explored with Anne. Browse the Collections tab to explore the archive and support future conversations. Check it all out at https://www.patreon.com/c/backfromtheborderline.

WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS →https://www.moods.world/ MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at https://www.moods.world/.

Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

In medieval southern France, a woman stood up during a religious debate and challenged the men who claimed the authority to speak for God. A Catholic cleric told her to return to her spinning, because theology was no business of hers. Her identity was Esclarmonde de Foix, and she belonged to a Christian religious culture in which women could teach, exercise spiritual authority and administer sacred rites.

This is Part 7 of my series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying Christian mysticism and the forgotten feminine dimension of divinity. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

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In the last episode, Anne and I explored the Black Madonna, the Grail and the possibility that teachings associated with Miriam Magdalene survived in medieval France. Now we enter the Languedoc and the world of the Cathars, a Christian religious movement whose beliefs brought them into direct conflict with Rome.

Through Esclarmonde’s life, Anne introduces us to a society where women could participate in theological debate and religious leadership, and where Christianity was understood in ways that would eventually be condemned as heresy.

The Catholic Church launched a crusade against these communities in 1209. What followed remains one of the most devastating episodes in medieval European religious history. Anne believes the Cathars may have preserved teachings associated with early Gnostic Christianity and Mary Magdalene.

After our conversation, I return with some personal reflections, including the extraordinary experiences that first led me toward Esclarmonde years before these interviews. I also discuss recent reading that has challenged some of my own assumptions about Catharism and made me reconsider how easily we can romanticize the religious past.

☿

ANNE BARING

Writer, Jungian analyst and author of Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. Explore Anne’s work and writings at https://www.annebaring.com/.

STUDY COMPANION

✦ John and Caitlín Matthews, Walkers Between the Worlds

✦ Arthur Guirdham, research on Cathar reincarnation and past-life memory

✦ Jehanne de Quillan, The Gospel of the Beloved Companion

✦ Gilles Quispel, research on Gnosticism and the Apocryphon of John

✦ Margaret Barker, research on First Temple theology and Divine Wisdom

✦ Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief

✦ Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom

EARLY CHRISTIAN AND CATHAR TEXTS

☿ The Apocryphon of John

☿ Liber de duobus principiis (The Book of Two Principles)

☿ The consolamentum, the Cathar rite of spiritual baptism

RELATED LISTENING

✦ This Episode Isn’t About UFOs, It’s About You (Part 1)

✦ This Episode Isn’t About UFOs, It’s About You (Part 2)

The first two episodes document the synchronicities and experiences that eventually led me toward Esclarmonde and Anne’s research. Buckle in, it’s a wild ride.

SOURCE NOTE: This conversation moves between documented history, medieval legend and esoteric interpretation. Some of Anne’s proposed connections remain speculative. I’ve included these resources so you can investigate the evidence and reach your own conclusions.

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WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership →https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderlinehttps://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline. There are hundreds of private episodes going back to 2021, plus new Premium audio, House of Cards (my ongoing Rider-Waite-Smith tarot study).

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MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at https://www.moods.world/.

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A spiritual teacher dies, her community has to continue without her, and centuries later the written record can no longer tell us exactly how her teachings moved from one generation to the next. What, if anything, survives?

This is Part 6 of my multi-part series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying Divine Wisdom, Christian mysticism and the feminine dimension of divinity. Each conversation can stand on its own, but they build on one another. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

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Last week, we focused on Miriam Magdalene and early Christian writings that present her as a woman with spiritual authority of her own. This week, Anne takes us west.

In the tradition Anne works with, Miriam travels to Gaul after Yeshua’s death and spends the rest of her life teaching there. After her death, the historical record gets much harder to follow. Centuries pass before medieval France gives us another dense concentration of religious images, stories and devotional practices that Anne believes deserve serious examination.

That gap sits at the center of this episode. A book can be confiscated or burned, while people can continue visiting a statue, singing to her, asking her for healing and teaching their children to make the same pilgrimage. How much religious knowledge can survive that way, even when later generations no longer fully understand what earlier generations were preserving?

Anne takes us into the Black Madonna tradition, sacred caves and medieval devotion, and later into the Grail stories and the wounded king whose dying country can only recover when someone finally asks about his suffering. We also spend time with the Lady of courtly love and an old attempt to teach men trained for war another relationship with women and power.

After Anne and I finished recording, I kept reading Jessie L. Weston’sFrom Ritual to Romance, which Anne recommends during our conversation. I discovered that I had misunderstood an important piece of the Grail material we had just discussed. I come back after the interview to tell you what I found, why it changed the way I hear the Grail story, and why I’m now wondering how often a culture keeps the image, ritual or story while slowly forgetting how earlier generations understood it.

☿

ANNE BARING

Writer, Jungian analyst and author whose work explores Divine Wisdom, Christian mysticism and the recovery of the feminine dimension of divinity. Explore Anne’s work: https://annebaring.com/

STUDY COMPANION

✦ Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance

✦ Annine van der Meer, research on the Black Madonna and Mary Magdalene

✦ Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom

✦ James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

PEOPLE AND TRADITIONS DISCUSSED

☿ Black Madonna devotion

☿ Parmenides and ancient incubation rites

☿ Chrétien de Troyes and the Grail romances

☿ Eleanor of Aquitaine, troubadours and courtly love

☿ The Knights Templar, Sufism and medieval intellectual exchange

☿ The wounded king and the Waste Land

SOURCE NOTE: Anne and I move between documented history, medieval legend and esoteric interpretation throughout this conversation. Some of the connections proposed here are speculative. Read the sources, compare competing interpretations and see where your own research takes you.

Next in the series: Esclarmonde de Foix, Joan of Arc and the Cathars.

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WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership →https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderlinehttps://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

There are hundreds of private episodes going back to 2021, plus new Premium audio, House of Cards (my ongoing Rider-Waite-Smith tarot study), and an even larger Ultra Premium archive with access to Votive House, my twice-monthly live conversation series.

WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS →https://www.moods.world/https://www.moods.world/

MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world.

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Mary Magdalene has spent nearly two thousand years buried under other people’s interpretations of her. Repentant prostitute. Devoted disciple. Apostle to the apostles. Mystic. Wife of Jesus. Suppressed leader of early Christianity. This episode asks us to actually meet Miriam before deciding who she was.

This is Part 5 of my multi-part series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying the Goddess tradition, Christian mysticism, Divine Wisdom, and the feminine dimension of divinity. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

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Our previous conversation explored the Essenes, the Therapeutae, and the religious culture Anne believes surrounded Yeshua. Here, we focus on Mary Magdalene as a spiritually educated woman and an initiate in her own right.

We look at early Christian writings in which Mary repeatedly understands teachings that other disciples struggle to grasp, then ask the question at the center of this episode. How much spiritual authority did Mary possess?

Her relationship with Yeshua is part of that investigation. We discuss The Gospel of Philip, the Greek word koinōnos, traditions concerning their possible marriage, and the consequences of understanding Mary as Yeshua’s spiritual counterpart.

We also discuss The Gospel of the Beloved Companion and Annine van der Meer’s Mary Magdalene Unveiled, which examines proposed connections between the Beloved Companion material and the canonical Gospel of John. These claims are extremely controversial. Anne finds the case persuasive, and so do I. I’ve included key sources below so you can examine the material yourself.

Near the end, Anne reads an initiatory teaching attributed to Miriam concerning ascension, direct spiritual knowledge, fear, and power. After the interview, I return for a longer reflection on why I think this teaching deserves serious contemplation.

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ANNE BARING // https://www.annebaring.com/

EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTS

☿ Pistis Sophia

☿ The Gospel of Mary

☿ The Gospel of Philip

☿ The Gospel of Thomas

☿ The Gospel of John

MARY MAGDALENE RESEARCH

✦ Jehanne de Quillan, The Gospel of the Beloved Companion

✦ Annine van der Meer, Mary Magdalene Unveiled

✦ Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

✦ Margaret Barker, First Temple theology and traditions of heavenly ascent

VISIONARY SOURCE

☽ Claire Heartsong, Anna, Grandmother of Jesus

SOURCE NOTE: Compare translations, read competing interpretations, and see where your own research takes you.

New episodes of Back from the Borderline are released every Tuesday. Follow the podcast wherever you listen, and if someone comes to mind while hearing this episode, send it to them.

Next in the series: The Black Madonna, the Grail and the Survival of the Feminine Tradition.

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WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership →https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderlinehttps://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

There are hundreds of private episodes going back to 2021, plus new Premium audio, House of Cards (my ongoing Rider-Waite-Smith tarot study), and an even larger Ultra Premium archive with access to Votive House, my twice-monthly live conversation series. Paid audio can also be connected directly to Spotify, so you can keep listening where you already listen.

WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS →https://www.moods.world/https://www.moods.world/

MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world. Paid BFTB members also get MOODS for $15/month instead of $22.

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What kind of spiritual world could have formed Yeshua before Christianity existed?

This is Part 4 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend beginning with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, and following the series in order.

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Christianity often starts its story when Jesus begins preaching. In this conversation, Anne and I go further back and ask what was already there.

Anne takes us into her understanding of the Essenes and Therapeutae, contemplative communities she believes preserved an older Wisdom tradition concerned with healing, direct experience of the divine and disciplined development of consciousness. They called themselves Children of the Light. Anne places Yeshua inside this religious world and describes him as an elder brother and teacher who had gone further in his spiritual development and could show others what a human being was capable of.

We talk about what spiritual training was actually for. Anne describes meditation, inner vision and ascension, along with an understanding of healing based on restoring harmony within the person. The heart served as an organ of discernment, while religious knowledge was expected to alter how someone lived rather than remain an idea about God.

The women around Yeshua come into focus in the second half of the conversation. Anne describes Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene as advanced initiates and teachers rather than the passive figures many of us inherited through Christian tradition. We talk about women as healers, the spiritual education of children and Anne’s beautiful description of motherhood and caregiving as forms of initiation into love and service.

Some of Anne’s reconstruction draws on historical and late-antique texts, while some comes from modern channeled material, especially the work of Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis. I spend time in the introduction explaining these sources and why I’m willing to investigate visionary material without treating it as documentary history.

The episode ends exactly where the next conversation needs to start. Anne describes Christianity as having lost the inner mystery school she believes was intended to develop alongside its public teaching. Part 5 is devoted entirely to the woman she places near the center of that missing tradition: Mary Magdalene.

☿

ANNE BARING

Official website: https://www.annebaring.com/

ESSENE + WISDOM TEXTS DISCUSSED

The Essenes: Children of the Light — Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis

The Power of the Magdalene — Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis

The Essene Gospel of Peace

Pistis Sophia

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

AUTHORS + SCHOLARS TO FOLLOW

Stuart Wilson

Joanna Prentis

Flavius Josephus

Dr. Annine van der Meer

Marguerite Rigoglioso

Carl Jung

☽

WANT MORE BFTB? Join the paid membership → https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

There are hundreds of private episodes going back to 2021, plus new Premium audio, House of Cards (my ongoing Rider-Waite-Smith tarot study), and an even larger Ultra Premium archive with access to Votive House, my twice-monthly live conversation series. Paid audio can also be connected directly to Spotify, so you can keep listening where you already listen.

WANT SOMEWHERE TO TAKE WHAT THIS EPISODE BROUGHT UP FOR YOU? Try MOODS → https://www.moods.world/

MOODS is my reflective intelligence platform for dream work, tarot, symbolic reflection, and deeper inner inquiry. Bring it a dream, a question, something happening in your life, or an idea from the podcast you want to spend more time with. You can start free for 7 days at moods.world. Paid BFTB members also get MOODS for $15/month instead of $22.

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What if early Christianity contained a path centered on direct knowledge of the divine within us, and that path was pushed outside the Church that survived?

This is Part 3 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend beginning with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, followed by Part 2 on Marija Gimbutas and the civilization of Old Europe.

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In this conversation, Anne and I enter the world of Gnostic Christianity and a Yeshua many of us were never introduced to: a teacher concerned with awakening human beings to the divine light within themselves. That understanding of Jesus sits uneasily beside the Christianity that eventually gained institutional power in Rome.

We start with Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose surviving poem describes a journey into darkness, guidance from the daughters of the Sun, and knowledge received directly from a goddess. Anne sees him as part of a more ancient visionary tradition that continued into Gnosticism, where gnosis meant direct knowledge of the divine rather than religious belief alone.

From there, we get into the Gnostic Yeshua, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, and why a Christianity built around the divine light within the human being came into conflict with the Church that gained power in Rome.

Sophia is at the center of the episode. In Pistis Sophia, Divine Wisdom descends from her celestial home, becomes lost, and has to find her way back toward the Light through thirteen metanoias, or changes in consciousness. Anne compares her story with the Christian interpretation of the Fall, especially the guilt and disobedience that became attached to Eve. Sophia gives us another way of understanding what has gone wrong. She has lost touch with where she came from and mistakes a lesser light for the true one. Her task is to wake up, learn to see differently, and remember.

We also spend part of the conversation with Carl Jung. Anne trained as a Jungian analyst, and she talks about Jung’s own visionary experiences, Philemon, The Red Book, his fascination with the Gnostics, and the task he believed he had failed to complete before his death: restoring the reality of the soul to Western consciousness.

Near the end, Anne reads from Trimorphic Protennoia, where the Divine Feminine speaks in the first person, and The Hymn of the Pearl, a Gnostic poem she has lived with for roughly sixty years. Both return us to the idea running through this entire conversation: that spiritual life begins in remembering what we are and where we came from.

☿

ANNE BARING

Official website: https://www.annebaring.com/

BOOKS BY ANNE BARING

Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God

The Myth of the Goddess with Jules Cashford

The Dream of the Cosmos

Messages From a Transcendent Dimension

GNOSTIC TEXTS DISCUSSED

Pistis Sophia

Trimorphic Protennoia

The Sophia of Jesus Christ

The Hymn of the Pearl

The Nag Hammadi codices

The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Philip

CARL JUNG

The Red Book

Seven Sermons to the Dead

Answer to Job

ALSO MENTIONED

Parmenides

G.R.S. Mead

Peter Kingsley

Orpheus and the Orphic tradition

Heraclitus

Pythagoras

Plato and Aristotle

Zosimus of Panopolis

G.I. Gurdjieff

Father Richard Rohr

Marie-Louise von Franz

Philemon

Theodosius I

Taxila

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CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

You’ll get:

☆ Weekly bonus episodes

☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)

☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts

☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)

If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/

MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

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What if the history of Europe contains a civilization most of us were never taught about?

This is Part 2 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, which introduces Anne and the larger history we’ll be following together.

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In this conversation, Anne takes me into the work of Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and the world she called Old Europe, a network of Neolithic cultures across southeastern Europe that she spent decades studying through figurines, vessels, settlements, burial sites, goldwork and recurring religious imagery.

Anne explains why Gimbutas believed this world was centered on the Great Goddess, how she read birds, snakes, spirals and water as part of a shared sacred language, and why she argued that these societies were matrilineal, broadly egalitarian and unusually free from organized warfare.

We also talk about the later movement of steppe peoples into Europe, the fierce opposition Gimbutas faced during her career, and the later ancient DNA research Anne sees as supporting an important part of her migration theory.

The conversation also becomes beautifully and unexpectedly personal. Anne speaks about growing up with a mother who received channeled writings, the out-of-body experience Anne had at thirteen, and the dream that brought Jules Cashford to her and eventually led to the ten-year writing of The Myth of the Goddess.

Anne also remembers seeing the objects from The Lost World of Old Europe in person at the Ashmolean Museum, including the great painted vessels that left her speechless. We end by asking why this history still matters to her, and what she would say to Marija Gimbutas if she could sit across from her now.

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ANNE BARING

Official website: https://www.annebaring.com/

BOOKS BY MARIJA GIMBUTAS

The Language of the Goddess

The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe

ALSO MENTIONED

The Myth of the Goddess by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford

Messages From a Transcendent Dimension by Anne Baring

Joseph Campbell

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Federico Faggin

Iain McGilchrist

SEE THE OBJECTS

The Lost World of Old Europe exhibition via New York University’s YouTube channel [click here to view]

☽

CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

You’ll get:

☆ Weekly bonus episodes

☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)

☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts

☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)

If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/

MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

Hosted on Acast. See https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

For thousands of years, the Western image of God became increasingly male. Anne Baring has spent much of her life studying what we lost when the feminine disappeared from our understanding of the divine.

This is Part 1 of my eight-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September 2026. Over the course of the series, we’ll explore the work Anne has spent much of her life devoted to, from the ancient Goddess and the Western wisdom traditions to Mary Magdalene, the Divine Feminine and the sacred marriage. This first conversation introduces Anne and many of the ideas we’ll return to in much greater depth throughout the series.

Born in 1931, Anne is an Oxford-educated historian, Jungian analyst and co-author with Jules Cashford of The Myth of the Goddess. We begin with the ancient Great Mother and the work of Marija Gimbutas, before moving into Anne’s account of how Western religion gradually separated spirit from nature. She takes us through Asherah and Sophia, the feminine Holy Spirit, Mary Magdalene and the Christian traditions she believes preserved an older teaching of love and wisdom. We also talk about power, self-deification, the body, and why Anne believes the loss of the feminine divine changed the way Western culture came to treat the Earth and one another.

Anne is 95, and this is the first in a series of conversations we’ll be recording together. Future episodes will give us time to stay with subjects we only scratch the surface of here, including Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Companion, the Essenes, the Cathars and the sacred marriage. This first conversation ends with Anne speaking personally about prayer, service and how her understanding of God has changed over the course of her life.

Explore Anne Baring’s Work

Official website: https://www.annebaring.com/

Books by Anne Baring

Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God

The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford

The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul

Books and Writers Mentioned

Marija Gimbutas: The Civilization of the Goddess

Marija Gimbutas: The Language of the Goddess

Erich Neumann: The Great Mother

Riane Eisler: The Chalice and the Blade

Margaret Barker

Elaine Pagels

The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, translated by Jehanne de Quillan

Related Episodes

My episode on Gnosticism, Sophia and the Gnostic creation myth

My previous episode on Mary Magdalene

House of Cards: In this episode, I mention my ongoing tarot series, House of Cards, during this conversation. We’re studying the cards one by one through mythology, religious history, occult philosophy and the Western wisdom traditions that regularly appear on the podcast. Join the Patreon and listen to House of Cards at https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

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In 2020, I almost paid $4,000 for a shadow work course. One of the first books I was told to read was Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink. I read it, tried to understand what I was being sold, and kept getting the same bad taste in my mouth. It’s been six years since then, and I’ve come back with receipts. I understand why it bothered me now.

This episode digs into the history behind some of online spirituality’s favorite borrowed ideas, Jungian shadow work, Tantra, sex magic, Thelema, Babalon, occult initiation, manifestation, the Left Hand Path, passive mediumship, and the modern spiritual coaching industry that learned how to package this material into high ticket programs.

I look closely at Carolyn Elliott’s work, what Carl Jung actually wrote about the shadow, how Western neo Tantra differs from older tantric traditions, and the ethics of a teacher who can reinterpret your hesitation as resistance, scarcity, fear, or evidence that you need their teaching.

We also need to talk about why psychologically intense spiritual work can go badly when authority outruns training, why so much ancient wisdom being sold online has a surprisingly modern family tree, and why people sometimes leave these spaces burned enough to decide that every form of esotericism must be "demonic".

If you’ve ever looked at a $3,000 retreat, a spiritual certification, an initiation, or an Instagram teacher promising transformation and thought, what the fuck am I looking at, this episode is for you.

For my full exploration of Aleister Crowley, Thelema, and sex magic, you can listen here.

If you want to join my card-by-card study of the Tarot through Christian Hermeticism and deep symbolic study, you can start from the beginning on Patreon. Click here or visit https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline.

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Aleister Crowley had a beautiful idea, and then he built a religion around himself.

This episode takes Thelema seriously enough to examine what Crowley was actually teaching. True Will sits at the center of it, alongside The Book of the Law, Aiwass, the Aeon of Horus, sex magick, Babalon, and Crowley’s claim that humanity had entered a new spiritual age. He drew heavily from the Golden Dawn and Hermetic Qabalah, then remixed and recast those traditions through his own revelation and his own ideas about freedom, sexuality, and authority.

I’m interested in the point where spiritual freedom starts giving one man an extraordinary amount of interpretive power. Crowley’s treatment of women, the role of the Scarlet Woman, the use of sex as magical technology, and the theology built around Babalon all deserve much more scrutiny than either Satanic Panic or Crowley worship tends to allow.

True Will can absolutely be understood as disciplined vocation rather than appetite, and many modern Thelemites read Crowley critically while taking consent and individual freedom seriously. The harder work here (that I attempt to undertake in this episode) is taking a hard look at the actual religion without turning it into either “evil” or “enlightenment”.

This is a study of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema from inside the Western mysteries, with plenty of sympathy for the questions Crowley was actually asking and very little patience for the places I think his answers went badly wrong.

Next week, we’ll be following Crowley’s massive influence all the way into online spirituality, Existential Kink, modern shadow work, sacred sexuality, and the high-ticket coaching economy.

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I’ve spent a lot of this series thinking about what happens when the body gets so used to effort that it forgets how to stop. By the time I got to this final episode, I found myself somewhere I didn’t expect. I was thinking about grace, and the spiritual cost of living as though everything depends on your ability to stay useful, vigilant, and in control.

In Part Three of The Braced Body, we’re taking everything we’ve learned about chronic tension and nervous system bracing into much deeper spiritual territory. I’ll get into the old argument between Augustine and Pelagius about human effort and grace, why Sabbath has something to say about our inability to stop working, and how ideas like kenosis and alchemy can help us think about surrender without turning it into weakness or self-erasure.

We’ll also spend some time with Meister Eckhart and the older mystical traditions that understood spiritual life as something we participate in rather than something we manufacture through enough effort.

Somewhere underneath all of this is a problem I know very well in myself. You can get very good at understanding/taking care of /improving yourself, and still be living as though receiving anything you didn’t somehow earn is dangerous as hell.

I wanted to know what happens when that habit reaches our spiritual lives too, and whether the body might know something about grace that the intellect has been trying to understand for centuries.

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Your body can be exhausted and still refuse to rest. You lie down, your jaw stays tight, your shoulders keep working, and some part of you remains ready for the next demand.

This is Part Two of a three-part series on chronic bracing. We move from why the body learned to stay tense into what it can do instead. Drawing on Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Hubert Godard, bodywork, and basic physics, I look at why yielding has such a bad reputation, how the floor and the bed support movement, and why “relax your shoulders” often changes almost nothing.

We also talk about the exhale, the fear of letting another person help, and the difference between yielding and giving up your choices. You’ll hear a few small practices that can help your nervous system notice support before it adds more effort. If you haven’t heard Part One, start with The Braced Body, Why You’re Tense Even When Nothing Is Wrong. Part Three will move into grace, surrender, and what it means for spiritual trust to reach the body.

CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

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☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)

☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts

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If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/

MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

Artwork credit: “Surrender” by Tom Sullivan (Saatchi Art China)

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Do you clench your jaw without noticing? Do your shoulders stay tense even when you’re finally sitting down to rest? Does your body still feel like it’s working long after the day is over?

This episode started with something completely ordinary. I was making the guest bed, lay down for a minute, and noticed that even though I was trying to rest, my entire upper body was still working. My shoulders were tense. My jaw was clenched. It was such a small moment, but it sent me down a rabbit hole. I wanted to understand why so many of us keep holding ourselves together long after we no longer have to.

In Part One of this series, we’ll look at why chronic jaw clenching, neck pain, shoulder tension, and the feeling of always being “on” can become so familiar that we stop noticing we’re doing them. We’ll also talk about why understanding your childhood, your attachment style, or your nervous system doesn’t automatically change these habits, even when you know exactly where they came from.

Along the way, I’ll borrow ideas from Moshe Feldenkrais, Wilhelm Reich, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I want to see whether their work can help explain why the body keeps preparing for demands that ended years ago, and why receiving support can feel so much harder than we expect, even if it seems really simple on the surface.

By the end of this episode, I hope you’ll start catching the moment your body begins to brace. That’s where change begins. You can’t work with something you can’t see. This is Part One of the series. In the next episode, we’ll stop asking why we brace and start looking at how the body learns to trust support again.

If you’re curious about trying the Feldenkrais Method yourself, https://FeldenkraisProject.com is a great place to start. The free lessons can help you notice how your body moves and where you may be using more effort than you need. You can check it out here: https://feldenkraisproject.com/.

CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

You’ll get:

☆ Weekly bonus episodes

☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)

☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts

☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)

If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/. MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

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A lot of us are walking around with religious trauma and a God-shaped hole.

I was raised inside a version of Christianity, and I know what it can leave in the body. Shame, fear, sexual repression, homophobia, spiritual surveillance, and the feeling that your body itself was a problem.

Leaving can honestly sometimes be the only answer. For some people, atheism feels better than trying to rescue anything with Jesus attached to it. Others move toward witchcraft, occultism, or a private spiritual life built from candles, books, rituals, and scraps. At the same time, plenty of people are running back to traditional Christianity because the modern world feels hollow, lonely, and stripped of beauty.

Both responses make sense. Burning the whole thing down can feel like the only honest answer when religion harmed you. Returning to the old Church can make sense when the alternative looks like “buy things, optimize yourself, and die.” At least the Church has ritual, saints, feast days, candles, moral demands, and a story larger than the self.

But neither response heals the wound on its own.

This episode is about the broken spiritual inheritance of the West, especially Christianity, and why we keep swinging between rejection and return. We leave the Church and lose old languages for grief, prayer, beauty, and moral life. Or we return and pretend the harm was exaggerated, as if shame, control, misogyny, homophobia, and fear of the body were just minor details. The Church absolutely preserved beauty, but it also caused immeasurable harm.

I’m interested in what happens after you’ve left, told the truth, stopped pretending the harm/abuse was acceptable, and still have to decide what you’ll carry forward.

This episode moves through religious trauma, Christianity, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, the Church of Rome, the broken masculine and feminine inside Western spirituality, and the problem of building a new spiritual life without pretending you made yourself from nothing.

Not everything can be saved, but not everything should be burned to ash. Both things can be true.

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If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/

MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

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This year, I had the chance to attend Contact in the Desert, which is a conference devoted to UFOs, psi phenomena, consciousness, and anomalous experience. While I was there, I joined a live podcast panel hosted by my friend Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops. Also on the panel were psi researcher Adam Curry and Josh from the Polarity YouTube channel, so the conversation went exactly where you’d expect it to go, which is to say… EVERYWHERE.

We dive into everything from UFOs and consciousness to the stranger and more fringe material underneath the usual disclosure conversation. Things like Carl Jung’s theory of the UFO as a mandala, CE5 (a contact practice where people use meditation and intention to invite anomalous lights or craft to appear), the unconscious mind, the body’s fear response, trauma, altered states, AI agents apparently inventing religious behavior, and one truly unforgettable story about raccoons creating a ritual around a quantum food dispenser. Yes, you read that right. :-)

The central focus of the panel ultimately circles around the idea that anomalous experiences seem to depend on what an individual psyche can tolerate and what our deeper wiring permits us to perceive.

I also talk about the orb sighting that completely changed my relationship to the phenomenon, and why my own work keeps returning to symbol, tarot, depth psychology, and archetypal thinking as tools for making contact with a deeper reality without losing my sh*t in this one.

I think a lot of UFO and disclosure discourse tends to get stuck on “weird things in the sky,” beings, craft, government secrets, etc. And don’t get me wrong, I think those are important things to dive into. The problem is that they leave out the bigger (and weirder) problem sitting right in front of us. Which is that the human being is the one doing the perceiving.

I hope you enjoy listening to this one as much as I enjoyed being a part of this panel with three awesome humans who I now consider dear friends.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Michael Phillip [Host of Third Eye Drops]

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thirdeyedrops

Josh [Creator of Polarity]

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PolarityJosh

🜁🜃🜄

TAKE THIS EPISODE INTO MOODS: MOODS is a private space for dream work, tarot, self-reflection, and exploring the ideas, questions, and patterns that emerge from episodes of BFTB—or your own life. Patreon members receive 31% off MOODS access with a 7-day free trial. To activate your discount, email support@moodscodex.com with “Patreon MOODS Access” and the email associated with your Patreon account. Read more about MOODS here.

MEMBER SUPPORT: Patreon comments and messages are not monitored for support. If you need help with account access, billing, subscription changes, listening setup, or a technical problem with the membership, visit https://bftbportal.com. The portal includes an email where you can reach me directly, though replies are reserved for genuine membership or access-related issues.

🜁🜃🜄

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This week, I was doing an I Ching reading, and one line stood out to me: “To find what you seek, leave the child and follow the adult.” This episode was inspired by that line. I use it to think through spiritual maturity, especially in a culture where adulthood often feels empty, exhausted, and totally cut off from wonder.

We talk about the younger self that still wants someone to come save us, hand us answers, or make the pain finally mean something. We also look at the way strong feelings can trick us into thinking something must be true, and how spirituality can become another way to avoid ordinary honesty, responsibility, and hard choices.

Then I connect that to Mary Magdalene, especially an early Christian text called the Gospel of Mary, where Mary says Jesus taught her things the other disciples didn’t hear, and the men have to decide whether they can accept that a woman may have received something they didn’t. We also talk about courtly love, the medieval idea that a knight had to learn patience and devotion through his love for the Lady, and the Cathars, a Christian group in southern France that was condemned by the Church and allowed women to carry spiritual authority.

This episode is for anyone who still wants a spiritual life, but doesn’t want to use spirituality as a way to stay stuck. I’m asking what it looks like to keep our sensitivity, curiosity, and openness, while also becoming someone who can make decisions, tell the truth, care for their real life, and stop waiting for something outside of themselves to fix everything.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, translated by Jehanne de Quillan
• Mary Magdalene Unveiled by Annine van der Meer
• The Dream of the Cosmos by Anne Baring
• Merchants of Light by Betty Kovacs
• The Cathars by Malcolm Barber
• Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont
• The I Ching, Hexagram 17, line 3

CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon →https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

You’ll get:

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☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts

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If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS →https://app.moods.world/

MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

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Dion Fortune was one of the great occult teachers of the twentieth century, and one of my personal favorites.

In this episode, I’m joined by Ike Baker for a conversation about Fortune and her legacy. We begin with Ike’s own relationship to her, including the story of visiting her grave in Glastonbury, then move into her work on magic, psychology, psychic hygiene, ritual, Qabalah, polarity, Christ, Crowley, Avalon, and the power of images to act upon the mind.

Fortune understood something we desperately need right now as a collective. The unseen world has consequences, the images we feed can become forces, the mind has gates, and ritual changes the one who repeats it.

Ike is teaching a full course on Dion Fortune beginning July 13th 2026, called The Magic of Dion Fortune. The course meets Mondays at 7pm Eastern via Zoom for 10 modules. All sessions will be recorded for registrant playback and will include custom syllabi, supplemental materials, and slides. The course covers Dion Fortune’s unpublished papers and rituals, along with an integrated study of her theory and practical work through 21 of her writings, including The Mystical Qabalah, Psychic Self-Defense, The Cosmic Doctrine, The Circuit of Force, Applied Magic, Sane Occultism, The Training and Work of an Initiate, her occult fiction, and her rites of Pan and Isis.

To register, visit https://ikebaker.com/, open the chat box, and tell Ike you’re from Back from the Borderline and want to register for The Magic of Dion Fortune. Use code BFTB100 for the listener discount.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

• Ike and Skyler’s Aetherica episode on Dion Fortune: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dion-fortune-theosophy-hermeneutics-qabalah-thought/id1696416784?i=1000763560692
• My episode: The Arrogance of Over-Empathy: https://pod.link/1576242501/episode/NmEzOTg5MmIzMGQ1ZWJmM2M5MmVjZTgx
• My Patreon-exclusive conversation with Ike Baker: https://www.patreon.com/backfromtheborderline/posts/lucid-in-dream-156921083
• Join House of Cards, my weekly tarot study series on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/collection/2222096
• Use MOODS to reflect on this episode →https://app.moods.world/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

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This episode is the opening lesson from my new Patreon series, House of Cards.

House of Cards is an ongoing study of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot through depth psychology, mythology, symbolism, dreams, and contemplative practice. Every week we move through the deck one card at a time, treating tarot as a language of psyche, symbol, and myth. I’m releasing this first lesson publicly because it explains the philosophy behind the series. You can continue the study from Lesson 2 onward over on Patreon.

In this introductory lesson we explore:

• Why symbolic literacy matters in the age of AI

• Why tarot is far more than fortune telling

• How sustained attention transforms the way we see

• Why symbolic systems have always been central to spiritual and psychological development

• How to approach this series for the deepest transformation

Suggested Deck

Throughout this series I’ll be using the Smith-Waite Centennial Tarot Deck (Pamela Colman Smith Centennial Edition). We’ll explore in much more granular detail why this particular deck was chosen in Lesson 2, which is available now on Patreon.

Next Episode

House of Cards 02: Why the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck: Join us on Patreon as we explore the origins of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, Arthur Edward Waite, Pamela Colman Smith, Christian Hermeticism, the revolution of the illustrated pip cards, and why this deck remains the symbolic language of modern tarot over a century after its creation.

Continue the Study

If you’d like to study the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot with me, you can join House of Cards over on Patreon. We’ll move through the deck one card at a time, one week at a time, treating each image as a living lesson in psyche, symbol, and myth. Start with Lesson 2 and join us whenever you’re ready.

👉 Join the study: https://www.patreon.com/collection/2222096

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