You see something's going to happen. What's going to happen?
Help?
What I you? Welcome back to the Occult Rejects Today we're joined by Marianna and Christina, the hosts of Sora Mystica, a podcast that describes itself as a podcast exploring modern spirituality through the eyes of the mystic sister. Their show brings together astrology, caro dreams, myth depth, psychology, art, literature, and the occult in a way that feels both scholarly
and intimate. On their public site, they described the show as a series of insightful, imaginative conversations meant to help listeners explore the rich symbolism of the world around them. I truly do think, and I really do mean this, that if I really do like this show, I really do think you'll like this, so I highly suggest to
check it out. Marianna Lewis presents herself publicly as an archetypal Taoist, terrorist, terrorists, psycho, spiritual educator, and sacred feminist with over a decade of scholarship in depth psychology, A Coult philosophy, and archetypal theory. Christina Ferrella describes herself as a counseling astrologer, astrology educator, an author whose work blends
astrology with mythology, art history, and literature. Together, sore Mistica has become a space for conversations on symbols like alchemy, the Great Mother, the Collective, Unconscious Reversals, retrogrades, dream language, and magic itself. Now, before I introduce the rest of the panel and the guests, I do have a few announcements.
On Saturday, April twenty fifth, the Southern the Southeastern Masonic Supposium is happening at Asheville Masonic Temple at eighty Broad Street Broadway Street in Ashville, North Carolina, and I will be there in person, So come down meet me and the rest of the true and who will be speaking there. We got John Michael Greer he will be speaking, he is the keynote speaker. Then we got my boy who's been on the show before and he's coming on more
Cown Concrete from American Eastoteric. He will be there as well. And my boy Ike Baker, He's going to be speaking along with Tom Carter. So we got four speakers that day. If you can make it, come on down, check me out. I'll smoke on with you all right. Also want to remind people about the website if you're into reading. We have tons of information and multiple contributors, and we finally got t shirts. T shirts up on the site if you're interested and fun fact, the art is all based
on the eyeball. So now let me introduce the rest of the panel and the guests. All right, Kaiva, what is going on? Kaiva? How are you? Please? Let everybody know who you are.
Thank hey, thanks for having me on.
My name is Kaiva Rose and I practiced tarot and astrology and you can find me on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. I do weekly astrology videos and I post some daily as well. If you like a reading, you can contact me at eleven Kaiba Rose three dot com as well.
I look forward to chanting with you all.
Oh, thank you. I really appreciate you coming on and brand my man maggize in the media. What is going on, Sir.
Sah Nick, Thank you for having me as always, love the show, love the place, love everything we do here. We are the occult rejects of the rejects. We are the heretics of all sorts. Everyone head over to Magus in the Media, where we break down myth, magic and meaning in the stories that we all love. Do the thing. I'm on X trying to take down all the craziness on both extremes as well as my Instagram where all the clips are put up there. We're doing it, and
we're doing it together. In this asia chaos, there's only one way out, and that's to become a magician, warrior, king, lover, queen, whoever you are, and let's do it together. I'm excited to be a part of this panel here today. Hello both of you. Nice to meet you.
Thank you very much, Brandon. I always love your introductions. Since we've had Marianna on before, I think we'll saw with Christina. Christina, please, if there was anything that I left out or anything you like to promote, please just introduce yourself and let people know what's up.
Oh sure, Hi, very grateful to be here with you all and happy to see my friend Marianna on the screen.
Yeah.
I'm an astrologer. I am actually a first time soon to be first time author. I just wrote a book called Divination for Dummies, like for the Dummies series and it is coming out April twenty eighth, and so if anybody is curious about a kind of really good primer on all things divinatory, meaning like intros into things like tarot and astrology, but also working with pendulums, scrying, dream interpretation, the e ching, casting charms, working with lots all of
these different topics, palmistry. Everything is in there, everything that like my teenage witchcraft self would have really enjoyed having in one book. Yeah, So that comes out, yeah, quite soon at the end of April. I also teach classes on an ongoing basis in astrology and also around the topics of myth and ritual. And my next class that's going to be starting also in late April, is called the School of Astrological Arcana. It's kind of like my
I call it my big class. It's like the top to bottom everything you want to having your toolkit if you are a budding astrologer. So that is starting really soon April twenty ninth. So you can find all the info about that on my website, which is Christinaferrella dot com. And I think that's it for now.
That's a wow. You're a very busy woman. You got a lot going on, especially in April.
Yeah, I don't know what's going on. With my Stars in April. But I'm clearly having some transits.
So if you don't mind me asking who you do publish the book.
With, It's Wiley. That's the company that publishes all of those dummies books. Yeah, yep. There. They seem to have like a cool acquisitions editor on board because they're branching out into other more occult territories. So I know that I've seen, you know, like a kind of herb craft book for dummies out recently by someone who I know
on the internet. There's folk witch craft for Dummies book that just came out, So I know that they're just kind of it seems like they're yeah, just getting into this world.
Yeah. Interesting, if you want, we'll have to get you on if you want, we can promote this book that's coming out in the futures. Yeah, I know. I think that is also just the amount of stuff you mentioned. I was like, wow, there's a lot in there. All right, good, good for you, Christina. That's also making it happen all right, doing Mariatta, that's uh, what's up with you? What's new with you since the last.
Time your own Oh well, my book came out.
That's true.
So that's really exciting, Tara, And the Psychology of the Soul is out and it has good reviews coming in.
Yes, I've noticed that myself on social media. I've seen between you and and Cherry Cherry that we had on both of you is a lot of people are raving about your books.
Yeah, it's really it's just wild. I mean, it's liked. Good for you actually read this? What are you talking about? Why would you do? How would you read that?
I don't want to read my own stuff.
Is so strange. But that is out. And then also, like Christine, I'm teaching a big class in April. We always do that somehow, we like like to each other to each other all the time, We're like, oh, I'm doing this, are you doing that? And then always is overlapping.
I think it's like a spring seasonal thing. It's just like new energy.
Yeah, yeah, it's And it's been such a miserable winter here on the East Coast, so I think everybody's looking for something fun to do. So I have my Archetypal Terror School, which is like my big program that I teach, coming out April nineteenth. So I'm in the middle of launching that and telling people about that, and so that's that's what's happening for me.
Awesome, good for you for you. Yeah, I don't know which one of you is wanting answer this, but I did kind of have it in the intro and I took it out, so I thought it'd be interesting to hear it from your side. How did you two meet?
We went to grad school together, so yeah, so we were both kind of like, I don't know what to do with my life. So we went to grad school, which is what you do when you don't want you know what to do with your life.
I guess, Yeah, when you're having a mental breakdown because you hate everything you've decided to do, you go to grad school.
Yeah, and we were both studying like Western intellectual traditions and like all this kind of weird out there stuff. We actually were taking a class together called Dreaming in the Middle Ages. So we met in this class and she did presentation of the fool card in the Tarot, and I got very jealous because she was smart and knew more about the taro than I did, so I was I was learning about the taro. And then we got a drink at some point and we're like, oh, no, actually we're friends.
And so then I didn't say oh no, I said, oh wow, yeah, But.
I know.
She ended up liking you.
I know what happens to people that I'm like, I'm not gonna like you a lot.
That's awesome though, Yeah, that's what I had. That you guys met in a class together. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. That's awesome. So I guess you both kind of also came from different you both come from different but related disciplines kind of tarot astrology. But now you know where do your approaches naturally overlap and where do you think you both challenge each other?
Yeah, I can answer that, I think, or I can This is my version of the answer. I think that we both really, I really think it's important to have an archetypal perspective in our readings. And I don't think that we're totally unique in that, but I do think that there are a lot of astrologers and terror readers who use those tools as maybe something a little bit more of like a quick fit of insight of information.
And I think that what Mariann and I, you know, try to do, is like find the archetypal through line or archetypal thread, whether you're working with the symbols of the taro or the symbols of the needle chart. And for me as an astrologer, I really really love and rely on the language of mythology and just mystic symbolism
in general, and I bring that into my sessions. And so when Marianne and I were kind of cultivating our practices and talking about what's important and what inspires us as readers, it's like finding that story for people, or finding that symbol or finding that like you know, dream memory for a client or a friend or whoever you're reading for. And you know, I think that that's like our most obvious place of overlap, right, Does that make sense Rin?
Yeah?
Yeah, absolutely. I think that we have the same perspective of like there's mystery and there's magic, and there's enchantment in life that goes beyond just like oh this means this, and there's this list of things that mean other things, especially when we're working in these divinatory practices like astrology and taro, and so we're always looking for the deeper thing.
I think where we diverge, which is really cool. As Christina said, she's has such a huge well of knowledge about mythology, and I dabble a little, I don't know nearly as much as she does. And I have such a strong background in like union psychology and depth psychology, which she also dabbles in a little bit, but just doesn't necessarily drop from that as much as I do.
So as she also has like a really rich background in like art history and you know, just like culture in general, whereas I tend to like pretend I'm living in the Middle Ages, I don't know as much. So we have these really cool ways that we have the same like general focus, but off from really different kind of places of interest.
I think our values are quite similar, and then we have different like yeah, we like go off in slightly different directions, but what's at the center of our practices is very similar.
Yeah, well, I also do definitely see. I think between both of you is how you're not just on the scratch the surface, like you were saying. You take this stuff a little bit deeper and I think look into it a little bit more, which is I think is huge, which is why I suggest the show. Did any of you guys have a Kaiva a brand? Did any of yous have any questions before I keep going.
Yeah, do you practice so like, do you practice psychological astrology then or do you get more into the traditional sense your backgrounds more in psychology? And then do have you read Ariel Gutman's book, then Christina the.
Venus star Point book, No, Mythic Astrology. Yeah, I'm looking at it on my shelf right now, so, yes, I have.
That's one of my Yeah, that's one of my favorite books.
Yes.
Wait is that this green though, or is that Aril Gutman? Anyway, I'm looking at mythic astrology over there. It doesn't matter good.
I think it's got a good question. Maybe it is screen it might be okay.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not wearing my glasses. I love Ariol Gutman though, she's really cool. I love her her being as star points stuff. So hi, fellow fellow astrologer. I'm I think I'm I'm a bit eclectic. So I really love psychological and psychoanalytic perspectives because I just can't help myself. But I'm also kind of like working within a Hellenistic framework. I use whole sign house system when I read for people. I do care about planetary dignity, but like not to
like a very rigid extent. I use the rules of the Hellenistic astrological world to kind of frame out my practice and then I like jump off from there. I would say, so, yeah, I don't know, I have a lot of mercury in my chart, so I kind of cobble things together. Does that make sense?
Yeah for sure? Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
I love traditional astrology. I have Jupiter in Taurus on my MC so it's like tradition is very much and I'm a rising so yeah, I'm a Leo rising. So I love traditional, but the psychological is definitely beneficial for sure.
Yeah, it's great to blend both. I mean, the traditional astrology stuff just didn't really have a lot of space in it for psychological perspectives because people were trying to figure out when to like farm or like coronate a king or go to battle or whatever with those astrological techniques. So I think that we live in a really cool, rich time where we get to cross pollinate the old
traditions with these newer perspectives. And I don't know, it's kind of like a little astrological renaissance that we're kind of living in right now.
I think it's interesting that you say that you think we might be going through like another modern renaissance at this point.
In terms of the way I would define that or the way I would maybe qualify that as like, there's so much great research being done in the field of
astrology right now. We have a really awesome group of like scholarly people doing amazing looking back, translating texts, bringing it into the you know, the present moment, recovering techniques from thousands of years ago and experimenting with them, and you know, like the folks at the Astrology podcast are kind of like in the public leading edge of that, I would say, and it feels very much like a
cool time to be an astrologer. I don't know if it's a renaissance time for the world right now, but I think that it is for the occult arts a very interesting moment.
Yeah, it's same thing with Tara. I would say, like Tara was was born in the Renaissance essentially, and it's been around, but really only it's twenty first century, end of the twentieth century that it's like boomed back into like contemporary consciousness. So definitely we're definitely having some kind of a magical like resurgence Renaissance thing going on.
No, definitely, I think something. I mean, especially even with the way we all connect now, Like I was even thinking about the thing that I was on this morning, I was like, all these people are able to connect when they were so far away from each other other countries. You know, if you look at back in the Renaissance, how many occultists just went to Germany to go, like meet other occultists, talk to other people. Now we just
do it on the computer. Yeah, you know, so it's interesting times for sure, for sure, I think.
Yeah, especially with astrology, we have the technology to make charts right, so our job is a lot faster, you know, like we can we can choose to hand draw charts, but it's nice to have a program that does it for you so you can do all the technical work of you know, prediction and everything like that.
So it's interesting.
I'm really bad at math, so I'm really happy that I don't have to hand draw my charts.
Oh yeah, I took a class on it, and it was like I could do it, but it definitely took like an hour to do a chart, which is like a long time. And then like time zones are so tricky. You have to have a special book because one county could have a time zone that is using daylight saving time in a state that doesn't use daylight saving time. So like it's crazy, and that's where I just like
time is such a silly thing. If we just went by the sun, our life would be so much easier, Like we wouldn't be as confused.
I don't know, it's just my take.
I agree, I totally agree.
Anyway, I have any questions before asking to right your show frames itself around the idea of the mystic sister. What does that phrase mean to you now beyond the title?
Yeah, so the mystic sister in Latin soar mystica is a term that was given to in like Renaissance alchemy. They would often have like the alchemists were male generally pretty much, and so there was this reference to the sore mystica and a lot of these writings, So like the mystic sister, the helper, the assistant basically who was a woman who would be around and so her role was like this as a support, but also she was
like the backbone of the work. She was keeping all the notes and she was you know, measuring all the things and just so instrumental to the alchemist completing his work. And Young talked a lot about this archetype of the sore mystica and the mystic sister and this kind of animal figure almost in his terminology for it. So when we were thinking of this podcast, so this is kind
of what we're doing. We're like being the assistant to like people doing their own kind of inter searching and inter alchemical work and offering different perspectives and bringing up ideas and such. So I think that's that's kind of We had a long list of potential names and then we were like, yeah, that that feels the best.
It was Marianna's idea, so yeah, and then like what does it mean now beyond the show? That's like that that's our relationship and we get to, you know, explore all of these weird topics together. And I think also like it's created a little alembic of like growing as
people together too. You know, it's like we cast a spell on ourselves with this show and with the title names our spells words or spells, and so yeah, I think that that's the other side of it, is just that like having somebody be able to reflect back to you, like the places where you're learning, the places where you are curious, the places where you need to still learn and grow. Is that sort of like alchemical mystic sister
relationship that I think is important? And I have three brothers, I don't have any sisters, so the stick sister is important to me.
Okay, yeah, yeah, I even remembered sore from being in the oto that meant like sister. Yeah. I like the name. I think it's whistle nice.
Yeah, it's also cute. Sounds like.
Uh, Brandon and Kaiva, Do you have anything? I just want to I don't want to keep going with that and don't forget you guys. All right? Oh you said that the podcast kind of grew out of years of private conversations. What made you decide those conversations needed to become public?
We kept complaining so much to each other about how no one knows anything. I'm just kidding, No, we.
It sounds like us, you know how it goes?
No, I know, So that's like the short answer the long answer.
I love.
Yeah, I think that really yeah, just coming from a place of wanting to share, knowing that like a podcast would be a comfortable format for people like I think Mariann and I coming from like, you know, I don't know, it's like academic background, and then kind of importing that maybe academic feel into our classes and maybe even into
our readings. Accidentally, the podcast is informal, it's casual, and even though the topics are kind of deep or complicated, it's nice to just hear people talk about things like that in an informal way. So I think that that was like a bid to differentiate, you know, what we were offering people, and yeah, hopefully people like it.
So yeah, I think that's like a lot of times that this kind of material. There's so many classes out there now, like so many institutions teaching classes on myths and fairy tales and you know, psychology and astrology everything,
and it's great to learn. But we really, you know, we really were just talking about these things between ourselves and you know, as friends, and it was like, well, I feel like what I would love to listen to is just people talking about this without it being as Christina is saying, like academic and trying to teach me.
So now I know, and obviously we talk about a lot of things that we've learned, so there is a little bit of like for people who may have not heard of the stuff that we're talking about, there's a little bit of learning there. But we just who wanted to be discussion just like, well, what does this mean for us for the world. Like when we're talking about the symbol of like the maiden, for example, this is something everybody knows about, but like, what does it really mean?
What is it about?
Why are there all these stories about the maiden stuck in a tower? You know, whenever we read about a story of the pearl, what is the pearl symbolizing? What is the point of that? And exploring, you know, what we think about it, what we know from our studies, and just kind of feeling reconnected to these symbols and to these things that we find in the world that have always had me and we know have meaning, but we don't really know how to access it. So we
wanted it to be casual, informal. As Christina said, like just just feel like we're talking to people.
Oh, I love it, I love it. You kind of almost went into a little bit of the next question I had. Your work is very symbol centered sometimes why does symbols matter so much right now, especially in a culture that often flattens everything into literalism.
H good question. I think that's something that we talk a lot about on the podcast, is the need to re enchant life. I feel like, like, as you said, like it's become very flattened into literalism. There's not a lot of room for exploration of depth. It's very hard to access these things now. And the most poignant way I think that we find to get into the enchanted center of life, that meaningful center of life is through
these symbols. This is like the universe. We're always like, I don't know how many you know, tarot clients will have there, Like I've seen a crow like eight times in the last two weeks, and it's like what does it mean? And they need it to mean something, and they know that there's something that it's connecting to them, connecting them to in a bigger way, and so we can both explore what that might mean for them personally and what it's bringing up, but also what does it mean.
Throughout time? This is a symbol that's come up over and over and over again throughout the centuries, the millennia, so there's something in that that we can find, and it doesn't really matter if it's true or not. The point is that we're getting something enchanting from it and feeling reconnected to the cosmos, to the universe, to life, to the bigger thing. I think that that's what a lot of us are starving for, and so symbols are just the easiest access point to that.
Well for sure, No, I really agree, And I think symbols, even somehow in our brain, are psyche I think even tap into stuff. Yeah. Do you think like symbols you kind of mentioned a little bit now, like ones that have been around for a long time, do you think they hold like they hold more you know, they gather more energy throughout the years as long as they've been being used and stuff.
Yeah, I think it connects to the idea like Yung's idea of archetypes, right. He called symbols are different than archetypes, and that symbols are like representations of things, whereas an archetype is like a whole bundle of energy.
They're very connected.
But we talk about them a little differently. But when we're thinking about an archetype, you know, Jung called them the primordial thought forms. He called them the psychic organs, like these are the things that motivate our experience of humanity and are at the base of it. And so when we have a symbol that connects us to an archetype in some way, or an archetype itself that exists forever,
like that energy is so apparent, like the Witch. I mean that is such an ancient archetype or symbol that's both. And yeah, we're still really mystified by that one. We still keep breaking it up. They just had what was it the movie that came out. I think it's got nominated for oscars or something weapons, right, and there's like which stuff in that too, and it's like, whoa, why is this still so fascinating to us, like millennia later.
So I do. I do think that the more that it stays in our collective consciousness, the more power it has. And then we also see the phenomenon of things falling out and then rising back, and then falling out and rising back depending on whatever is in the zeitgeist.
Guys on the brand I see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting. What's interesting is that the zeitgeist is both something that stems from the unconscious mind naturally and cyclically, but also is pushed by the powers that be. At times, it feels like Hollywood and Western media and all the type tries to not only bring up certain symbols which then connect to these archetypes, but they also invert these symbols as well. And so you get then that latched onto by mainstream media, and then
you get these new ag grifters. It feels like that are out there who then latch on to these terms like which like magician, like all these things and so what I mean because then that leads into Carl Jung talking about these two extremes of the diagram of the pyramid, that you have your highest aspect of these archetypes, and you have the two extremes on either side. And sometimes I feel like these terms are now falling into the two extremes where we should actually embrace these things but
not identify with them. How do you feel about something like that?
Yeah, that's something I say all the time whenever, like my students are working with the taro is that we're learning from these archetypes and trying to connect to them and finding the polls right because as Young said, there's always a shadow in a light. There's these these huge poles on either side of every archetype, but we're not them,
We're not them. I think like one of the one of the people that really kind of encapsulates how much in contemporary I think we've always done this, but like we see this so much is like Marilyn Monroe, right, Like she is the embodiment of an archetype, and there's like you can see that the intense like beauty of that and the allure of that and like gravitating to her. She's like the perfect you know, Venusian like symbol. And then at the same time she's.
The whore, right like she's like she's were disgusted by her, and so we have this huge split and people were so so so obsessed with her and some still are because she's embodying this archetype.
She's she's actually like it's living through her. And was did she embody that? Because that was already in the collective consciousness and people were already kind of that was rising, you know, as we're like post World War two and the sexuality women is is changing all these things maybe or is it something that because she existed all of a sudden triggered that archetype to rise, and people like
projected that on her. I don't know, it's like, it's an interesting phenomenon that I don't know if there's a clear answer to.
Yeah, she has a neptune on her ascendant, so people were projecting things onto her.
Yeah, that's funny, and that's it was interesting with her. And when I was I don't remember what book I was, but they brought her up. Actually, as she ended up, I would consider her being trapped within that eggregor of the archetype, of that kind of Venusian woman, because she then she couldn't get a position or a role until these roles were kind of created, and then she was taken into them, and then she couldn't get out of it.
And so it's such a fascinating thing where all of a sudden she got stuck within something, but she wanted to branch out, and so her voice supposedly wasn't that's not even how she sounded the cutesy girly you know, blah blah blah, and then all of a sudden she's like no, her voice was actually deeper and lower, and she not like it was a man or anything like that. But she ended up becoming like trapped within her own archetype. She became the exact antithesis of the thing that she
wanted to be in the end. Fascinating.
Yeah, yeah, she she got trapped in the projection.
That's exactly it. She became like the potato sack, as Young says, of the Onama archetype of disembodied masculinity or something like that.
Yeah. I do find it interesting that we're mentioning her, because like what you're getting at is a really huge impact took on. You know, that role. Great, I just unfortunately wonder how much the CIA had it behind it.
That's exact.
I mean, they really that good and actually putting that out. I hate to say that's a conspiratorial.
Yeah, well she has a direct work of the CIA.
I mean she.
Was what I call it a Yeah, she was an agent for them as she was putting emerging together the Mafia and JFK's presidential thing. So yeah, sorry, you know who.
Else was too? Julia Child? She was.
She was a member of the She was part of the Olsens and so when they did the Sounds of Music, she was infiltrating Sweet or Switzerland at that time, to take on a bunch of dat over them, and she's she's come out and just said that's what she's done with.
Fascinating enough. George Clooney is also one of them.
I think conspiratorial anyway, fascinating stuff. I do have another question if you don't mind, well, I think you did. You both know, you guys good on that answer. You guys finished? Yeah, okay, yeah, sorry about going off on that.
No, don apology, you don't sound finished, Christina, I talky, No.
I was thinking about Neptune. I was thinking about on her Ascendant. So just thinking about like collective projection and also being swept up in things that are bigger than you, like the CIA, the the planet Neptune is about like the collective consciousness or the collective unconscious. Maybe it is the planet that kind of breaks down structures. It symbolizes all kinds of things like merging, escapism, addiction, but also
you know, ecstasy, poetry. It's just like it's a very literally nebulous planet that puts a fog around anything that it touches. And so in Marilyn Monroe's chart, she's just an example that I happened to use sometimes of Neptune on the ascendant, and that means that when she was born, when she was coming into this world, the planet Neptune was rising over the eastern horizon, and because it was on the eastern horizon point, it was very, very prominent
in her chart. It kind of takes on this larger than life energy. And people who have Neptune on their ascendant tend to be like the vessels of projection for other people. And so if you're like not Marilyn Monroe and you're a regular person, you might deal with people just in your life projecting shit onto you that isn't yours. You might have to live up to expectations that are not fair that other people just have because they're projecting
shit onto you. But for somebody like her, she became whatever confluence of forces pushed her into the path that she became this, you know, yes, like the kind of I don't know, anima extreme, and I do see that as a result of her Neptune placement and then getting swallowed up by addiction, grief, you know, all these different
kinds of things drowning. Neptune is the god of the sea, and so you know, just literally being overpowered by forces bigger than yourself feels very much like what happened there. That's my Maryland two cents, poor.
Thing, Yes, poor thing? Actually yeah, wow, that was really impressive. Thank you. Huh. A lot of your episodes move between scholarship and lived spirituality. How do you balance serious study with personal intuition and experience. I don't know if you want to take that first the maybe Marianna and then well, like Christina.
Yeah, I think that, as we said before, because we wanted this podcast to really feel like we're just talking, like we're just talking to people to each other, Like we we have such strong backgrounds in our individual academic stuff that we've we've studied, so we're always drawing from that, but then we live the experience and we're living how you know, we're actually making sense of all this stuff.
And so I think that that was one of our intentions from the very beginning, was to say, like, Okay, we're going to talk about the stuff that we would talk about. We're going to like go through the brain the brain process of what does this mean and what are we drawing from? But like then what does it mean for us like, well, how do we as I said before, like the maiden archetype, right, and like oh, we're reclaiming this archetype or we're reading story about it
or whatever. What does this mean for how we're experiencing our own you know, phase of life or how we're you know made in Mother Crone is like one of the very big things that we love to talk about this like the triple goddess thing. What does it mean to transition from one to the other in real life today? Like it's not just an idea and it's not just a concept. It is we're living these archetypes, We're living
these symbols. So so yeah, I think that we are always thinking about what is what is the lived experience of this thing? And then how does that apply to our spiritual practices too?
I love Yeah, well said, and I think like to layer onto that. The way that I see it is like, you know, we're both naturally kind of bookworrey, and what we find when we're reading, like or what I find when I'm reading is I'm not necessarily reading so that I can like have all the knowledge and like be the smartest person in the room, But I'm reading to
like find inspiration. And when I read something, if it's a depth psychology essay or a book of ancient hymns, or you know, some essays on some artists that I really care about, or just myths, you know, you're looking for new signs that you can like trace in the world around you, if that makes sense. It's kind of like you're looking for new pieces of proof that magic
is real. And so I think that I use the intellectual stuff as a jumping off point for my lived magic or my lived whatever folk which practices or lived creativity, and it really brings meaning to your experiences. So that crow that you see eight times in a row is not just a random crow that is kind of creepy because it's like a crow, you know, it's a symbol for something that puts you in direct contact with something bigger, you know. So that feels like a very like you
know whatever, atmospheric answer. But that that's kind of how I see it, Like that's the point of marrying the intellectual stuff with the modern spirituality stuff, which we really need. Like we've said before, the world that we live in flattens and kind of sucks the juice out of everything. For the sake of profit or collecting our data or you know whatever, and it's ugly, and so it's like a little reclamation of what's actually part of the human experience.
I think great, great answers from both of these amazing Brandon A Kaiva, you have anything before I keep going, all right, I don't want to leave you guys. Huh uh you. This is a good question that lingers one. Do you see modern spirituality as getting deeper right now or getting more aesthetic and diluting.
I don't know. If we're going to have opinion, we might have the same opinion I am. I'm a orpio skeptic all the time, like first and foremost, so I have a tendency to look at yeah, and I tend to look at everything with like an iyrol of like why are you doing that? So I I think people do a lot of things without having true motivation behind it. They just do the thing that they're told to do, or they do the thing they see somebody else doing.
And that's normal human behavior. That's not that's not bad. It's just that we I don't know if as a society we're that good yet of asking ourselves, like what things have true meaning for us. So modern spirituality to me is a proof that, you know, one of the things that Young often talked about was the great crisis of the of the modern man is the loss of religion, which is essentially the loss of the connection to what's greater.
Also the pathway like the routines and the doctrines to connect us to that greater thing, which is unfortunately what probably a bigger loss in religions that we don't know what we're doing anymore. We don't know how to do the connection. We don't know how to get to the other side of something. So in modern spirituality says we're we want to reconnect to this. That's what our goal is. This is still at the base of our humanity. But a lot of it is Instagram. It's just shiny, you know what.
Is cute?
What do other people say that they're doing.
That's a huge thing, right, hearing what somebody else is doing. Oh, I got to try that now. You haven't even really learned what you were just looking at before. Absolutely, And I've done that myself, which I could say, which I've spotted I've seen in myself. You know, That's how I've seen it. I've done it.
I think we've all done it because we're looking we're looking for teachers, right like we're looking for people to tell us what how do we access the mysteries of life? Like we're here, like you know, an eighteen year old kid thaying, I want to believe in something. Someone teach me. Someone teach me, and we don't go to the priest anymore, and we don't you know, we don't have the gurus the same way anymore, and we don't know.
Where to access it.
So we go to the internet or we go to
like the book that someone recommended. And I understand why we do that, and I've done that myself too, absolutely, But it's something that I'll have a lot of people will come to me and say, well, like I tried using the tarot in this way, or I tried creating a spiritual practice, and in the end it like I don't know, I just didn't like it, Like yeah, because it wasn't that's not your thing, Like it didn't have meaning for you, So of course you're not gonna keep
up with it. So it's it. We all have to find what is the actual pathway individually to access whatever greater thing we're trying to access. For me, that was very much UNI and psychology. Once I found that, I was like, oh, I know the path to understanding myself and to do like finding connection to the greater stuff of life. But that's not for everybody. Like sometimes it's astrology,
sometimes it's it's ten thousand different things. Right, So yeah, I think that there is a huge vein of shallowness in modern spirituality because it's a bit performative and we don't really know what we're doing and we don't have the patients to discover what we're doing and the humility to do that all the time. But I have hope for us. I think I think it proves that we're trying to do it. So that's my very cynical answer.
Is really I would even say through like kind of like materialism, and I just have to explain it's like just because you dress up and cosplay doesn't know you know what you're doing.
Yeah, right, I was gonna say, people, when you see on Instagram everybody filming in their ritual, I think that is so absurd. I'm like, that is such a private, sacred space, Like I don't even think you're cool.
I think you're the like I don't trust you, you know what I mean.
Like when I see people do that, I categorize them and I'm like, I will never you know what I mean, Like I wouldn't anyways, because they're typically the type of people that I wouldn't watch either way. But when I see it, it's so disheartening because it's so misleading, like so many people, right, and they become these like gurus and their their sun crowns, and you know, it's like do it for yourself. But if it's for like us,
you know, theatrics, it's like it's not working. But yeah, so I totally agree.
Just capitalist spirituality at that point.
Yes, I've heard that actually going around a lot lately, that term capitalist spirituality or materialism spiritual materialism. Yeah, that's the only one saying in mar it.
What's funny is most times those people who are doing the capitalist spirituality are like haters of capitalism. So it's such a fun inversion that happens with somebody when that's ultimate LARPing is this live action role playing rebel of capitalism as they're trying to use capitalism to push their brand out even further. So it's it's fucking aggravating. I agree.
Yeah.
My favorite one is the manifestors who are like, you have to you know, you have to let go of all of capitalism and materialism. But here's how you manifest a million dollars a month. It's great.
Yeah, I'll teach you how to do that for thirty three dollars a month.
It's seven seventy seven dollars.
Very much.
These are angel numbers, Get it right, Nick, that's it?
Oh god, Christina, what's your thoughts?
I hate angel number pricing. My thoughts are are you know, are very similar. But I will also say, like, yes, there's nothing that stresses me out more than seeing people filming their rituals and then putting them on Instagram and then getting a lot of attention for it, like this is a cult work. It's literally supposed to be happening
in secret. It's it's that's what, like, what are we doing? So, you know, if I think that as somebody who teaches about ritual of vination and I teach astrological magic classes, you know, to my students, if I ever like film something, it's not my ritual, it's like this is the sample. This is like the you know, here's the carved candle with the astrological glyph, here's the magic number square that you want to use for mercury. Like I think that
that's fine. But when people are like, this is my my like personal money manifestation alter, I'm just like, whoa, that's that's bananas. So I think that, yeah, it's really an interesting time that, you know, like I'm able to live as an astrologer. That's really cool. That means that there's interest in the astrological arts enough so that I can like pay bills and that's really really special and
really amazing. At the same time, you bump into people that get really frustrated that it's not like a quick switch that you can flip to know everything. You know, I've been studying this stuff, I don't know, probably like officially since too as an EID or something like that, But I don't really care about the timeline. It just it's it's a long relationship that you have to form with these materials before you really understand them and know
how the symbols speak to you. And so something that I see a lot is like people getting fed up with astrology kind of like what Marianna was saying about people saying, oh Taro didn't work for me. It was like too whatever, too much. These things are ancient frameworks for the most part, and so they take time to learn and engage with. So is it, you know, is
there a kind of superficializing of spirituality? Yeah, there's a spiritual there's a superficializing of literally everything, because anything that can be commodified at this point will be commodified. And so I think that our job is to be like voices of like non superficial spiritual perspectives and frameworks and keep speaking it and then hoping that we reach the right people, or that we can turn the right people onto the path enough that we make a little bit
of a change. So yeah, is that less less? I really And your answer.
Marianna, maybe maybe just a touch, because it tends to be a little bit more generous and I tend to be a little bit more cynical.
I'm a ver go.
You balance each other, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's something that Christina and I complain about privately often, is that people want to get the answers without going on the journey.
You gotta suffer you to.
Suffer, and so we'll often have students who, like we'll take a class of ours and then maybe retake the thing class the next year or something, and then we'll still get emails that are like, you know, I'm not really I'm not really getting it, or you know, can you just tell me? Can you just give me more information? It's like I've given you everything. I've given it to
you and given it to you. But the thing is that now you have to take that and do something with it, do your own exploring with it, follow your own passways with it, and then it'll make sense or or maybe you'll find that it's not really worth it for you or whatever. But we complain about that a lot with each other, or like this person just really wants something from me that I'm trying to get but they don't know how to really get it.
Yeah.
Well, and that's where like the intuitive part as well.
Like I always think it's interesting how like you can read every astrology book, but you have to know how to weave the things together. And it sounds like that's probably what that person is struggling with, is the weaving part, because that's something that you have to innately have in yourself. And that's why, like if you can do astrology, it's going to be in your chart that you can do astrology. Like I mean, that's just what all the agents said, you know what I mean. Like, so if you're meant
to do astrology, it'll be written in your chart. If you're meant to be an actor, it'll be written in
your chart. And like that's where, you know, sometimes people just have to say, like, that's just not my path, and like that's where sometimes, being that it's such a pop thing right now, it's kind of unfortunate because it confuses people to think like, well I should be able to do that too, this person's doing it, and so just being like, well it's not my thing, I am y, you know, and then career whatever it is is even like a big thing for them either way.
So it is interesting how that works out.
Yeah, I think, you know, when I was learning astrology a million years ago, it was before this big internet boom of people talking about astrology online. So you could like haunt some weird message board, you know, on the internet, and like read other people's wacky conversations about asteroids, you know, or you know, you could get the books and you could really immerse yourself in that. But still astrology books do not ever do the thing of giving you the
sense of intuitive sight to synthesize. And that's what people always complain about. They're like, I know what the planets mean, I know what the science mean, the houses, blah blah blah, but I can't bring it all together. And so I try to teach that in my classes, and I do think that it is a little bit of like you need to kind of be an intuitive person to see similarity, to see symbolic meaning and things. And that doesn't mean that if you don't have that gift, you can't you know,
read your chart or use astrology. But sometimes people, you know, push really hard on like commodifying it, or you know, I want to do this for like a side gig, and that's where it breaks down. That's like where the diamond's like Nope, actually no, it's not going to happen.
So yeah, I appreciate, appreciate the answers. That was great. I thought it was a good question.
Too, as fascinating. I also want to add in the idea that I find with my students because I teached martial arts during the daytime, and it's such a fascinating thing that how I learned and how the ancient like not ancient, but the Chinese teachers. I've had, even my
non Chinese teachers who learned from the Chinese teachers. It's like when you're learning forms or doing certain things, I feel like nowadays people want their like you're saying, their hands held throughout the whole practice and instead of I remember when I was getting taught my teacher and then when we would go train with the Chinese guys, they would be like, here's what it looks like, and then they would sit down and then they would like do this and drink their tea, and then you would just
do it and then you'd look at them like am I doing it right? And like the thing that I always tell my students, and I've probably said this a billion times, but they just look at you and they go do you have power? And then you're like, uh no, They're all like keep doing it, do more, do more until you have power. And what they mean is do you have foundation? Do you have grounding? Do you have
the ability to continue? And so it's like one of those things where they're all like people have become weak because they want their handheld through the whole process. And I think that is an issue of the globalized world of instant access, which is fascinating because then it goes to the stories of when you would want to go learn these Chinese arts or these ancient arts, mystical arts.
The story is you would have to sit in front of the temple for weeks on end, and then you know, people would get not being able to do it obviously, and they would walk away, and then the abbot would come out and he'd put a bowl full of rice in the middle of all of them. Five people would go up there and they would eat from the rice. The abbit would come and point them away. You must, you know, you cannot. You must be disciplined before you
enter into the Western or the Eastern mystical teachings. And I think again that just goes back to proving what you guys are saying everyone here as well as that it's like everyone wants their handheld through the process. They're not willing to suffer, and that is what has to happen.
Yeah, in the tarot, the card for that kind of is the higher fint because the higher fins is like the preseas like the pope, and he disseminates the knowledge, right, But then at that point you take it and you have to find your own way to living it or experiencing it. And this is something that you're totally right. There's this You don't realize that throughout history you always have to be initiated into the thing and the initiation process is a process of self discovery and challenge and
testing and all these things. And so now we just buy a class, which is great. I'd love that I can buy classes that interests be and learn that thing that I could teach this, But we don't always understand that the initiation cannot be removed from the process. You also have to go through the journey and the confusion and the testing and the finding the other thing. Like when I started with Union psychology, I say this all
the time, Like in my classes. I found a book in my grandpa's attic and I was like, this is interesting. I've heard of this young guy. Let me just read this. And then I was like, oh crap, like my life just changed. I think I have to keep reading about young and what Yung said. And then I just I just read whatever book I found in his attic. It wasn't like someone told me this is what these are the books you have to read it. And I didn't have like a Google cheat sheet of like this is
how you learn union psychology. Just kept reading and I just kept discovering, and then that you led me to other things and the tarot and all this stuff. And so what I teach now is compiled from a decade of my own like initiation process through all of this work. So it's not something someone ever told me. And it's really cool that we get told these things. Now, we get these we can learn them from people, especially all this occult material and spiritual material. But we can't remove
the initiation process. We still have to do that process. And so we as teachers, we can ever we can never get, you know, help help the students through that. We can ever eliminate that part of it, nor should we. Then they're not really they're not really absorbing it.
You know, it's really interesting that you said, like, you know, like all your experience too. I think that's awesome. I would even say I think for myself, you know, probably going back to you know, a little bit around twenty ten around there, I feel like there was kind of like a little bit of a big boom of people getting interested in witchcraft again in the occult, but it just seemed to be everywhere and scattered, and myself included
I as part of that. And now since that time, I've been able to kind of like, you know, put my experience into something like I've learned from it now and trying to like sought to explain I'm getting at but just what you said just reminded me of that of kind of like you know, refining my experience and being able to share with others now since it's been
like fifteen years since then. You know, I think that does help, you know, And and I do think that people like us that stuck with it and found something that we loved and we're doing. Not trying to sound cocky, but I do think, you know, all of us here have a chance of kind of being part of like the new voice or aon going forward, you know, because a lot of the people that have been around that
we learned from there kind of stepping back. They're getting old, you know, and it's I think if we keep going and keep doing what we're doing, you can definitely make an impact and help, especially with our past experiences. So I love that you said that rightly.
Yeah, totally agree.
Yeah, And I think it's actually the most important thing, especially because we live in an age of grifters, and so it's like this high level of charlatanism is so gravating that I feel like, kind of what we said earlier is like I wanted to create megas in the media four years and life just didn't allow me to for one reason or another. Maybe I wasn't ready, whatnot,
and so forth. But it's like so fascinating how quickly the universe once you allow the pathways to open themselves up, that all of a sudden, now I'm talking to some of the people that I've always wanted to communicate with and it has only taken so much amount of time. And so it's like, I think the universe it's almost like I like to think of it as the analogy of like the white blood cells in our body system, where like certain things are created, like diseases in the body.
And I'm not saying grifters are diseases. Maybe i am, but it's one of those things that it's like fascinating to think that then the universe creates its way to balance out the spectrum. It's very symbolic to how the force is used in Star Wars, and so the force balances itself. It's not that the light will always win or the dark world always win, but when the light is created like an Anakin Skywalker, that there are toothsith to balance that. And I like that because it's the
symbolic for understanding that there will always be balance. That is, the light will never win because it's not supposed to. The light in the dark are supposed to balance themselves out. So if good, if true, authentic voices, hopefully like all of us here, aren't speaking out, then there will be an imbalance in the world will go to shit kind of like it is has been because of the voices that are the loudest are the ones that are the least courageous. So it's kind of how I like to feel.
I feel that out.
Did you have? I know it's getting close to out. I want more. I did have some questions for both of you separately' see if maybe I can get like one each first, I'm going to go. I mean, okay, all right, I just didn't want to hold jab either. If you've got stuff going on, all right, questions they gave very good answers. I didn't think they were going to take this one. What's she going to start with you first? Marianna, you describe your work as archetypal taro
or archetypal taro. What makes a different? What makes that different from standard tarot teaching or standard car reading.
Yeah, so, in traditional taro, we're generally using the cards to give us answers, right, sometimes to make predictions like oh, this is what's to come, or this is what's going on under the surface of things. You know, your boyfriend's
cheating on you, the kinds of things. And in archetypal taro, it's not that we we say that the cards can never come up sometimes offering these little predictions or these little plimses into what's going on, but where you read them far more as representations of the psyche, mirrors of the psyche. So what's going on in our inner world
that is then reflecting somehow into the outer world. So something I always say is that in an archetypal terror reading, the goal is not to get an answer to a question, but to find out what the better question was all along. So if we say, okay, like I don't know if I should take this job or not should I take
the job? Or going to the cards, we're saying, give me the answer, tell me what I'm supposed to do, what's the right thing, And that can feel very relieving to get an answer, But we're not supporting our strength of character. We're not supporting our ability to understand ourselves
and continue our individuation. We're speaking given a directive. When we use the tearo in the archetypal way and the archetype approach that I've you know, created or outlined, we're trying to understand why don't I know what I want?
Right?
That's the better question. Better question is like, Okay, I don't know if I should take this job. But then the cards will reveal you know, you have deep fears around being alone, or you you know, can't separate from your parents, or there's something going on under the surface that is the reason why you can't make the decision. That's the better question. Why don't I know? Why don't
I know how to live? And so if we use the cards that way, they support this this incredible journey of growth and how we're understanding ourselves and advancing ourselves in life, which is a more challenging way to read because we're not just being told what to do. We have to figure it out for ourselves, but a much much more rewarding way. So that's really the distinction of like archetypal tera versus traditional thank you.
I like that I was going to say something I totally forgot I was paying attention to. All Right, did a of you just have anything you wanted to add before I go over.
For Christina, Well, I just want to add that everyone can learn about archetypal Taro and Mary in this book. Yeah, it's very exciting.
If you want my book is about.
And if you want to hear what it's about, go check it out on the Occult Rejects. It was out not too long ago. So yep, just did a great job on that book. Christina, your public bio says you blend astrology with mythology, art, art, history, and literature. What does this add to astrology that a more technical approach might miss.
I think that the symbols of astrology, the symbols of the occult, are in everything, and so when I you know, like I don't know in college when I was studying, I was a literature major art history minor, and I felt and I was studying astrology at the same time. I felt like I kept bumping into the same symbols, the same archetypes, the same you know, versions of a story.
And I realized that, like you could kind of translate human experience with these symbols, Like I saw a link between what was maybe expressed in a movie and also an astrological symbol. And so I think it's almost like a it's just like a human impulse, right to like connect these things. But it's my way of bringing together all of these cultural artifacts and say, here are different
ways of seeing self. You can see yourself in a movie, you can see yourself in your natal chart, you can see yourself in you know, a painting from one hundred years ago. And importing the symbols of astrology into the arts and vice versa lets us kind of have a more expansive experience. And it's a reminder that things are interconnected. Right, Someone's not just painting and abstract painting for the sake
of making that painting. That artist is moved by something probably divine or archetypal or just human and it's a really cool experience to feel like you have insight into what's going on there. Somebody who comes to mind is Helma off Clint, who's a painter. You know, she preceded the abstracts preshioness movement. She preceded vastly Kandinski, and you know, because she was a woman, didn't get any credit for doing that. She was kind of obscure in her time.
Looking at her paintings now, they are full blown mystical experiences rendered on canvas, and they're full of astrological symbolism, and so, you know, bringing the arts into astrology and vice versa, I think is just a way of saying, like there is a universal language that people speak in.
Uh.
And I just personally fucking love art and movies and music, and I like to have other ways of offering people insight and examples, you know, so of stuff in their chart that that might make it easier to see themselves. So yeah, I think that that's how that all kind of works together.
Do you like Remediosavarros, Yes, I read that way.
Yeah, I love for those two. Yeah, they're great.
I want to go to Ariminico or actually in Washington apparently they have a women's art museum.
Washington State or Washington d C.
H Washington d C.
Apparently there's a women's art museum there and both of them are showed there.
So I heard, don't I think?
So?
Yeah, they're amazing, both of those artists that they were. They were best friends. Just for everyone else, they were besties. And they both expatriated to Mexico during World War Two and just like both of them lived, I would say, like dire straits, poverty. But we're painting kind of similar things but in different different different languages, maybe I could say, but they're both very obsessed with fairy tale mythology, the occult or astrology. Alchemy. Yes, they're so big into alchemy.
And yeah, excitingly too, there's like a revived interest in their work and a lot of the women's realists too. There's a lot of New Skull worship on their work. So we're lucky again about that. Yeah, I love those love those ladies.
Yeah, I like what you said about art. And I think at some points just my opinion, and I even think with poetry, and maybe I get this idea because a little bit of like how Plato thought about stuff.
But sometimes I do think that that stuff was like art was just the way for people who had some sort of experience or enlightenment was putting that on, just trying to replicate it and put symbolism and all this art into that, which is why at one point Plato was like, all these poetry people just like you should be a leader, Yeah, because it's bullshit. You don't even know what you're talking about.
How can you have a standing army when people are doing poetry?
So besides that, no, But besides that, no, No, I was saying, what's fascinating about when he's talking about that? And I think this is a common misconcert And I'm a Platonist myself and a philosopher, But the idea is that he's trying to not tell you that that that poetry is bad. He's trying to tell you that poetry is actually one of the highest of all arts. It's
this divine madness. And when he's speaking about poetry as such, he's saying that through bad poetry, you are getting this kind of propaganda, this misrepresentation of some of an already a representation of the real And so fascinating enough. Art is the term techne or skill or craft in Greek, which is a purposeful knowledge based productive capacity for things as such, which is modeled after virtue. So it's such
a it's such an interesting thing. Of like Plato was a poet, he wrote in Dialogues, it's a cosmic play that he's doing, and we never know technically what he's saying, but we can gain what he's saying through his through Hermanuda, through an understanding of what translations are and what he truly is trying to represent through said poetry. So he's trying to teach us how to be poets through using the divine madness of the higher genius and an understanding
of the forms. And so that's I'm very passionate about that. So that's one of those.
Thank you you basically said what I was trying to get at a professional It sounded better out of your mount the morning. But another thing, even with art, I think it's very like I don't know if it was Michael Mayer or Robert Flood, I think like even one of the reasons why they were big into their emblems is because they understood that art. Can you know you may not know how to read Latin, but this art, if I put everything what I'm trying to say in these emblems, you might be able to pick it up
that way. So I do think art is very like what you were saying. I just think it's huge for the occult.
Art is so beautiful too.
Engraving, amazing, it's great. I've covered books just because I thought they were so awesome. All right, now back to you, don't mind real quick. We'll go back to another one for Mariana, and then we'll do Christina and maybe wrap it up you Marianna. You say taro can function as a mirror of the soul and support individuation. What does taro open up psychologically and spiritually when it's approached that way?
I think that so so as I was kind of saying before, like if we can, if we can use the cards to mirror back the inner realities that oftentimes are also expressed as outer realities, Like very commonly we pull the five bands when we're in conflicts of people at work, and then also we are having a lot of conflict with our own sense of you know, right and wrong or something right, Like these things mirror each other.
We can do that, then we can you know, progress in this process of examination and self discovery and challenging our ability to really understand what is motivating us unconsciously, and then that is the process of individuation. That's what it is. So like, one of the things that I often recommend people try with the Tarot, and that I talk about this a lot in my book is shadow work, right,
and we mentioned this in the last podcast. I'm not always a fan of shadow work because I don't know if we really have an understanding of what we're even
talking about with it. But in the way that I talk about it with the taro is that, you know, we pull a card, it's confusing, or it's challenging, or we feel a lot of resistance to it, here's an opportunity to really examine it, work with it, keep it, put it on the altar, make it be this anchor point that we're returning to all the time, so that we eventually get to the place of I see something about myself I didn't see before the ego which had
blocked this understanding because it didn't like it, because it brought up some kind of big, you know, shadow element that I just can't reconcile with whatever it might be the case. Now it's becoming clear, and now maybe I can have some kind of understanding, empathy, forgiveness for myself and then change, which is you know, I like the way that young kind of took the the formula of alchemy and broke it down into those four stages. He like way simplified it into the uh negrado albatos to
treat toss in ruveto. And this was like his formula formula for confession, elucidation, elucidation, education, and then transformation. And so I use that a lot when I'm talking about shadow work. This is what we're doing. We're confessing our shadow then we're elucidating it, we're trying to understand it, and we're educating ourselves on it, trying to find the root cause, find out, you know, how it's affecting our lives, and then transform it. And the taro is it's a plug.
It plugs us into the things that we're really based on. Proms that Union says is thought we're using divination. What we're doing is using this tool to plug us into this arca type of field. So whatever archetype is most magnetized is most constellated. That's what we're going to be drawn to. So whatever is going on in our psyche, whatever archetype is there, the card will come to represent it, and then we get plugged into this straight or landscape
of knowledge that we should explore. So that's that's kind of like the formula of how we use it to support ourselves in the individuation process.
Awesome, I love it. Nice kiro Brandon, you have anything, oh not? Right back to you, Christina. How do you keep astrology from becoming deterministic while honoring its depth and symbolic force?
I try not to get It's very difficult, especially when you're first learning, because when you're learning astrology, you will notice that some forecasted transits to your own chart do bring difficult experiences. Bad things happen when certain planetary alignments come to be, and what you have to not do is expect the planets to always be doing the same
thing over and over again. To you, I think that this is kind of where we have to have knowledge that transcends these literal interpretations of astrology, and remember that the planets in motion right, just thinking about like transit work, which is like the astrology of what's going to happen,
the astrology of the future. I guess you could look back on transits too, but people mostly use it to future trip and you can't do that because though the planets kind of go in their courses and they activate our charts and they activate one another in the cosmos, they're not going in a circle and doing this thing
over and over again. They're moving in a spiral, and so they're always kind of like pulling outwards, interacting with the psycheist of the moment, interacting with you as this different person than you were six months ago when you experience, you know, from like one eclipse to another, for example. And so one of the hardest things I think about being an astrologer and a budding astrologer is to not
feel anxiety, fear, worry, or like pressure with astrology. And so I think that we have to see the planets as activating periods of time that are like doorways, and we kind of can step into them with knowledge, or we can maybe use that knowledge to you know, work with them in a different way. I think that astrology doesn't have to happen to us. I think that we if we like move with the wave. Like when you're swimming in the ocean and you're trying to get back
to the beach, you don't just like flail. You have to wait for a wave to carry you in. That's kind of how I see the planets and what they do for us. So, you know, without it being deterministic or avoiding determinism is very difficult. But that's why we need to shift our thinking about astrology from like literalism to it. It's symbolic, it's energetic, and it's divine as well. We're in conversation with something that's divine, a divine intelligence.
So yeah, that feels it's a very tough question I think to answer.
I think it's great. Thank you, that's awesome. Yeah, I do have like maybe some closing questions, maybe get one or two more out of you and then we'll wrap it up. Is that okay for both of these You good?
Mariana?
Yeah, okay, okay, all right? What's uh? And it's funny how I had this and even Marianna kind of went on about the symbols. What is one symbol that has followed each of you through your life in a way you can't ignore. If you can think of any maybe one that was like the most profound for you it still touches you the most today, or something. I don't know.
For me, maybe the labyrinth. It's just been bugging me for a really long time in dreams and in yeah, experiences.
The silly question, but is that like the labyrinth that you would see like on a medieval cathedral floor? Yeah? Okay, al right, okay, all right. I wasn't all right, it's funny because I was just like literally recording that I'm recording on stuff on that myself.
So when you said that, it's, oh, that's so funny.
Yeah, I literally edited myself this morning hearing me talk about that. Shit.
Wow, that's awesome, cool synchronosity.
Yeah, nice, Well was.
It, Kyla? I think you were talking about labyrinth not too long. Weren't you just bringing up labyrinths the other day?
Yeah?
I have always been interested in them, and I just got a book because I have this inspiration for some project that I want to do.
So yeah, I love labyrinths.
Actually, Uh, Corona Borealis was the first like star that led me into my nightgazing journey, and so I have a really special connection with that star, and that's the star that's on the crown, that's the and the labyrinth itself.
So yeah, I was, I was, actually Christina would like this. I'm reading a book right now called Matrix. I think it's called Forget the Author. It's a novel and it's a novel that's basically just based off of Hildegard of bing In, but it's like it's not her, but it's like someone who's like her, you know, and she like, is this like feminist abbess and she basically builds a labyrinth around the abbey because she doesn't want any men entering.
It didn't actually do that, but yeah, she could have, so you might like that book, Christina, since it's it's like that sounds cool.
She booked at the church and I forgot what it was. I think like they wanted to tell like you you're not allowed to sing anymore, and she's like no, And I think she actually went up higher.
She wrote letters to Pope's being like you're awful, you you are not a good Christian? How dare you? And she's just like this little German advis you know.
She came up with harmonizing.
Yeah, she she had a huge influence in polyphonic music.
Yeah, we never would have had Iron Maiden. That's all they did, is they always harmonized. I'm sorry, that's what.
You're really showing your age there, Nick, your age ship.
All right? Last one, uh what do you oh wait, did you ever get Marianna? Did you mention a simple.
I don't know, it's hard. It's something some A big one for me is angels. They always have haunted me. I don't I've my mom was obsessed with them when I was a kid, and I used to just everything was angels for me, and like talking to angels and thinking about angels and angels appearing and all sorts of stuff. So it's followed me and it's not always been a good thing. So it's I have a have a unique what is it? It's like a Ralpa has a line is like every angel is terrifying. That's how I feel.
H Well, if you read the descriptions of them, they really aren't the cutest. Yeah, all right, So it was kind of a little bit of a serious one. What do you both hope sore Mystica is really doing for people? Like or what do you hope they really get out of this.
Yeah. I think for me, I hope that people feel like their own curiosities and their own sense of things being enchanting or mystical or meaningful is validated, and that they're hearing other people have the same experience and feeling motivated to claim it. As we said many times, you know, in this discussion, there's such a flattening of life, and oftentimes where like the little occultist or witch or a spiritual person or whatever in a circle of muggles normies, right,
who are like why do you care about that? I remember when I was an actor, before I, you know, transitioned into taro and stuff. I used to have my young book always and my rehearsals in between my scenes, and people would be like, why are you reading that? Like, I don't if I have to explain that to you, I don't want to talk to you, because because it's important, because it's cool, because there's a ten thousand reasons why
I'm reading that. And I think that it's very easy to be isolated in our beliefs and our in these interests, and so I hope that people hear us having these discussions and realize that these discussions matter and that they should. They can have them, and they can seek out communities where they're they're available all the time. So that's that's it for me.
That is awesome. Thank you, thank Christina.
Yeah, I agree obviously with everything she's saying. And then, you know, I think, specifically for me, I hope that people listen to the show and realize that there is a deep, rich context for this symbolism of our lives. And I think it's especially important in a time where as we've said, things are flattened, compressed, you know, stripped of meaning. Reading rates are declining, like you know, whatever screen time attention issues are happening. Kids aren't reading books.
I think that we're kind of like, you know, guardians of that tradition of reminding people of how deep history is and how these symbols are like part of the language that we're supposed to be speaking. I think that the symbol is a or the symbolic realm like returns us to something really essential, and so like, is knowing symbolism gonna make a million dollars?
Hell?
Now?
Is it going to make you feel like a human and make you feel connected to yourself, to nature, to your partners, to your art practice to your ancestral lineages. Yes, and that's really really important. So that's kind of I think the biggest thing for me with with the ongoing conversation.
That's awesome. Yeah right, yeah yeah? And how many episodes do you have out? Now?
Pause a hiatus and so I think we paused at fifty.
But that's great.
I was pregnant now I'm not, so, which means I had my child baby, the baby was born. We'll be back.
Yeah, nice, nice, Yes. So, like I said earlier, to the people listening, uh, you know, for the people on audio who are I'm watching right now, I really do highly suggest to go listen to that podcast if you're into this show. So they got fifty episodes, you can go binge, So go check them out. All right, thank you both, very very much. I really thought this was an awesome, awesome episode. I had a feeling it would be and it was better than I thought. So I
really appreciate both you women. Uh, before we wrap it up, I'm gonna have everybody just plug themselves real quick. Kaiva, what is up? How?
Yeah, this was a really lovely chat. Thank you for coming on and thanks for having me on.
Nick so You can find me at Kaiva Rose on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. You can go to my website eleven Kaiba Rose thirty three dot com. Also, if you like fantasy novels, I have a young adult fantasy series called Rue Odyssey and you can find that at Rue Odyssey rou Oudissey dot com.
Thank you, thank you, thank you very much, and Brandon sure wrap.
It up, so let's do it. Thank you, ladies. This was fantastic. It's always wonderful to also be able to speak to those who are also seem to have a tap into authenticity and honesty in a sphere which is full of grifters, and so that's fantastic. So thank you. I look forward to hearing more from you both. And Kaiva, as always, you're brilliant and everyone should go out and read her Rue Odyssey trilogy. The third one is being written as we speak, even though she's right here, she's
writing it as we speak. It's amazing and I think everyone should read it. She's a fantastic traditional astrologer and I think she's one of the best there is. Anyway, everyone go out and check out Magus in the media. Subscribe I can share again. The world is getting darker, and it's always darkest before the dawn, and that means that renaissance, I truly believe is on the precipice. Channels like the occult Rejects, Magason, the media and the like.
We're all here to help illuminate the shadows and the dark. So just choke go check out all this stuff. Life's great. Thanks Nick as always.
Of course, yes we do. Thank you. So that was amazing, love it, ladies, Marianna you want.
To go ahead, yeah, thanks so much for having me on again.
It was so fun.
I loved it a great time. And you can find me at Persephanie Sister dot com, per Sephanie Sister pretty much anywhere, Instagram, substack, YouTube on all those places, and check out my book Taro and the Psychology of the Soul, which is out now. And if you want to learn more about Archetypal Taro than my upcoming class, I have a beginner's class available too as well, and then a little bit more of an intermediate class the Archetable Terror School.
So all that's available where you find me you'll see information about it.
Yeah, awesome, Thank you so much. In Christina, please.
Thanks everyone lovely to be here, meet new people, and yeah, just have this conversation. My stuff again, I don't know. Christina Farilla dot com is my website. Can find me at Eighth House Astro on Instagram, TikTok, I'm on substack. And yeah, my class, the School of Astrological Arcana, opens late April, and my book Divination for Dummies is out April twenty eighth. So those are the things. And yeah, I appreciate the time and space.
That's right. Well, so I forgot about that book and I have to remember that. I'm going to hit you up for that. Okay, awesome again, thank you both. I really thought this was an awesome chat. I really had a great time and I could tell. I mean, the people in the chat loved it as well. So I really appreciate it from both of yous, and you know, Kaiva and Brandon. Amazing stuff. And thank you everybody in the chat. And Howard, thank you again. My man. I'm gonna have to end up like sending you a toe
or something at this point, am I first born? I don't think that's how it happens. This guy sent me so much freaking money. Thank you, Howard.
But thank.
But uh yeah, so uh yeah, that's I guess that's why I go live now too. But no, but besides everybody coming in the chat and giving the questions or whatever comments, that's why I go live. I love it. I like everybody adding to it as well. And that is the end of another Occult Rejects and until the next one, everybody be well later