---
title: "Ritual, Descent, and Divine Connection: An Interview with Jane Meredith"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/ritual-descent-and-divine-connection-an-interview-with-jane-meredith/
date: 2025-05-26
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction Huge thanks to Jane for answering my many questions. This interview is a transcription of recordings provided to me, any inaccuracy or strange words is down to my (Perseus..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "Ceremonial Magic"
  - "Magic"
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word_count: 6348
---

# Ritual, Descent, and Divine Connection: An Interview with Jane Meredith

## Introduction

Huge thanks to Jane for answering my many questions. This interview is a transcription of recordings provided to me, any inaccuracy or strange words is down to my (Perseus Arcane Academy) error. I do hope you enjoy this interview we go into lots of varied topics. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments and do share with firends you think may also enjoy the post.

About Jane (courtesy of [janemeredith.com](https://www.janemeredith.com/about))

> Jane Meredith is an author, ritualist and teacher. Her books include the best selling *Journey to the Dark Goddess*, *Aspecting the Goddess*, *Circle of Eight* and she is the co-author of *Magic of the Iron Pentacle* and co-editor of *Elements of Magic*.
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> Jane lives with her cat in the Blue Mountains, Australia. Pieces of her heart are in many places, including the Northern New South Wales, Paris, Limeuil, the Lake District and of course with her beloved son and his partner. She writes (and dances) - every day and tries to follow an ecstatic, reverent and joyful life.
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> Fascinated by magical systems, myth, fairytale, and the vivid natural world we are part of, Jane's passions include: Kabbalah, sacred sexuality, trees and rivers, white cockatoos, CloudCatcher WitchCamp, creative magic and co-created ritual, and dark chocolate. She loves travelling, reading, theatre, exploring intimacy, and being alive.

If you would like to look further into Janes teachings then you can look at the following links:

##### Janes Books

##### Janes Courses

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Table of Contents

- IntroductionJanes Books- Janes Courses- Interview- The Roots of My Path- Living in the Blue Mountains: Place and Practice- The Cycles of Nature and the Wheel of the Year- Working with Altars- Myth and Spiritual Technology- Crafting Ritual: Intention, Structure, and Co-Creation- Aspecting Goddesses- Descent Work and the Dark Goddess- Magical Partnership and Co-Creation- Bridging Ritual and Daily Life- What’s Calling Me Now- A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah

## Interview

This is Jane Meredith doing a recording answering or attempting to answer about 10 questions for the Perseus Academy.

## The Roots of My Path

Let's begin at the roots of your path: where did your spiritual and magical journey begin, and what pivotal experiences or callings drew you into the world of goddess spirituality, ritual, and magic?

Like, I really think that all children are pagans, that I certainly was, but all the kids I've ever known or seen are deeply immersed within nature and perhaps don't experience that separation that we're taught to put in place, increasingly, as we grow up and later on. So I think my spiritual and magical journey began, you know, when I—at least when I was born. But as a child, I was very in love with rivers and trees and the wind, and lots of other things as well, but those things especially, maybe. And I just felt like that I was talking with those beings and that they were talking with me, and the stars is another one—really, really felt very held by the stars, the starscape.

And so I had many pivotal experiences as a child: with the wind, with rivers, with trees, with the stars. And, yeah, then fairy tales. I loved fairy tales and I read many—I was a big reader, I read many, many books of fairy tales and then later mythology and was very passionate about all of those. And then I guess also a lot of children's books have magical aspects in them. I was, yeah, a very passionate reader; I read a lot and I was deeply involved in all of those things and I didn't really see why those things should stop within books and not be a part of my life.

So I personally practiced various forms of magic and dream work and ritual just kind of by myself or sometimes with a friend, all my life. And I really think that I just never stopped, that's my answer. And really, so many people that I meet—adults I'm talking about—you know, I think that's why paganism is so accessible and so alive, and magic is that we have all been there and practiced and done that and known that as children. And so when someone as an adult says, "Oh, we can do this," it's like, "Well, of course, I've always known that and it's familiar to me and real."

## Living in the Blue Mountains: Place and Practice

Okay, this question two: living in the Blue Mountains of Australia, how does place shape your practice? What does it mean for you to work with the land, and can you share a moment where the landscape or its spirits became active collaborators in your rituals or teachings?

Yes, so currently I am living in the Blue Mountains, which is an area west of Sydney in Australia— Dharug and Gundungurra Country. And working with the land—I mean, I don't think we can not work with the land, okay? And I think that because the air we breathe is the air of this particular land and the water we drink is often or usually the water of this particular land, and the earth we're standing on, and the weather that we're a part of is a part of this particular land, and it—we're a part of it, like it's moving through us.

Some of us are lucky enough to be able to eat the food that is grown as part of this land. Many of us either have gardens or walk in parks or admire the cloudscape; all of it is the context of this land, that we don't just kind of live within like we're in a sealed kind of train carriage passing through it—we're actually deeply immersed in it. I think we all know this, right?

So I like to actively work with the landscape and I do that in several ways, one of which is this very mundane way of gardening. I don't have your usual type of garden; I have a bush garden, and my efforts within gardening are to remove invasive weed, replant natives, and establish and hold that. So that's a practice of working with the land and it's a small compensation maybe, or a recompense for invasion and colonization. Like, I acknowledge that my place in this country and on this land is questionable, and I feel that what I can do, at least in this small part of it that I'm nominally partially responsible for, is make it beautiful for the birds and animals and insects and plants—very much the plants that live here, whose land it is.

And so that's a huge practice. But then when we're talking about more specifically, I guess, imposed spiritual or magical practices—for example, with the wheel of the year—rather than reading a book about what happens at the autumn equinox, I am more likely to go outside and take into account the weather, look at what's in flower or what's happening in the landscape, and kind of read the mood a bit. I mean, I do this in other ways as well, like politically and within community, but the landscape is a very strong part of that, and then that informs any ritual that I'm going to be involved in creating or co-creating for the autumn equinox—what is actually happening.

And of course, doing that practice over years in the same place builds up layers to that, like a reference that, "Oh, this autumn equinox is a lot wetter than usual," or whatever it might be. So I think land is essential. I wrote a book called *Circle of Eight*, currently out of print but I do have a lot of copies of it, that was really all about a very elaborate, detailed, in-depth process of working magic that comes from, is relevant to, is related to, is in conversation with the part of the land and the landscape that you happen to be living in whilst doing it. And it's about consultation and observation with the land, and then beginning to work magic—and in quite a sensitive way—with parts of landscape, in particular directions.

So yeah, it's a passion of mine to be fully present, to be fully embodied. I think essentially it means being part of the land where one is.

## The Cycles of Nature and the Wheel of the Year

Okay, three: what role do the cycles of nature play in your practice? How do you celebrate the turning of the wheel of the year, the phases of the moon, or other natural rhythms? What kinds of seasonal or lunar rituals have become anchors in your life?

I do observe the moon personally and feel it and sometimes work with that moon cycles within my own personal magic, but in public magic and public rituals, I have much more deliberately and much more often and continually worked with the seasonal wheel of the year, as I explained, as relevance to the local place wherever I am at the time. And I like to create a public ritual within the Reclaiming Tradition—reclaiming style—preferably collaborative with one, two, three, four, or more other humans, and invite people along to that to celebrate, yes, the turn of the wheel and this time of year most obviously and what's happening in the land around us, but also different phases of our lives.

And so to take the autumn equinox for an example, again, we might celebrate not just what we've harvested from our gardens or what the land is harvesting, or the change—stepping over the line kind of from the light half to the dark half the year—but also how that plays out in our lives. Maybe what we've harvested personally or understood or changed in the last 12 months or six months, and, yeah, what that means to us personally in our lives about that taking that step.

And I think in the last one we did for the autumn equinox a few months ago, we did actually incorporate crossing over a line, and that was in a, you know, light trance state, where each one of us recognized these kind of more light or outgoing areas in our lives and meditated on what it means to cross into the darker, more reflective, possibly more inward focused part of the year. And we only crossed over that line when we felt, yeah, ready to do that, and that we were doing it consciously.

And it is an anchor in my life as in it's something that I try and create or participate in regularly, fairly regularly, and definitely did it when my child was small and, yeah, love to have that on offer for people to come and be part of.

## Working with Altars

Okay, question four: let's talk about altars. How do I work with them? Do they change over time? Are they daily devotional, magical intent? What makes them come alive for you?

I mean, I think altars—the good ones—are kind of alive in their own right. But they do especially come alive for me when I am consciously working with them. And I am someone who, I want to say irregularly, but when I feel the need, does work magic with and on altars. I do have devotional altars and they might also have little bits of magic sprinkled around them. I'm looking up at one as I'm saying that, which at the moment is an Aphrodite, beautiful little statuette, which has a rope of pearls which I sometimes wear draped over her shoulder, and it's got a kind of collection of shells around the base. It's just near a north facing window, which in our case, north is where the midday sun is.

And right next to her she happens to have—and maybe this is no coincidence—an apple for Eve, my tarot cards, and on the other side a gift that my son gave me and a copy of my Kabbalah book, all of which—they just happen to be there—but all of which I'm going to take in as one altar and think of it as an altar to love and devotion and the mysteries. So just even looking at that gives me a little thrill there. But yeah, I have various altars—I'm going to say they're scattered around the house. I don't necessarily have permanent locations for them; sometimes I do, and they change, like I redo them or I undo them or I move things about.

So I guess I'm less—I feel devotional in it, but how someone else might regard devotion, as in a daily practice and a very set altar or set of altars, that is not me at this stage in my life. And I mainly suggest that other people create altars almost as an experiment, as a relationship with the divine and with that part of oneself, one's own soul, as well as maybe a particular divinity, but to see what changes. And I love the word play between "altar" and "alter"—what will alter for me if I work with an altar? So I like that concept.

## Myth and Spiritual Technology

My fifth question that I've chosen is: myth is at the heart of your work, especially descent myths like that of Inanna. How do you engage—personally engage—myth as a spiritual technology (love that term)? What does it mean to live a myth, and how has this shaped your own descent and return?

Well, descents and returns are kind of continual—witness the moon or the wheel of the year—and really, I think, witness any one of our lives. It's not that we do a descent and a return, but it is pretty much a continual type of a process and it's a process on the move, you know—not so much like we descend and then we're down, down (although that does happen) or we ascend and we're up, up. But I think of it more like, you know, the 360 degrees—oh, I'm a bit down, I'm a bit further, a bit further—bit like the phases of the...

I want to say that I recognize it as a deep truth that happens with all living things and maybe some things that we often don't think of as living, such as mountains and rivers or stars (although I do think they're living as well, in a particular way).

And this great myth of—we're calling it descent and return, we could be calling it death and birth or birth and death and rebirth—I think it does shape everything, pretty much the same way that being part of nature shapes everything.

I have often—I have been a person who has often worked with a particular myth, like chosen, or occasionally it's chosen me, where I have sat with it, unpicked it, read many versions of it, maybe written versions of it, engaged with its elements within mythic play or ritual or spellwork, and all of those things blur a bit together to me. But times when a particular myth has been strong for me—really felt immersive—I have deliberately walked those paths. And there's other times where I've taken it more lightly, like let a myth kind of frame a particular month or six months and seen what happens, like, "Oh, now I'm drawn to do this," or, "Oh, this came up in a dream, perhaps I'll go here or there or maybe I'll do a reading now."

So I think, yeah, many and complex are the ways that I engage myth as spiritual technology, as well as obviously some of my books are based around this, some of my workshops are based around this, work in reclaiming WitchCamps often has a particular myth as an anchor point for the whole ritual arc of the camp. So it's pretty important to me, but I don't think I've got any standardized answers—which might be the case for many of these questions.

Well, one thing I do love about a good myth is that it's a map, and so when it—this question says how has it shaped your descent and return—I do think this is one of the things that I love most about myths: is if you're in a descent place or underworld place, the myths, including the myth of Inanna's descent and return with Ereshkigal in it, but many other myths of descent and return, actually map the steps. They actually say, "Oh, do this, this is how you get out, you got to do this and this and this." Like Orpheus, for example: you got to not look back, you got to pay the price, etc., etc. So there's all these kind of—they're more than clues—like instructions on how to do the thing.

And sometimes I like to take a myth and remove all of the kind of emotive stuff around it and just get down to a list of what happened. And then when I've got those steps of what happened, then I can build them up again into a kind of ritual or a mythic working or a spell, perhaps, or an understanding of the myth that I think can cut through a lot of the kind of social nuances of how the myth was written down or recorded and how we're reading it or receiving it—can get to the bones, the skeleton of it. So I particularly like doing that.

## Crafting Ritual: Intention, Structure, and Co-Creation

Okay, my ritual work is apparently widely respected, thank you. When crafting a ritual, whether for yourself or a group, how do you begin? What elements are essential for you: intention, structure, co-creation?

Well, those are great things—intention, structure, and co-creation. Maybe I go intention, co-creation, structure, and content would be my order. So, yeah, intention—why are we doing this? Like, we might be doing it because it's a particular festival—Samhain, for example—but then let's go for an intention within that. "Oh, so our intention is to remember the beloved dead and reach out to the ancestors," for example. So we decide on what the intention is, and if it's a co-creation, that's through discussion.

Yeah, co-creation: we might have asked every person who was co-creating it to suggest one ritual piece that was important to them. Some of them might be duplicates or they might merge together really successfully; others, as we're working, might turn out not to fit into this ritual, but usually they do, depending.

And so, yeah, then we might go for a structure, and reclaiming rituals in particular have a very clear and recognizable structure, with a particular setup and then something that's sometimes called the tofu or meat or heart of the ritual, which can be one, two, or three distinct pieces, but that work together or in a particular sequence. So we would decide on those, and then the sequence is usually pretty obvious, but if it wasn't obvious we would decide on them. And then the kind of concluding pieces—so that's the structure.

And then the content, like, "Oh, well, so you get given a piece of that," like maybe the most recent Samhain ritual that we just did a few weeks ago, I was in charge of the trance. And the trance had particular objectives: to optionally visit the land of the dead, to meet with ancestors, and to return. Had a few instructions, things that I had to hit, but the creation of the trance was in fact up to me in this case. Sometimes it would be co-led, two people, so I had to actually write the trance, which involves kind of experiencing it oneself and feeling into it and having a few options for maybe what's happening on the day.

For example, our ritual was supposed to be outside, and then at the last minute it got switched to inside, so that changed some things that I was doing within the trance. And it took off the time pressure as well, because we weren't outside in the cold and the dark. So yeah, it's a bit elastic and a bit adaptable, but that content piece, and then everybody else had the different pieces that they were responsible for or holding or working on, which I knew the structure of but I didn't necessarily know the deep content of until it happened. So there's always this kind of unfolding of a ritual, even when I'm partially responsible for putting it on, where there are pieces that I haven't been responsible for and so I'm kind of immersed in the ritual, maybe in a similar way to people who weren't responsible for it at all.

And the second part of this question is: could you share an example of a ritual that turned out to be especially transformative? And I want to say, well, like every ritual is especially transformative in its own special way. So I'm going back to my Samhain ritual—as I said, it was a few weeks ago—it was an unusual ritual in that quite a number of people came to it who had never been to one of our rituals before, and this is held by reclaiming-identified people in the Blue Mountains as a public ritual. And it was transformative for various people—like, quite a few people came who had had beloved ones die, not just in the previous 12 months but really in the previous 3 or 4 months, and so there was a strong heartfelt emotion happening throughout this ritual.

At the beginning—one of the beginning tofu pieces of the ritual, so we're already well into it, but I guess early on and before my trance—was that we name those people who we knew and/or loved who have died in the last 12 months or whose deaths have deeply affected us, and we light candles for them. So this process can take a long time, even when there's not a lot of people there, and it was particularly moving this time, and I can't exactly say why. Maybe that extra level of emotion was brought.

There were also—the genocide in Gaza was named, and we tried to imagine what it would be like to have 50,000 candles lit there. That was also quite emotional. And, yeah, there were some other more general community deaths mentioned and honored, and so it was deeply moving.

After that, we did some things which included then, eventually, when we got to the trance—so I guess this ritual had an experience of opening ourselves and deepening into that and deepening again and then deepening again before kind of coming out and concluding it. But I think every ritual has the power to be especially transformative for someone somewhere, and maybe oneself as well.

## Aspecting Goddesses

Just going to have a mouthful of my tea. Okay, you've worked extensively with aspecting goddesses: what is it like to invite a deity into your being? How do you prepare, hold, and then release that presence?

You know, I did write a whole book about this, which is called *Aspecting the Goddess*, and so I want to say there's no quick or easy answer to this. But I will say there are several different ways to do it, and the reclaiming way, which is the way that I was taught from reclaiming tradition and which is modeled in that book *Aspecting the Goddess*, is a very disciplined and fairly precise way that involves some practice. And therefore I believe, and we believe collectively, is somewhat perhaps safer, or more sound, and perhaps more respectful to the human doing the aspecting and, we perhaps like to think, also respectful of the deity being aspected.

And suffice to say there is preparation and there is releasing, and there's a lot of techniques and technical aspects of that. And if we're practicing or learning it for the first time, I guess we go in lightly and with good support. And as we gain more experience and perhaps are held more deeply, or there's, you know, maybe a ritual of 100 people and this is something we've done many times and we're working with a deity that we know and trust and love, that is another tip: that this is not the advised, perhaps—or advised by me—way to meet a deity, but more advised to work with one, to do this practice of aspecting or drawing down with a deity that one knows fairly well and has a long practice with.

And can I share a moment when aspecting changed you? I mean, really every time I have done it, it has changed me, and it certainly deepened my knowledge and appreciation of the myth, the deity, their stories, my own practice—hasn't always been easy or delightful. And again, in that book, I share many instances in kind of long form of times when I have worked with a deity.

One of the most startling experiences that I ever had, I guess, was aspecting Eve in a reclaiming witch camp ritual at night, under a full moon at Easter. And that experience still resonates through my entire body—it was very powerful. Many other people also found it powerful in various ways. And for me, I felt like, "Oh, this is speaking to my DNA, this is speaking to myself, this is about being a human," even though it was aspecting Eve, who we were working with really as a goddess, as a deity, as well as the mother of humans, or humans. And, yeah, it changed my understanding of that—I want to say fairly pivotal—myth forever.

And I feel like it touched Eve—yeah, I just, I feel myself going into silence with it again and again. Towards the end of the ritual—this wasn't a big speaking role, but it was held over quite a long time, like over an hour—but towards the end, there was a piece where Eve/myself was supposed to speak, and she slash I was holding this passionate piece about being the tree and offering the fruit, and this is life and death. And it was pretty powerful. You can hear in my voice that I keep stopping and not really having words for it. But I did write a whole story about it in that book, so perhaps I'm better with words when they're written down.

## Descent Work and the Dark Goddess

Okay, taking a breath. Descent work appears again in your *Journey to the Dark Goddess*: what does it mean to descend? How do you guide people into shadow, loss, or the underworld in a safe and empowering way?

Okay, that's when I began the descent work with that *Journey to the Dark Goddess*, which was actually the second book that I ever published, so that's really the base of all of my descent work, is that work.

What does it mean to descend? Yeah, great question. In mythic terms, it means giving away everything that you have or own or are, including your life, your personality, your possessions, your relationships. That's mythically, and in ritual we tend to echo that, even if it is just a ritual to have a moment or an hour or sometimes a day, or day and a night, or three nights, where we have literally released, relinquished, sacrificed everything that we own, everything that is our personality, everything that is our life, our relationships, and we do literally imagine, "Oh, what will it be to die right now and do that—the death work?"

So that's one way to guide people, is to follow those mythic steps. And I do that in the *Journey to the Dark Goddess* book and I do it in workshops—usually weekend workshops or sometimes a bit longer. And this—I don't, almost one doesn't have to guide people into shadow or loss or the underworld, because you know what, everyone has these experiences in their lives. Plus, people who've come to a ritual or workshop or book with that as a topic obviously often are pretty familiar with it themselves—they're like, they're struggling with it or they're deeply in the experience and they wouldn't mind a bit of a guide or another voice along the track. So I haven't found that there's much need to guide people there, like people are pretty familiar with it.

But that practice that I outlined earlier about giving everything away is a pretty good guide. And this word "safe"—how interesting. Is this a safe thing to do? I mean, I think it's like sex—it can be safer ritual, but can it be safe? "Safer ritual," well, this might include that we would advise people who are experiencing a lot of mental or emotional instability in their lives already to perhaps—this isn't the right thing to do, especially maybe in a whole group. That we always advise people not to suddenly go off their medication if they're taking medication. That we always set up very strong ritual surrounds and guides and safe people—the people leading the ritual—and explain as much as possible some of the experiences that one might have.

I think there is a level of safety, as I explained before, about following the myth: that the myth is a guide and a map, and that they're circular, they pretty much always end where they began. And so there's this kind of circularity, even if someone gets lost on the steps on the way up, right? You still do the ritual of taking all the steps and you still get there. Maybe you need to do a bit of extra clean up work or refresh your work, but basically you have been dragged out by following the steps of the myth.

I do think it's empowering, in essence, to take charge of a descent, even a ritual descent. And I do believe that doing this as a practice—probably more than once—does really assist. I believe this and I have some experience in it, but, you know, everyone would have to find out for themselves. But theoretically, I believe, and to some extent this has been my experience, that doing this as a practice, in inverted commas, like doing it as ritual, as spell work, as mythic work, does lay down the tracks or the experience or that map for when real life hits us and we're suddenly plummeted into a descent that was not of our choosing, not of our time. And it can be a health crisis, relationship crisis, a hundred things—a work crisis, a death—all these things have the power to kind of drag us sideways into the underworld.

But my understanding is that when we're familiar with our own personal underworld and how it is for us, and what the steps are, and some things that one can usefully do on the way down there and on the way up and back up, that it helps us navigate these huge parts of our lives that really—yeah, you can't live to be an adult and not experience involuntary descents.

## Magical Partnership and Co-Creation

Next question: your collaborations, like with Fio Gede Parma on the iron and pearl pentacles and also *Elements of Magic*, suggest rich co-creation. What have I learned through magical partnership? How does shared ritual design or authorship deepen my own practice?

Obviously I've learned many hundreds of thousands of amazing things from amazing ritualists that I've been lucky enough to be taught by, to be on ritual teams with, witch camp teams with, and writing books with—amazing.

I think that the main thing that I always learn is how much richer, in a particular way, the breadth and the depth in that breadth that a project can be with multiple authors or collaborators. So I'm going to talk about *The Magic of the Pearl Pentacle*, which is my most recent published book, and I co-created and co-wrote with Theo—Fio Gede Parma—but we also had 10 other collaborators in there who were working on specific pieces, either an essay in most cases or a couple of times a different piece that are insets into that book.

And for each one of those humans, they brought something to the book that Theo and I, with all of our experience, all of our magic, all of whatever, could not have brought, because that was their life experience. We asked people to write on things that they were specialists on, so we have Willow Kelly, who's a death doula, writing about death held within community and spiritual community in the section on love. Now neither of us—neither Theo nor myself—could have written that piece. We could have theorized about it and said, "Oh, this would be a great thing," but we weren't there being the death doula doing the work, whereas Willow was and has brought that depth.

And so we have written on things that we're specialists on, and we have written kind of the generalized—I mean, in depth to us, right—but also generalized work within that book. And I just—my understanding, and when I read the book now, I look at it, I can see how the breadth is widened by the contributions of those people, and we could have mentioned those, but the depth within the breadth is brought by those co-contributors in a way that wasn't possible just with the two of us.

And even in a book which is just the two of us, I think if you read our books separately, we write in pretty different styles and pretty different content. Even so, when we come together, we're bringing two different things together, and it's an amazing process—and not without its challenges, I'm sure we would both say—but it's also such a beautiful, beautiful process. And by now, this is our third book—the Pearl Pentacle one is our third book that we've co-collaborated on, so co-authored—so we're pretty confident in it now.

And most of what I've said about writing, I think you could move across to co-creating magic and ritual as well.

## Bridging Ritual and Daily Life

Okay, even the most powerful rituals must be integrated: how do I personally bridge the gap between the ritual or workshop and daily life? What practices help us to ground, digest, and live the transformation?

Yeah, daily practice, I would say. And my daily practice does change around from time to time, but some elements of it currently are that I garden every day for an hour or an hour and a half, sometimes a bit longer, and like, occasionally not, but at least six days out of seven I would do this. I do it in the morning, and when I'm out there, like the white cockatoos swoop overhead and call out and I talk to them, I'm immersed with these little growing plants that I'm planting, and also what I'm weeding, which is a bit, you know, it feels out of balance sometimes. Like, I can easily, you know, murder—I'm going to say four, five, seven hundred weeds in that time, and I might plant one or two things if I happen to be planting that day.

And, you know, I've justified it earlier in this interview why I'm doing that, which is a level, a very simple and local level, of bush regeneration. So that helps me—that practice.

I do try and dance every day for half an hour, also in the mornings, and I write in my journal every day. And all of these practices—you could say they're not magical at all, right? They're just writing, dancing, gardening, and yet those are the times of the day where I probably feel most intimately in touch with my own magic, myself as a magical being. There might be more exciting things that I'm doing, like maybe I am working on a ritual or a book or who knows, you know, creating something magically, but, yeah, they're like the stars, whereas the night sky is all the rest of it—what's holding it together.

## What’s Calling Me Now

My final question I chose is this one that says:

*"Finally, what's calling you now? Are there practices, mysteries, or deities that are drawing you towards new edges or initiations? What are you currently exploring in your own deepening?"*

Yeah, I mean always, of course, naturally. Maybe the one reason why I spoke of Eve earlier is that I am going to teach a workshop in Sheffield in the UK in about six weeks that is re-immersement, in that myth, the Eve myth—maybe from a slightly different angle, Eve, Lilith, and the serpent. And so I'm excited for that to come alive, like off the page in the planning and the administration into the actual, "Oh, now we're doing it," so that's exciting.

Because *Magic of the Pearl Pentacle* only just was released, I'm still involved in a lot of kind of work around that. The Pearl Pentacle seems very present to me and I have started working on a new book, which seems really fun. And books are not always fun, but this one seems really fun, and it's a book around the major tarot cards. And I've always loved the tarot and I've worked with it a great deal as a reader and as teaching tarot to other people, and now writing about it just seems fun—plus, I'm not doing most of the writing. So I am kind of curating or managing and definitely editing a book with the contributions from many other people around these major cards. So I am exploring it, and I guess it's deepening me because, again, it's that breadth where you get the depth of the breadth from other people.

So someone's written an essay on *The Lovers*, which I would never write if I was responsible for writing an essay on *The Lovers*, for example, and every other card you could apply that to, but it's really fun. So "deepening" sounds like it should be really serious: what am I deepening into? So I'm deepening, I guess, but it's fun and it feels light-hearted and sweet and, yeah, magical in that kind of stardust magical way.

So we'll see what happens. That's what's calling me now.

**PAA: Thank you very much for your time and detailed answers, we very much appreciate it. **

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