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Ethical Witchcraft, Pagan Ecology & Plant Spirit Magic with Sian Sibley · Coffee & Divination

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  when I come into a relationship with a plant it's very much like going to a party and you walk into the party and you cannot honestly tell me that you will have the same type and level of conversation with your best friend as you do with your boss you will be two completely different people and plants they don't forget they're they're millions of years older than us so they will have conversations with us based on our experience based on where our emotional and mental health are you know you you can't I've got a monkshood in my garden that gives me really lovely vibes but just refuses to talk to me and it you gotta understand that there will be certain plants that just don't want to talk to you you know it it's they are people they have the right to say nah piss off I don't really want to talk to you I don't want to talk to humans you know Blackthorn one of my one of my major teachers Blackthorn she's a really difficult tree to get to know she she don't want to talk to you takes a lot of work to get to know a Blackthorn you know so but other people's experiences will be very different from your own and in our culture difference tends to be thought as is wrong but in this circumstance difference is perfect because you know that validity of that relationship is they're working directly with what you need and what you want to understand not what somebody else down the road that's doing the same work as you will do so it's about again those doubt devils about casting those aside and accepting what the plant is trying to teach you welcome to coffee and divination a podcast about the arts of obtaining hidden knowledge in changing times join me JoAnna Farrer to chat with experts from around the world on tarot runes geomancy and the many ways divination can help us navigate and plan our paths ahead I'm delighted to share today's conversation with Sian Sibley an author whose work brings together some very important threads in plant magic geomancy animism witchcraft and a deep reverence for the living places where we actually are Sean has been a writer and witch and educator for over 30 years she is also a biological scientist and teacher by trade and she weaves together so many of those threads beautifully in her works in this interview we talk about her latest book Black Paths and Green Cathedrals and explore what it means to build relationships with plants and spirits in our everyday practice before we dive in I also just want to take a moment to say that this is the last weekend before my first book The Diviners Path officially comes out from Llewellyn on June 8th pre orders and early orders really do make a difference for authors and I'm very grateful to everyone who's already ordered the book and talked about it with others if you haven't already ordered and you're curious the links are all in the show notes I also have a number of different in person events coming up I will be presenting a workshop at the famous Atlantis Bookshop in London in July I'll be at the Serpents Key in Pennsylvania in August and a number of other events in Vermont and New York in September and of course I will also be a presenter at Temple Fest this year so if you haven't signed up for Temple Fest I highly recommend you do it's gonna be a great time all of this and a lot more is over on my website where I've also added a lot of new free resources because of the book which you can find there and you can always keep up on what's going on and who's going to be on the shows coming up on our Instagram at coffee and divination if this podcast is helpful to you it really helps to share it with others and of course to review it if you can wherever you listen to it and thank you so much to everyone who has been so supportive of the podcast over the years I'm very happy to welcome Sian Sibley well it is my absolute pleasure to welcome on to the show Sian Sibley someone whose works I have very much enjoyed and whose conversation already even before we began recording we were already enjoying our conversation on paganism and ecology and many other such things so thank you so much for coming on the show oh it's wonderful to be here thank you for having me so we have a traditional first question and the the first question is since this is a podcast about divination I'm curious to know what was your first encounter with divination or things that are related to that was there somebody in your family who practiced you know magic or divination or read tea leaves or something or was this something you encountered and like started reading cards or something when you were much much older it's a it's a weird start for me because nobody in my family was in any way pagan or um associated with witchcraft in fact it was the opposite on my father's side all of my father's the men in my father's line are pentecostal ministers so they were very very religious so but then on my at my mother's side they were all atheist um and it's very weird I I always say this I think that my grandmother um came from a family of pagans that were hidden pagans because in a time when um everybody named their children with biblical names my great aunts and uncles my my grandmother's brothers and sisters were called things like harvest and Merlin and Iris which is a flower and Iris which is a you know they they weren't biblical names at all they were all Welsh and folklore names or mythological names I can honestly say that divination for me was something that came a it came very naturally from sort of gut feeling and that sort of stuff but I didn't use a set of cards until I started learning tarot when I was about probably about 26 or 27 um and now what I have now is over the last probably 12 years as I've been working with the um spirits of the the trees and the plants garage every time I work with a new spirit I make or my husband actually cause he's a really good artist makes me a meditational card so I've ended up with a pack of probably around 80 cards and like I have things like for me a butterfly is about transformation so he's drawn me a butterfly and so I use those now as divination cards but as a coven we we use lots and lots of different methods geomancy particularly we really like as a coven because you can use it magically as well for divination so yeah we have a big tradition of and it it's really weird because our uh initiate study at the moment is talking about tarot for divination but for magical purposes and for meditational purposes as well so we got a big project going on as a group on improving our divination so it's a good good timing for this podcast oh fantastic yeah no I have I'm sure we will we will get into uh geomancy and connections with you know how you have it uh in your book your most recent book so you you mentioned your your background was from that uh decidedly at least not openly or would not be called pagan shall we say how did this kind of connection to land spirits and the work that you do now develop for you it it started when I when I was very young we had ponies and horses um and very often my my background was um how can I put this I I had a wonderful family but my mother and father weren't particularly happy with the life they had and they tended to be very argumentative and there was quite a lot of alcohol and those types of things involved as well so I spent a lot of time with my brothers and sisters I've got uh two sisters and a brother and we took our ponies out into the land and what I found is that I would speak naturally to my pony to the trees as I was walking through and and that connection was there but then when I was about 11 or 12 I I came into the local library now in Wales we have free libraries but they are very very how can I put it white bread OK so you very rarely get anything on witchcraft and at the time I didn't know I was practicing witchcraft okay cause I was doing magic quite naturally without knowing what it was and I went into the the library one day and on the table not on the shelf on the table was a copy of what witches do by Janet Farrar and and and Stuart Farrar now in turn around remembering that my grandfather was the pentecostal preacher at the time I knew that if I had taken out that book as a loan they would have told my grandfather so I stole it I put it into my pocket and snuck out this is when I was 11 and I still got the book today and that although I didn't understand the pictures cause I was only 11 and I didn't understand the ritual per se when they were talking about magic and that that relationship with the divine being in nature that spoke to me and from then on I always thought of myself as not being Christian which was really different in those days cause we're talking about the 1970s and spending most of my time out in the country so it's been it's been a very very very long journey so we're talking 50 50 years ago now so it's it's a long time yeah no that's it's amazing when you when you mentioned that I looked over at my copy of what Witches Do which I did not steal from the library but I definitely understand that whole like uh if you if you find that book cause I had the same thing when I was a kid that there was just randomly a book in the library libraries are places for a reason so but you know the the thing that absolutely has made my you is that I had I run conferences in in Britain and I invited Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone to speak at one of the conferences and they came and she I I my publisher had sent out as as as they do as you know my new book which was coming out because she thought she would be a good person to review and she loved my book so I was so chuffed it sort of come full circle it's a it's been a lovely experience oh that is that is really beautiful yeah that's wonderful so with that being said we um the your latest book is is titled like Black Paths and Green Cathedrals and you write a lot about the intersection of ecology and paganism and animism and uh and all of that could you maybe tell us a little bit of what what Black Paths and Green Cathedrals is about for people who may not have read it yet just so that we get that that intro taste before we dive in black paths and green cathedrals is a reference to where I live to start off with because where I live there are a tremendous amount of coal seams and coal mines old coal mines so the coal dust goes into the soil and the soil is very rich but it's very full of coal okay and then the green cathedrals in Wales we have the most amazing forestry and it whether it be um farmed forest or whether it be wild forest the most beautiful trees one of which um is a a yew tree that I work with which is they believe they can't age it properly but they believe it's between four and five thousand years old which is an amazing age and he lives in a um churchyard up in Clun Bigan which is uh up in the Brecon Beacons which is wonderful if ever you get to come to Wales go and see Clun Bigan it's gorgeous but for me it came from a place where I was I've been running a coven for a long long time and I started working with plant spirits when through the alchemical texts of Charabel OK who is a um a Welsh what I would call a shaman really because he's working with plant spirits and I suddenly realized that one of the things that I was doing as a pagan was a I wasn't acknowledging the personhood of the plants that I was using for things like incense and that to me was if I'm claiming to be an animist then I've got to acknowledge the personhood of the things or the people that I'm using or working with so I started working with the sharable method and my first plant was mugwort and I don't know whether you work with mugwort but she is a wonderful plant to start off with she is very welcoming and very loving and very open to bridge between you and other plants as well I found that I find that smoking mugwort in my pipe um when I'm working with other plants really eases that communication between you and the plants but then as I looked into it more I looked at the different things that we do as pagans for example crystal use and the majority of pagans that you speak to are beautiful ecologically sound most of them are vegetarian a lot of them are driving ecologically friendly cars they are doing their recycling and yet we're still using crystals and if you look into where crystals come from they are mined in exactly the same way as your tin your copper your coal they're all deep mined or they're shallow mined in strip mining OK the other bit that concerned me was that the way that they are gathered is that children are used in the labour to get them from the ground because they pickers they pick from the surface if they they they are surface mines so I decided that I would do a survey and talk to different people about why they used crystals and the majority of people that have and I mean a tremendous amount of crystals don't actually use them at all they just go they stand on the altar as decorative pieces well if you're an animist you can't I don't see how you can calibrate taking something from for example Argentina where most of your amethyst comes from shipping it right across the water and then put it on a shelf and not work with it because you have no relationship with that amethyst person if you believe it's a a an animist a society you're better off walking out into the wood locally and finding a stone because that will give you a more immediate relationship with the land around you rather than a being an ecological and shipping across the sea b mining and c those those stones don't know us we don't know them so pulling them out of the ground to enhance your own spirituality is a little bit false the crystal issue is is a is one that is almost like a a symbolic step in the right direction of when we examine one thing we find that then it it brings up a lot of other connections that we may have been unaware there are certainly limits to how much that we can perfect that that relationality because there's always going to be issues in any system but if we start to think in one direction with like crystals for an example then it'll probably bring up other things that could be changed and we already before we begin recording brought up frankincense and I feel like frankincense is such an important thing I love the scent of frankincense and I do have a small amount of it that I use on special occasions but it is uh in my opinion meant to be used very sparingly and there's lots of other things we could substitute could you maybe talk a little bit about frankincense before we go yes well well when I when I started looking at um animist relationships and the relationships between pagans and the products that they use I did some investigation into incenses and what I found was the boswellia tree which is where the the frankincense resin resin comes from is grown in parts of Africa and as well as being affected by climate change now it and it's something that you know when you you start reading it and you start thinking about it you just think oh yeah I didn't think about that what happened was when frankincense has been used for millennia okay it's it was used in Egyptian temples it's been used in Mesopotamia it was it's always been used for religious offering and for ritual performance but what's happened over the last 2,000 years the majority of people who used um frankincense were Catholic churches but in a Catholic society there would be sort of one church per town and they would use quite a bit but it would be once a week when they did mass but now if you look at the the the the latest um census of both UK and in America there are nearly 500,000 of us now when you look at the census well every single person has about 10 grams of frankincense so that's a hell of a lot more than is currently being used by the Catholic Church so it's not about people being careless or being malicious when they're buying these things it's purely a numbers game because there are more of us and I thank whatever divinity you believe in for that because I think green religions particularly paganism are the way forward in the ecological societies that we're in now to solve the problems that we're having but we have to take account of the fact that when something becomes fashionable and popular we then use lots of it you know it's it it it is a problem purely because of numbers yeah and that also goes speaks to the the other really key element that I I'm very certain that you and I agree on which is that uh location matters and that localness matters so if you are talking about either you know picking up a stone that you are near because it's where you live or where you find yourself that's very different um from the extractive process of having something shipped across the world absolutely absolutely related to that then since this is a podcast about divination I I think that one of the most fascinating parts to that and I I have had people ask me this I think and you you answer it in many different ways in your book when people say well okay I want to form a relationship with the spirits around me how do I know that I'm not talking to myself or just imagining things in my head how are how do you think with helping people if they are if they are new to that process of discernment and listening well I call them the doubt devils OK and everybody everybody struggles with it OK the only people that don't struggle with doubt devils are people who are evangelical and we don't want to encourage that in any religion OK cause you will always doubt what you're getting because unless your ego is so big that you don't OK so what I always say is I I think I I list four things in the book one is does it does it enhance your own spirituality does it make you feel elevated does it make you feel more than you were before you started the divination or the the spirit process if the answer is yes keep going that's fine are the spirits or are you getting divinations that are asking you in any way to manipulate or to use something you shouldn't be or talk to somebody in a way that you shouldn't be if they are stop and try again thirdly if it's something that you need proof of then you're never going to get past that point where you are allowing those divinations to give you information because part of the the process of opening the divination centres particularly when it comes to working with tarot or working with pendulum is that you're actually that there's two ways of thinking about it I think about it in that I'm I'm working with the spirit of my pendulum or I'm working with the spirit of the tarot but in working with those spirits you're also working with the higher aspects of yourself that are more open to group mind and to to looking at the flow of ideas okay so when I'm doubting what I'm doubting is both my relationship with the divination tool and my relationship with myself but it's very easy to do for me I'm a I'm a trained scientist so I had an enormous issue in the beginning when I was working with my group and a good friend of mine at the time um said to me right he said this is what you do he said you've got your symbol you've got your doorway to work with the spirit but you're struggling with believing that that's true that you're not just inventing it so he said get the name that you've got from the plant which for me was Amisorel and plot it on a camellia which is for me I use the the Venus camellia because my good is a Venus plant and when I plotted those two they were almost identical and it was hysterically funny and I I think I've written about it in the book when I ran out like a little girl to my garden and went look look all excited and what I got from the mugwort was no shit Sherlock so they they they do have patience because one of the things that people don't realize you know calling yourself a pagan calling yourself a witch calling yourself um somebody who believes in spirits besides the human spirit is overcoming probably around 1,000 years of indoctrination where the human is the highest person on that pyramid so allowing you to understand that other people are alive they just don't look like me and you and they have very different biologies and very different ways of living in the world that's a massive step so you're inevitably gonna have some sort of doubt devils floating around in your head because and the other thing that we gotta get over as well is that for those thousand years where we've been told that the world is a mechanism 300 years it got worse okay we we had the ancient Greeks originally started with this golden chain of Homer where we were well male intellectuals were in the middle we weren't really mentioned and then it carried on until you got to Descartes and all of the mechanist philosophers and that then told us that even we even we were biological machines we weren't really a person we were just biological machines and that's fed through to our medicine to our philosophy and to the way we treat the world so getting over that that's a massive thing for white western people we got a big jump you know but we've got to get there because if we don't get there I would say in another 50 to 100 years we're not gonna be here to get there okay because I'm a great believer in in in poo pooing this idea that we are going to kill the earth we won't kill the earth we will do away with ourselves and the earth will just go let's try again so it's it's it the idea that we are the top of the pile a is ego on a massive part and it comes from the patriarchal religions and I blame the ancient Greeks as well cause they were a pain in the bum with it but it's also um it's a safe place for us to be as a culture because it means we are more important and we have a bigger say in how the world is it's about control you know that's all it's about is control so if we can get over that and you can release those doubt devils it opens you up to so much more you you literally never on your own because wherever you go there are plants wherever you go there are spirits so it it sort of allows you to see the world as it actually is instead of this veneer that we've put on it I I completely agree um one of the things that I think when I was sort of a child realizing that sort of animistic ways were not how other people saw things it was very odd to kind of feel the isolation and the loneliness of when you don't include others with you know quote in in the conversation then yes it is extremely isolating and lonely and I think theoretically that does make people maybe possibly a little easier to control because if you're afraid and alone look at that you're going to rely on that exactly in a different way it's the control mechanism of the patriarchal churches is is it if you think about it it's a masterstroke of manipulation it's amazing because one of the things that they do is if you if you are a person who believes in a heaven and a hell particularly and the people that are controlling the entry into heaven are telling you how to behave okay you will comply because you're too frightened not to whereas people like me that are pagan and see death as a completely natural and not even a a a sort of unusual thing because absolutely everything in the the real world dies without being frightened without you know the way you die causes fear if you're hunted down by a lion and eaten you know that's gonna cause you fear but it's not the death isn't isn't something that other creatures fear so that introduction of heaven and hell that is a masterstroke of manipulation by those religions so and it it makes me smile because the people very people who preach that this is how you should behave don't behave in that way uh hypocrisy hypocrisy haunts us all in some way or another so yes so speaking of that we we were you were mentioning how uh of course mugwort I I agree is a a beautiful teacher who I'm so happy uh to have around me and so present for people both in the US and in the UK so that's that is one um your your books frequently go into depth about individual you know plant spirits and how to connect with them and they are they are based obviously on where you are in the UK but many of those same species are found in other parts of Europe and the US um when you are building relationships with a given tree or an area of land what are some of the ways that those places like what do they expect of us how do you think of like what the expectations are from from that's it that's a very good question what what I tend to do is I would the main way to build a relationship with anything is to give it time to go and sit and just and it's something we really struggle with be quiet yeah just sit and listen and feel yeah I I am not a person I'm I'm not particularly clairvoyant I'm not particularly clairaudient I I feel things very much in my body and the communication with plants and with land for me comes through the feelings it it it it makes in my body and they will then translate in my mind as to what the plant is thinking what the plant is trying to give you one of the things that I am very very keen on is for people to steward and when I say steward I mean the proper use of the word steward not the one you see in the Bible Steward means to be in relationship with to look after to tend and when you say things to the land like if you will teach me about these plants then I will tend to you it means that you have to pick up the rubbish it means that if somebody is using a technique of magic for example a clootie which is environmentally damaging that you go and you remove those clooties even if you've got people there shouting at you because those clooties are their magical practice well I'm sorry if your magical practice is killing the tree that you're using for magic that's not magical practice that's that's the only place I tend to get a little bit spiky is when I have pagans that won't listen so for example clootie stuff if you if you're using a clootie I don't know whether you're you're aware of clooties you tie a a a a rag around a tree and you infuse the rag with your spell and as the rag rots the spell is released into the world okay but a lot of people now are misusing the technology and that they use in cluties that are non biodegradable so the magic is stuck there so your spell won't work for a start but also it cuts into the xylem of the tree where the water goes through and it makes the tree infected it causes the tree branch to die so whenever I go anywhere I take a little pen knife with me and when I see those things I cut them off you know if it's made of paper or it's made of something like a hemp or something like that I leave them there because that person knows what they're doing but if it's florist ribbon or anything like that I will take it off okay so that service is about um looking after that relationship with the land and the plants on that land so that's why it's really important to make sure that when you're forming relationships it's with land that's around you because if you commit to for example um I work with a a a garden that's down in uh Southdown which is about 20 minutes away from me well that means every time I go down to that garden I have to do some work I have to pick up rubbish or I have to well if I was doing that every day that's 20 minutes a day so it's a massive commitment if the land is not where you live and there's a wonderful book by a lady called Lynn Shaw who's talking about working with the plants and the land where you live even if you live in a in a city that you can find plant spirits and it's it one of the things she says in her book which I loved is the fact that because it's covered in concrete we tend to ignore the land that's under a city but it's still alive it's still you know working it's just got a layer of concrete over it doesn't mean it's dead it just means it's not flowering at the moment but then when you look in the cracks of the pavement there's always flowers and plants so it's about giving that service it's about like one of the things that I'm doing in uh may on the 15th of may I'm going down we're having a big issue at the moment with sewage in our water so I'm doing a a speech to Surfers Against Sewage that are doing a paddle out to sort of raise awareness and if they if I don't get lynched I don't know what will happen because I've I it's very impassioned I have sent it to the organiser and made sure it's OK because I was a bit scared about people that you're getting upset um but so that you know that's part of my service you know when my Kevin goes anywhere we do pick up rubbish we do take it so it's service to the land in that way so yeah and that is also where it is um individual because it the the kinds of expectations of service will necessarily be different based on what the real needs are so that's that time of listening and not deciding oh well I heard this person on a podcast say I should do exactly one thing exactly it's it's interesting for me because one of the things that um and I do try to make it clear in the book is people worry about when their relationship with a plant or their experience with a plant doesn't match up to something that's in a book and my argument is is that it's when I come into a relationship with a plant it's very much like going to a party and you walk into the party and you cannot honestly tell me that you will have the same type and level of conversation with your best friend as you do with your boss you will be two completely different people and plants they don't forget that they're millions of years older than us so they will have conversations with us based on our experience based on where our emotional and mental health are you know you you can't I've got a um a monkshood in my garden that gives me really lovely vibes but just refuses to talk to me and it you gotta understand that there will be certain plants that just don't want to talk to you you know it it's they are people they have the right to say nah piss off I don't really want to talk to you I don't want to talk to humans you know Blackthorn one of my one of my major teachers Blackthorn she's a really difficult tree to get to know she she don't want to talk to you it takes a lot of work to get to know a blackthorn you know so but other people's experiences will be very different from your own and in our culture difference tends to be thought as is wrong but in this circumstance difference is perfect because you know that validity of that relationship is they're working directly with what you need and what you want to understand not what somebody else down the road that's doing the same work as you will do so it's about again those doubt devils about casting those aside and accepting what the plant is trying to teach you yes and I think that also that ties into something you I really liked how you discussed the concept of no in in the book ah yes we're we're kind of already there I mean it's our culture tends to see uh we we especially when we're we're new and we're excited about a thing that like all things should be yes and and then there's also the way of turning it into if I get a no am I wrong am I bad is is this my fault like it it can turn into a lot of things that get you up outside of just the well what is what is your conception of that how do we how do we deal with that I think for me in my practice when I get a no I I feel it in my body and I think I've talked to quite a few people and they get that same energetic feeling and it it it I always remember having a conversation with a lady once that wanted a um a one from a Cherry Tree she very much wanted this Cherry Tree cause this Cherry Tree was growing in her father's garden and she wanted a relationship with it up and I understood it was a beautiful thought and she said oh but this she said if this cherry was not it wasn't I I it felt really odd when I was taking the wand and I said well did you stop and she said oh no no I take the wand and she said the problem is is when I use the wand it makes me feel sick and I'm like ugh ha ha ha ha ha this the whole point of working with the tree is that you work with the energy so when you take a wand from a tree you're not just holding a stick you're holding a conscious communication with that living being that has allowed you to take a piece of itself so that you can use that energy in the working that you have so it's about honouring that energy and when the tree says no and you will feel it I feel it here I feel it as a a gut punch almost and they don't mean to be nasty but that's how just how it feels you must honour that you must turn around and walk away I had I don't know whether you read the bit about my experience with Blackthorn this was I wanted to do some work with uh because around us the um ash trees are really this was about 10 years ago really struggling with the hypothermia um uh fungy so I thought to myself right I'll do a spell and it's the one that I use the geomancy in in the book where I'll put Casa and bind weed around a piece of ash with a circle of salt and I will use a blasting rod which is made of um blackthorn to empower this barrier okay so I go walking up the street and in Wales all of the the the trees are coppice so they laid split and laid down to make a hedge so I went to the first black thorn which I'd I've been talking to for a while and I introduced myself and I said please could I have a piece of your wood to work this spell and I had a very distinct no I under no circumstances no you could feel it in your bones so I said oh thank you OK thank you very much and I walked for about probably about two miles but it was the same hedge that was running and when I got to the next Blackthorn I went to open my mouth and the feeling I had in my body was still me you stupid girl because it was the same tree because it been coppiced so eventually I got my blackthorn wand and I did the the working but it was a completely different tree in a field miles away from this hedge but it's it's only when you experience that no that you land it's almost like a calibration technique you go and you say can I have you you feel the no and then you'll know what that no feels like the next time you feel it so it is it is difficult and there's we we as a culture as a white western culture we very much want what we want I want the thing therefore I should be entitled to have the thing but when you're working animistically you have to understand that these guys are people too and they can say no and you have to honor that yeah absolutely and the that honoring of but how do they put it it's um if you're talking only to hear yourself talk then you're not actually interested in anyone answering you so you actually have to believe that you're going to get an answer and then listen to the answer yes yeah it's it's it's very much the um what is it uh oh who said it I can't remember who said it the the guy who wrote Matilda believing is seeing not the other way around it it's really important that you you believe these people are people and then they will talk to you if you one of the reasons I called my first book unveiling the green was because of the experience that I had with mugwort I went and I did a mugwort initiation with a lady that was working with plant spirits and before then I'd said we haven't got any mugwort around here at all it's you know we live in Wales it's boggy we don't tend to get it and the lady looked at me and she said to me wait and see so I had this lovely initiation into working with a spirit and we we smoked I do the same ritual for other people now we smoked mugwort we drank it we had tincture it was lovely there was a beautiful meditation and then on the way home I'm driving up my street and there was mugwort everywhere and I mean everywhere it grew in every nook and cranny that you could find and I'm driving along thinking well how haven't I seen this before and I honestly believe that they have the capacity to veil and then when you acknowledge them as people suddenly they're there I it's it's something when I'm teaching a class on this it's something that I talk about in that if you see a plant that is looking either particularly attractive or maybe it's sort of got a it's attracting your attention all the time that is a plant that's saying to you come and work with me I've got something that you need because it's their way of of waving of getting your attention so yeah and I think that is something that um I think these conversations are also important because I've had conversations with people where when I will describe that there'll be like a look that comes over someone's face and like oh well that did happen to me there was this one time when this one plant and then they'll tell like a crazy story of something that is clearly not coincidence and they will have dismissed it because it's not a conversation that is commonly had but pretty much a lot of people have already had these types of experiences but it hasn't there's nowhere to situate it and that's the problem so yes and and that's the issue is that because we are not taught in school we are not taught in childhood cause this happens naturally in childhood you know I I have memories of talking to the big oak that sat by the the the the cow trench in the battlefield where I used to ride the pony we naturally do that we automatically allow ourselves to understand that there are other people in the world we in you know um uh invisible friends and that sort of stuff but then when you go to school and in school it's all mechanism it's all mechanism I I'm a ex biology teacher myself and I can remember sitting in the classroom once and I'm teaching biology and I'm teaching the biology of colour OK so it was supposed to be the biology of the eye but I wanted to mess with their brains a little bit because now and again kids need something to go ooh so I said right OK so I held up a folder I'll do it like this so I I held up a pen and I said what colour is that pen so they all went oh it's pink miss and I said no no I said there's no such thing as pink that is a material that is bouncing back white light that absorbing all the light except for the the the um we've learnt that corresponds to pink that's bouncing back and hitting you in the eye and your brain has labelled that as pink and you could see them going what do you mean there's no such thing as colour I said well the other thing to think of is you were saying that's pink everybody else will label that pink but they might not be seeing the same pink as you see because you know one of the things that people don't understand is that in some ways we live in completely separate universes you know in in my universe that's pink in your universe that might be pink it doesn't mean that you're wrong it's just that your eyes look at it in a different way and it's exactly the same with magic just because something for you works magically for somebody else it might not I I very often use the philosophical use of Marmite you know the have you ever had Marmite some people love it some people hate it but it's the same chemical so it's just in your universe it tastes wonderful and in somebody else's universe it's horrible you know so it it's all about this self um understanding and understanding that not everybody will see it the same way as you do I just have to tell you that I actually remember torturing my own parents uh over the color example because I was trying to get across to them that I said but how can you be certain and they're like no we just know okay can you stop asking why and stop making this more complicated I love it I love it but it's it's the same with anything else you know I I can remember literally um people talking in the 1970s 1980s that uh it was okay to eat fish because fish don't feel pain and my argument is have you ever been a fish how do you know that you know yeah absolutely yeah and and that is where the the arts of listening and like you said one of the hardest things is being still and we are not good at that and we are not encouraged to do that as a culture because that is uh not productive in in the in the way that our our culture likes us to think about productive absolutely absolutely it's one of the one of the things I talk about in the book is is perfect um you're allowed to be an individual you're allowed to have any life you want unless you want to have a life that doesn't involve yourself in the capitalist society and then you're looked on with great big doubts of judgement absolutely absolutely you mentioned the you know the magic word of geomancy earlier and in your book you go into and give some examples of how you incorporate geomancy in into these workings and you mentioned one um geomancy is something we've had geomancers on the show here before so I don't want to make you go into like a huge long explanation but just in case somebody hasn't heard of that can you do like super brief like intro to it before I have like one or two questions for you geomancy is earth based divination OK it's it's a it's a um a style of divination that started in the Arabic societies it was originally called Ramal and what you do it's the simplest thing you think about your question you have a stick and you make holes in the floor while you're thinking about your question OK and you do that four times and you can either do complex to your mancy which is talking about mothers and daughters and cousins and nephews and judges and all sorts of stuff or you can do quick and dirty which is what we tend to do which is you make one figure to answer the question OK so you make holes in the in the thing without looking at the holes and without thinking about it you're just thinking about your questions you the first lot is you add them together and if they make an even number it's two dots if you make an odd number it's one dot so you make four rows asking a question and it makes a shape and each of those shapes has got a different um divinatory meaning so for example kasa which is what I used in the ritual with the astry means it's it's almost like it's a saturnian figure it's a encasement an imprisonment and I wanted to encase that fungus to stop it spreading okay um but each of them um will have a different meaning things like Leticia will be joy um Tristia is sorrow and you you you look at the the the shape that you get for the figure and you can make a judgment on your divination process okay so we tend to use it differently we will use it the figures to empower a magical working and one of the ones that I put in the book is by one of my coveners who's called Lucy Greenwood um she we wanted to do ecological work we wanted a lot of the work that's done at the moment on in the pagan field is done against things so I know there's a famous uh spell at the moment against Donald Trump and there's this and we're gonna curse was the cursing the moon what made me go what ha ha ha but but what we wanted to do is instead of being against something we wanted to make something grow so we worked for the growth of green industries in the area that we are in South Wales okay so we went down to the garden on the beach and we uh Lucy is a Morris dancer OK so she we used Morris dancing as a way to make energy but what we did is every time we did this Morris dance we had a chorus where we all went together with our um sticks in a line in a circle and we danced around and then at the end of that we would go into a geomantic figure so we all stood in the different positions in the figure and we did it I think it was three weeks running um as the moon was at the moon was waxing and then we did it the last time on the full moon that work um cause when I did it when I wrote it up when we did the first edition with Black Lodge Publishing of um Black Pass and then I looked at it's the results of it in this edition that we just released from with Eon Publishing and the amount of growth of green industry in our area is huge it's absolutely huge we've had wind farms we've had um a hydrogen plant we've had a councils going from um park and rides so you park your car and then you ride on a free bus there's been loads of that going on but things like tree planting societies tree all of this has sprung up in the two years since we did the work so it was a work beautifully um and it's something I would encourage rather than battling heads with the current status quo look at what you can grow instead it's a much more um useful way of working magic rather than trying to force somebody cause group mind is that's a heavy thing once you got a group mind involved you know it's one of the things that we're all struggling with as pagans at the moment is the rising fascism that's a massive group mind so it's better to work behind the scenes and encourage things that we're working with dandelion at the moment to encourage things growing through the cracks little little things moving and and people being able to rebel but quietly so they're not putting themselves in danger you know and that is another thing from nature that those those the force of life is oftentimes the the most powerful of all and it can be underestimated by other people so I I am a in complete agreement that you know also nature abhors a vacuum so it is much better to be putting new things in places and letting them expand um exactly exactly so when you're we're talking about clearly that that is such a beautiful example already are there other ways that you incorporate geomancy or working with those figures into specific you know relationships you have with different trees or plants um do you find that there are certain ones that respond better or that are like oh yes geomancy I love you know like any other kind of like symbiosis that you find what because they got planetary alignments as well the geomantic figures you can use them in your meditations with the plants so for example um something like a oak is Jupiterian so you could use the Jupiterian figures to sort of visualize the figure in front of you walk through it and work with the plants on the astral plane one of the things that Charabel whose work I based um the meditations in Black Paths on did was he was one of the first people to look at working with plants on the astral plane rather than sitting with the plant now I like both I've got to be honest with you I I do like to sit with the plant as well but he worked almost exclusively with the plant on the astral plane and he did it by walking through the symbol but you can use the geomancy for that as well so for example if you were working with something like nettle and you wanted to work uh you could use puer which is a a Martian symbol and you could use that and go and visualize that growing in front of your face when you're doing meditations walk through the door that is poor and you could sit with the the spirit of the nettle that way as well so they are very very good meditational doorways yeah no that's that's absolutely true I just want to we are you know kind of coming towards the close of the interview but I wanted to give people a taste because in the book you have a beautiful way of giving a number of different angles and facets to each tree that that you bring up and you there's colpepper there's Cheryl Bell you know there's your own personal notice um is there any advice that you would give people when they are looking at there's a lot of disparate advice out there basically about any game plan that you want to explore how do you sort of handle the balance between historical or other people's opinions and and what you do do you have like a process for how you work through that or yeah I I I found that the best way to do it is not to read anything at all until you form your relationship because then that relationship is a natural one that comes from you OK and then I I the the biggest one for me that made me crease laughing is I don't know whether you've read in unveiling the green the piece I did on Buttercup ah cause that freaked me out Simon Rotton because I went into buttercups are everywhere in Wales they're absolutely everywhere and I was thinking before I went into the relationship flower of the sun it's gonna be a lovely easy thing to work with it'll be a beautiful relationship I can learn about growth I can learn about photosynthesis I can find out all these things from this wonderful plant and when I went and sat in a field full of buttercups and I picked one I suddenly realized that this is the one of the most Martian plants I've ever seen made a relationship with the dog he was aggressive he was in my face he was did it's not that he just didn't want to work with me he really disliked anything besides his Buttercup or yourself right he was really like that well I I thought well I must this I'm doing something wrong because you do you know you so I went and I read charabel and charabel said that Buttercup is a plant that attracts psychopaths so the one thing that I can be pleased of is that I'm quite obviously not a psychopath because it really didn't like me but what he said is that when you have someone with a massive aggression the the Buttercup can absorb that aggression that that martial aspect it has can take that from you so then I read Cole Pepper and he said almost identical things that they were very good at working with people with what what he called um uh what was the word he used that made me cringe um demented states that was the word he used demented states and but I could you could feel it you you you could absolutely feel it so when now somebody if I go somewhere and somebody says oh my favourite my favourite flowers are buttercup I go ooh ha ha so yeah it it's it's ah you you have to trust your own instinct and the best way to do that is not to not to read anything on the plant it's inevitable that you will get something through osmosis you know mugwort at the moment she is everywhere because I think she's opened herself up so much because we need to start working with these plants to to to save ourselves and stop us from ruining everything she's gone right I'm gonna talk to everybody and so you're getting experiences from mugwort but even there um when I worked with mugwort I was postmenopausal so I worked with her I got lots of stuff on dreaming I got lots of stuff on opening doors she was a massive door opener for me um my one of my Kevin uh girls Carrie was in um in menstruation and she's got endometriosis and she which was a complete blood plant for Carrie she was all to do with cleaning the womb and getting her getting her healthier in that way so even if you know a little bit about the plant you will get a different experience yeah no that is that is also where the just the act of actually doing the thing going out and and meeting the plant is is the best way all the all the books and all the thinking in the world doesn't substitute for what you will then discover for yourself so exactly exactly um before we wrap up I like to always leave space uh for guests it's kind of a a last question which is is there anything in particular I think you've touched on a lot of things that you are clearly very passionate about people thinking with but are there any conversations that you feel just keep coming up or pieces of advice that you you've heard yourself have to give a lot anything you want to leave listeners with as um could be related to anything we've been talking about or something totally separate haha it's I think two things I think are pivotal at the moment particularly in the place that we are with our exposure on TikTok our exposure on social media what the main one for me is that it's all very well and good to listen to people who are maybe more experienced than you or maybe have a traditional um training behind them but at the end of the day magic will come through you in whichever way is more natural to you just because you're doing it differently than your local Wiccan priest or your local witch or your local doesn't mean it's wrong it just means it's your way of doing it and that's exactly the same with the plant spirits never ever listen to someone who tells you you're doing that wrong that that's just that nobody should ever say to somebody you're doing that wrong you can advise on technique but if your technique is different to theirs that's their technique leave them alone so and the other one is what we were talking about earlier on nobody understands everything nobody understands that um some things we do are not as ecologically friendly as we would hope they would be and the idea is is that you get educated on it you find out about these things and when you find something that maybe a is and ecological but be is against perhaps your own moral compass then you stop doing it and one of the things I'm always trying to say to people is I'm not asking people to throw away their crystals I'm asking them to keep them and honour them and develop relationships with them because you can't send your amethyst home you can't send your um carnelian back to Buenos Aires where it came from but you can honour them and you can look after them but just don't buy anymore if you know that these things are coming from any ecological sources and one of the things I found in my research which god love people loads of people have said this to me I only buy my crystals from ecologically friendly sources there is no such thing as an ecologically friendly source of crystal if you're walking on the beach and you find a beautiful white little piece of crystal that's ecologically friendly if you do that when you finish your work take the crystal home let it go let it go back to where it should live because it's a person but there are no such things as amethysts that are ecologically mined there are no such things as um obsidians which are ecologically mined they are just not it doesn't exist it's a mythology that we've sold ourselves to make ourselves feel better about our practice so it's about educating yourself in what is sound admitting wave maybe six I've still got crystals in my temple I put them in the garden in the soil because that's the closest I can get to taking them home you know so I've got a big piece of amethyst and a big obsidian ball that I bought probably 30 years ago that sits in my rockery so but just just take account of what you've learnt and stop buying into that capitalist ideology that seems to be quite prevalent in paganism at the moment move away from it yeah yeah and it's also about you know knowing that you will you will learn more every day so you're not going to reach a point where like ah I won't make any more mistakes like that again no no you'll make loads you'll make loads but that's good that's good because if you think about it if you couldn't make mistakes if you couldn't do things the wrong way we would be living in dogma yes and that is not a not a pleasant place and not a healthy place either it is causing issues for others around us both human and non human so exactly exactly I appreciate your time very much tell us what I know you are probably working on many things and you mentioned that you were gonna be many places can you tell us a little bit about where you are going to be and what you're working on I am literally all over the place this year um I'm in a lot of camps I'm in the Festival of pagans and witches on uh Sunday and Monday of this week I am in Pagan Tribal Gathering I'm doing a a a conference in Dorset for um at the Dorset Pagans that's when I'm organising myself in October um I've got a book coming out in at the end of June June I called Drinking Tea and Hurting Spiders which is a um a guide to running a magical group and it's one of the things I'm proudest of is it's I I've spent a lot of time discussing the safeguarding issues around working in a group because I don't think it's something that people discuss and I think it's very very important for people who are beginners to be safe and to understand that there is nothing somebody can offer you that is worth allowing them to abuse you and that includes financial abuse that includes um physical safety uh safeguarding in the spiritual sense as well so I've included all of that and then I am sending a the the last book I've done um which I'm really proud of it but it's driven me insane ha ha ha it's it's a it's a bit more of an academic book than my other books it's a I'm calling it um the slow and Fatal Dance and it's a history of magical healing and healing in the world so it's a big long historical um survey really of of where we've come from and then it's looking back at what the old the different treatments were for things like fever and toothache and and I've looked through loads of grim wars and lots of different um canning man traditions and that's coming out I think it's gonna come out in 2027 and then my last one which is out in January I've been writing since Covid since I retired I've written five books and it it's like it seems to be I every time I send a new book out I think god I've only just published the last one but I've got a book from Moon Books coming out in a January of 27 on Medusa and her role in working with victims of sexual trauma so and her history so that's quite a good that's based on work that I do in workshop with victims of sexual abuse or sexual um inappropriateness so that's that's quite a good one I'm quite proud of that one as well so yeah I am a busy busy bunny and then I think I'm gonna have a rest ha ha for a little bit I don't know how much that'll last but sure yes I agree I agree well thank you so much for that and I will have links to um your books and other things so if people are curious and where they can find you that is in the show notes and I will look forward to having you back on so we can talk about so thank you so much for your time so far ha ha thank you thank you very much for having me that's been great