Neoplatonism, Omens, & Divination with Dr. Gwendolyn Reece

In this episode of Coffee and Divination, I'm joined once again by Dr. Gwendolyn Reece — Pagan priestess, Theosophist, librarian, and author of "The Waters of Mnemosyne: Ancient Greek Religion for Modern Pagans" 

This time, we go deeper into Neoplatonism: what it actually is, how the gods fit into a monistic cosmos, and what any of that has to do with recognizing an omen (for divination) when you see one. 

We talk about the difference between superstition and actionable intelligence, why academia keeps the occult at arm's length, and what it would look like to bring real philosophical life — symposia, hard questions, communal thinking — back into modern Pagan practice. 

I completely agree with Gwendolyn about the importance of philosophy, in-person discussion, and philosophy as a LIVED experience in the modern day. Every one of us has something important to contribute to this conversation... If you're passionate about this as well, reach out to me via email on my website, www.coffeeanddivination.com 

It's always a true pleasure to have Gwendolyn back on the show, and I'm sure you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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• Find Dr. Gwendolyn Reece online - Gwendolyn's website: https://gwendolynreece.net/ 
• Buy 'The Waters of Mnemosyne: Ancient Greek Religion for Modern Pagans': The Waters of Mnemosyne a book by Gwendolyn Reece - Bookshop.org US

Upcoming Events with JoAnna:

September 4–7, 2026: TempleFest at Prindle Pond Conference Center in Charlton, Massachusetts

• Check into the website ( www.coffeeanddivination.com ) to get on the pre-list for the upcoming online divination and nature-led divination container course, coming this fall.
  
  

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• The Coffee and Divination YouTube channel: WHAT MAKES AN OMEN? Dr. Gwendolyn Reece on Theurgy, Neoplatonism, and Divination 

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Thank you for listening, and, as always, see you between the worlds...

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I think that we could begin having more discussions about like okay so what do we think the real purpose of life is what do we think it means to be a good human and really deeply thinking about that because I think that the overarching cultural models that we are given are pretty wounded and pretty broken and I think that we have something to offer if we will sit down and do some more of that thinking welcome to coffee and divination a podcast about the arts of obtaining hidden knowledge in changing times join me Joanna Ferrar 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 today I'm very happy to once again be speaking with Doctor Gwendolyn Reese Gwendolyn is a pagan priestess a theosophist and she is a part of the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel she is especially devoted to Apollo and Athena she's also a teacher for the Theosophical Society and the authors of Llewellyn's the waters of Nemoceine Ancient Greek Religion for Modern Pagans Wendolyn spent many years working towards a PhD in religious studies and she is a professional librarian her scholarly grounding in Neoplatonism is something that runs through this conversation today she's been on the show before and today we will be discussing Neoplatonism and Greek philosophy and how it relates to omens and what we get from the gods through divination a few quick things first my book The Diviner's Path a nature LED approach to divination with Tarot Runes and pendulums is of course out and available thank you to everyone who's picked up a copy and if you get a chance leaving a review wherever you purchased it does make a big difference second of course Temple Fest is coming up and I'll be teaching a workshop there as will Gwendolyn and a few other people who've been on the show recently and now I can finally announce that I will also be teaching and presenting at the Sacred Space Conference in 2027 that's near DC so you should get your tickets now if you haven't already registered details are all in the show notes for that you can always find me on Instagram at coffee and divination and of course the website coffee and divination.com where we have a lot of free resources and now enjoy the conversation with Doctor Gwendolyn Reese it is my pleasure to have back on the show Wendelin Reese I feel like at this point I can call you a friend of the show so it is really lovely to have you back and to have another conversation about these wonderful topics thank you for being here oh thank you so much for having me it's always a joy to see you be it in person or here so I'm just really honored that you've invited me back and excited to be here very cool so we have a quite a tableau of topics that we can discuss what it is you and I that sit down and we were talking before I hit record about which of those topics we will cover today and I figured that one of the threads that we can uh follow in our discussion of the gods and divination and how we how we interplay all of that with ritual in our lives would be to first talk just the basics of the concept of Neoplatonism which is something that you are quite an expert on and I figured that for some people who are listening who may know the word but not really be able to uh give us a definition if you could maybe tell us a little bit briefly of the basics of what Neoplatonism is yeah so I would say for myself having known like big scholars who are you know making their careers in this I will say that I am a passionate student haha um so I do know a fair amount but you know like I said I know some of the the biggest scholars in the area so I'm not gonna claim to be one of them but Neoplatonism arose in the early part of the Common Era and it was a synthesis of previous um eleatic and Hellenistic thought that comes together and platonic is usually considered like you know the grandfather of Neoplatonism and what he's doing is synthesizing really the best of platonic Aristotelian stoic it's got a bit of Pythagorean Orphic and some other things in there and he's bringing them together in a coherent philosophy that also has an incredibly strong mystical element running through Plato himself is considered to be one of the world's great mystics and so I first encountered really trying to get into Plotinus when I was working on um a PhD in religious studies that I did not end up finishing I became a librarian instead but I still go back and do research in those areas um and I was working comparative mysticism and he was really kind of my my favorite guy I loved him so it's bringing together a lot of the different pieces it is ultimately it is monistic meaning that there is behind and back of and the source and basically everything is one so we call that monism and in there is a a tractate that's called the one although in the language of mystics they say the one that is the true one cannot be spoken of and is neither one nor not one I mean that kind of thing you know so there's that sort of mystical language which I'm happy to talk a little bit about that actually um with mysticism but then it's it has emanation as part of it so that everything that is in differentiated reality is emanating from the one and in Neoplatonism there is both a cosmology that is explaining the way in which the world and beingness works but it also gives you a method for going through back up to mystical union and so in that way it has a practical aspect as well so platonic is kind of like the the root of it and I'm happy to talk more and I'm sure we will about all of these different things and then some of the other later um thinkers that come out of this and are part of Neoplatonism you've got Iamblichus who's the great theurgist you've got Proclus is kind of the last one and so and they have additional elaborations and with the omphalos you also have more in the way of ritual than you do in Plotinus that is more interior mystical so one of the things I'm just going to mention because I think is useful is that when we look at any of the world's great mystics and like I said I love looking at this across different cultures I think there's something very important to look at there because I think that it is all revelatory in terms of an experience that people are having across culture across time that I believe there's pretty compelling evidence that that experience the root experience is the same experience that is therefore part of what it is that we can all have that is then interpreted culturally differently but one of the things about them is that the mystics always say and it is ineffable which means unspeakable and then they go about to talk about it for like the next 600 pages so this is something that happens across all the way and I think what is actually going on there is that they're talking about an experience that is logically ineffable based in the nature of language and I think that's actually revelatory because all of language presupposes subjects and objects it presupposes a speaker and one who is hearing and the claim of the mystics is that this experience is a unitive is a unitive experience in which subject and object that differentiation is eradicated so that there is no differentiation all of language presupposes and this is the old Kantian categories that uh there is space and time and the mystics say this is transcending space and time it is outside of space and time so I think when they claim that it is a experience that is unspeakable they are making a logical claim there that actually can help us understand something about what it is that they are saying so I'm just gonna put that out there but that's that's kind of Neoplatonism in a nutshell it's got all the best of Plato Aristotle the Stoics and he's figured out a way to blend them together in a way that is a um a good syncretism of all of them that is really a phenomenal uh encapsulation of a lot of those things so thank you and I I appreciate that you you bring in language in that way because it is I've had a number of discussions with people will to say well what was the point of all of this you know wasted breath and ink if you're just going to in the end say it was ineffable but I I agree with you I think that that understanding of the way that language by its very nature works means that we can say that it's logically impossible and therefore it is a statement that that can help to understand it when you when you look at it from that that perspective so that's that's beautiful um with that being said there is you given the the basic map of that and one of the things that I have encountered with with some people who have looked at these things a number of different things but one is that is this kind of is Neoplatonism something that encounters the world as something that is positive and alive or as something that is a dead cosmos because I think that there are sometimes uh prejudices from people's experiences of philosophy in in other areas where they may presuppose that oh it's philosophy so it's kind of materialist and it's kind of just presupposing that things are dead and gods don't exist yet this is a this is philosophy from a more living world if if I can use that phrase I don't know absolutely and I mean to me this is one of those things that you know if I have my own mission statement for what I'm hoping to bring into you know the pagan community it is partially one of those legs of a tripod stool or whatever is kind of trying to rebirth philosophy and its real meaning because philosophy the word itself it means to be a lover of wisdom and it is not meant to just be a description it's not like a dead text kind of thing although that is often the way it is taught it is really meant to be a way of living so that you are a lover with all of the you know philos it's like that that is the deep affectionate love to be that kind of deep intimate connection with wisdom itself and if you look back at like where it arose cause philosophy is originally born well interestingly it may have been simultaneously born in both Greece and India at roughly the same time separately but those are the two places that it arises and in the traditions that I know the best although I've done a fair amount of study of Indian philosophy as well it would be in the um in the Hellenic context and it always has two primary goals one of them is is trying to search for the nature of truth part of what happens when it's originally born and so this would be with the Presocratics is that they begin looking at the world trying to understand the world and they look at things and they're like wait there is all this stuff that looks like it's stable but when you look more closely it's always changing and so there's something there where just you know the way in which we're observing something means that like our common sense perception of it is maybe not accurate and then they also are like but what is this part of my mind that is able to think about this so it also has this turn very early on too so it's got the what is the nature of reality understanding that the true nature of reality may not be its appearance and then the second one is given whatever that is that is the true nature of reality what does that mean for living a good human life and those two things are always there together they are always there and so it really to me is you know when when I believe we're called to live a philosophical life it certainly does not mean like sitting around looking at something dead it's like this active engagement in these questions of the world and trying to understand what what is this what is this reality and what does this mean for me and so I think it's beautiful and I think the way in which it was studied and lived for so long as really lived is what you really wanna do um it's just very different than unfortunately how it's often done in philosophy classes which you know um I got to teach Aristotle and I love teaching Aristotle and that made me so happy but like you know I'm just very excited by but yeah so I I get that um there is almost all of the major philosophical positions that we can think of did exist in ancient Greece so there was like one of the schools that was a pretty radical materialist just like we would find now actually the atomists you know there's various things like that but then there's all sorts of like I said there's Plato is clearly mystical in his in his um you know approach Neo Platonism is mystical I Aristotle is fascinating Aristotle has elements that I think are actually kind of mystical but he's also very much more like let us explore he's more like the Star Trek to the Star Wars universe of Plato Hahaha it's like let us explore these things and make them move them from the category of the unknown into the known you know that kind of thing and he's the founder of logic um you know so it's yeah there's a lot of different differentiation that's there but in many of these traditions you can have things that are very abstract like Plato is very abstract Socrates is very abstract but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't believe in the gods also it means that the gods are understood in a larger context I mean you know so sometimes you will have part of the danger is that sometimes you will have the ancient Greek philosophy read backwards through monotheistic Christianity and I would encourage people to go read the original and to recognize that this is where they they are because you know it is very important in Christianity and in Islam I mean the reason we have Aristotle is because Aristotle is the sage and he's one of the foundational thinkers in all Muslim philosophy so I give thanks to the Muslim scholars who you know kept those texts because I love Aristotle um so you know there's there's all of that but if you read them through the later uh you know the later elaborations you will lose some of the things that we would see there as pagan so you know just as an example that to me makes it very clear is when we have um Socrates and and Plato's dialogue is going off he's gonna be executed and he tells his followers to um sacrifice a cock to Asclepius because he owes him he owes him a rooster so I don't think these things are um at odds with each other you can have a very abstract understanding of the nature of reality is ultimately one and all differentiated reality is a part of one and is coming from the one but also believe in the gods it just means that they're part of the one too in Neoplatonism you also have this understanding as you have these imminatory schemes where things are you know everything is stepping down into greater differentiation casting on the mantles of density is one of the ways occultists sometimes talk about it and in that understanding there are great beings that are that are we would consider them gods that have their retinue or their later emanations would be coming down into you know different chains so that kind of fits into the imminatory scheme as well and where exactly there's debate amongst the neoplatonic philosophers about where exactly the Olympian gods fit in all of this so they talk about it yes yes I I think we will we will go into a little bit of that a little later but I I will just say you you say one of your your goals and I would say one of mine is to sort of uh make people think about how divination and philosophy are absolutely 100% linked because like what are you what are you doing with divination you're you're attempting to come to greater understanding of something and that's well it's really philosophy as well like if you're not good at interrogating something if you're not good at thinking about things you're not really gonna be able to divine or you probably wouldn't even think to divine at that point anyway that's right what is occulted and then what are how are you getting to the information and that's philosophy it's divination it's all sorts of different art forms but yes so I can do it that way awesome and actually um Hellenistic astrology by the way it was it was founded as um you know because there's there's philosophy that begins in Babylon but a lot of the stuff that we think of as you know our current astrology like the house system all that that's coming out of Hellenistic but it was founded as a um as a discipline for the study of fate it was trying to understand what is fate what what is this thing and of course the Muira so it doesn't necessarily mean predestination but the Muira means like you know the um kind of the patterns that govern the world and you know the patterns the essential nature of things so for instance like a human being's muerta is that we are beings part of our muerta at any rate is we are beings who die and who know we will die you know that kind of thing so it was trying to understand what is the nature overall of of fate so just to put that in there for the connection between divination and uh philosophy there absolutely yeah and that is another kind of like there's there have been debates even amongst sort of modern diviners about whether astrology is divination like does it does it count as a separate thing because of the way that it's the way that it's going about that search for for information I I think that it is but you know that's a separate topic I agree with you cause Hellenistic astrology and all of that kind of comes from the same interrogation of what it is to know or be fated to have to have knowledge in some way so so with the um with that being said so we've we've tried you already mentioned like the emanations and chains of being and stuff like that we are we are eventually going to tie this down into omens and divination okay but um where you mentioned that there are there's like sort of different opinions about where the Olympian gods fit in and I don't expect you to go too far into like whose opinion is what but um how do you view that and like where where do you fit philosophically with how you view the emanations and like where the gods fit into this lovely thing we've been talking about so far yeah so I will say that I am constantly in evolution of thinking about these things so I will also say that I hold to myself as a living growing being the ability to disagree with myself at later times hahaha and I consider that to be growth hahaha but at this moment my understanding is that you know you have like if you have the that which is the one that is neither one nor not one this whole thing here and then you know you have that the big moment is something causes it to begin to have self knowledge and as soon as that does that split into subject object if you'll remember that this is also a methodology for re achieving unity through a mystical experience that subject object differentiation so something happens where the nous which is like the mind of god if you will is contemplating itself and it's like that that self reflexive turn and so as above so below I think that's important just for us to recognize that there is something here that that also kind of works for us once it does it's having thoughts and those thoughts then create this next level um and so and then from there from each of those thoughts it is always looking up and then contemplating and having additional thoughts so the question is where are the gods in this are the gods that we would know of as the Olympian gods are they in that like they wouldn't be the the news because that's still unitary are they in that next level are they in the level after that they are so much bigger than me I'm not sure hahaha um but you know I think that many of them are quite high um I also think that many of them have the equivalent of like avatars where they continue to step down some so you know um down into like so you have these kinds of chains so and I think at least for me um so like I believe that Apollo has a very very cosmic level and he's of course the one that I'm I'm closest to I believe he has a very very very cosmic level I believe he also has a level that is more personal um you know he also can relate on these other levels so I see him relating all the way up and down into these chains to a very very cosmic place um and you know and then the question then is like okay and this this comes out of the um out of the some of the stuff that is legitimately ancient Greek where they're you know going around and they're looking and they're like ah I see you I know you as whatever but that would be partially the way in which this works is you're like oh okay so are Apollo and Vishnu in the same chain like what what is that are they actually kind of reflections or maybe the same thing you know that would be an um you know legitimately ancient way of looking at it so that is actually kind of how I tend to look at it and I think that I can relate to them on a more personal level and then when you're working with them sometimes you get up very very high into abstraction and and you know when you're dealing with something that is very cosmic but I deal with them as high as I can which you know well see that's that's the way in which I'm currently understanding them but much like us it's like you know we have an individuality that is immortal and is beyond what we consider ourselves to be and and beyond what we often are touching and then we have the the soul level the personality that you know a piece of that I think reincarnates as well but it's a little bit more personal and then we have like the stuff that is really just like here that is tied into this particular incarnation and I think the gods are kind of like that I think that they have these different elements as well which makes sense given this particular kind of philosophy that's kind of what I think haha yeah yeah uh you will be held to that for all time no I'm kidding all time all time I can never be wrong haha yes all all things are changed anyway so um well with that you know I think that for for many listeners then of course we're talking about how all these different things are connected and that's sort of the the idea of correspondence and the idea of you know things being like unto other things shall we say so then that immediately starts to sort of take us down into the idea of divination itself yeah which has that layer of there are symbolic truths that are connected one to another and how they then how those symbols present you know gives off certain meanings because of their likeness to others would you kind of agree with that as a statement yeah yeah I think there's a couple of different things going on simultaneously I think that we have um and it really has to do with when we're doing divination I'm speaking kind of myself too it's like trying to identify what is the source here is the source and cause it varies I at least for me there are times in which I think I am getting certain things that are a gift that are direct communication from one of the great ones um there are other times in which it's like I think what I am doing is reading the pattern of the cosmos or I think I'm reading something or my higher self is is sensing something and pulling that through that's more of a pattern of the cosmos that is not necessarily a gift if that makes sense and in Neoplatonism I see both operative that I think would be useful so you have as we said there's the correspondences there are different kinds of energy that are coming through that sometimes that part of ourselves more that we can raise ourselves up because we exist on all these different levels too and so like all of us are in some of these chains and so if you can raise yourself up to a higher and higher level of abstraction you have greater knowledge able to come through that then has to work its way back down to the point of view that like can go aha I now know what to do with that or how to say something it's you know um so there's there's that and so that would be like the correspondence makes that that's part of it with the correspondence um you know that there are these things that are are there and then there's the things that we would call in the in the Greek is called the schema which is actually where you get symbol um and those are gifts um the idea there is that you know if you are raising yourself up and they are considered gifts from some of the great ones who are trying to communicate you're raising yourself up and what they're doing is they are dropping things that are able to like pierce these different levels of the veil and if you can grab them then you can be pulled up and have that knowledge and so um but again those are it's a combination of you know you may be calling for it you may just be open to it but those are um they're the shutting the uh where we get charisma right um charisma it means gift so those are gifts so the Seama they get dropped down and if you can grab it then that's take you right up through those levels of reality and then you can perceive at a higher level so I think there's a combination of like I said there's a part of us that is always there that if we can um if we can shift our attention and get ourselves kind of clear then we have access to a tremendous amount but then there are these other things that are particular going back so with that that understanding I will just say completely agree with you on that um my book has like an entire chapter on why I think omens are so important and how we should be listening to them and blah blah blah and it's very very very important and I appreciate that the distinction of of looking that at that as the the way of things dropping down while we are reaching up and ideally if we are doing that well then there's connection oh yay yeah cool um so the now I'm curious your opinion on this because I I always like to hear other people's thoughts on this how then in this connected universe that what distinguishes something as being an omen as opposed to not how what do you think of as like the way that you recognize it or is that even a question that you would ask yeah I mean I think that this is an interesting it's a practical challenge right you don't want to become superstitious you don't want to become someone who's wandering around and like oh my god someone dropped a pin does that mean that terrible things are going to happen you know so you don't want to see things where there's not things but you do want to be open and paying attention um because the other the other piece of it too is that we want actionable intelligence we don't want more noise you know that's a huge part of the challenge there's already so much noise in the world we want actionable intelligence when we're doing divination or seeking omens or whatever so there's a couple of different things that I can recommend for that one of them is like is some omen training by which I mean it is a useful thing if you are working with one of the great ones to say I am asking for some guidance today on this please show me a sign and I I also do kind of a I I believe in doing something like the um pendulum testing just for yes no just so you can like verify for yourself so go through the day and see what happens and see if anything grabs your attention and then at the end of the day when you're doing your meditation your devotional work say did you send me anything yes no um was it this you know yes no okay does this mean and you know and do some testing of that sort and like I said I like you can do it with dice or whatever just something that'll give you a basic yes no um to do some of that kind of like really narrowing in on things but then when you're doing that over and over pay attention to when you are getting something and what it feels like in your body because what it feels like in your body may be different than what it feels like in my body but I kind of know for the most part like when something's coming through because I'll ask I mean there may be things that are coming that I'm just completely missing I mean that's quite likely actually but I kind of no like oh here's this feeling aha that means and I the same thing actually with really big intuitive hits um you know when you're getting something that turns out to be real Clair sentience or something like that you know these are the kinds of things that come through sometimes when you're not even looking if you can recognize what that feels like subjectively then you'll be more likely to know when it's happening again I'm a big believer in journaling for these sorts of things because the other thing is sometimes you don't see it until like a couple months later at which point you know if you don't have good records you're just gonna keep missing and spinning around but the other one sometimes it's really blatant if you know if you work with any of the great ones closely I mean I love Apollo I love Apollo he's so compassionate for me when I get all like insecure and stuff like that because when I'll be like am I making am I not doing a good job I'm maybe not doing it's like I will inevitably see something walk by with his name on it oh I'm like thank you thank you you know I mean just like really blatant I sometimes need the clue by four you know um so there are some things that are like that um or I remember once when I was doing an oracular ritual for him and he said this phrase that was so weird but it was a very specific phrase and someone walked by with a T-shirt right after that ritual that had that exact phrase on it and I'm like okay that was meant for me to see that and know that I am not in the way and not messing up they can be very kind that way which is good for us very patient very patient you know so that that's kind of what I would recommend but the other thing I would say is you know check yourself for your own anxiety because if you are a really anxious person then that is something to address because I have noticed that there are some people who have kind of an underlying problem with excessive anxiety that starting to look for omens just makes them neurotic you know and that's just a that's a real thing and if that is part of your makeup then that may be something that you want to address before you're like cosmos give me signs cause you know if you if you start thinking like every single thing is doom it's probably not um everything every single thing is probably also not like yeah all is great all the time but you know at least all is great all the time doesn't tend to cause the same level of harm as seeing doom where there's not any so that's very very true I mean swinging in either direction can have its its various arms but I would harms but I would definitely agree that if it's on the anxiety side it can and leave more marks and and definitely not be as pleasant in terms of of how we can then interpret and make decisions based on it so speaking of actually making decisions and how that you know betters our lives I have a few different questions but I think the next one would be how do you or or maybe you don't see any connection between like the practices of divination it could be any form that we've been talking about and therapy and that idea of like trying to move up through that to a greater awareness of that oneness like is there do you see any connections between that and the way that you think about divination or yeah I mean I think that the better you are at moving up into the higher levels of self and being able to I mean we talk about it in terms of purifying the vehicles which just means like cleaning um it's trying to you know it's trying to make your glass as clean as possible as it comes down through you know the better at divination you're gonna be'cause at the big challenge is always even when you're doing something like you know possessory kinds of work like oracular work it's they're having to use your vehicle you know you're having to use all of your stuff you're having to use your mind you're having to use so also you know the more mental development you have the the more tools there are to work with um but all of that kind of uh work with theory is about shifting your ability to operate in higher and higher levels of or vibrations of consciousness more abstraction and then cleaning that stuff that is not really you as much as possible so the more you're able to do that the better a diviner you're gonna be because the less distortion there's gonna be it's like kind of you know getting the Windex on your lower vehicles hahaha so it can come so the light can come through more clearly so there's that but I think the other piece of it is that there is guidance that can be given uh and received that can help you know how to do that work better because there's overall practices but that doesn't necessarily speak to whatever your individual kind of challenges are and at least for me and maybe this is because it's part of my own challenge like I I kind of need to feel loved I don't think I'm alone in that um and so that helps so you know when you feel the divine love that helps you have more confidence to keep trying to do the work and that I think is a huge part of it and especially you know our our society is always giving us these like are you worthy are you worthy and when you have the divine ones telling you like of course you are cause that's not their frame it's like that's just not their frame that's a human frame and so you know the more you're both trying to do that work but then also doing the divination that helps you be in closer connection that to me also just helps me have more more will and confidence to keep on moving cause it's not easy I mean that's the other thing that's and I I should warn everybody about this if you have not I I think many of us know this cause you know any kind of real initiatory practice is is basically doing the same kind of thing its theory is a form of this kind of spiritual development is a a approach but it's doing something very similar to what you can do in different kinds of traditions as soon as you're actually making progress you go into a centrifuge and all your impurities spin out to the surface and there you are and like every time you do another big jump into like I am ready for more growth welcome to suddenly being like what is this stuff I didn't know I had and that's part of the process but it's always that kind of moment in which you're like having to be confronted with the things that you really kind of wish that you didn't have because that's the only way to get past it it's the only way to grow by it right it's like you know to do that work but it's not always pleasant no and I I couldn't agree more I think that that is um possibly one of the things I I am so passionate about divination for is that ability to not only you know know what you need to know for next week or something but also to just get those types of moments like you're saying about like somebody walking past with that T-shirt or getting a piece of information that lets you know that you're actually not alone in facing some of these demons it doesn't mean that it's like any spirit or or any more than any other person could do your work for you we're here to do our own work and that is sometimes very difficult particularly when we step onto one of these pads but to know that it's like oh well I can talk to somebody else about it there there'll be some help on the way I can get some information back so I don't just feel like I'm alone in this little spinning wheel of of new stuff that's gotten kicked up yeah it makes a big difference it does at least to me it makes a huge difference and it's the same kind of thing of like you know when you were there for someone you love it's not like you're doing their work you can't do your work for them you can't do any of that it's like but you can be there so it's like hey you're not alone that's that's worth everything that's a lot I mean you know it's like even in the um the taking refuge in the three jewels if you're a Buddhist like that third one is you know taking refuge in the Sangha is the like you are not alone you are in a community and you know and to me also having that include the great ones is important so we have gone into some very beautiful uh topics I I almost hate to sort of bring it back to a almost feels almost materialist standpoint but it's interesting cause your background as you said librarian and you are also very interested in all of these topics from an academic standpoint I just had John Michael Greer on and we were talking about he's a recent work on Yates and the occult side of Yates and how that yeah strangely has been ignored what so shocking people would not the academics would not have taken that as seriously um and so it is interesting to me and I'm given your background how do you feel about the the ways in which some of these great philosophers have had their more occult leanings or their theatrical uh sides to their works cleanse and I understand what you're saying about like from the the Christian or or other religious perspectives but nowadays it feels like hmm it's still suspiciously absent a lot although that is improving yeah it's there is an interesting challenge and I was dealing with this a lot cause originally my goal had been to be a um professor of religious studies and to do comparative world religion and philosophy and so I was working in one of the you know really good PhD programs for that when my dissertation committee kept falling apart then I'm like I owe a house and in addition to that I was like you know what I do not wish to go to some of these places there's only a few places in this country as a practicing pagan that I really wanna live and I don't wanna be like I will take a 10 year track job anywhere I was like no so that's when I became a librarian haha which was a good move for me what I also observed in that was very clear in religious studies it you've got to see something there that um is a challenge with the academy and I can also then see the history of it which is that when the like western institutions of higher learning were breaking from the church because they were all under the church you know so they were going through this period towards you know trying to create things that were not like just the um Christian institutions anymore and we're trying to do secular science they were trying to do secular history they were trying to do all these different things and as part of that they made a distinction between okay so the religion part goes in seminaries and everything else goes with us and we won't touch your stuff you'll stay out of our stuff and that really is kind of the the way in which that has developed and part of what that does though that is distorting is that it does mean that you get really hesitant you can talk about and there are some scholars that have talking about talk talking what is that talked about haha talked about Yates and his occult leanings I actually just reviewed a book on on part of it but they tend to be in these little niches and that's not like the main thing that people are looking at but they're doing it even then as kind of like this is part of the history and isn't this interesting let's look at this through the literary themes but they're not gonna actually engage in like his practices they're not really gonna engage in any of that similarly you know you have every single thing on reincarnation ends up pretty much either in like let's talk about it through Buddhism or Hinduism or you know some of these or it ends up in parapsychology because that way it's not doing anything where it's like you're taking it seriously but the reality is someone is right and someone is wrong about reincarnation whichever way that is someone is right and someone is wrong that is not a article of faith there is something there that either I am right or I am wrong about and so there's all of these different things so in like religious studies and in all the in the philosophy they study about them but they don't try to live them anymore because the only place that that tends to happen is in over in divinity school and over for the priesthoods and over for but that's that's not useful to me so and I think that's kind of how that happened to be blunt about it and that's when you end up the one thing that is safe to go live by is materialist atheism and that is also distorting the one place that we had a little bit of of gap where we could get around it which is why I always hung out with all the Sanskritists was because Indian philosophy has this so deeply embedded and has this other history that's not tied up with the church you can kind of get away with it a little bit over there that's what we were doing over and you know some of I always found myself in these rooms with the people doing Indian religion and philosophy because they could talk about mysticism and talk about it for real not just as historical kind of constructs hahaha yes and then that those conversations were like okayed on on another level yeah on a different level they were allowed to say stuff and do things that none of the rest of us could really fully get away with so you know mm hmm yeah so I I think that's part of it I think it's just it's the history of how this has has worked but I think it ultimately impoverishes things yeah and that that also then ties into how people if people don't see its utility if they don't see its connections to how it would actually make your life better then I get well I've been told that it's over there in the history section so I don't really think that applies to me and and what I need to do this month so it will stay in its corner where it was not meant to be in a corner it's meant to be a lived experience so absolutely yeah and I mean I'll also say I could go on at length and things that would bore probably all of your audience I have big issues with post modernism but you know I I think that's the other piece of it hahaha there's a whole thing there of the radical materialist atheist kind of situation but yeah no I think it's touched all the arts as well cause I have thoughts on it and how it's involved with music and art in other ways that are not so helpful yeah anyway um back to divination so with that being said with that kind of disconnect that's of how the the history and the practice of these things kind of got shunted away in its little will you stay over there in your corner and we'll move all religious studies over here that does kind of leave the connection points of theology and divination and these these things in this weird third category of a a homeless middle ground at the moment so you were mentioning how you want to sort of bring this back especially to the four in the way that uh pagans think about this so in what sense would you think that people need to bring that that love of wisdom or that philosophy back into their practices is that like everyone just needs to read Aristotle I'm imagining you're going to say yes um anything else besides that I think I mean well I would love it if everybody ran earth all because it's awesome but you know I also understand that is not likely um you know but I do think part of it is just realizing that this history here this is ours I mean to me this is part of it it's like this is this is ours like we have a deep deep history of very rich pagan philosophy that I would love to see recovered but I think the other piece of it is more like an approach to life so there's something called the Socrates Cafe which I love uh where what they're trying to do in in that particular movement is you know it's not like you sit down and you read Plato always advisable but not what we're doing it's more like let us come together in groups and use our minds to discuss big topics and explore and just try to get beyond things and try to approach things in this way I think that what we could be doing and what I would love to see done is for us to begin I think I think contemporary paganism has a lot to offer and that we have a lot to offer to the world not just in terms of our ritual which is well done at this point I think we're doing a great job of rebirthing ritual I think we're doing a great job of rebirthing devotion I think we're doing um a decent job and I would like to see even more of rebirthing some of the arts you know I'm I think we have not done as good a job of trying to think about and express what is our you know what is our real thinking what is it that we have to offer the world in terms of our world view and there's pieces of that but we have this entire thing of like oh well our beliefs because we're so I think we're just traumatized by Christianity to be honest like you know everyone's afraid of telling someone like me saying what my beliefs are mean that somehow I'm judging your beliefs which you know that's not a very polytheistic or way of doing things anyway I mean like I said every single philosophical position was there in ancient Greece so there's a lot there but I think that we could begin having more discussions about like okay so what do we think the real purpose of life is what do we think it means to be a good human and really deeply thinking about that because I think that the overarching cultural models that we are given are pretty wounded and pretty broken and I think that we have something to offer if we will sit down and do some more of that thinking you know I remember like when I was leading one of the Socrates Cafes my my question I just started everyone off with which symposia are fun that just means you get together and you have some drinks and you talk about a topic and you commit to like we're gonna explore this topic I think we would be good at that and I think it's fun so mine was is hope good and that was the entire thing we just explored like is hope good what do we mean by that what do we think why do we think that and I mean you know we could do that with almost any kind of topic and that's more like how to live a philosophical life than necessarily reading Aristotle although I love Aristotle if anyone ever wants me to come talk about the nichomachean ethics I can do it that sounds awesome um I would love to hear that I I completely one side note my coven actually does do symposia as a part of our retreats because we do that we will literally have a night where we do exactly that so I think I think wider spreading of that idea I'm all in I I agree with you I think that that is one of the places where the potentially just the nature of the mediums and the nature of of how we are interacting with one another makes that more difficult because people that is much easier to do in person doesn't mean it's not possible online and I I hope that other people are coming up with those ideas maybe they already are happening I just haven't heard of them that would be great too but I think that that is something where we will then as a community and at various little communities if we if we prioritize those types of conversations and prioritize making spaces where that can happen then they will they will naturally evolve but we have to prioritize the somehow finding the places and the times so I I agree and I'm gonna say you know I do think the other thing that I would love to see more of is it doesn't even have to be with just pagans like invite your friends I mean we need as human beings human beings are social creatures and we learn best and think best in conversation with each other and so creating those opportunities because communication is the medium of all relationships and human beings don't do well if we're not in relationships and what I would like to see is deeper enrichment of the kinds of conversations we're having individually and as communities so much like I am having a great time talking with you haha we should have some drinks and do this sometime exactly speaking of symposia we need to make that happen um and perhaps we will invite we will certainly be inviting more people I'm sure for any symposium that you and I are gonna be at but um before we have to to wind up I I want to leave some space for you've already given what I consider to be a lot of very excellent ideas and I don't necessarily want to call it advice it's advice but ideas for people is there anything else that you find that you've been sort of saying to people a lot or things that you've been thinking on a lot that might be advice that might be just you know a thought that you feel like you want to leave people with things that I'm thinking about I think a large part of what I'm thinking about right now and I'm really still exploring and trying to always do a better job myself is trying to get to actionable intelligence through noise I I you know and trying to do that I think recognizing right now and part of it just for people who don't know me I'm in Washington DC there's so much noise there's so much psychic noise there's so much all sorts of stuff right now so there's just you know when everything is dialed up to 11 all the time then what happens is you know you can't I hear very well so I I think just um in case other people are experiencing that I think anything we can do to to try to also just tell our minds and to tell when we're doing divination like if this isn't actionable I don't need to know it right now you know and trying to find ways I'm I'm experimenting with different forms of reading than I have been partially just to like way more very fast iterative um to try to get to things that are actionable versus you know doing as much like deep pattern kind of things because there's just too much like too much noise um and like I said I don't know if you have any advice on that I would love to hear it but I think at least for me that is a large part of what I am currently and trying to be very careful not always successfully I will admit this not always successfully in my divination um trying to keep separate like here's the piece that is psychic here's the interpretation because usually the psychic stuff is dead on accurate the interpretation I am sometimes not as clear about because again the noise problem so I'm trying to to do different things to keep those separated in myself does that make sense yes absolutely one of the things that I have been doing a little bit more of related to that is the idea of separating out I I mean sometimes depending on the type of reading or what you're doing like that that instantaneous you're in the flow of the divination and therefore the interpretation comes very naturally out of seeing a card land on the table you just say it out loud you know what it is but then there can also be times when the opposite I've been experimenting with with doing the opposite which is that you intentionally separate out the time of the like well I threw the cards I'm gonna walk away or the next morning because that that forced separation can then in a weird way gives space for something else to enter in so that you're not necessarily reacting from fear or for first impression sometimes first impression is absolutely the right one and sometimes it's a it's interesting to experiment with making a space before the interpretation occurs um and you get very different types of insights from those two different ways and it allows that interpretive um mindset to get separated out but I don't think that is the right thing for all types I think there's definitely a lot of times where it's just throw the runes and you see the runes and the answer is there you know what I mean yeah at least for me I'm finding if I can do that and do it really fast before my mind intervenes as usually we aren't getting more accuracy so Amelia Ellis always says like you know with with cards it's like one is a little 10 is a lot what more do you need to know you know what I mean like sometimes just read what's on the damn cards faster than you can think about it too hard but then that you can also do the opposite where like with dream interpretation or even omen interpretation we're like leaving more space can lead to more clarity because then if you kept good records haha look at that you may be able to look back and get a better interpretation but that's a different style you know what I mean so it's like they're both very useful just different applications and reasons so oh I love talking about this with you it's also yeah thank you and I'm gonna I'm gonna experiment with um with leaving some of that like I said I'm doing like yeah so I've just that to me has been the biggest thing is is trying to hear through the noise well that is I think a very important point to leave people with because it is really hard to even sometimes recognize that we're in that sea of noise so I appreciate you even pointing that out because I feel like sometimes we're so in the waters that it's hard to even know that we're in those waters and then if we don't recognize it that can do its own harm because we haven't really made space to understand oh this is hard because it's hard right now because we're in a lot of noise yeah cause I mean if we're psychically open right it's like oh here I am it's like well my god just the anxiety of the people in this building that I live in now much less ha ha ha it's like okay that's a lot of noise that's a lot of noise so that's going up ha ha going up rather than out because the out right now is just yeah I appreciate that and so where can people find you and there's going to be things in the show show notes for your website and your book and all sorts of other things and I have a few YouTube videos of where you were talking about Neoplatonism and things like that but oh great what do you want to share with people I so I will be teaching at Temple Fest I'm very excited about that that will be coming up in September I will be teaching at Sacred Space again when that comes around I should do a better job of updating my website than I usually do but I do have a website and I am reachable and I also I don't think I have anything on the books to teach for the Theosophical Society right now I just got done with a course for them but I do pretty regularly teach for the Theosophical Society as well very awesome well thank you very very much I will be looking forward to the next time that we are we are talking here on this show and other places so thank you for that and thank you I this is so fun thank you for having me