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Icons + Idols — Ancient Goddess Wisdom for the Modern Age w—Gabriela Gutierrez

September 28, 2023 grace allerdice Season 4 Episode 178
Icons + Idols — Ancient Goddess Wisdom for the Modern Age w—Gabriela Gutierrez
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home—body podcast
Icons + Idols — Ancient Goddess Wisdom for the Modern Age w—Gabriela Gutierrez
Sep 28, 2023 Season 4 Episode 178
grace allerdice

In this episode, Gabriela Gutierrez takes us on a captivating journey through the world of imagery, religious symbolism, and the goddess in ancient Europe.

From the first religious scriptures etched on Paleolithic cave walls to the transformation of icons into idols, Gabriela unpacks the layers of meaning behind these ancient artifacts while challenging us to view ancient cultures through their own lens, free from the limitations of a colonial perspective.

“What does it mean to live a life in devotional, intimate, direct relationship with it, not through somebody else's interpretation?” — Gabriela Gutierrez


Gabriela is a writer, scholar and teacher of the mythic imagination, mysticism and ancient history. Her work stems from her decade-long studies with shamans and renunciants around the world, and is focused on the revival of the spiritual traditions in pre-patriarchal Europe. She teaches and offers distance healing in-person and online, and her writing and independent research can be found on her Substack ‘Under a Fig Tree’.


we discuss —

  • The multilayered nature of religious symbolism
  • An ancient formula for living a life of peace
  • Meeting the ancient mind on its own terms
  • Where wisdom begins
  • Experiencing the divine on your own terms
  • Being close with death in order to fully live


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Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Gabriela Gutierrez takes us on a captivating journey through the world of imagery, religious symbolism, and the goddess in ancient Europe.

From the first religious scriptures etched on Paleolithic cave walls to the transformation of icons into idols, Gabriela unpacks the layers of meaning behind these ancient artifacts while challenging us to view ancient cultures through their own lens, free from the limitations of a colonial perspective.

“What does it mean to live a life in devotional, intimate, direct relationship with it, not through somebody else's interpretation?” — Gabriela Gutierrez


Gabriela is a writer, scholar and teacher of the mythic imagination, mysticism and ancient history. Her work stems from her decade-long studies with shamans and renunciants around the world, and is focused on the revival of the spiritual traditions in pre-patriarchal Europe. She teaches and offers distance healing in-person and online, and her writing and independent research can be found on her Substack ‘Under a Fig Tree’.


we discuss —

  • The multilayered nature of religious symbolism
  • An ancient formula for living a life of peace
  • Meeting the ancient mind on its own terms
  • Where wisdom begins
  • Experiencing the divine on your own terms
  • Being close with death in order to fully live


LINKS

If you enjoyed the episode, check out —


Mentioned in the episode—


More about our guest —


Free Resources —

Discover your wild water archetype + upgrade your self care with our free Water Medicine Quiz


Stay Connected —

Subscribe to the home—body podcast wherever you get your listens.

grace’s website

home—body website

This podcast is produced by Softer Sounds.

Support the Show.

My name is Grace and you're listening to the Homebody Podcast. Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's episode. I am so happy to be joined by Gabriella Gutierriez. And Gabriella is a writer, a scholar, a teacher of the mythic, imagination, mysticism and ancient history. Her work stems from her decade long studies with shamans and renunciants around the world and is focused on the revival of the spiritual traditions in pre patriarchal Europe. She teaches and offers distance healing in person and online, and her writing and independent research can be found on her stub stack under a fig tree. I'm so excited to be having Gabriella here for this episode because I feel like a lot of her work fits in so beautifully and perfectly with a lot of the things that we're honing in on and curating around. For this season of the podcast, which a lot of which is about the house of the goddess or the house of the feminine or the third house is what we call it in astrology. So I feel really excited to be jumping in with that. Gabriella, is there any other context or anything else that you would like to add about yourself, about how you're showing up today? Anything else that you would like the listeners to know? Just greetings from Devon. I've just arrived back from Australia for a little while and there's blue skies at last, and there's warmth and there's a freshness in the air that you only really get in Britain. It's really specific to this land, so it's just really nice to have a call from here, because last we talked, I was in Australia, wasn't I? And there's just something magical about this land that I think in line with the themes that you want to talk about and so just want to bring in the importance of place that we're calling in from as well into our conversation. I love that. It's very much a place that I have a lot of personal, inner longings around, but have never actually been to Great Britain. And it's something I'm excited to make a pilgrimage one day. We're going to talk a lot about your research on the goddess and female religious experience in ancient Europe in particular. And I'm wondering if you could sort of kick us off by telling us how did this research find you or how did you find it, if you feel it more that way. And what was sort of the beginning of feeling like this is something that you really want to spend your life looking into and storying back into our field of knowing. Yeah, I think I've got my mother to thank for that. She was always interested in women's religious experience and women's history, and she always kind of kept my and my sister's eyes open to the gaps in our history and what we don't know about the women who are our ancestors. And she had this book by Meryl Stone called when God was a woman. And I read that book when I was, like, ten, and it just blasted my mind and my heart open to another possibility, to an inquiry that's kind of underlined my life around. Where were the women in the history books and in the class settings at school when we studied any kind of background, any kind of historical material, where were the women? That was just the question that always came up for me. And so I just started to try to answer those questions through my own inquiry. And that led me to lots of phenomenal people, archaeologists and independent researchers and archaeologists who are kind of pseudo archaeologists, I could say, like, particularly in the Balkan Peninsula, who have a totally different understanding of history that isn't yet kind of accepted by mainstream education there or anywhere, actually. So I think that when you set an intention, life conspires to meet it in some way or another, you're just introduced to people. And I think that's been happening for me for the last 15 years or so. And so I've just only now started to put it all together and started to transmit it through writing, through workshops, through lectures. So, yeah, it's been a long time coming. In your opinion, from your perspective, what is sort of the magic of this moment, or even the importance of reviving or bringing this back into our awareness in this moment, at this point in time, or our cultural experience? That's a great question, one I hope I can do justice too. From what I understand, based on my findings, there was once a worldview that existed in what we call prehistory. So there's nuances as to when, as to the dates of when that changed to our timeline. But prehistory usually covers everything up until ancient history, so up until just after the Iron Age. And what I found is that there was a worldview, and the further back we go, the more refined it was. That was life affirming and that was Earth centric, and that believed in a regenerative force that most often, when symbolized, took the form of a female deity or of the female body that we understand as a goddess. And that's the language that we use to define that being. But I think it's very interesting to sort of try to meet the ancient mind on its own terms, as opposed to on our terms. And so when we go, okay, what could these people have believed? Or what was their relationship with this force that was often symbolized by the female body, but was also symbolized by bullhorns and bees and serpents. And that was animistic at its core that believed that everything in the world has an intelligence or a life force. Within shamanism, you call it a spirit, but everything has life. And therefore everything can be interacted with and participated with. And so I think that this cosmology that was essentially the first religion. And again, that's a modern term that we use to define a set of customs and beliefs so that we understand each other. This religion can offer us, I think, a lot of insight into how to best navigate the questions and the problematics of our current times. And I think that there is something to say about a people who understood in this life force, regenerative principle that moved within all things. That was life and death, and life and death that was cyclical, not linear, and with which we could actively participate through our imagination. And the imagination was not fantasy or make believe as we associate it with now. It was the bridge that facilitated a movement to the imaginal, to this life force, this place of intelligence and compassion and illumination and wisdom that exists within all things. That was a long answer, I think, to your question, but they're big topics that are sort of hard to put words to. No, I think that's perfect. I feel like I was noticing as you were talking about that and even earlier when you talked about the book that you read when God was a woman. I grew up in Christianity, which is like one of the Abrahamic religions. And to me, something that those, or at least my understanding of them, Christianity is the one that I'm most familiar with. They're a lot about up there, like what happens later, what happens above us, what happens in the transcendental realm. And something that was deeply a different book that I read that sort of when I was leaving church was Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. And it's sort of her version, her story about why is God he owned. And it was kind of scratching an itch that I didn't really know that I had. Why are my desires excluded from this? Why is the planet excluded from this? And that's something that I wasn't really given permission to have or feel justified in. Even the way that you're talking about, we have these ways that we be like, oh, that's imaginary. And we mean that in a way that it's less smart or it's not as something to be trusted, right. Because it's not coming through the architecture of academia or what have you. These ways that we downplay all of these things, we make them seem silly. And actually, they're perhaps original in many ways. None of that is in any particular order. But I was wondering if you have any reflections you'd love to respond back to about that. Yes, I think that there's a lot to say about how humans imagine an image, right. Like, the way that we imagine or, you know, the way that we understand the world around us is through imagery. And I think that this was the first religious scripture, if you will, were the images on the caves, on the Paleolithic caves that were images that sought to transcribe the divine or the imaginal, and those images became icons. And henry koibar was a french theosopher, late 20th century, and he would talk about the difference between idols and icons. And I think that this is a really important thing to sort of start to enter into relationship with when we talk about the goddess and the move towards a more life affirming cosmology again, because what he talked about was that essentially, though, we started to try to transcribe or record our religious experience through image, and these images became these icons or icons that hold knowledge, that transmit something like the image of the mother Mary holding her child to her breast is an icon. Right? It holds so much story and emotion. It's emotive, it wakes all kinds of things up in us when we really engage with the image. That is the power that an icon holds within religious experience. But the problem that Henry corbin really highlights is that icons became idols. And so what we did was we thought or we began to identify the image with the god, and so the images that were created became the gods, as opposed to a transmission for them or a symbol that could wake something up in us. And then we saw this move as we did that, as we changed our icons to idols, we began to move towards a more fundamentalist and unilateral literal way of thinking and of seeing the world. And I think that this is the big move and the potential for a big transformation in our world, in our global cosmology. I think where we go? What happens when we start to see religious symbolism as a symbol for something that is so multilayered and polyvalent that there is so much there that will speak differently to my heart than it will to yours, than it will to anyone else's and that that direct experience is valid and is true and that there isn't one way. And I think that the symbol of the goddess is a really helpful one in waking that thousandfold possibility up in all of us, because she is both death and life and everything in between. The god began to be associated solely with life and solely with light and with the upper realms, the sort of paradisial realms, the heavens above, and the need to transcend our physicality and the physical world in order to get there. And I think what's really interesting about these older cosmologies is that actually, from what I understand, god was right here. Like god was in the bones, in the blood, in the earth, in the soil, in the sea and the rivers and the trees and the deer. Just this idea, I think, like you spoke about, that the abrahamic religions are often more focused on the upper. And what these older cosmologies held at their core is this understanding that the life force or god is in everything. And so there was no need to go anywhere other than here. And an example of the benefit that that kind of cosmology can have on the sort of social structures of life is one of the things that I was really interested in and have done quite a bit of writing. On is the notion? Well, more like the fact, actually, because we have evidence for this, which is great, that for almost 2000 years in the neolithic, in the Balkan peninsula of Eastern Europe, the peoples who lived there lived without war, lived free from war. There is no evidence of warfare or any kind of armor for about, well, just over 1500 years, almost 2000 years. And this points towards this extraordinary I mean, it's kind of hard to wrap our head around when you think about it, that's almost as long as Christianity has been a thing with no war. So almost 2000 years of peace. And when I asked this archaeologist, that was the first to bring it to my attention, in Serbia, he works at an archaeological site just outside the city of Belgrade on one of the Neolithic settlements there. And he said to me, I think they had a three part formula that allowed them to live in peace. I asked him, what was the formula? And he goes, it was a tryptic code of conduct. And it came down to being vigilant, responsible and awake. And if you were these three things, vigilant, responsible and awake, you led a peaceful life and therefore you lived in a peaceful community. And this isn't to sort of glorify a past golden age. I think that and he agreed, individual dissonance has always been a thing like individual feuds. It's not to say that that didn't exist, but strategized warfare or systematic warfare was not a thing. And I think that's extraordinary. And I think that tells us a lot about the social world that we can create together if we lean on those cosmologies. And that kind of code of conduct. That made my eyes well up a little bit when you said that. It's a big one, it's a really big one. And it's something that growing up in the age that we're in now, it's almost impossible to imagine a world like our entire economies are supported by war. And whenever I hear or come across these philosophies or conversations that are just assuming sort of the apex of technology and sort of human development that we're in right now, a common thing that comes up for me, I'm like, we cannot even collectively conceive of what it would be like to live without war. To me, that is not an apex of any kind. Like we can't conceive of grace in this way. So it just feels so nice to hear you say that. This is why I think it's so interesting to try to meet the ancient mind on its own terms. And that's a concept that isn't mine. That came from my dissertation supervisor, Alice Oswald, who's a phenomenal poet, award winning poet. She's one of the most extraordinary women I've had the pleasure of studying with. And she put that question to me once when we were in one of our tutorials for my dissertation, and she went, how can we meet the ancient mind on its own terms as opposed to on our terms? And I just thought that's so, you know, what is it that the mind of the Neolithic in Eastern Europe thought? How did they hold themselves? And what is it that can shift in us when we move our attention in that direction, as opposed to imposing our own understanding on them and our wish for a sort of golden age or a dark age, depending on who you ask. If you're very involved in an Abrahamic religion, for you, that was a dark age. If you're involved in the goddess movement, that was a golden age. I think it's really interesting when we go, okay, but what was it for them? How can we see it from their eyes? Because otherwise it's just another form of colonialism, actually, from the modern times to the past, where we're trying to impose our own way of seeing onto a people as opposed to trying to see through their eyeshadow, can be a challenging place, as you know. And Water Medicine is a transmission designed to reorient you back to the refuge and inspiration that you carry inside of yourself, no matter what's going on in the world outside. If you're feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, burned out, or like you're just going through the motions in your life, it could be an invitation to go deeper and let the soul of yourself seep back into your veins. Whether you're feeling creatively blocked, low energy, or just stuck in a rut, water Medicine can help you reconnect with your desires, heal from past hurts, and find more joy and resilience in your life and in yourself. People who have taken this course tell me that it changed their lives, that it's something that they revisit over and over again, and that it introduced them to layers of their longing and aliveness that had been blocked for years or perhaps never even visited. Water Medicine is a course designed to help you find your flow and reclaim the wild water within you because the world needs you, and perhaps more importantly, you need you, all of you, and overflowing with your life. If something inside of you feels like a yes, then head over to Homebodies.com. Joinwatermedicine, and you can use the Code Listen ALLCAPS to get a discount just for our podcast community. If you're not ready to take the plunge but you still feel curious, head over to Homebodies.com and take our short quiz that pops up on the Homepage to get started on your Water Medicine journey completely for free. And you can find all of this and more in the show notes below. That's Homebodies.com, and you can use the Code Listen at checkout you I wondering if you'll speak a little bit. You were speaking about icon and symbol, and we've spoken a little about the imaginal and, you know, and I think a lot about this culture that we're in. We're in such a culture of divulgence and over explaining and marketing. It's almost like any mystery is there, almost like is no mystery. Like you can't even watch a movie without them having to take the script and explain every possible thing to you within the first 20 minutes. And I'm wondering if you would I love the quote from Lorca on your website so much. It says, only the mystery allows us to live. Only the mystery. And I think something about symbology and icon and even know you speak on your website as well about how women's wisdom traditions have really survived by hiding and hiding in plain sight. And I'm wondering if you'll speak a little bit about this sort of the value of mystery or of hiding or potentially how or in some of the ways, like even storytelling. Right? The point of storytelling is experience, not necessarily divulgence or explanation. And again, that's not really a question, but just something I'd love to throw onto your plate. Yeah, no, they're great points as well. I think that maybe a good in would be there's something about hearing somebody's experience of something intimate, right, like a dream or a love letter from a beloved in the early days of romance and not trying to interpret their experience. There's something about listening to somebody tell you something of their experience or of their relationship with something mysterious without responding with interpretation and going, oh, well, in your dream, owl means this and a spider web means that, and losing your tooth means this. Or in a love letter, oh, he said this, so it means that, or she said that, so it means this. Because that's what it means for me. And there's something about holding ourselves within the mystery. So to allow for those things that are by nature mysterious to have their own, to have their way with us, to really have their way with us. And I think that the only way that we can really fully and personally interact with mystery is by surrendering to it and leaving our analytic, calculated, strategic mind behind for a little bit, going, okay, can I just be in relationship with this without trying to understand it from an analytical or rational point, but just allowing it to have its way with me. And I think that that's the way that Lorga lived his life without trying to romanticize him. He was human like all of us. But I do know that he had a way of being intimate with everything that he was exposed to and in a deeply romantic relationship. And what I mean by that is that he was in the romance of it, like in the love affair, in a devotional relationship, with life. And that meant that life had a that life was trusted. And so it wasn't about trying to categorize or pinpoint or go, I get it now. I understand. Now it's like, okay, I've got this information, and now I go into the next question and then the next question. And I think that's what's really beautiful about being in relationship with wisdom. I think that there were lineages of predominantly women, also men, who were in direct relationship with the goddess of wisdom. Some called her Sophia in Ireland. She was sovereignty. She was Al Hakima in the Middle East. She was a force that was lettered and learned and that informed those who were devoted to her about the mysteries. This is a slightly separate I'm going off on a bit of a tangent, but I think that it's it's related in the sense that there's a relationship that we can begin to embark on with wisdom that is a relationship with the mystery. I think that that's the beginning of Wisdom to go, oh, yeah, I know that. I don't know everything. Like, God is the mystery, the great mystery. And so what does it mean to live a life in devotional, intimate, direct relationship with it, not through somebody else's interpretation? So that can go as far as saying, let's say, like, the contraculture to Abrahamic. Religion is the new age movement. And within the new age movement, there are notions that are now spoken of in a way that is quite dogmatic like. We all have chakras. There is karma. We need to ascend into a higher plane. There's a code of conduct. And I'm weary and a little bit cynical about it because it feels like the essence of it feels quite similar to that which it's trying to rebute to the dogmas of the older religions or the Abrahamic religions that it's trying to rebuke. So I think it's really interesting when we start to go, okay, yes, it's likely that the body has energy centers that is part of a spiritual tradition that was in India that is very separate to what we were living in Europe at the time that that was being developed. How true is that for me? And so we check in with our own relationship with our bodies and with the divine and with the mystery, and we go, what is my direct understanding of my body, of my worldview and my cosmology and my relationship with the divine, with the earth? And to each kind of discern our own way of relating with these things that is true and sincere for us, not imposed on us by somebody else's interpretation. Yeah, a lot of it was making me think a lot about just this way that, like you said, the romance of it just this way that following the scent of something versus knowing something. And I love thinking of it as a romance because really the driver, I think, when we're feeling romanticized or seduced by something is just to connect it's just to be with. Yeah, there's something about the allowing the word surrender is feeling very alive for me right now and also being able to sort of tolerate because the unknown feels so much like chaos, feels so much like void. And if there's void, then what do we do? Like this way that we want to codify everything and make it explainable and know the right answer, that I can make other people know the right answer? It feels a little bit about trying to control that chaos that is the mystery a little bit. And I'm wondering, I was thinking too of just the way some of the different ways that we think of this idea of holy spaces or temples and what's appropriate there and thinking about going to a temple and in this particular religion the holy person is someone who doesn't eat and never has sex and doesn't have hair. And then you go to this temple and this religion and it's like you literally go to the temple to have sex and have a feast and have super long hair. They're completely different ways of engaging with what we conceive of as holy and life giving. There's a deeply human longing to find the beloved. And the Sufis understood that very well. The beloved as God? Essentially. And I think that that longing drives us to do all sorts of curious things and who's to say right, what's right or yeah, I mean, if it's right for you, by all means, like I take my hat off to you and onwards, so long as it's not harming. I mean, everything harms to a degree, but that it's causing the least harm possible. But I think that part of the issue with the sort of niche that I'm involved in studying, which is women's religious practice and this sort of life affirming cosmology that goes beyond the gender of woman. That is a cosmology that was practiced by all. I think what's sort of important to remember is that for a very long time and for at least the last 5000 years, there has been a systematic eradication of that cosmology. So that worldview was systematically suppressed first by the Indo European invasions of the Balkan Peninsula during the Neolithic. So when there were lots of cultures who lived there, but a brilliant thinker who did an important body of work there is called Maria Gambutas. She was a Lithuanian archaeomythologist. So she introduced, or sort of created this school of thought and this methodology that put together archaeology and mythology. And she believed that in order to really understand the remnants of the world that these people left behind, we had to study the artifacts with their myths, with their stories. And so she developed this hypothesis called the Kurgan hypothesis, which basically says that there were a peaceful peoples which coincides with what the Serbian archaeologist believes. Dragon Yankovich is his name. I realize I didn't mention it before that for almost 2000 years these people in the Neolithic who venerated a mother goddess, lived in peace. They were then invaded in three waves by the Indo Europeans. So the peoples who lived in the Kogan steppe east of the Balkan peninsula, and they basically suppressed the peaceful peoples and introduced warfare over a period of almost 4000 years. So it took a long time, but the result was that we have virtually no remnants of that time frame, very little artifacts, enough to show us that these peoples were earth honoring and life affirming, as I said, and peaceful, but not enough to paint a full picture of our European history. And so this is something that I think we have to again surrender to and make peace with. That we will likely, who knows, we will likely never have the full picture of where we came from. But we do have enough pieces to inspire our imagination. And so, after those invasions, we moved into, I would say, the second suppression of this mother goddess or life centric cosmology happened at the hands of the Mycenaeans. So the mainland Greeks over the Minoans in ancient Crete, and that was in 1450 BC. So they were invaded. The Mycenians, just like the Indoeuropeans, introduced a male godhead that overtook the indigenous or the native traditions that worshipped a female mother goddess. And then we see a similar thing happen later on in the medieval era with the Inquisition that was 800 years long and essentially sought to eradicate earth based wisdom. Well, it may sound a bit extreme, but I have called it this in the past and I still kind of stick to it. It was a genocide of women and knowledge. It's hard to call it anything else. Like it ticks all the boxes for genocide. So this is our inheritance in the west. This is what we're now carrying, these 5000 over a period of 5000 years, this persecution of woman, and particularly woman who knows woman who is with Sophia or Gnosis or Al Hakima or sovereignty. And so we're just starting to heal from that. We're not there yet. We still live in a world where in some countries women can't gather to have the kinds of conversations we're having. So we're highly privileged in that degree. But also it shows us how much further we've still got to go, how these issues are still very real. You mentioned earlier some of the symbols that have sort of been, we've discovered through time that were frequently associated with these more earth centric mother goddess religions. You mentioned the bullhorns, the bees and the serpent. And I'm wondering if there are any ways that you would like to just speak to any of those symbols as potentially portals or icons or doorways through which we could understand or open to seeing the world a little differently than we do now. There's one particular symbol that I find very. Interesting that is. It's called the Labyrinth and some folks may be familiar with it. It was first recorded in Crete, but there are very similar symbols or representations from old Europe or this Neolithic Europe. And the Labyrinth is essentially two triangles that meet at the point at the center with a line underneath it that looks like an axe. Some people call it the double axe, sort of like a triangular infinity symbol on its side with a line through the middle at the knot and nobody knows what it means. It's one of the great mysteries within archaeology. It's fascinating, but with the study of archaeomythology, you can start to piece together and imagine a story around the symbol and it starts to become alive. This is the thing about icons. They speak, you just have to have ears to listen. And this particular symbol is potentially a doorway into the original or the first cosmologies that understood that in order to live fully, something has to die. And that lived very close to the possibility of death. And that it was that closeness that allowed for a fullness of life. And so it may be that the symbol was because the symbol was I mean, oftentimes it's depicted as an axe that many have thought was a symbol of war and violence. I don't think it was used that way. We have images of women and priestesses holding the double axe in religious environments with bees and serpents and bullhorns around them. This is mainly in Crete and who seem to be in ecstatic altered states practicing some kind of religious activity and they're holding these double axes. Those women weren't at war. And so what it has woken up for me is this idea of the death mysteries and that in order to be fully alive, you have to be familiar with the force that is death and that you walk in between them. So you walk between these two loops of infinity. One is life and one is death. And I think that that symbol can speak to that and can wake up what the ancients knew. So there is much we don't know, but when we look at their artwork and their symbols and the artifacts that they left behind, they speak to us. And so we start to receive through the imagination and it pieces together something in us. So I think that there's something really fun, actually, that can happen, really inspiring and motivating when we start to relate with these old teachings or this world that was left behind with curiosity and allowing it to just open something in us, allowing it to flower as opposed to define and expand as opposed to contract. And that does something for us as well. That in itself is healing because that ripples out into the way that we interact with the rest of life as well. I love that I have not heard of that symbol and I'm going I'll nerd out on it super hard. I'm like, I wonder if that's the symbol that I randomly drew after my meditation this morning. I'm very curious. As you were describing it, I was like, that might have come through earlier today. We'll see. Yeah. I love hearing that. And I think there is so much wisdom in what you're saying, and that is such a beautiful anyone who's ever grown anything, even if it's just like a plant in their backyard, like all the soil that we have that we need to plant is made of all dead things. Yes. I'm wondering, as we work our way towards wrapping up, is there anything that you feel like is sort of on your heart to speak about or to share that I haven't made room for or that I haven't asked? Or maybe you feel like is just sort of prickling after some of the things that we talked about that you'd like to share before we wrap up? I just brought a book of poetry, and I thought that we could have a poem. Beautiful. And I often have a book that sort of speaks to me when I'm doing certain things, and today it was Mary Oliver devotions, and I think it's quite in line with lots that we've been talking about. So if I may pick a Mary Oliver and she can sort of wrap up this conversation, she'll do it much better than I ever could. And I don't know if you've heard of bibliomancy. It's a practice that I love to do. So you flick the page at any page, and the poem that comes out to you, or the piece of prose poem in this case, will be an icon. So let's see who wants to be here with us and anyone listening today. Water snake. I saw him in a dry place on a hot day, a traveler making his way from one pond to another. And he lifted up his charry face and looked at me with his gravel eyes, and the feather of his tongue shot in and out of his otherwise clamped mouth. And I stopped on the path to give him room, and he went past me with his head high, loathing me, I think, for my long legs, my poor body like a post, my many fingers, for he didn't linger. But touching the other side of the path, he headed in long lunges and quick. Heaves straight to the nearest basin of sweet black water and weeds and solitude, like an old sword that suddenly picked itself up and went off swinging, swinging through the green leaves. Mary Oliver never disappoints. She never does. She's like the goddess of the moment. I feel like, indeed, the capital M moment. The now, where do you like people to find you on the Internet? If people listening want to engage more with your work, could you share with them where they could do that? And then also, if you have anything coming up this fall that you would like people to be particularly aware of. Please share that as well. The two places would be just my website, which is Gabriellamayagutieres Net. My name is a bit of a mouthful, my middle name is Welsh and my last name is Spanish, so it's not the easiest pronunciation for the Anglo Saxon, but that's my website. And my substac, where I publish biweekly writings, is under a fig tree. And I do have an online program starting in September, which will be on the Bee priestesses of Bronze Age Crete. And I have another course also online starting in November called The Three Secret Selves, which is a marriage of mysticism, mythology and ancient history. So all of that's on my website, as well as the monthly gatherings, I do dismemberment ceremonies to stay close to the death mysteries, of course, and new moon rites. So, yeah, that's all on my website. Beautiful. And we'll have all the links to all of those things below in the show notes. And thank you so much for coming on. It was such a joy to connect with you and just all of your wisdom and research and I can tell so much of your heart and yourself is in all this. And so thank you for sharing not only your wisdom but also yourself in this conversation. I appreciate it and I know the listeners will enjoy it as well. Well, thank you Grace, and thank you for having me. It's been a delight. Thank you so much for listening. 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