The Mythopoetic Imagination, Ancient Religion & the Living World with Gabriela Gutiérrez

Ancient religion, imagination, and the living world weave through this conversation with Gabriela Gutiérrez, writer, mythopoetic researcher, and independent scholar.

Together, we explore the prehistoric roots of the Greek gods, dreams, ritual, the transformation of the ancient goddesses, and how stories can restore our relationship with an animate, ensouled world.

Connect with Gabriela Gutiérrez’s work:

Website: https://www.gabrielamairgutierrez.com/

Substack: https://gabrielamgutierrez.substack.com/

✨ Women & Mythology Podcast is a soulful exploration of myth as a living force in our contemporary lives.

Hosted by Maria Souza — Comparative Mythologist, Poet, and Educator.

📖 Learn more: www.womenandmythology.com

🎧 Follow on Instagram: @womenandmythology

💌 Subscribe to the Mythic News newsletter for stories, reflections, and upcoming events: https://www.womenandmythology.com/subscribe

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, myth lover, I'm Maria. Welcome to the Woman and Mythology Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

For me, imagination has become one of the most trusted ways back into an old way of knowing that hasn't been corrupted by the kind of wellness industry that spirituality in the West is somewhat hijacked by. And so when I talk about imagination, what I mean is the bridge through which we can perceive and participate with the more than human world that is usually not accessible to us through ordinary consciousness.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Hello, myth lover, welcome back. I'm so excited to be sharing this conversation with all of you. I'm truly honored to be joined by a woman and scholar whose work I deeply admire, Gabriela Gutierrez, writer, mythopoetic researcher, and independent scholar, whose work explores the prehistoric roots of the Greek gods, the origins of religion in Europe, ritual imagination, and the enduring wisdom of the more than human world. Gabriella and I share some meaningful threads. We both studied in the same region of England on the Dartington state in Devon. And in many ways, we were shaped by a similar mythopoetic worldview. She now also lives in Australia, and throughout our conversation, we discovered many beautiful points of resonance between our work. Through her writing and research, Gabriella invites us to rediscover the mythopoetic imagination as a way of perceiving, participating in, and making meaning of our lives. In our conversation, we speak about the role of imagination as a way of knowing and how it differs from fantasy, dreams, sacred places, and the imaginal in mythic research, the prehistoric roots of the Greek gods and the transformation of the ancient goddesses, Demeter, Dionysus, and the mysteries that survived beneath the Olympian myths, why we should be cautious about identifying with a single archetype, the difference between the sacred and the spectacle in our modern spiritual landscape, and the simple practices that can help us cultivate a more mythic way of living. This conversation is expansive, thought-provoking, and deeply nourishing. Whether you are drawn to mythology, ritual, dreams, or the living world, I hope it offers you new ways of seeing and perhaps inspires you to follow the threads of your own wild soul. Let's dive in. Hi Gabriela, welcome. Thank you so much for being here with us. Hi Maria, thank you for having me. To begin our conversation, I would love to ask you, how did this work with the prehistoric gods began? And if you can speak a little bit about the use of gods and goddesses interchangeably.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yes, absolutely. What a great place to begin in deep time, the impossible places. So I grew up and I'm from a family in northern Spain, an area called Cantabria. And we go back there about nine generations. We've managed to trek our grandparents and their grandparents' grandparents and so on for about nine generations. And the area that they've inhabited is one of the most densely populated prehistoric cave sites in the world. My grandfather is from a village that is near the cave of Altamira, which is the more known prehistoric cave that has artwork from about 15,000 years ago, particularly the bison racing across the rooftop. It looks like a sky of stampeding beasts. And the first time I went into that cave, I was about seven years old. And my grandmy father had been in that cave before me, and my grandfather and grandmother before him. And it was just one of those places, along with a few others there, like El Bindo is another one, and Cobalanas, another. We grew up with a sort of presence of that imagery and that darkness and that silence and it's just what you did. Sometimes we'd all meet with our extended family for lunch on a Sunday, and then we'd go to La Cueva, vamos a la cueva, go to the let's go to the cave. And funnily, the rest of Spain calls northern Spaniards to this day. They say they're like cavemen because we're more backward, we're less because the Romans and particularly the Arabs during the 800 years of Muslim Spain didn't weren't really that interested in northern Spain. It was very mountainous, the terrain was not friendly, it was rugged, and the people were considered barbarian. So they left it. And so Northern Spain has really preserved a lot of its folk traditions and ancient customs and its cave art. The caves were only really discovered in the last 200 years or rediscovered in the last 200 years. So it's all very new, and it's almost there's this thread unbroken between deep time and our current era. And so the scholars who started researching those caves, and they're always found in magical ways. We could have a whole conversation just around how those caves were discovered. But yeah, so my pull towards prehistory and deep time has been in my, we could say childhood imagination, because I think it's formed and informed a lot of my thinking and my art and my any kind of creative expression I had throughout my life has found its sort of root systems in the caves. I'm often drawn to ochre colours and to imagery of deer and snakes and bees. They're the kind of three that I'm always appear in dreams and balls as well. So it's just one of those things I think when we engage the thread, what David White calls the golden thread of our life, right? Or the golden or red thread, depending on what version of the story you hear, of the labyrinth in c in the minotaur story, Ariadne's thread. Once you locate that, you can I feel like we can all trace it back to our earliest beginnings and go, oh yeah. There was always a strange draw or a an of a certain thing, a certain fragrance that we caught when we were usually around the age of seven, which is when a lot of debt psychologists and traditional cultures talk about a shift in human consciousness, right? When children go from around the age of seven, there's this experience that happens where suddenly a seven-year-old will go, Oh, there's Uncle Jason at the door, and then you hear, and it's Uncle Jason. Things like that. If you pay attention, there's a magic that happens for the around the age of seven. And what depth psychologists say, like James Hillman talks of it as the acorn, and he says, at the age of seven, the acorn is planted in a child. It's this magical seed. And depending on how the culture around the child responds to the planting of that seed, the doorways to the imaginal will either remain open for the rest of their lives and continue to expand, or shut down at that age. And usually the cultural experience, at least in the Western world, is that door is shut down, that a child will be told that his imaginary friend is not real or that her dream had no meaning. It's just a dream. And so you find that we're moving more and more in a culture that has lost its thread and can't quite recall the magic of the things that called to us around the age of seven. And so it's an interesting experiment, I find. And when I work with people as well in group settings or in mentorship, to talk about this question. Who were you around the age of seven? What was going on in your life? And what was the magic that you believed in? Who were your who were the beings or the characters in stories or that you saw in dreams that stood out to you? And it's an exercise that through different practices, children can adults can remember about their childhood through dream work, through contemplative practices, through stories. So yeah, my kind of draw to pre-was this, I suppose it was ancestral and family-centered. But it developed or perhaps became more sophisticated as I began to be more and more interested in the origins of religion in Europe. I was very drawn to, you could call it a spirituality, so that word can be misused a lot. But a search for meaning, meaning making. I found I didn't really find a home within the Catholic or Protestant sides of my Spanish and Welsh families, nor in the kind of overly scientific or agnostic upbringing in the education systems that I was raised in and then at university. And I felt like there was this unspoken reality that I was experiencing because my parents never shut my door at seven. They encouraged it. Fully to them, I really have everything to thank them for. And so these experiences of dreams and more than human presence in the living world just got stronger and louder. But I didn't have a template to understand them through, or elders really, though my parents encouraged them, theirs had been shut off when they were both seven. So they didn't have that kind of relationship, even though they encouraged it in my sister and I. At least not to that degree, anyway. And so I I feel like to answer your question in a kind of more community or culture-driven way, so that it's relevant for other people, what happened for us when we were around the age of seven? And what is the kind of what is the seed within that, the seed that was planted in us around that age, that can become what the alchemists call the magnum opus, the great work of our life. Right? That's like the foundation that's planted as a soulful thing, as a non-ordinary, numinous thing, that if watered correctly with the right myths and stories and mentorship and eldership and it and time in wilderness and so on, it grows into what holds our life together, what gives us meaning, and what gives our life meaning and purpose. So for me it's uh, and I think this is always a discovery, the thread it keeps unraveling, but there's a real pull towards the origins of religious experience in Europe, who were our gods in the Western world, what did we believe and practice before Christianity, and even more and even further back before the Roman invasions, who were our ancestors and what of them can we take on to meet the challenges of our times?

SPEAKER_00 11:47

This was so beautiful, Gabrielle. I actually had a few tears in my eyes when you were speaking about the acorn and your family. And I would love to talk to you about the role of imagination. I know that you approach imagination as a function of a way of knowing. And I would love if you could share a little bit about how imagination plays a role in your work today. And what are some of the images, the rituals and plays that through imagination open a dialogue with the soul of the world?

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Yes, of course. For me, imagination has become one of the most trusted ways back into an old way of knowing that hasn't been corrupted by the kind of wellness industry that spirituality in the West is somewhat hijacked by. I think that most seekers in the West will go through their own experiences generally, that they're almost like the modern initiation of contemporary seeker, to find charlatans and four or fake gurus to be betrayed within a spiritual community, whether it's by spiritual teachers or whether it's certain Livs passing off as being something that they're not. And so there's something to say about this, about the things that remain in the Western imagination or the Western psyche that we can trust. So what I've found is that imagination is one of them, and the mythopoetic is one of them, and that there is a wisdom lineage, I call it. It's I don't mean an unbroken lineage of wise folk, a way of experiencing life and a way of seeing that has not been that has not been destroyed, even though indigenous traditions and wisdom traditions have been throughout the Western world. I think that European indigenous cultures were colonized so long ago we've forgotten it happened. And so a lot of people of Western origin believe that their culture has no spirituality and that we must go to the Andes or to the temples of India or Bali or the Amazon even to search for spiritual meaning. When actually there is an unbroken, there was something that wasn't able to be suppressed. And I believe that was the mythopoetic. And I believe it was kept alive by the romantics in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in Britain and in France. I think that they had a deeply shamanistic way of understanding life and the natural world, and that you can trace it back before them into the Middle Ages and particularly Islamic alchemy and mysticism that came in for about 800 years in the Iberian Peninsula and parts of France. And you can trace it farther back to the neoplanktonists and to Greek thinkers like Paracelsus, who, though he was one of the founders of rational thought, he was also he also went into caves to seek dream incubation and to seek insight from the caves, the wisdom of the cave, whether it was a god or the god of the cave, or answer your question earlier, sorry, about gods, just briefly. When I say gods, instead of saying gods and goddesses, for me, gods encompass all non-human or more than human intelligences. So the gods are oak trees, and the gods are dea, and the gods are beef, and the gods are rivers and weather patterns. And sometimes they take anthropomorphic form as what we would see as male and some are female and some are liminal and some are earthen or elemental. So that's how I use the word and the tub. So just to pull back into that idea that imagination and the myth has a lineage. And if you go if you begin to develop your own relationship with it, and it can be done directly, we don't need middlemen or interpreters. In fact, I it's helpful we don't have them, I think, that we can have our own relationship with stories, as well as having supervision and mentorship like you do beautifully in your work. I think that we need story keepers and those who have eyes to see the river under the river, the layers beneath the stories that have been preserved, especially for women, so women can find themselves in the myths that are pre predominantly about heroes and conquerors and kings. So I think there's a lineage that is accessible to everybody, and one of the ways in is through imagination. And when I when I work with imagination, I find it's really important to differentiate between imagination and fantasy. I think that the not to bash it too much, but it's hard not to speak of this in contemporary affairs as well. The wellness industry leans more towards fantasy overall. Of course, there are people who work sincerely and in integrity, but the arching blueprint of it is one that is more in the mirage, the sort of fairy glamour. That sort of glamour comes from the word of the mists that surrounded Avalon in the stories, the fairy glamour. And we can see glamour for mystery or for beauty. And I think we're seeing a lot of a focus on that in the modern Western contemporary world. And so when I talk about imagination, what I mean is the bridge through which we can perceive and participate with the more than human world that is usually not accessible to us through ordinary consciousness. So it's the means of in interacting and invoking intelligence beyond our own ego that we can work with to co-create not only a meaningful life for ourselves, but also for our families, our children, our partners, our parents, our kinship systems, and our greater or wider community. Fantasy is the projection of our desires and our wishes and our longings onto the more than human world. And I think that in order to know the difference, it's really a question of trial and error. It's like the more we do it, the more we do certain practices and listen to stories in certain ways, the more we can discern the difference between our own longing and our own projection and the truth of things and the essence of things, to see things as they are as opposed to how we want them to be.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

I love how you shared that so beautifully. And the discernment between the fantasy and the imagination. It reminds me of the story of the match girl, the little match girl. You know that story, in which she falls into a fantasy and she ends up dead. And how the fantasy can actually be in so many ways soul destroying, while the imagination, it's life generating. I find that's also a good compass for us to discern, as a little thermometer for us to feel. Can you share an experience from your research when imagination revealed something that reason alone could not perceive? Yeah, that's a really good question.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Yes. It's interesting because my mind is going to a dream, actually, which would classify under a similar kind of category as imagination, because I believe that dreams are the imaginal revealing itself. So when we dream, we see the unseeable in ordinary consciousness, whether it's I think there are big dreams, like Jung said, and small dreams. Dreams with a capital D where you dream something and it's not your every night dream. And so there was what happens, and I think I may have mentioned this to you in one of our chats. When I'm on research trips, and for me it's really important that I have a sense experience of the places I write about. So as much as I can, I go to the places that I am researching. So the places that I'm writing about, I as much as I can try to travel to. So I can have a sense experience of the physicality of that place and the memory it holds. And because these are sacred sites, things have been fed, right? They've been visited with intentionality. More often than not, they've been pilgrimaged to. And so they are heavy with memory. P. L. Travis, who was the writer of Mary Pobbins, an incredible collection of essays called What the Bee Knows, she talks about ancient wisdom or ancient knowledge held in equally the human blood and the blood of the earth. So the memory lines that make up the natural world. The more that we condense that in a particular place that is deemed sacred, either because of certain ley lines or certain things that make it sacred, like cave-like structures. They are liminal places that are almost an archive. They hold an imaginal blueprint. And it's hard to talk about these things without sounding really woo-woo. So I'm careful about the language that I'm using, but I can't not bring in the imaginal when I talk about my research, because it's Rilke's young poet going and writing a book of poetry and not acknowledging and tipping his hat to the giant shoulders he stands on, which is Rilke. For me, the imaginal is that in academic research. And without acknowledging and tipping my hat to the imaginal, there's a big gap in in my work. So it can be easily dismissed by an overly Scholarly or intellectually or rationally driven or academic. Anyway, a bit of a tangent, but to say that dreaming is imaginal. It is contact with imagination. And in research trips, in particular sacred sites, every time Maria. Every time, they are accompanied by dreams. I'm an avid dreamer. I always have been a psychedelic dreamer. My partner calls me. They are insane. They keep me up, they keep him up. And I've had to learn how to negotiate with that so that I can actually sleep and feel rested in the morning and not like I've just got an idea for a new sci-fi novel. So I'm now able to cool down my dreams a bit through years of practice. But sometimes they come and on research trips they come. And the most recent one I had, which I'll share here in answer to your question, was when I first moved to Australia about three years ago now. Or so. I had a dream where I was walking around the I was walking around the paddocks that we lived in just outside Buchland in Australia. And there was a white bull in the field. And I was with my dog, and the white bull spotted me, and he was colossal. He was the size of a mammoths. He wasn't your regular bull. He looked like an auric, but he was white. And he saw me and he just went for me. And so in the dream, it felt like a lifetime of trying to outrun the white bull. I felt like my heart was going to come out of my mouth. And eventually he cornered me in a w by a wall, and I had to turn and face him. And he put his head down and all I could see was were his horns and he just charged right at me to stab me in the heart with his horn. A few years later I went to Crete to do some research for a book I'm writing at the moment, and I arrived to Knosos, which is one of the most significant Minoan archaeological sites. The Minoans were a people from the Bronze Age in Crete. Their history, I would say they were the first civilization or one of the first civilizations in Europe. Not much is known about them because we haven't translated their alphabet, but they were a literary people, and there's evidence that they were animistic, probably matrifocal. Their primary divinity seems to have been a mother goddess, though there's contention around that. Anyway, I arrived to Knosos, and that night, before visiting the site, I had a dream. And in the dream there was the white bull. And this time I was walking with a noose around his neck, like he was my pet dog. He had a collar and I had a rope. And we were walking around the grounds of Knosos, and the white bull had become my pet, doesn't quite capture it, but he'd become my in French you say animal de compagnie, my companion animal, which I think is so much nicer than pet. So he was my companion, and we were exploring the ruins of Knosos, and he was showing me different sites around the temple complex is about a kilometer. It's enormous. So he was showing me the temple repositories where priestesses would By the way, I'd never been to Knosos before, so I had no idea about any of this. So he's showing me where the priestesses held their votive offerings, where beekeeping tools were kept, where this the this figure known as the snake goddess, who I think was more a priestess, channeling a deity. But again, it's all down to interpretation. So the white ball is giving me this tool, as it were, of Kleisos. Until we arrive at this giant black megalithic stone. And I look up and it's pulsing. It's a bit like if you've seen Outlander, it's a bit like the stones in Outland. It's it sounds like a swarm of bees. And I get closer and I get closer, and he nudges me to put my back against the stone, and I feel the stone become malleable, and I become the stone. That anyway, that's the dream summarized. The next day I physically go to the archaeological site of Knosos. Luckily it was dawn and there were rarely any people there, so I got to see the site. And as it were, I tested the dream. And so I had my notes. I've avidly wrote them down that that that night. I woke up at about three in the morning and wrote them all down. And the next morning went to the sites, the particular places that the white bull had shown me, the temple repositories and the beekeep the place where the beekeeping tools were kept and where the snake goddess was held, and it was all accurate. So all of the banners on each of the sites had the titles and the names of the places the bull had shown me. But the most interesting thing to me was that just before I left, I came to a stone. I it wasn't a large umson. It wasn't a large blacked megalith. It was actually quite small and it was hidden in plain sight. But had I not had the dream of it as a kind of colossal thing that caught my attention, I probably wouldn't have even I would have walked past it. And what I saw happen at the site was that's indeed what was happening. Tourists were walking past this stone. I saw a stone and just sounded it straight I was in my dream again. So I just thought, this stone, there's something significant about this stone. I didn't have any information around it. There was no there were no nables, no nothing. I went to the museum after in search of it. I thought, oh, maybe there's some information about it at the museum. Nothing. Months later, I reading Sir Arthur Evans, who's the main was the main archaeologist of Knosos in the early 20th century, he wrote about how Minoan sites had what he called bear tiles, which are a type of megalithic stone. And that now they're not really hidden in museum basements. Some of them are just hidden in plain sight at the actual archaeological sites, but without any information, because they're not no one really knows what they are, so they're just pushed to the periphery. But what I think is interesting is that the presence of such stones is indicative of the age of that culture. Megalithic stones are old and they belong to an imagination that understood the world as alive and that participated with the natural world in ceremony and ritual, and whose temples were made of stone and cave and groves. So there's very little we know about those sites, but I think an interdisciplinary approach that tips its hat to the imaginal, to imagination, to dream language, is the way forward in gathering and collecting more knowledge about our origins and our earliest ancestors so that we ourselves can know how to live, really, how to find meaning.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

What a fascinating story. I had both smiles and tears and goosebumps, as you told. And I think you're absolutely right. We need uh this approach done with integrity, with that sense of discernment, grounded in a practice of reverence as well towards the site of the visit itself. I feel it can be what is missing, and it also feels like a very feminine approach into this research and into this work because the realm of imagination of mythopoetic is very feminine, not necessarily for women only, but it is very feminine. So you work with the prehistoric roots of the Greek gods, and I would love for you to slowly enter us into that landscape. Could you help situate our listeners by speaking about the shifts in worldview, culture, and ways of being from the Neolithic old era, so 6,500 to 3500 BCE, to the Omaric oral single poets, and then the emergence of Greek literacy with Hesiod.

SPEAKER_01 30:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

How much time do we have?

SPEAKER_01 30:21

Yeah, it is a mythic topic. So I recently wrote an essay series on the prehistoric groups of the Greek gods discovered through a mythic lens. So it doesn't claim to be a historical archive, as it were, it's mythic interpretation of history through myth and story, also through archaeology and anthropology and the study of continuously existing traditions and knowledge systems. My approach to these questions is that there was a as power changed, and as our values changed from centering the natural world to centering the human and the human in a particular form, ultimately the male human, our gods changed with that change. And one of the primary questions of ancient religion is of the study of ancient religion is what happened? Why did the faces of our gods change? And I personally feel like this is a natural progression of human of the human condition. The more power we have, the more chances of misusing it, the more comfort we have, the more chances of a sense of less responsibility and conformity, less interest in life and in living. More interest in really just surviving and being okay and and even compromising ourselves and our that the acorn of our seven-year-old self. So I am not really of the school of thought that there was a kind of evil or power-hungry patriarchy that overtook a matriarchal history. I think it was much more nuanced and complex than that. I do believe that for the majority of human history we have venerated the natural world, and that the closest expression of that in human form was the female body. And this is why you see artifacts and symbols centering the human, the generative female body, usually in acts of birth giving or milk-giving or menstruation, usually bare to reveal the symbolic body that is life-giving and life-taking. I don't know if that indicates that we were a matriarchal peoples cross-culturally. And I don't think it matters that much. I think it's much more interesting because right now, with the this is another topic and another one that could be a whole podcast, but the battle of the sexes and the genders, I think, is rooted in this battle for power and supremacy. Who was the top god? And it's coming out, I think, in a really harmful way, because I don't think there's any evidence that there was a top god until the last 5,000 years or so. I think that we lived within an overreaching soul, and soul was existed was believed to be equal in all things. Doesn't mean it was a golden age. We've always had jealousy and doubt and fear and death and illness and so on. But I think that there was a shared worldview cross-culturally that understood the world to be alive and that understood the body to be sacred, particularly the generative, life-giving female body. And so in this kind of question of the prehistoric groups of the gods, the first place I'm taken to in my research is that is it appears that there was this universal worldview, and that the gods, as I've mentioned earlier, were not for the largest part of human history, that they were the elements and they were the weather patterns, and they were beehives, and they were deer, and they were foxes and badgers and so on. And the gods before they became before they were placed on Mount Olympus in Greek mythology, find that you can trace each of their root systems back to to a grouping of these elemental animal beings or intelligences. And so the project isn't so much about finding one animal or one being per god. It's all the root systems that these kind of mycelial systems that would have informed the tree of that god. And so it creates this grove of intelligences. So the Olympic became what we know of today because of Homer and Hesiod. And they were likely not individuals, they were groups of people who, over at least a hundred years, wrote down the origins of the gods. Massively bold project. I'd get like hats off to whoever came up with that idea. That's the kind of thing I'd want to do. I want to sit here with you. Let's write down actually when I did in the project, looking at the origins of the gods and going, who are they? Where were they born? Who were their parents? Where did they come from? Who were their great-great great great grandparents? It's really bold and also can become fundamental because we can think we find an answer to the mystery. And as soon as we think we found an answer to the mystery, we're in trouble. So the gods found their ancestors, their great-grandparents from Olympus in the neonithic worlds of old Europe, as you mentioned, and in the Minoan Bronze Age. The gods change and move as we change and who knows which came first? Do the gods change and then we change, or do we change and then our gods change? Do we change because of environmental changes and climactic changes? No one really knows. Again, it's not for me, that's not where that's not really that important. What matters more is how can we recover truthful templates for how our earlier ancestors lived during times that seemed to be slightly more cohesive than this one. I don't think it's hard to find a time that is culturally, environmentally, and spiritually more cohesive than this one. That's not to bash on culture either. I think that there's incredibly good things too, like the conveniences and the health systems and the educational systems to a degree. Like losing I'm losing faith in them too at the moment. But and women's rights. And women I'd much rather be a woman now than in the Middle Ages. So there's a we have a lot of we can live with both truths, I think. In acknowledgement of the goodness of our time, and also in recognition of what more we can do. I think thinking that it's all bad can be a really painful existence. So perhaps much more we have more chances in living a life of low grade joy. We probably won't be happy all the time, but I don't know if that's possible, but just a low grade content. Oh yeah. I'm okay. Believing or experiencing culture and modern modernity and life as with as having a goodness, as well as noticing the gaps that we can fill or that we can water in order to create a better world for ourselves and our families and our kinship systems and so on. So the origins of the gods is a really I think it's a I think it's a religious question. And by that I mean I think it involves the entirety of who we are, because it asks, where did I come from? And if I know where I came from, I may stand a better chance at knowing where I'm going and why I'm here. And so the root systems of these gods speak to the same animistic worldview that we spoke of earlier. This cosmology that understood the world to be alive and generative, and where humans existed in right participation and right relationship with it, where the doors of seven-year-olds and their imaginations were encouraged to open through story and ritual that held those rites of passage and those experiences, as opposed to shutting them down as childish fantasy.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Thank you for sharing that, Gabriella. And with all this newfound knowledge into the prehistoric roots of the Greek gods and just this new imagination, really, as well, of thinking, what can we carry forward now to the future to make this life more meaningful? I would love to hear your thoughts on some of the goddesses that we talk about when it comes to Greek myth specifically. So either Athena or Hera, Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, I know we wouldn't have time. I would love to go one by one with you, but I know we wouldn't have time. So if you'd like to pick one or two that feel specially meaningful to you. And then more than just because I feel that there's a lot of information out there about them, but I would love to hear your thoughts on what are some of the misconceptions, what has arised through this new perception of these goddesses? What are the transformations they have undergone through history and some of these misconceptions surrounding them? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 39:56

Okay, very rich ground we're entering here. I wouldn't expect anything less from you. So straight away I'm drawn to two. One of them isn't a goddess, though. And if it's okay, let's bring him in. Because yeah, because he's because in the recovery project of who were our gods, essentially who were the old gods of the Western world, it goes beyond Greece, right? Because there were all these because cultures have influenced each other and cross-pollinated for time immemorial. So what I'm looking at really, it's pre-Olympian, but it covers the whole Western world. And my new Substack series is on it is the taking on this wider lens. So going from Greece now into the rest of Europe, and who were the old gods of Iberia and of the Sami and of the British Isles and so on. When we look at figures like Demeter and Dionysus, you find these old Neolithic forces. The this archetypal story that that goes beyond the Western world that you find variations of in the Americas and in Siberia and in certain parts of Africa as well, the great mother and her divine child. It's this archetypal story that is age-old and that has variations, of course, but in essence it tells of a mother goddess who gives birth to her son once a year, and he is to be king, and by king I understand this as he is the protector, the sacred custodian of a people and a culture, not a ruler, not a tyrant, a steward and a custodian, and a guardian. And he is born once a year in midwinter with a some with a winter solstice. And he is then in adult form, united in sacred marriage with the goddess, and then he is die or he is killed or sacrificed again in the spring, sometimes in the summer, depending on the cultures. But his existence is traceable across this wean of the year, across these four kind of liminal creative, destructive times, the summer solstice, the winter solstice, the spring equinox, and the autumn equinox. And these times of year are storied through this myth of the mother goddess and her divine child or her sacred son. And you see a variation of that story all the way through into Christianity with Mother Mary and her child, the sacred Christ. And this myth, when I look at it through the Greek lens or the prehistoric Greek lens, the pre-Olympian lens, I see the clearest figures as the great mother and Dionysus, her sacred son. Zeus does he's you find variations of him.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

This is fascinating. So for our listeners who are not familiar, we have now Demeter as mother of Persephone with Zeus. Zeus is the father, and Dionysus, son of Zeus, with Semele. I am mind-blown right now that you are bringing Dionysus as the child and uh Demeter as his mother, because I never connected Demeter to Dionysus, you know, they were very separate for me. Yeah, okay, so continue. Please tell us more. And I will just add you one question. Is Dionysus' birth in there, the tie of Zeus? Is does that appear for you somehow?

SPEAKER_01 43:42

Yes, that dance and Zeus are this gets very complicated. But Dionysus and Zeus are like the father and the son that you also find in Mesopotamia with Baal and oh, his name has slipped my memory, but the bull of Seen in ball form, and it's the sacred father and his divine son, or his younger. The way I interpret it is it's the same being, but a younger version and a mature version, reflective of the rites of passage that the masculine needs to go through from childhood to manhood. And the same with Dionysus and Zeus. But we really need to undo our ideas of Zeus as this tyrannical sky father. He became that, he certainly became that. But before he was considered that way, he was he held the essence of the sacred bull. And the bull, if we look at any creation story for the primary kind of when you think of creation stories and in the Abrahamic religious, or at least in Christianity, we think of Adam and Eve. And if we go a bit further back to the Greeks, we look at Pandora and Pandora's box. And if we go a little bit further back, we find the bull. And the bull appears throughout the Mediterranean world as this generative, viral, confertile, masculine, erotic power. He's not abusive, he's not a rapist, he's not an abduc of maidens or virgins, he's the vegetation god of the Neolithic. He's the vegetation that that is born and withers away every year, and whose existence is fed and maintained through ritual, through a people's ritual and their stories of him. And Zeus became Zeus and Dionysus were first those names were first found in Bronze Age tablets, clay tablets, in Mycenaean Crete. So the Mycenaeans were the mainland Greeks who invaded Minoan Crete in around 1450 BC. And some people think that it was a peaceful migration, some scholars don't believe in the invasion. I think it probably was. And the gods of the Minoans were replaced by the gods of the Mycenaeans, and the alphabet of the Minoans, which is called Linear A, was replaced by linear B. Linear B has been translated now. Linear A remains unclotted, so we don't know much about the cosmology of the Minoans other than what we see in their iconography and their archaeo and their archaeology. In the Mycenaean tablets, we find the names of the Olympian gods. And so the gods of Olympus, of what we see is classical Greece and this sky family overlooked by tyrannical Zeus, finds its roots in the Bronze Age Crete, in Bronze Age Crete. And there is no evidence that Zeus, first of all, that they were a family, second of all, that Zeus and Hera, that Zeus was the divine father, and Hera was his sister and who he married and ruled somewhat with, but not really. She was certainly not depicted as the jealous wife. That was a much later Hesiodaic and Homeric tr edition. And I think those character traits reflected the people at that time. They reflected Greece in 800 BC. But before that, in 1450 BC or through to 3000 BC in the Minoans, these gods were probably names of gods that already existed in that world. And what you find what's really interesting is that Dinah is the one missing. And there's some suggestions that certain god mean Demeter, but there's no evidence as direct as Zeus and Hera and Aphrodite and Poseidon and so on. They all appear very clearly in the record. And so what some scholars and the translators of Mini of Linea B argued was that the absence of her name shows that she was a later, that name was a later edition. It was a later creation, it didn't exist at that time. What existed was the title Potna. And Potnia has been translated from Linea B as meaning lady or mistress. And many scholars believe that she was the mother goddess. And that she, if there was a sort of primary intelligence, it was this divinity. And she was maternal, feminine, and she's depicted on the iconography and on the frescoes and on the seal rings of the Minoans, you often find this great female figure, often bigger than other figures, often barechested and grandiose, often in what look like ecstatic states or ritual contexts. And Demeter, the way that I have tracked her in my series, but also in the current book I'm writing, which is on the Melesi priestesses of ancient Greece, be priestesses of ancient Greece, Demeter is the goddess most associated with those priestesses. The classical Greeks write of those priestesses as women of Demeter or of the Mother Goddess. I believe that Demeter was the later expression and name for the mother goddess of Bronze Age Crete, of the Minoans, and before that into the Neolithic of Old Europe and prehistoric Europe. This story is then married with Dionysus, who is Dionysus and Zeus Zagneos, as he was known in ancient Crete. His story is essentially the same. He was born in a cave, or he was hidden in a cave, I think he was born in it more than hidden, but born in a cave to the great mother Rea, fed on milk and honey by bees and goats, who were probably priestesses, named bees, which is what Melissa means in ancient Greek and modern Greek. And so you you have this story of Demeter and Dionysus, the mother goddess and her divine son, marked by the the astrological and seasonal year. Each cross point in the wheel of the year is marked through ritual and story around these two figures, the mother goddess, and I call him the wild god, and they are named later on as the closest kind of essences that I think they're maintained in. The two gods who are most, and in fact, really the only gods of the Greek pantheon who are linked to mystery traditions. The mysteries of Demeter and the mysteries of Dionysus, like the mysteries of Isis and the mysteries of Osiris. There's a very similar dual nature to a mystery tradition in the ancient Mediterranean, be it the Aegean, Greece, or Mesopotamian Egypt.

SPEAKER_00 50:47

This is absolutely fascinating as you were speaking of the mysteries of Demeter and Dionysus that actually have a lot of ceremonies and rituals enacted for them in ancient Greece. Dionysus had an incredible number of female followers, and it was a ritual that was different than most of the rituals in time, in which they were just being witnessed. In the rituals of Dionysus, there was a participation of the women, right? Not just the priestess were enacting the rituals, but just villagers, anyone who would come, they could fully participate in there in the drinking and in that ecstasy that would come upon. And if he's also a very feminine god.

SPEAKER_01 51:33

Yes, yes. That's what's really interesting, because what you're speaking to really is the difference between mystery traditions and dogmatism or creed of classic Greek religion. Demeter and Dionysus, they maintained the more wilderness-focused, experiential, somatic, mythic experience, a participatory experience of religion that was actualized myth, really, at its essence. It was myth told through ritual and through gesture and song and story and the body. So Demeter and Dionysus, I think, are they the gods who kept the mysteries alive.

SPEAKER_00 52:14

Incredible. Thank you for illuminating that. And I can't wait to read your book. I could stay here forever in this conversation, but unfortunately, I need to move us a little bit forward. And I would love if you could speak a little bit about the danger of identifying with a single archetype. I share a very similar approach in my own work and classes. And I feel like our modern culture is so attract and fixed with these archetypal identities, and they want to name something to us, as I was explaining on that little quiz as an example. And why do you think that is? And can you share a little bit about the dangers of identifying with an architect?

SPEAKER_01 52:55

Yeah, they're all such great questions you have, Maria. I feel like every one of them is a book in itself. We could go on for days and years and a day. The first thing that comes to mind, it's a bit of a joke, really, but I just I had this thought the other day and I shared it with my partner and we had a bit of a laugh. But I said, imagine men doing spiritual work dressed like this, the archetypes that they're or the time periods that they're recovering or engaging with. And I started we're still imagining together, we're like, yeah, they dress like Trojans or Achilles, like Brad Pitt in Troy, that kind of like broad, bronzed, that kind of very like classic Greek, or perhaps they dress, and they do nowadays in some places, as indigenous shamans from the Amazon or from parts of Peru or the Andes, which like Cyber people do actually do that. But my point was that it's really, you could really make a kind of, I don't know, a sort of just a commentary on this somehow through images, where often women who are seeking to connect with these ancient traditions are dressing like Greek priestesses. And there's this misconception about the sort of toga, the long flowy dress, as being synonymous with female power. Actually, a lot of the women who wore that dress were it was just the normal dress. It was like women in the 70s wearing Levi's and tank tops. There was it wasn't indicative of spiritual prowess or any anything of that sort. Started thinking, God, imagine men started dressing like that, wearing capes and wearing shields with fake bows and arrows. And so it's just a kind of sometimes it feels very absurd what's happening to the spiritual culture in the West. And I think it's down to this the compassion I feel for it, and my own, obviously, we're all human, we all have these longings, a a remembrance of meaning, right? That we when looking, we're so hungry for it. There's a drought. And so we're turning to anything we can and we latch on for dear life. Like this kitten I recently got, she just sometimes she latches onto my hand and she will not let go. And it's so painful. And the more we try and get free, the harder she latches on. So you've got to just let her figure it out herself and eventually she'll let go. And then there's a bit of space for us to actually connect. It's that kind of feeling. I think that when we find something comparing myself as something of meaning to my cat. I think I am. I feed her every day. She seems to lead me in some way. And the processes we move through. The natural rites of passage that women experience in their bodies and those that men have to go out and experience in order to come close to the mystery that women experience naturally. We latch on to symbols and images and certain characters in stories. How many people do we know who over-identify with a hero in a story over a witch or a wise woman or a or the villain or a certain cloud movement in the stories? We're all the hero or the heroine. And this over-identification with one thing, I think, is rooted in the movement from a pantheon of gods and understanding that soul exists in everything equally to thinking that there is more soul in the human. And then that there's more soul in certain forms of humans. And we do the same with our images and our icons.

SPEAKER_00 56:50

I think you touched on such a great point. I see this when people come to listen to a story and do all that commentary that I do in my classes. This immediate positioning into the main character of the story as themselves, whoever the monster is in the tale, they're going to place it as that toxic partner. And it's a very linear experience. And it takes some time to decolonize our imagination and our mind and open that space for other energies and forces to lead, really. One of the things that I find also very problematic with this over-identifying with one archetype is that then you are only in conversation with one of archetypal force. And you're setting yourself up for failure because an archetypal force is too grandiose for our human heart. But you are limiting yourself more than that as well.

SPEAKER_01 57:48

That's right. That's it. And I think that there's this because of this need to find an identity in the absence of one. Soon as there's one where there's resonance, we go, that's who I am. So in these tests and these quizzes that you see, are you the mother or are you the whore? Are you Hera or are you Demeter or are you Aphrodite? And it's first of all, we're neither because we're not gods. And I think that's a really important thing also where you hear women call each other or themselves goddesses. You know, I imagine someone who identifies as a goddess hasn't had the encounter, hasn't actually had an encounter with those kinds of forces because they're not, they're terrifying. Those forces that have only had a small number in my life, and I imagine lots of us have, without having a language for it, perhaps, or I certainly didn't when I first in my first encounters of the numinous, and it's terrifying. There's nothing shiny, benevolent, petamama-esque about it. It's this misunderstanding, I think, of the feminine as only compassionate when, again, for the largest part of human history, I think she was also seen as predatory. She was death and she was life. There's this and. And I think it would be really helpful as women to allow ourselves the ants. I am mother, and I am artist, and I am freedom, and I am oak tree, and I am the storm, and I am the Khan. And to really allow all those times. And and also just add one more thing, because this is a significant part, I think. I have a Q ⁇ A column on my substack called The Oka Papers. And recently I received a question, really beautiful question from someone who feels and has felt very lonely in her inability to share deepest yearnings and to end up having conversations about things that she herself is instigating but doesn't really feel like having. But she can't, it's like she can't, it was like she can't access the ways of expressing the depths that she feels within herself. And so it's a very lonely place to exist in. And the story that instantly came to mind were all these variations of this story of the beast husband, the animal husband, and the woman who goes into the deep forest and marries, in this case, a bear. And she marries the bear and she's taken into the bear life, and she almost becomes a bear. She's still human, but she speaks bear and she moves bear and she eats bear and she has bear cubs. But when she returns to the village, no one speaks bear. And so suddenly she's between these two worlds. And I think that's where a lot of us find ourselves. And so we go, oh, it's much easier to just be bear. I'll just be bear. And I'll put on my bear suit and I'll play the part and be bear. And I think the work is that's the third stage of at least Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the return from the three stages of initiation, to return to the village. And to whether or not we identify with his mapping, just to give this kind of to give a holding to this idea is how do we continue to stay with our humanity and bring the imaginal with us and recognize that we too are the village for someone else who's trying to speak bare to us. So what it's not that we've found the key to the kingdom, it's that sometimes we're going to be the cause of someone's loneliness. And so that's like being the villain or the cyclops or the the storm in the myths, as well as the central characters.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:24

Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. Still a little bit in this territory. You wrote an article exploring what happens when the sacred becomes spectacle. I imagine that got you some traction and a lot of comments because it's something that deeply resonates within our community. And I thought you raised many important questions for sacred work in our current age. And I was wondering if you could speak about the tension maintaining a private spiritual life and sharing one's experience publicly. Where do you see healthy boundaries around what remains sacred, hidden, or protected? That's yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:07

The questions just keep getting better, Mariah. I on how I relate to this is as soon as you share ritual, it stops being ritual. It starts being spectacle. And by sharing, I mean on online spaces with a camera. I don't mean sharing in a with a group of people in person or privately, even online. I think you can still manage this in a private held container. You can undertake ritual together. But as soon as there's a camera that is filming you and we are aware of the camera filming us without the presence of other people there with us, such as a virtual call or a conference or whatever, the ritual is no longer the ritual can no longer be for the gods. It becomes for the viewer. And they're two very different things because the viewer is not a god, the viewer is a human like us. And so what I tried to name in my article through questions, not as a critique, but as a commentary, because that's what I do. I'm a cultural commentator. I write about things that are relevant because that's where my interest and my the non-negotiable thread is for me. The point of the essay was to ask where does our ritual become a spectacle? And is it possible to share rituals online through predominantly through social media? That was more what I was commenting on. Particularly women's use of social media to show ritual behavior in order to sell something. And to and in more specifically using the body. We all know that we have a magnetic sexual energy, erotic energy that we can use or misuse. And I think part of initiation for women is learning how to be in right relationship with our sexual energy and how it can be a conduit for creative goodness over a conduit for manipulation. Again, another massive topic that you find throughout the myths as well, right? The misuse of sexual energy or erotic energy. And so the essay was a commentary on this, and though I didn't really offer my viewpoint in it, because it's really hard to do that without sounding like you're attacking. So my approach was to ask questions. But because we're having a conversation, and the the whole point is that I'm bringing in who I am and what I think, otherwise I'd just be quoting other thinkers. What I think is that a ritual is no longer a ritual when it is filmed for a viewer that stops being sacred and becomes a spectacle.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:58

Thank you for sharing honestly. I agree with you. And I actually find that a lot of women feel the same way. The practice remains in the intimacy of everyone's heart.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:09

Yeah, because I think that there's a lot that is said without saying. When it comes to the numinous, I think we say more in this in the absence communication than in trying to fill in our interpretations. Like Hefez says, and I ended the essay saying this: go find God. Go find God and tell no one.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:31

I loved that quote so much when you shared it there. It's so good and it's so true. And what you shared before about it's not that you can't share it with anyone, right? But it's about having that sacred space to share. Because also, once we do share publicly, openly, without that discernment, the mystery of the ritual itself disappears. If it was a sacred story, it Becomes the profane one. I love the difference between what is sacred and what is secret. Our rituals, our ceremonies, they don't need to be secret, but they are sacred. So they require sacred containers, sacred spaces, sacred moments, sacred hearts to receive it as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:19

Yeah, I think that's such a good point. It makes me think of how I suspect religions and rituals were once exoteric. They were for the masses and they were ritual and ceremony were undertaken in the village squares, the village plazas, in the public spheres and in the groves and the caves, and all the community participated in the initiation of others. They weren't hidden, secret, as they became, again, this changed. They became the mysteries of Demetra and Dionysus became secret mystery traditions, but they had to, in order to survive in an age that was becoming ever more dogmatic. And in the persecution of paganism by the Romans, for example, there had to be more and more secrecy so that the initiates of those traditions could survive, essentially. It came down to survival. We're not in that place now. And so I think as you say, that difference between the secret and the sacred is for me, it's more about a privacy that is it's like part of the language of the sacred. You can, of course, have public sacred experiences like ceremonies that you experience with other people, ritual theater, I think is it time, you know, has happened for time immemorial. Ritual performances where you tell sacred stories and there's an audience that participates with song and story and so on. But there is something really abrasive, I find, in the sharing on social media, specifically on on social media, that is almost like a funnel that sucks soul. And so I think we need to be really discerning in what we share. And a lot of the sort of reflections I received on that essay were saying, how else can we share ourselves when we're there's sharing our courses? And really what I want to say is, but what do you mean? You're a priestess sharing your course. What does that what who by whose authority? And of course there's a reclamation of that, and this is also a really delicate topic, and one that I feel a lot of grief around because I think that a lot of women do naturally have an inclination to the numinous. I think that every culture has always had ritual specialists, and traditionally, ritual specialists in in again, deep time and for the majority of human history were women. I have a series, a lecture series called When Women Were the Shamans. I believe that the first that I believe that ritual knowledge and healing wisdom systems lived in the hands of women because of the generative nature of the female body and the womb. But now we don't have elders in the Western world because of the suppression of the shamans and wisdom traditions and paganism and so on throughout those approximately 5,000 years. So what do what are we supposed to do? So we're women reclaiming these roles. And I like I said earlier, imagine that some are sincere. In fact, I know some women who are, but they're not of putting menstrual blood on their faces on social media to make a point. I think we can talk about these things with much more class and in more subtle ways, as you said, that where more is said in what's not said.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:53

It reminds me of the stories in which a queen, a princess, a king, they approach a healer or a witch asking for a spell, guidance, protection, whatever it is, sometimes a child. And the healer or the witch, they say, I am not a witch. Why are you asking me that? And they deny several times as a way of even testing the loyalty, the fidelity, the desire of the one who asks. And then finally they ask for something in return, and it feels all wild and visceral. But there is this a person who is, in the stories at least, a witch. They don't call themselves like that immediately. It takes time for that veil to actually be open for them to release that identity and show themselves as such, because it's no easy thing. It takes enormous responsibility. It comes with a lot of consequence. So it's not something that they are out there proclaiming themselves as.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:56

And I think there's the evidence is also in the proclamation of that title on in spaces like social media, is evidence in mistrust or distrust of the mystery itself. Because it's the mystery that brings that brings us what we need. Right? So if you are if in the stories, and this would be true for ordinary life as well, seeking a child or seeking protection for something or relief from a certain illness or imbalance, life and the mystery will point that person in the right direction. They will it undisputably, we are constantly in relationship with the mystery, right? And things just appear on our path, people appear on our path. And I think proclaiming ourselves as something is it reveals a distrust in that mystery that actually every healer is not for everyone. So if there is an openness to that way of seeing, and a knowledge, perhaps, of ways to ease suffering through a numbering, whatever method, there had that has to be married with a trump so that the people who need that particular type of healing will find you. Because a lot of the women were like, but how do I promote myself? How will people find me? But surely your social media isn't really that helpful for someone living in a rural village in Germany. It's not so there's got to be something about being in the place where you are and trusting in the mystery and that people are there's a beautiful story for somewhere in Eastern Europe, and it's a healer who sits on a mountain and people come to him, and the way he heals them is by looking at where he has that illness in himself. So he goes into contemplation and he goes, Oh yeah, this is where I have that illness in me. He heals it in him and it heals it in the person. And I just I love that anecdote. Yeah, because what he doesn't have in him, he can't heal in someone else. But what we're doing on Instagram is going, I can heal everyone, a healer, shaman, whatever terms thrown out. But the mystery, what I the little I know of this from studying with a shaman who was my teacher in Peru when I was in my early 20s, who I'm still in contact with, though I don't practice that art form, he would say the same thing, and I really feel this to be true. It's one of those seed wisdoms that that you can't truth when you hear it. And and he would say, anyone who needs what you have, only need what you have because you need what you have. You are in as much need of what that person needs as they are. And anytime someone comes to you with something that you don't need, they're not the right you're not you will not be able to help them. You'll waste your time, you'll waste their money. And so there's something about this is much more nuanced now. I couldn't really write about this in the article without elaborating, but it's where healers are particular, it's yeah, it's like certain herbs work for certain ailments, certain healers work for certain ailments. There's no one healer for all things. And so once you proclaim yourself as that, you're already acting to be you're you're operating as though you're the entire garden as opposed to the herb that you are. There's an arrogance there that's very dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:28

One of my deep beliefs is that there are as many ways as there are women in this world. I fully believe that for everything in our lives. And of course, this would apply as well for our spirituality, for our healers, for the practices that bring meaning into our lives. Because of our time. And even though I could stay here for the rest of the day talking and entering more of the historic realm, the imaginative realm, the mundane calls, I need to go pick up my kids from school.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:04

So I want to ask you two things for us to close. If you could offer either one myth or one ritual practice or an act of imagination to a woman seeking a more mythic life, what would that be and why? I would say two or three.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:23

Let's put in three things. Three is a good number to end with, a good ritual number. One is walking, just walking. A practice of getting ourselves out of the house, off our phones, off our screens, out of the distractions. Ideally in wilderness, but that's not possible for everyone. So maybe a park or the seaside or a lake. Even a city, this can work. And dropping into out of as you walk, dropping out of the mind in the head, and dropping into the womb. Is this just for women, did you say? I think all of my listeners are women. Let's let's make this specific to women, dropping into the womb and walking without knowing where you're going, but allowing the womb to be the compass that shows you where you go. So obviously you can't do this in any neighborhood in a city. It's gonna feel safe. But the idea is that the womb is that we begin to develop a relationship with our womb. And walking in a womb-driven way can help to create a template in our upper brain to start living in a womb-driven way, where all the decisions we make, the choices, the what we invest our time in, the people that we offer more of ourselves to or less of ourselves to, the discernment that is such a hard trait for women to master or to fine-tune in themselves. To walk with the compass as a womb that can then create a template for the womb as a compass for our lives. There's this old knowledge that the womb has always been seen as the seat of a woman's power. It's her first heart, her first brain. And in the artwork from the Paleolithic through deep time and into the Neolithic and even the Bronze Age and even folk cultures, you see the depiction of the Yoni as sacred and holy, or the depiction of Bukrania, the skull of a bull, as in as symbolic of the womb. And so the first thing I would say is to develop a relationship with the womb is to walk, to start walking. The second is to start a practice of sitting as a ritual practice every morning before starting the day, even just five minutes, outside with no phone, no dream journal, no journal, no nothing, no nothing. Just sitting. It sounds easy, but bloody hell, it took me years. Just sitting, nothing else. And this is very Mary Oliveresque. It begins to she, I don't know why every time I when I started this practice, her poems would come to mind. And so I always see it as it's a Mary Oliver thing, but I'm not aware that she did this practice. But anyway, so sitting every morning with no distractions, somewhere outdoors, just listening, perceiving, nothing to do, not going over the to-do list for the day, trying to develop a practice of stillness outside every day. The third one is read more poetry. Read more poetry. There's a brilliant collection, a three-part series of poetry called Staying Alive, Being Alive, and can't remember what the third one is. But they're contemporary poets and a mix of classical poets as well, actually. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's such a good one to bibliomency. So every day as well, to end the night, my partner and I do this as much as we can before going to bed, just reading a poem, bibliomancying it. So meaning bibliomancy was a middle-age practice and medieval practice of you choose a book and you open to any page and you treat that page as a map or uh as a teacher, as a guide, and a poem or that whatever that prose is that so you can use this for all kinds of books, but particularly for a poetry practice here. So walking with the womb, sitting in stillness once a day, and reading more poetry.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:45

Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. They feel simple, but incredibly potent. And for my last question, for listeners who would like to continue exploring your work, where is the best place for them to find you and to begin?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:02

Probably Substack. I write on Substack every Sunday, and it's become this little ritual. Sunday morning I send out a piece. Every Sunday is for the paid readership, but otherwise there's a free Sunday piece every first Sunday of the month that's an essay and a poem. And all of these, all of my Substacks, what they do is they it's essentially an archive of my research over the last five years. And it's an exploration on myth and ancient history and the origins of religion and prehistoric ritualism and how we can draw on those wisdoms in relevant ways to apply to our current lives in order to, as I was saying earlier, live better.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:50

Fantastic. I'll make sure the link to your Substack and any other links, you'll send it to me later, are available in the description of the episode for our listeners. Thank you so much, Gabriela, for your time, all your wisdom, your stories. It's been a great pleasure to listen and host you. And I hope to have you again very soon for another conversation. And I wish you all the best as well in the publication of your book.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:18

Thank you so much for having me and for everyone listening.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:21

And to our dear myth lovers, see you in our next episode. Until then, remember your life is a story only you can tell. Stay close to what feels true and sovereign within you.