Missing Witches - October 23, 2025


Maya Deren - The Cardinal Points And The Points Between

Topics
Catherine Denham activism Vodou and experimental filmmaking
WF GB Jones - Sacred Rebellion Judika Illes Magic Spells Oracle Deck Launch Party!!

Episode Stats


Length

49 minutes

Words per minute

140.59

Word count

6,926

Sentence count

349

Harmful content

Misogyny

9

sentences flagged

Toxicity

20

sentences flagged

Hate speech

29

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 We call in Maya Darin, witch of the lens, Maya, goddess of the veil between, of the changes.
00:00:06.240 The most important experimental filmmaker in history died broke and sick, wildly malnourished,
00:00:12.920 using the little money she scraped together to feed her cats. 0.99
00:00:16.100 She was Ukrainian and Jewish.
00:00:17.960 She was a socialist.
00:00:19.260 She thought she was going to Haiti to make a movie about dance.
00:00:22.320 But in the form of the dance, she saw the whole metaphysical worldview.
00:00:26.940 She studied possession.
00:00:29.120 She became a channel.
00:00:31.440 Her most famous film is Meshes of the Afternoon, but in a film called Witch's Cradle,
00:00:36.540 there is a woman with a pentagram on her forehead, sometimes visible, sometimes hid by the effect of light.
00:00:42.820 And around the pentagram reads, the end is the beginning. 0.99
00:00:46.620 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:49.720 Be a witch. 1.00
00:00:50.980 Be a witch. 1.00
00:00:51.780 Be a witch. 1.00
00:00:52.280 Be a witch. 1.00
00:00:53.340 You must be a witch.
00:00:54.600 Sometimes, being an artist or a witch is walking a teetering line between seeing magic everywhere,
00:01:04.520 feeling yourself unspooled into the shining web of stardust and bioluminescence,
00:01:10.220 and then slamming back hard into the ground, the practical, the knife in the boot,
00:01:16.100 pills on the counter, bills piled by the door.
00:01:19.260 I guess it's more accurate to say that we always ride that infinity loop of changes.
00:01:25.380 God is change, as prophet Octavia Butler gave us, which is a way of saying change is the only thing
00:01:31.760 and the everything, the all-powerful thing, the infinite. I think I told you already about the
00:01:38.520 way fear hit my body and mind this summer. I slammed into the ground, got hit hard by the
00:01:44.820 changes, I thought I was done cancer treatment, then I was told it had probably metastasized to
00:01:50.300 stage four, and I spent weeks in the waiting place, colored by a slick fear that turned colors up to
00:01:57.000 eleven, and then eleven million. I didn't tell you that during this time, whenever I pulled a card
00:02:03.640 from the deck of ancestor oracles my missing witches co-creator Amy and I had made, with all
00:02:09.980 the people our hungry witch selves had been missing, I polled Maya Darin. The message on
00:02:17.140 the oracle card we created for Maya Darin reads, where can you be an initiate at this time?
00:02:23.680 Know that the soul of the universe is there, waiting to meet you. Experiment.
00:02:30.620 One day I walked into the woods, lay on the ground on a sunny plateau, put on a drum track
00:02:36.300 and listened to the leaves, the pearly everlasting growing around me. Saw myself within a river,
00:02:43.720 saw underground lit up by a web of stars. A man, a beloved ghost, rode me to a dim shore,
00:02:52.100 and my friends met me there, and we were kids. And we just played. I got up and did the rest
00:03:00.080 of the hike in a dream state. Everything was symbol and magic tinged. I turned left down
00:03:05.960 into the valley my daughter calls Valley of the Queens, instead of right up the usual path across
00:03:11.780 the mountain, and I found enormous granite stones left by glaciers going home, as the Anishinaabe
00:03:18.720 word for north phrases it, encoding their 10,000, 30,000, 100,000-year memory of changes.
00:03:27.840 Under a stone bigger than my house, there was an opening, wet and muddy, small enough to squeeze
00:03:33.620 in and lie under, but I didn't. I was afraid. I took a picture up inside and saw the wet underside
00:03:41.640 of the stone was traced with glowing webs. I put my hand on the stone and felt a laughing voice say,
00:03:49.320 you don't have to if you don't want to. It's all out here too. Then I opened my eyes and right
00:03:56.040 next to my hand, there was a perfect web, like a cartoon web, an archetypal web, four long lines
00:04:04.320 intersecting, like north-south, east-west, and the cross-quarters in between. I drew it when I got
00:04:12.640 home. I tried to Google it, but I didn't get far. Days later, a package arrived. I had ordered a
00:04:21.140 copy of Maya Darin's book, Divine Horseman of Haiti. But two copies showed up instead. I laughed
00:04:27.840 and texted Amy, Maya Darin is yelling at me. And then I sat down and flipped it open randomly,
00:04:33.940 and there on page 19, amidst notes on the translation of Haitian terms like esprit
00:04:40.680 and explanations of the use of footnotes in the text, there is inexplicably a drawing of the exact
00:04:49.400 symbol. Four long lines intersecting, north and south, east and west, and the cross-quarters.
00:04:57.660 Beneath the image, the words, the cardinal points, and points between, with no other explanation.
00:05:04.160 My jaw dropped. It was 1.11 on the clock. Crying in the nurse's office days before,
00:05:11.560 gulping air, she had said, it's so normal, it's so normal what you are feeling.
00:05:16.920 Tu as perdu tes points de repaire. I stopped her and stopped crying. What does this phrase mean,
00:05:24.520 points de repaire? And together, we pieced it together, something like orientation.
00:05:32.480 You have lost how you find yourself. Your cardinal points.
00:05:36.980 Amy wrote about Maya Darin and the woman who brought her to Haiti and introduced her to the
00:05:47.820 psychology and philosophy of ritual dance in Haiti, Catherine Denham, in our first book,
00:05:53.480 Missing Witches, Reclaiming True Histories of Feminist Magic, in a chapter on Beltane.
00:05:59.980 Quote, born in Chicago in 1909, Catherine would become an incredibly successful dancer and
00:06:05.880 choreographer, establishing and running the Catherine Denham Dance Company, one of, if
00:06:11.960 not the earliest self-supporting, predominantly Black dance companies.
00:06:16.660 She is hailed as one of the first African Americans to conduct anthropological field
00:06:21.380 work, and the first anthropologist to explore the function of dance in rituals and community
00:06:26.640 life.
00:06:28.420 All of her research informed her civil rights activism, raising Haitian dance out from behind
00:06:33.640 the demonizing glare of colonialism.
00:06:35.880 and presenting it as a valid, beautiful, and intense religious and cultural art form.
00:06:42.240 Her book, Island Possessed, tells of Haiti's history,
00:06:46.020 how the island came to be possessed by the spirits of Vaudu,
00:06:49.740 and how she herself became possessed by Haiti,
00:06:53.420 its people, its culture, its ritual dance.
00:06:56.960 Catherine purchased a parcel of land there and adopted Haiti as her second home.
00:07:01.380 Catherine presented as fearless
00:07:05.760 She used her bravery to change the world
00:07:08.840 In 1950, she was on a tour of South America with her troupe
00:07:13.120 Arriving at her pre-booked hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil
00:07:16.660 She was refused service by the man behind the counter
00:07:19.640 Because she was black 0.97
00:07:21.500 Because the dance company surrounding her was all black
00:07:25.300 At this time, there were no written anti-discrimination laws to protect Afro-Brazilians
00:07:31.480 But, undeterred, Catherine Dunham went the very next day to see a Brazilian attorney regarding the racist incident.
00:07:38.700 As a result, Congressman Alfonso Arrhenos de Mayo Franco introduced a new anti-discrimination law in the House.
00:07:47.280 Catherine's refusal to allow herself to be treated badly, even as a guest,
00:07:51.860 and her determination to make change, to battle racism in all its forms,
00:07:55.900 ended with a law being passed to benefit Black Brazilians.
00:07:59.560 It was the first law of its kind in their history.
00:08:03.520 As she got to know Haiti, its people, its customs,
00:08:06.800 Catherine recognized that the vital and unifying spirit of Haiti came down to Vodou.
00:08:12.600 She went to study the dance and became a partner in the dance.
00:08:16.300 She learned that the dance of Vodou goes beyond the body,
00:08:19.880 beyond art, and into the realm of the sacred.
00:08:22.620 It was not just celebration, it was care.
00:08:26.120 At one point, she calls the days-long drum and dance ceremonies
00:08:29.680 bush psychiatry,
00:08:31.860 connecting these rituals to the mental health of their practitioners.
00:08:35.800 And this is a Beltane lesson that we can keep for ourselves.
00:08:39.880 Dance.
00:08:41.180 Because it is not frivolous or sinful, it is self-care.
00:08:45.500 Part of nature's psychiatry.
00:08:48.320 Eventually, Catherine was officially initiated into Vodou. 0.76
00:08:52.820 And so it also went for Maya Darin,
00:08:55.120 When Catherine Dunham wrote her master's thesis on Haitian dances in 1939, Maya was her editor.
00:09:01.100 She was an experimental filmmaker who, inspired by Catherine's work, first visited Haiti in order to make a film about ritual dances.
00:09:08.100 She too found a truth there beyond measure.
00:09:10.620 She found a belief system that resonated so deeply within her Ukrainian-born heart that she too became an initiate.
00:09:19.020 Maya saw the dance in all aspects of Haitian life.
00:09:21.840 In her book, Divine Horsemen, The Living Gods of Haiti, she writes of the countryside as a theater in the round, where a lyric dance drama of prodigious grace and infinite variety is in continuous performance.
00:09:37.700 From the pre-dawn dark through the day and back into the night, Maya describes the onomatopoeia rhythms and cadences, phrasing, of market-bound women, the percussion of a donkey's hooves.
00:09:50.760 Beyond the ritual and ceremonial, Maya recognized the choreography of all life, undulating waves.
00:09:58.500 She notes that a baby on his mother's hip, absorbing the beats of a ceremonial drum, will know the drum beats as its own blood-familiar pulse.
00:10:07.700 And we witches recognize this too, the beat of the drum, the beat of our pulse, the magic of dance in all forms, the natural molecular dance, the fun, secular dance, the sacred metaphysical dance that, as Maya says, is a statement addressed not to men, but to divinity.
00:10:26.900 Divinity for Maya is the Lua. She wrote,
00:10:57.560 The lois are the souls of the cosmos.
00:11:01.340 So when we dance, we may dance in solitude for our souls alone.
00:11:06.480 We may dance with our soulmates, or we may dance as tribute to the souls of the cosmos.
00:11:12.860 For Beltane, any form will do, as long as we are dancing.
00:11:16.580 let's always be dancing at Beltane and at Samhain as the veil thins
00:11:27.360 Maya gave herself the name Maya in collaboration with her husband Sasha Hamid
00:11:34.300 who said he gave it to her because Maya was the goddess of the veil between reality and
00:11:39.660 spiritual truth I say in collaboration because even if someone offers you a name you need to
00:11:45.360 choose it every day for the whole rest of your life for it to be yours. And even after they
00:11:49.520 divorced, Maya stayed Maya, goddess of the veil between, of the changes. And I swear I'll start 0.63
00:11:58.080 this story about Maya properly in a minute, but quickly, before I forget, because everything is
00:12:03.460 always slipping away from me now under the heavy water pressure of chemo brain and the crushing
00:12:08.720 collapse of chemically induced menopause. And as I think I've told you before, my people were never
00:12:15.000 steel traps to begin with, my mother told me once her brain forgets to protect herself.
00:12:21.060 Here are things I want to remember to tell you about Maya, all out of order, okay? Maya was and
00:12:27.060 is the most important experimental filmmaker in history, and she died broke and sick, wildly
00:12:33.040 malnourished, using the little money she scraped together to feed her cats before herself.
00:12:39.000 She was Ukrainian and Jewish and had fled Russians and Nazis.
00:12:43.400 She was a socialist.
00:12:44.680 She was interested in what the choices about form said,
00:12:48.300 about an artist's whole metaphysical understanding of the world.
00:12:52.760 She worked as an administrative assistant for Catherine Dunham.
00:12:55.780 That's how she got the job, helping to edit her thesis.
00:12:58.580 She showed up and asked if she could help her, learn from her,
00:13:01.900 assisting a Black woman in the 1940s.
00:13:04.880 There are ways we can be portals.
00:13:07.640 She played with the way film could capture dance and martial arts.
00:13:11.640 She thought she was going to Haiti to make a movie about dance,
00:13:14.600 but in the form of the dance, she saw the whole metaphysical worldview.
00:13:19.200 And she knew she had to put the frame down and feel and witness,
00:13:23.180 not commit the error of dissection, but be an artist and be in this knowledge with every cell.
00:13:29.980 She studied possession.
00:13:32.400 She became a channel.
00:13:34.800 She died of a sudden brain hemorrhage brought on by severe malnutrition and too much amphetamines
00:13:40.080 prescribed to her by the same Dr. Feelgood who would cause JFK to botch the Bay of Pigs invasion.
00:13:47.100 Her most famous film is Meshes of the Afternoon, but in a film called Witch's Cradle that she made with Marcel Duchamp.
00:13:55.000 There is a woman with a pentagram on her forehead, sometimes visible, sometimes hid by the effect of light.
00:14:00.740 And around the pentagram reads, the end is the beginning.
00:14:05.900 The film follows white string moving of its own accord around the necks of men, a web stretching out from her hands, a web all around a room, a line that goes up and down and seems to descend forever.
00:14:18.180 she wrote in a letter to a friend inside I am quite mad emotional and sometimes in little things
00:14:28.280 I am what I really am sometimes I am what I really am a little thing she continues like
00:14:38.660 laying in the shadow of the lilac bush have you ever done it laying with your hair in the mud
00:14:43.700 in the cool torrent, beating, pounding relentlessly and ruthlessly on your naked body, pressing it
00:14:49.960 into the earth from whence it sprang, blinding your eyes, choking you, taking you for its own,
00:14:55.340 and then watching the lull, the end, the moon climbing up the tear-cleared skies,
00:15:01.840 creeping stealthily inside, a glorious sin in your heart, end quote.
00:15:08.260 we call in maya darren which of the lens the mud the lilac bush socialist of dream time
00:15:18.780 fugitive from the machinery of capital we call in the woman who refused to sell her visions to 0.60
00:15:25.540 hollywood we call in the maker who saw film as ritual rhythm as revolution we call in her hunger
00:15:32.260 her poverty, her struggle, her failures, her vision. We call in the drumbeat of her reel,
00:15:39.540 the rhythm that belonged to everyone. We call her as ghost, as teacher, as archetype, as one who
00:15:46.580 lived possessed by the loi. We ask, what does it mean to make art together in a world that keeps us apart? 0.68
00:16:02.260 Maya Deren was born Eleonora Derenkowskaya in Kiev in 1917, a Jewish child of revolution
00:16:14.540 and pogrom. Her family fled the violence of post-revolution Ukraine and settled in Syracuse,
00:16:21.240 New York. Her father was a psychiatrist who treated the poor for free, her mother a scholar
00:16:26.940 and critic who read Marx and Freud out loud at the kitchen table. In Maya's house, resistance was
00:16:32.660 not abstract. It was how you fed people. She worked for Stage Magazine, a socialist theater
00:16:38.860 publication that believed art should belong to the people. She absorbed a conviction that would
00:16:43.860 guide her forever. The work of art is not to replicate reality or sell a story, but to reveal
00:16:50.180 what we already share, motion, rhythm, breath, a pulse. Her socialism was both political and
00:16:59.560 metaphysical. In her 1946 essay, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film, she wrote that art
00:17:06.920 should not imitate the capitalist mode of accumulation, that its function is not to
00:17:11.780 produce a commodity, but to circulate energy. The task of art, she wrote, is to create a space
00:17:18.540 where time can be transformed. Witches, poets, artists, activists, filmmakers, listeners,
00:17:30.780 Risa of the future, I'm talking to you. Maya the Veil asks us to remember our craft is not 0.99
00:17:36.940 product, is not content, is not slop to churn the wheel of capital. Our making is a redistribution
00:17:44.580 of attention, invitations into shared transformation. In an essay published in
00:17:52.080 Mademoiselle magazine in 1946 titled Magic is New, Meyer wrote, quote, more than anything else,
00:17:59.280 cinema consists of an eye for magic, that which perceives and reveals the marvelous
00:18:04.940 in whatever it looks upon. And in a talk called New Directions in Film Art given in 1951
00:18:13.020 at the Cincinnati Museum of Art, Maya said,
00:18:17.060 A child looks at the world through eyes like clear windows,
00:18:20.900 really looking outward.
00:18:23.240 Then the individual needs to justify a history
00:18:25.840 that has begun to exist with him.
00:18:28.540 The window silvers over and thickens and thickens,
00:18:31.640 and finally we are confronted by a mirror
00:18:33.600 in which we see nothing but ourselves,
00:18:36.060 the affirmation of ourselves over and over again.
00:18:39.900 We no longer learn, we see ourselves,
00:18:42.360 and we know it.
00:18:44.760 For any human being,
00:18:46.140 it is important to try to keep as many holes
00:18:48.260 in that mirror as possible.
00:18:50.540 This is necessary in works of art
00:18:52.460 because the experience of art
00:18:53.840 is essentially an autocratic one.
00:18:55.640 A work of art demands the temporary surrender
00:18:57.880 of any personal system.
00:19:00.340 The person who surrenders
00:19:01.680 then possesses new experience.
00:19:03.900 That is growth.
00:19:05.860 It is the growth of traveling in another mind
00:19:08.500 and knowing it.
00:19:10.740 End quote.
00:19:12.360 Let's solemnly swear in Maya's name to try and always reveal for each other the marvelous, okay?
00:19:21.300 To keep holes in our mirrors, to make bridges into other minds.
00:19:25.400 What else is art or magic for?
00:19:29.620 I saw meshes of the afternoon in a small classroom at McGill University in Montreal when I was 20.
00:19:34.920 a room with raked seating for 40 people old wood up wrapping stairs where decades later in the same
00:19:44.820 room amy and i would guest lecture about witches for a sociology class on deviance seeing maya's 1.00
00:19:51.860 work floored me gave me permission let me travel into another mind she was one of only a few women 1.00
00:19:58.780 whose work we watched that semester and even though there was no mention of her foundational
00:20:03.340 writing on art theory of cinema, much less on the metaphysics, ritual, and spirituality of Haitian
00:20:09.900 voodoo, the meshes of the afternoon caught me. The mask of light, the self looking back,
00:20:17.280 the violence under the surface, and the power radiating from her hung all around me, made me
00:20:25.220 taller. Later in grad school, I made films that followed the light in leaves, slowed down the
00:20:33.040 bounding motion of loping down a green hill looped my own gestures walking again and again
00:20:40.460 in front of these french doors that opened out onto mount royal floor to ceiling five stories
00:20:46.960 up in the air my apartment at that time wrought iron and crumbling wood the doors which my dream
00:20:53.220 self would go on to place in my memory palace safe space where all my inner journeys began
00:20:58.420 maya's been there for a long time in the way i notice light and spirit gates
00:21:05.820 i remember now i actually first saw meshes of the afternoon before that university class
00:21:13.380 i took experimental film in cgep to grade 13 we watched it on a tv screen in a stale
00:21:20.840 grayish classroom and even then it hummed all down the hallways
00:21:25.900 and that summer in a back patio covered with grapevines behind a brownstone in Kensington
00:21:33.320 Market in Toronto I sat with a friend all day drawing the outlines of the leaves shadows in
00:21:40.100 bright chalk on the broken cement and my friend said you have a way of making regular days magic
00:21:46.580 and it was one of those compliments that shines through the deep waters of your whole soul because
00:21:53.380 you feel like the most secret hope for who you could be is being seen and maya was there too
00:22:01.700 between dreaming and waking reality and illusion shadow and sunlight in the changes
00:22:10.980 she wrote quote ritual in transfigured time is based on the manipulation of times
00:22:18.260 that film has no new objects in it and isn't a new theme it's called ritual in transfigured
00:22:24.100 time because it is a reference to ritual and ritual in primitive society or any society where
00:22:29.700 ritual takes place is known as rite de passage rite of passage that state which means the
00:22:35.540 crossing of the individual from one state into another boyhood into manhood or here as widow
00:22:42.100 into bride she continues because film is a two-dimensional surface but it is not governed
00:22:49.620 as other two-dimensional surfaces such as the canvas it is two-dimensional but also metamorphic
00:22:56.900 what is important is how one moment changes into another how changing is constant
00:23:02.180 it is the changing of things not the way things are it is a time form
00:23:06.820 and later i had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension that film is changing
00:23:16.700 metamorphic that is infinite the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than
00:23:23.320 a single life it is based on the book of changes the yi ching the basic principle of life is that
00:23:33.560 the dynamic was the functional flow of negative and positive, repeated. End quotes.
00:23:43.160 She made film as ritual, metaphysic film that draws us into the breath of infinite change,
00:23:49.400 the great silver river as I've been calling it at night, as I literally try calling it to me from
00:23:55.280 the shores of sleeplessness. The silver river is a film reel in Maya's hands, the magic of changes
00:24:02.560 that hold us beyond our daily strife, the feeling of resting my face in a river where I can still
00:24:08.980 breathe and I dissolve, but I'm somehow also more me. I do not have stage four cancer, by the way.
00:24:17.920 I got the call the day after my 45th birthday. On the day of my birthday, my neighbors and family
00:24:24.800 organized our now annual flotilla party on the little silver lake with its underground river
00:24:30.260 that makes us a community.
00:24:33.000 We bring our canoes and kayaks and pedalos,
00:24:36.780 even these funny floating docks with electric motors and Muskoka chairs.
00:24:41.380 And we pop bottles of bubbly and pass around snacks
00:24:44.340 and jump in and out of the water 1.00
00:24:45.740 and mouth, fuck cancer, together over the kids' heads. 1.00
00:24:51.560 And I felt the full euphoria. 1.00
00:24:53.480 I felt healthy and held, and I knew it even before the call came.
00:25:00.260 But I still keep close the weird wisdom from those weird days when death was close.
00:25:06.260 That the movement of all life is totally important.
00:25:10.400 The dance, the sway, all our little life rafts tied together, holding on.
00:25:17.160 Creating in our ritual, in our defiant celebration, in our art, a space where time can be transformed.
00:25:25.080 and we open holes in the mirror of the self and are together and not alone
00:25:32.840 in 1943 maya made meshes of the afternoon with her then husband alexander hammond
00:25:44.860 it is one of the most studied short films in history a dream spiraling on itself a woman
00:25:52.220 climbing her own stairs again and again, chasing and becoming the shadow that pursues her.
00:25:59.020 She wrote, quote, what still inspires me the most is the capacity of cinema to create new
00:26:04.780 magic realities by the most simple means, with a mixture of imagination and ingenuity in about
00:26:11.100 equal parts. To achieve on film the sense of an endless frustrating flight of stairs, the great
00:26:16.560 Hollywood studios would probably spend hundreds on the building of a set. You, however, can do it
00:26:21.720 for the price of the film required to photograph any ordinary stairway three times. End quote.
00:26:31.460 Darren filmed herself as protagonist and subject, but also as archetype, the woman alone in the
00:26:37.380 domestic labyrinth, trapped in repetitions of desire, work, violence, and self-erasure.
00:26:43.980 In a letter she wrote that meshes was not surrealism, but metaphysics made visible.
00:26:48.840 I make my pictures for what happens after the dream, for the waking that follows.
00:26:57.780 Quote, Darren's work is most often viewed in the context of surrealism.
00:27:02.620 She was a friend of André Breton's.
00:27:05.200 Darren, however, denied any connection with the movement's aesthetic aims.
00:27:09.620 The surrealist obsession with duality, with the lines separating the real and the imaginary,
00:27:14.660 the rational and the irrational, the waking life and the dream.
00:27:18.840 was in fact diametrically opposed to Darren's fascination with the continuity of life and death,
00:27:25.100 the physical and the spiritual, and I and the non-I.
00:27:30.640 Talking about her film, Meshes of the Afternoon, she stated that she was interested in the credibility of the unreal,
00:27:37.100 not the incredibility of the unreal.
00:27:40.200 I am concerned, she wrote, with that point of contact between the real and the unreal,
00:27:44.480 where the unreal manifests itself in reality.
00:27:48.840 Her films were intended as imaginary arenas where this point of contact could be visualized,
00:27:55.040 where boundaries normally fixed could dissolve or become wildly flexible,
00:28:00.120 where protagonists could move freely between dreams and waking life without ever resolving the differences between the two,
00:28:06.940 where nature and culture, urban and rural environments could be separated and linked by a single step,
00:28:13.280 where past and future selves could meet along the road,
00:28:17.220 fracturing into clones, moving along parallel paths of time and space.
00:28:22.040 Her years in Haiti and her intense involvement with Vodou
00:28:25.460 can be seen as her quest to experience a living culture
00:28:28.820 that gave credibility to the unreal
00:28:31.240 and thereby embody the vision she sought in her experimental films.
00:28:36.160 End quote.
00:28:39.080 In 1947, Maya traveled to Haiti and fell into trance. 0.86
00:28:43.280 She lived among voodoo practitioners and abandoned the structure of the Guggenheim Fellowship that had sent her there.
00:28:48.780 She wrote that she had to be an artist participant, not a voyeur, filming rituals and ceremonies no one else had been allowed to access.
00:28:58.540 In Divine Horseman, The Living Gods of Haiti, the book, with its foreword by Joseph Campbell, she describes possession not as madness or loss, but as collective embodiment.
00:29:09.600 The body as open channel for gods and ancestors.
00:29:13.280 She saw in Vodou a socialism of the spirit, each dancer, each drumbeat, each offering an act of mutual relation.
00:29:23.440 For us, this is another lesson from Maya of the Veil, to let the work take us, to be mounted by what we invoke,
00:29:33.620 to trust that trance and art and politics are not separate acts but the same current flowing through different bodies.
00:29:40.400 she wrote quote in possession the gods are made manifest through the flesh of the people
00:29:46.780 it is an economy of exchange not domination end quote this was an anti-colonial anti-capitalist
00:29:55.820 revelation in the west spirit and matter are divorced in voodoo they are married through
00:30:01.300 rhythm to film that to let the body of the camera enter the dance was to make ritual through
00:30:07.200 technology. She called her camera an instrument of possession. Campbell wrote, quote, Maya Darin
00:30:14.780 has performed the feat of delineating the Haitian cult of Vaudun, not anthropologically, but as an
00:30:20.980 experienced and comprehended initiation into the mysteries of man's harmony within himself and with
00:30:26.860 the cosmic process. He continues later, it is because Christians today recognize painfully the 0.90
00:30:33.940 limitations of our Western tradition, and are seeking earnestly some enlarged base for the
00:30:39.400 formulation of a unified and unifying, and yet adequately differentiated, understanding of
00:30:45.820 humanity that suddenly, as though promising a revelation, mythology and folklore have acquired
00:30:52.200 a new interest." End quote. We are more lost and fragmented, living more extreme class
00:31:01.180 fragmentation, more obnoxious destructive wealth, and yet have access to more decentralized meaning 0.95
00:31:08.580 making and means of production than when Maya lived and practiced. Darren refused the Hollywood 1.00
00:31:14.580 studio system and instead built small communities of practice. Salons, screenings, shared reels,
00:31:20.880 teaching others to run projectors and discuss form. She toured the country showing her films,
00:31:25.840 sleeping on couches, living off coffee and cigarettes. Her socialism wasn't rhetoric,
00:31:31.640 it was praxis, an insistence that art should not depend on extraction or hierarchy.
00:31:38.260 She once said, I make my films for what money cannot buy.
00:31:43.300 She dreamed of founding a filmmaking cooperative. She wrote that every filmmaker should own their
00:31:48.280 means of production, cameras, editing tools, access to light. Note to self here, remember,
00:31:53.720 The tools of magic belong to no one.
00:31:56.760 When we make art together, when we fund each other's survival,
00:31:59.760 when we share tools and stories, we are not merely making do.
00:32:04.080 We are enacting the very future Maya tried desperately to capture.
00:32:14.040 Quote,
00:32:14.740 The arc of the story is this,
00:32:16.340 a woman seeks to inhabit the world of the living and the dead.
00:32:19.700 Her conviction is ravenous, 1.00
00:32:21.060 her temperament volatile in the way that cool, clear liquid can ignite a lethal fire.
00:32:27.120 Though she makes indelible contributions to her field, sustained mainstream recognition
00:32:32.120 eludes her. After a streak of successes, she evaporates into a cloud of esoterica,
00:32:38.180 sliding in and out of visibility in the decades succeeding her death.
00:32:44.120 From today's vantage, it is easy to see how blatant misogyny was taken up in what is essentially
00:32:50.140 the tired refrain of, loosen up, doll. For a particularly egregious example, see Amos Vogel's
00:32:57.980 1953 Cinema 16 Symposium on Poetry and the Film. Of the five panelists, Arthur Miller, Parker Tyler,
00:33:06.020 Dylan Thomas, Willard Mass, and Maya Darin, Darin is marked not just as the only woman, but as the
00:33:12.300 too serious, too studious overachiever. On stage, she is publicly mocked and viciously heckled by 1.00
00:33:19.800 her male counterparts for her intellectual analysis of narrative poetics. As the story
00:33:26.280 too often goes with blazing women, Darren was ahead of her time for its majority, and then, 0.95
00:33:31.980 in the blink of an eye, she was demo day, end quote. By the late 1950s, Darren's health was
00:33:40.140 collapsing. She was receiving vitamin injections from Dr. Max Jacobson, Dr. Feelgood, whose
00:33:47.540 amphetamine cocktails also fueled the Kennedys and countless celebrities, the same system that
00:33:53.100 drugged presidents and botched revolutions fed her addiction. Her hair fell out. Her nerves burned.
00:34:01.080 She was still working, writing, editing, teaching, but she was being consumed by the same machinery
00:34:06.920 she had spent her life refusing. She died in 1961 at 44, nearly penniless.
00:34:17.540 To get down in the deep could be Maya Deren's mantra. 0.92
00:34:27.100 She lived life at breakneck speed,
00:34:29.160 and she loved with a terrible sort of love,
00:34:31.800 as though nothing was louder than the tick-tock of mortality.
00:34:35.700 Because this is my only chance to have the world,
00:34:38.440 to have that sense of sheer fierceness of being in the world,
00:34:43.240 the sheer and exhilarating violence of living.
00:34:46.940 End quote.
00:34:47.540 Capitalism still feeds on artists until they die of exhaustion.
00:34:54.500 The same sickness runs through our culture now,
00:34:57.800 billionaires funding fascism while creators scrape for rent,
00:35:01.640 the poison of productivity injected into our veins and marketed as self-care.
00:35:06.640 Our culture runs this message through us,
00:35:09.360 the urgency, the time poverty, our only chance to have the world.
00:35:14.960 What would a different relationship to the changes?
00:35:17.540 to time on an ancestral scale feel like in these tired bodies?
00:35:23.720 How could we spread ourselves out into each other to find some ease?
00:35:28.560 Into circles that redistribute energy, attention, and love.
00:35:36.340 Her films over and over seek to create a loop.
00:35:41.140 She said she aimed to create without climax, to make a lemniscape,
00:35:45.060 to reveal the place of change that is everywhere, right there within the mundane,
00:35:50.180 the living spirit of generations of ancestors that can slip into us, the magic in every room.
00:35:57.500 Remember, repetition is not failure. The loop itself is the spell, the return to the kitchen,
00:36:05.240 the sickbed, the editing table, the broom, the protest. These are our rituals of redefinition.
00:36:12.340 They are never done. The work is never complete. We are not defined by the fact that we always
00:36:19.220 return, but by the threads that are endlessly weaving, the end in the beginning, the cardinal
00:36:25.220 points, and the points between. Even all this forgetting of mine, up and down the stairs,
00:36:32.600 wondering why I went there in the first place, even all these chemicals washing through my body,
00:36:37.860 they are all coming with me on the journey, all part of the story now. Purity culture is bullshit. 1.00
00:36:45.360 This is how I make my magic now. Chemo, cracks, and all. We have to bring it all with us. We have 1.00
00:36:53.820 to tell the truth about the fault lines and the failings of even our most transcendent heroines,
00:36:59.520 the cardinal points and the points between.
00:37:07.860 Maya met Teji, though, when she was 30 and he was 15.
00:37:18.480 He would become her last husband.
00:37:21.020 They married shortly after he turned 18.
00:37:24.620 It's so tempting to say, oh, but, but, but they were creative partners.
00:37:29.920 Things were different then.
00:37:31.520 Gender dynamics in the 50s affected the relative weights of age difference.
00:37:35.580 but we know this now to be statutory rape an imbalance of power that causes distortion in
00:37:43.100 the developing mind of the kid i look at pictures of my husband at 15 all awkward elbows and grins 0.92
00:37:50.640 and trying to be a man and i feel in my bones how unfair and harmful and not fucking okay this ever 0.89
00:37:58.860 is. Add to it that she expressed frustration that his inheritance was slow in coming and she was 0.87
00:38:07.040 impoverished and an addict by then. It does no good to waffle around it. A culture that is sick
00:38:16.040 and distortive reverberates through bodies with trauma and violation. This doesn't excuse
00:38:22.820 predatory behavior. Lots of people live through trauma and don't marry teenagers. But the
00:38:27.880 constraints of the world narrow the field of possibility for all of us. We can stop seeing
00:38:34.180 the gateways and get lost in the hall of mirrors. In Religion and Magic, Maya herself wrote about
00:38:40.840 how Vodun gives Haitian culture a stability that results in lower rates of sexual violence,
00:38:46.180 even though there is so much poverty and desperation. She compares this to North
00:38:51.760 America where each child has only their parents as a kind of god. In Vodou, the loi, especially
00:38:58.940 Arjuni, the loi of love, lives through the parents and each successive generation and moves into the
00:39:06.720 individual, weaving them into collective relation. In Stan Brakhage's film At Wit's End, he recounts
00:39:15.640 the story of their meeting. They met under peculiar circumstances. One night she had gone to a
00:39:21.620 movie, and when she left the theater, realizing that she had left her purse inside, she went back
00:39:26.020 looking for it. In the empty theater, she found a 15-year-old Japanese boy sleeping under the seats.
00:39:32.860 He was Teiji Ito. She was quite shocked to learn that the theater was his home. He would wait until
00:39:39.560 the place was cleared out, then he would go to the streets panhandling. Teiji had run away from a 0.55
00:39:46.140 well-off but oppressive family to be a musician. He had no training, however. He hadn't even had
00:39:52.820 enough public school education to qualify him for a music course at a junior high school level.
00:39:57.640 But he had a natural talent, which Maya took on herself to bring out.
00:40:02.300 Maya, in her 30s then, took him in. They lived together for many years. They began listening
00:40:07.500 to music together. They would listen to Mozart, for instance, then to Haitian Vodun music,
00:40:12.520 and Teiji came to realize from the music of these various cultures
00:40:16.320 certain possibilities which he could integrate into a style
00:40:19.640 that would become uniquely his.
00:40:22.300 It is Teiji's music which was put on at land
00:40:25.500 after the film had run silently for many years.
00:40:28.920 He both composed and performed.
00:40:31.320 End quote.
00:40:35.460 Maya and Teiji were complex people, like all of us,
00:40:40.240 flickering, changing, remembered for their creativity and love, and also for their failures.
00:40:46.360 Artist Wendy Erdman describes driving up the coastal highway with Ito so they could wash the
00:40:51.180 airport off them in Muir Woods, laughing and playful, but also, quote, there was a dark side 0.75
00:40:58.400 to Teishi. He was manipulative, passive-aggressive, often a bully, even physically abusive on occasion.
00:41:05.740 I remember Cheryl with a broken arm. 0.90
00:41:09.660 Teji once beat Dan with a shillelagh.
00:41:12.920 Teji nagged Gene into putting family members on the company payroll, sulking if he didn't get his way.
00:41:18.640 He was narcissistic and controlling, frequently moody and uncooperative, occasionally frightening.
00:41:25.000 End quote.
00:41:28.120 What patterns repeated in their cells, in their gestures, in their roles of savior and violator and victim?
00:41:35.740 if maya and taiji had been able to grow old in a world with love expressed through communal
00:41:43.000 culture communal witnessing to right and wrong communal singing dancing mutual aid feeding and
00:41:51.080 caring for each other calling each other out and in attending to each other's spiritual and
00:41:57.460 physical health would she have slid off the edge of the dark the way she did
00:42:02.780 i don't know how taiji ito saw those days he died suddenly of a heart attack in haiti at the age of
00:42:11.460 47 but 20 years after maya's death he completed her unfinished film divine horseman the living
00:42:18.200 gods of haiti with his then wife cheryl wynnette a work of return and restoration and reclaiming
00:42:26.260 he created incredible soundscapes for meshes of the afternoon and other films of hers that
00:42:32.580 had been silent. Theirs was a collaboration completed beyond the veil, beyond the individual
00:42:40.080 and their flaws and breakdowns. In the end, he gave himself a voice in the work.
00:42:47.680 I wish it for all survivors.
00:42:56.640 The fact remains, Maya Darin redefined what film could be, and those films and her writing
00:43:01.900 trace an outline, like the shadows of leaves, of another way that life could be.
00:43:08.700 Her motion is still teaching us to move differently.
00:43:13.180 She showed us that to make art is to make ritual, is to wage a quiet revolution.
00:43:20.180 As fascism rises again, polished, algorithmic, disguised as normalcy, we can look to Darren's
00:43:27.060 films, especially as completed by Teiji Ito, for another model of time, non-linear, recursive,
00:43:36.020 haunted but alive. They remind us that history is rewritten not just through conquest, but also
00:43:42.180 like a dance learned from wise friends, passed on to other bodies who carry on when we are gone.
00:43:48.680 we call in maya darren and teiji ito's courage artistry defiance we call in the real as wheel
00:44:02.280 time as tide we remember a camera turning in small apartments in temple courtyards in the
00:44:11.780 hands of the people, we'll call in the truth. We remember that she died possessed by the spirits
00:44:19.480 she had once tried to honor. According to filmmaker Stan Brakhage, quote,
00:44:27.920 Maya's last film project, released in 1959, was The Very Eye of Night. It was financed by John
00:44:35.100 Latouche, whom she had met when she was with Catherine Denham in California. Latouche had
00:44:40.660 been the lyricist for some of Dunham's productions and had since become famous for his work with
00:44:45.360 musicals. He had also become financially comfortable and wanted to help some of his
00:44:49.460 artist friends. Maya was among them. He agreed to sponsor The Very Eye of Night. It took Maya years
00:44:56.160 to complete this film, and the money went way beyond what Latouche felt he could afford.
00:45:01.700 At some point, she was outraged that Latouche would cut her off, and so she put a curse on him.
00:45:07.240 It is said that Maya had gotten into the practice of putting Vodun curses on people who displeased her in one way or another. 0.91
00:45:14.540 At least she believed that she possessed this power. 0.95
00:45:17.480 That's the story anyway.
00:45:18.680 But in the laws of magic and Vodun, certain principles operate.
00:45:23.540 An important one is that if one becomes possessed by a god, the gods are responsible for whatever action ensues.
00:45:29.620 but, provided the possession occurs for one's own personal reasons, the gods are blasphemed
00:45:36.020 and may retaliate. The fact is that Latouche died of a heart attack shortly after Maya is said to
00:45:42.440 have put a curse on him, and so it is also said Latouche had friends in a rival group of magicians
00:45:48.080 who operated a curse against Maya Darin, stating when she would die. Maya Darin did die on a Friday,
00:45:54.860 the 13th of October, 1961, at age 44. End quote.
00:46:03.980 She couldn't escape death or the exploitative, addictive, youth-eating trauma repetitions of
00:46:10.620 white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist patriarchy, but she tried, and for shining
00:46:17.220 moments she slipped through portals and saw a world where she could live otherwise.
00:46:22.340 Graham Ferguson, founder of IMAX, said of Maya, quote,
00:46:27.660 She came from the sea. If you've ever seen her film, At Land, in her mind, she was a sea creature.
00:46:39.460 Her bedroom was an underground grotto full of shells. The ceiling was a painting of sea creatures
00:46:44.980 painted with phosphorescent paint. You really felt as if you were undersea at night. It was an
00:46:52.100 apartment of love, of beauty. End quote. Let's hold up a cup for those moments, no matter how brief,
00:47:02.280 when they were there in a glowing place of love, of beauty. For Maya, who tried to get down in the
00:47:11.620 deep, who lay beneath the lilacs, who danced until she was possessed, who said, sometimes in little
00:47:18.620 things. I am what I really am. Breathe together now and maybe you can see the cardinal points
00:47:29.880 and the points in between and feel each of us also listening. Also caught in the witch's cradle 0.97
00:47:37.780 and the meshes of these afternoons. Here in that breathing moment between the stone, beneath the
00:47:45.520 eye locks. Try not to slip down too far below to where the call of the magical loops around to
00:47:52.620 become the mirror again. Just breathe here, at the meeting place. The film continues.
00:48:02.480 The silver river shimmers on beneath. The circle opens, our perspective lifts,
00:48:08.860 and it's always been a spiral.
00:48:12.020 The ritual isn't over.
00:48:14.420 The rite of passage has only ever endlessly begun. 0.99
00:48:19.620 Blessed fucking be. 1.00
00:48:25.500 You must be a witch. 1.00
00:48:28.780 The Missing Witches Coven is trans-inclusive, 1.00
00:48:32.000 anti-racist, feminist as hell,
00:48:34.340 and welcoming to men and all people.
00:48:36.580 we are pro-science anti-ableist and utterly full of love and awe if you've been searching for a
00:48:45.180 community that believes resistance is sacred and re-enchantment is necessary that feminism is a
00:48:51.840 spell we're still weaving all together that care is radical that the future depends on our
00:48:58.220 collective imagination you found us we're always learning from each other we'd be lucky to get to
00:49:06.380 learn from you, too. Whether you claim the word witch or not, if you're hungry for this work,
00:49:12.100 this is your circle. Join us at missingwitches.com.