Missing Witches - MW Rachel Pollack - The Future Is As Real As The Present

00:00:00.000 The Missing Witches Coven is trans-inclusive, anti-racist, feminist as hell, and welcoming

00:00:05.460 to men and all people.

00:00:08.460 We are pro-science, anti-ableist, and utterly full of love and awe.

00:00:14.500 If you've been searching for a community that believes resistance is sacred and re-enchantment

00:00:19.940 is necessary, that feminism is a spell we're still weaving all together, that care is radical,

00:00:26.780 that the future depends on our collective imagination, 0.97

00:00:31.200 you found us.

00:00:32.660 We're always learning from each other.

00:00:35.940 We'd be lucky to get to learn from you, too.

00:00:38.740 Whether you claim the word witch or not,

00:00:41.020 if you're hungry for this work, this is your circle.

00:00:44.620 Join us at missingwitches.com. 1.00

00:00:46.800 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:49.880 Be a witch. 1.00

00:00:51.400 Be a witch. 1.00

00:00:51.580 Be a witch. 1.00

00:00:52.380 Be a witch. 1.00

00:00:53.480 You must be a witch. 0.97

00:00:54.780 Welcome home to the Missing Witches podcast.

00:01:00.060 This episode invokes the life, spirit, worlds, and deep enchantment of Rachel Pollack,

00:01:06.720 a linchpin theorist and practitioner in the world of tarot, author of the definitive culture-shifting

00:01:13.920 book on tarot reading, 78 Degrees of Wisdom, a creator of worlds and possibilities.

00:01:20.200 rachel isn't missing in the sense that witches don't sing her name but missing in the other

00:01:27.540 sense as in one who has recently crossed over and she's missing from us and we are bereft

00:01:35.240 and yet as i was writing this episode i was sent christine gorman's visionary woman tarot deck

00:01:44.740 A shining tribe, you might say, of channeled paintings, each one crafted by a visionary

00:01:51.060 woman listening to the woodblock that was her canvas.

00:01:55.880 Christine writes,

00:01:58.360 I saw, in my visionary way, Rachel Pollack as my world card.

00:02:08.120 I immediately called her up.

00:02:10.600 So I asked her, Rachel, would you be my world card?

00:02:14.240 Rachel Pollack, whose gargantuan ability to inspire like the sun, as millions of you know and have personally experienced, said yes.

00:02:24.000 She was just jazzed and cheered with delight when my portrait of her graced the cover of the Cartomancer magazine.

00:02:31.100 A cover girl at 75, she said triumphantly.

00:02:34.500 I am humbled by her love, support, and her consistent lion-tamer cheerleading

00:02:40.540 to expand myself to see what I am capable of.

00:02:45.500 I honor the ones who came before and did the work.

00:02:49.840 Rachel changed my life and has many sacred names in my heart.

00:02:53.480 Mentor, tarot midwife, and now, with her passing,

00:02:57.780 my angelic powerhouse fairy godmother goddess divine.

00:03:05.420 She is busy still, popping up in my days and nights, often not so subtly, like making her portrait fall off the wall, reminding me to get to work, and making my phone call folks all by itself.

00:03:22.200 End quote.

00:03:27.600 We honor Rachel Pollack, gargantuan sun energy ancestor.

00:03:32.880 Tarot scholar, tarot midwife, trans activist and philosopher and fairy godmother goddess divine

00:03:40.240 Novelist, futurist, possible worldist, comic book sorceress, teacher, poet, lion tamer, cheerleader on the other side

00:03:50.040 Energy unleashed and unveiled, reminding us all to get to work

00:03:55.420 In that spirit, maybe pick up a deck to read with her, with us, while you listen.

00:04:07.360 Rachel made her own deck called The Shining Tribe, drawing on ancient depictions of spirit knowledge.

00:04:15.320 She made her own myths.

00:04:17.440 She gave us a trans superhero whose very name was an alchemical spell, coagula, 0.99

00:04:22.600 dissolve but then always recombine always gather into new true shapes always become

00:04:30.760 rachel pollack taught us that divination is not a trick for fortune telling

00:04:36.460 it is a deep play with mystery it is question asking as resistance

00:04:44.440 it's permission to imagine otherwise ask your cards what can i imagine otherwise

00:05:02.560 this summer exactly one year to the day of my cancer diagnosis i thought i was done treatment

00:05:09.440 and then found out it might have metastasized into stage four.

00:05:14.180 I sat in my car screaming, no.

00:05:18.220 I was back in the otherwise place. 0.78

00:05:21.220 The community of death terror, the cancer people, the between world, 0.82

00:05:26.440 the people of the shadow lands between Solvay and Coagula.

00:05:31.140 I had a lung biopsy and waited. 0.67

00:05:35.440 And a PET scan.

00:05:37.660 And a bone scan.

00:05:39.440 And it was a hallucinatory terror and a shattering gift.

00:05:47.340 Dreams came pushing out of my body with the living impulse of

00:05:50.840 be it all, feel it all, body it all, hug it all, say it all while I still can.

00:05:58.480 And I saw symbols everywhere.

00:06:02.800 In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, writing about the death card,

00:06:06.140 Rachel describes initiatory rituals where the shaman would be cut down to the point of seeing

00:06:11.680 their own bones. To know the skeleton that shambles along within us is to know a thing,

00:06:17.860 both about our impermanence and what lasts beneath our changing shapes.

00:06:24.640 Quote, the initiation rites always led up to a simulated death and rebirth.

00:06:30.220 the initiate is led to believe that he or she is about to die everything is done to make this death

00:06:38.940 as real as possible so that the ego will be tricked and in fact experience that dreaded

00:06:44.820 dissolution then when the initiate is reborn he or she experiences a new maturity and a new freedom

00:06:53.960 of energy, end quote. Rachel was a wise companion to me in those days. I had strange experiences,

00:07:05.860 waking up from the way I slept then, light and dream-drenched with the kind of dreams that

00:07:10.780 muddle with your awake anxieties. I pulled a card in the night. I was reading Rachel Pollack's

00:07:18.700 a walk through the forest of souls, and followed her way of asking big questions.

00:07:23.700 What can I learn from this moment of waiting?

00:07:29.260 I got the ten of swords. 1.00

00:07:34.280 The woman lying all penetrated. 0.97

00:07:38.220 They did a lung biopsy through my throat.

00:07:40.560 I kept waking up during the procedure, choking and terrified,

00:07:44.620 and they increased the fentanyl.

00:07:46.360 they took samples by puncturing through to my lungs. But in the distance, you can see the sun

00:07:53.380 breaking through the clouds. This is a card of darkest hour right before the dawn. And then I

00:08:01.720 asked what I'd been afraid to ask. What will it be like after I get the results? What will that

00:08:10.640 time be. And I got the king of wands. It's funny, I remembered it as cups. It's been all about cups

00:08:18.260 around here lately, weeping and swimming and dreaming and memory plays tricks with tarot

00:08:23.880 symbols making its own mythology. But it was wands. It was magic and majesty and making your life,

00:08:33.320 living your truth after seeing the bones. And I held on to that while I waited.

00:08:40.640 Sometimes mythology is a life raft.

00:08:45.940 I kept having visions or journeys, half asleep in the bath or on the mountain, halfway through a hike.

00:08:53.340 Dreams that I was floating in a river, just underneath the water.

00:08:58.080 Seeing it sparkle, all around, as above, so below.

00:09:04.900 My hoser shaman friend, Amy Miranda, author of What We Forgotten.

00:09:09.640 One of those forced to see the bones too young

00:09:13.480 A kind and laughing sharp-toothed fury

00:09:17.580 Who produces award-winning art and walks between worlds

00:09:22.040 Led me on strange spirit journeys

00:09:24.920 Gifted me her gift

00:09:27.740 As many in my coven did in those days

00:09:32.700 Making a life raft all around me

00:09:40.520 And on those journeys, my mind let itself go places it never had before because my fear was a wide open door.

00:09:50.280 And those journeys brought me back wild hope, new symbol systems, dancing optimism, and weirdly appropriate medicine.

00:09:59.420 I am the kind of witch who checks vision prescriptions against peer-reviewed medical journals and consults a coven of oncology pharmacists.

00:10:10.580 Miranda pulled a card from her own deck for me

00:10:16.080 And it was the way of Wu

00:10:18.760 A boat

00:10:20.460 A Taoist principle of being in the stream

00:10:24.620 Not worrying about each choice

00:10:27.040 But letting your intention guide the shape of your life

00:10:29.820 Being in the stream

00:10:34.360 Decades ago, towards the end of a long-term relationship

00:10:39.980 my partner described his feeling as always not quite catching the wave.

00:10:47.140 I knew what he meant.

00:10:49.780 I know what those times feel like, just off the edge of the flow.

00:10:56.760 Anyway, that night after Miranda pulled the way of Wu,

00:11:00.240 I couldn't sleep again, and I pulled up Rachel Pollack's

00:11:04.040 A Walk Through the Forest of Souls, and I turned the page to this.

00:11:09.980 Dao refers to a flow of energy through all of existence.

00:11:18.760 If you move or rest in harmony with the Dao, all things become possible.

00:11:24.660 If you resist the Dao, you accomplish nothing.

00:11:28.160 When we shuffle cards for a reading, we give up conscious control of their order

00:11:32.500 and so allow the Dao to sweep them up and direct their fall.

00:11:37.060 They do not predict so much as show us how the energy flows, end quote.

00:11:49.660 The synchronicity was comforting and I let myself rest in the stream then.

00:11:55.720 I pictured myself flowing toward that underwater moonlight.

00:12:00.460 I felt safe and held.

00:12:02.760 I believed that my cough would go away. I would heal and feel strong again. And I waited.

00:12:15.260 Ask your cards. What will guide me to the boat, the float, the way of Wu? Where is the river

00:12:23.740 calling me? What do I need to let go of to ride? A wise man appeared in the radiation

00:12:32.380 waiting room on my second to last day and told me, fate is the divine or the universe pattern

00:12:38.780 telling you to go pick up a certain thing from the grocery store. Free will is the route you take to

00:12:45.260 get there. In Phallus Palace, a journal of female to male trans experience and theory, published in

00:12:58.620 2002, Pollock writes of Osiris brought back to life, made man by woman's hands. And she writes

00:13:06.940 of the real work of the alchemists, to become unified, to bring forth the true glowing seed

00:13:12.900 of ourselves, to walk with Osiris through the underworlds of our experience in order to become

00:13:19.180 a force for life.

00:13:21.680 Quote.

00:13:24.840 Osiris' death and rebirth charts in great detail

00:13:28.280 a transformation of consciousness.

00:13:31.220 The pictures, stories, and hymns from five millennia

00:13:34.640 that we call collectively the Egyptian Book of the Dead

00:13:37.640 actually bear the title

00:13:39.900 Pert-em-Hru, or Coming Forth Into Light.

00:13:45.960 The phrase brings to mind the modern expression

00:13:49.060 coming out of the closet.

00:13:51.720 In the ancient stories, a soul often journeys through the darkness of death

00:13:55.940 into a new existence.

00:13:58.120 In modern experience, someone hidden, repressed, fearful,

00:14:02.500 emerges into the light of true identity.

00:14:06.980 This identity has been inside the person like a seed,

00:14:10.680 hidden in the earth through winter,

00:14:12.500 until the urge to come out lets it shine forth,

00:14:14.980 like the secret child who's shone as a blaze of light on Set's forehead.

00:14:20.800 End quote.

00:14:23.540 This is part of why witches, at least these witches, 0.89

00:14:28.160 know to encircle and protect trans people.

00:14:32.560 Because we too have seen our true bones

00:14:35.460 journeyed through the darkness of the underworld,

00:14:38.860 lived in chronically ill and pained bodies,

00:14:42.120 lived violence, violation, terror,

00:14:44.980 Been to the edge of dissolution, shoved to the edge of families and communities, felt always other to the over-culture, and like the hermit, kept walking.

00:14:57.420 Past solutions that didn't feel honest, past controlling and shame-filled solutions, past glamours that crumpled into pyramid schemes or love with conditions that kept us small and subservient and masked.

00:15:12.000 trans people are people first and foremost like each and every one of us born deserving of the

00:15:20.880 simple right to live and love and fuck up and learn and be and when a person has been brave 0.99

00:15:31.640 enough or forced by their insides screaming to look at the bones of themselves and burn the 0.97

00:15:37.660 husks that were not alive, and to reach for something true, they can become a seed of truth

00:15:43.760 in a world that too often copy-pastes conformity, consumption, destruction.

00:15:53.460 Truth is a domino in the world, running down the lines of energy that weave between us,

00:15:59.340 flipping the tables in the synagogue, and releasing a power like splitting the atom.

00:16:03.680 We can be radically truthful and brave, too.

00:16:07.220 We, too, must be allowed to simply live the days we have in these bodies

00:16:11.780 and to listen to the ways they want to make love with the world

00:16:15.460 and make it kinder, safer, more glorious, more alive.

00:16:24.760 What is the truth that's splitting out of you?

00:16:28.620 Where can you root your bravery?

00:16:39.760 Rachel Grace Pollack was born in Brooklyn in 1945.

00:16:44.440 She grew up attending an Orthodox synagogue until age 15.

00:16:49.260 Her writing runs with deep knowledge and respect for Jewish philosophy.

00:16:54.000 She came out as a trans woman and a lesbian in 1971, the same year she first encountered

00:17:00.160 tarot and sold her first short story.

00:17:03.680 She called it her miracle year.

00:17:06.780 In 1973, she moved to Amsterdam with her then-wife, Edith Katz, and lived in Europe for nearly

00:17:13.180 two decades.

00:17:14.960 She published speculative fiction in New Worlds, then novels and nonfiction.

00:17:21.340 Unquenchable Fire, published in 1988, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

00:17:26.640 The Body of the Goddess, published in 1991, traced the history of religion and spirituality to the body,

00:17:33.280 especially the woman's body, and to the land.

00:17:37.960 Godmother Knight won the World Fantasy Award.

00:17:41.840 She wrote essays, poetry, tarot books, and comics.

00:17:45.340 In 1993, she took over Doom Patrol, following chaos magician Grant Morrison, and introduced Kate Godwin, Coagula, DC's first openly trans superhero.

00:17:59.520 I read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics in grad school, and since then I can't help but see comic books as places where time is weird.

00:18:08.380 Quantum particles scattering between creator and readers, opening spaces for the new.

00:18:14.000 MacLeod demonstrates that in comics, time is spatial.

00:18:16.960 It literally lives on the page.

00:18:18.880 Each panel represents a slice of time,

00:18:21.320 and the reader controls its unfolding by moving their eye from one panel to the next.

00:18:27.560 The gutter, the blank space between panels, is where the reader's imagination bridges moments.

00:18:34.520 Bridges moments, filling in motion and stretching or compressing time.

00:18:40.000 This means that time in comics can expand across a single, wordless image, collapse in a rapid succession of small panels, or even coexist simultaneously on a single page.

00:18:55.320 Rachel Pollack's Doom Patrol makes this insight tangible. Nearly every issue of her run references the tarot, using the card's archetypes as narrative engines and metaphors for transformation.

00:19:07.760 like mcleod's vision of comics tarot spreads our spatial maps of time they invite the reader to

00:19:15.220 see past present and potential futures coexisting on the table pollock brings that temporal layering

00:19:23.240 into superhero comics allowing multiple timelines mythic personal political to overlap and refract

00:19:30.640 her doom patrol followed grant morrison's who famously treated comics as a form of chaos magic

00:19:37.760 collapsing the boundaries between story and life.

00:19:41.980 Pollock extends that experiment,

00:19:43.920 using tarot to open portals between the reader's reality

00:19:47.380 and the strange, transformative world on the page.

00:19:52.960 Like Grant Morrison, she wrote the world anew into the books,

00:19:57.120 and so into the world.

00:19:59.260 She made the unseen visible.

00:20:01.480 what if you let your real self take up space and be seen how does that change the future

00:20:12.400 how does it change the past

00:20:15.740 rachel taught tarot with mary k greer for decades at the omega institute and taught writing at

00:20:25.920 Goddard College in the MFA program for 11 years. As editor and collaborator Justin Hall said,

00:20:33.700 she was the most interesting woman in the world because she was the most interested woman in the

00:20:38.480 world. She had a mind that never stopped moving, never reached the limits of its curiosity.

00:20:46.960 Rachel died in April 2023 of lymphoma after a long journey with cancer.

00:20:55.920 Her wife, Zoe Madoff, shared,

00:20:59.180 I am sad to tell you that our beloved Rachel Pollack passed so peacefully and beautifully today at about 12.45 p.m.

00:21:09.340 after a touching ceremony called Hand to Heart.

00:21:13.920 Several of us stood in a circle.

00:21:16.440 I had my hand on her heart.

00:21:19.360 I know that Rachel will continue to be a light in this world and in the next.

00:21:25.100 End quote.

00:21:25.920 In this Our Hermit year, Rachel Pollack comes to us as the lantern.

00:21:34.040 A light to living worlds, living truth.

00:21:40.580 I had cancer in my lymph nodes too, Rachel.

00:21:45.140 Mine was traveling from a core site of my personal feminine.

00:21:50.000 I had always liked my boobs, and breastfeeding my kid, though a torment in a way,

00:21:55.040 had been a healing place outside of time for me. 0.96

00:22:01.160 Surgeons emptied my breasts and filled them with plastic bags

00:22:04.520 and removed 12 lymph nodes down my arm,

00:22:07.380 and I have had seven infections since then

00:22:09.580 because we need our lymph nodes.

00:22:11.660 They move white blood cell healers through our underground waterways.

00:22:16.660 I'm sorry you had to live that haunting,

00:22:20.560 and I'm sorry your loved ones had to watch it take you.

00:22:25.040 But it's so clear the light and love of you moved and moves from your wise heart, spiraling out into the circle still.

00:22:39.920 Ask the cards, what message does Rachel have for you, witch?

00:22:47.260 What knowledge is circling in your lymph nodes? 0.87

00:22:50.880 in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma

00:22:55.980 cancer doesn't move in a predictable pattern

00:22:58.220 through the circulation of the lymphatic system

00:23:00.640 it appears like scattered particles

00:23:04.220 lighting up in the system

00:23:06.140 as though refracted by some unknown wave

00:23:10.200 maybe it's the mark of a time traveler

00:23:14.000 who knows

00:23:15.360 Rachel wrote

00:23:18.040 physicists long ago noticed an odd quality about equations that involve a process over time

00:23:25.040 nothing in the equations implies a direction they always work as efficiently from the future

00:23:31.760 to the past as they do from the past to the future quantum theory the branch of physics

00:23:38.500 that deals with the behavior of infinitesimal particles produces an even more interesting

00:23:43.840 view of time. Events occur through a process called transactional interpretation. A wave

00:23:51.160 ripples out from the present moment, the now. This wave must meet a resonating wave from

00:23:57.580 the future. The interaction between these two waves produces a probability field in

00:24:03.300 which events occur. At any moment, the future is as real as the present. The future can

00:24:10.280 cause the past as much as the past causes the future in fact neither one causes the other

00:24:16.120 they exist in a relationship that goes in many directions at once imagine a web with a vast

00:24:22.040 number of points all connected to each other with no single point as the origin or primary cause of

00:24:28.920 the others our consciousness places us in one point convincing us that a single line from the past

00:24:36.920 has caused our current situation to come into being.

00:24:40.800 But this may be an illusion.

00:24:43.860 The physicist Louis de Broglie wrote that elementary particles

00:24:47.680 sometimes seem to come out of nowhere

00:24:49.500 because they can move freely through space-time,

00:24:53.080 and our awareness reaches a point where they happen to exist.

00:24:57.620 If you find it difficult to follow these ideas,

00:25:00.780 try to experience them as a kind of meditation, Rachel writes.

00:25:05.220 Stand outside on a pleasant day

00:25:08.620 So no rain or cold wind will distract you

00:25:11.960 Close your eyes and try to sense this moment right now

00:25:16.840 Then see if you can feel the past rippling backward from where you are

00:25:22.340 Think of your parents and their parents

00:25:25.960 And the people who have influenced you

00:25:27.720 The events that shaped and even created you

00:25:30.600 Such as the first time your parents met

00:25:32.720 and more subtly the moment a friend showed you the tarot

00:25:36.020 or the first time you saw that book or movie that changed your life.

00:25:41.420 Now see if you can sense a wave equal in size that ripples out to the future,

00:25:47.320 as real as the one to the past.

00:25:50.780 Think of the friends you will influence,

00:25:53.460 the lovers who will move through your life,

00:25:56.160 the children you have or will have,

00:25:58.780 and their children and their children's children.

00:26:02.720 The now shifts constantly and is different for each person,

00:26:06.360 but it always contains the past and the future,

00:26:11.400 and both perhaps as real as the present.

00:26:16.160 End quote.

00:26:21.440 Rachel's writing returns again and again to the knowledge of the in-between.

00:26:26.900 Nothing exists absolutely in nature, she writes in 78 Degrees of Wisdom.

00:26:32.720 She quotes Ursula K. Le Guin,

00:26:35.680 Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light.

00:26:41.000 This is the witching place, not comfort of false clarity,

00:26:47.180 but the haunted crossroads where binaries dissolve.

00:26:52.700 Perhaps this is the place to say awkward things.

00:26:57.640 I find it hard to write about Rachel Pollack without quoting Neil Gaiman

00:27:01.900 because they were friends, and he interviewed a lot about her when she died.

00:27:06.460 And he and his ex-wife, Amanda Palmer, have been accused of sexual assault.

00:27:12.440 I think I'll make it to the end of this episode without quoting him.

00:27:17.880 But it felt awkward not to mention him, and not to say that I have loved his work,

00:27:23.080 and I know many have, and it's a sadness that lurks nearby here

00:27:27.460 when I am with Rachel Pollack's legacy, and that's infuriating.

00:27:31.900 the way we are entangled with the monstrous, all of us.

00:27:38.340 The other messy piece here at the bend between dark and light

00:27:42.480 where we must say true things even if they are an awkward sidebar

00:27:46.480 is that it can be heavy to engage lovingly with Jewish thought, as Rachel did,

00:27:53.120 while living in a world where Israel is committing genocide

00:27:56.320 draped in a rhetoric of Jewish protection.

00:28:01.900 But this isn't the first time we've had to untangle wisdom from dictators draping themselves in stolen tatters to justify their violence.

00:28:11.380 Throughout history, traditions with peace at their ethical heart have been co-opted to justify brutal injustice.

00:28:18.660 Sri Lankan and Burmese monks incited attacks on minorities in the name of defending Buddhism.

00:28:25.800 in islam the very word islam shares a root with salam meaning peace the quran says in surah 8

00:28:34.220 verse 61 and if they incline to peace then incline to it also and trust in god

00:28:39.800 and in surah 10 verse 25 we read god calls to the home of peace

00:28:45.900 yet in iran for example the ruling clerical regime has used islam to justify authoritarian

00:28:53.800 control, the violent suppression of dissent, and fascistic limits on the freedom and safety of

00:29:00.260 women and minorities, actions that many Muslim scholars and activists worldwide condemn as a

00:29:06.340 betrayal of the Quran's call to justice and mercy. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says,

00:29:13.400 Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God, yet Christianity has been

00:29:18.180 evoked in the Crusades, the Inquisition, European colonial conquest, the white supremacist violence

00:29:24.440 of the Ku Klux Klan, and by the modern Republican Party drowning out pedophile blackmailers,

00:29:30.680 Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein's victims with war planes, kidnapping people off the street

00:29:36.940 into unmarked cars, murdering and disappearing and lying to our faces. No religion is immune 0.85

00:29:44.840 from distortion. And though I'm inclined toward a scientific atheism as antidote for all this

00:29:52.720 cruel delusion, I still believe that the misuse of spiritual traditions by states or nationalist

00:30:00.960 movements doesn't erase the radical insights those traditions contain. In this spirit,

00:30:09.480 I still am moved by Jewish philosophy and esoteric wisdom,

00:30:14.300 especially as it comes to us in Rachel's hands.

00:30:19.360 In Forest of Souls, Rachel writes,

00:30:22.140 when Akiva considered a one-sentence definition of Torah,

00:30:25.720 he chose the commandment from Leviticus,

00:30:28.000 you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

00:30:31.580 Jesus, a rabbi after all, had made a similar choice

00:30:34.900 when he stated that love your neighbor was the whole of the law.

00:30:39.480 In 78 Degrees of the Emperor card, Rachel writes,

00:30:44.720 If the entire system is corrupt, producing only bad rulers, then stability becomes the enemy of morality.

00:30:54.220 The value of the symbol of the emperor depends a very great deal on time and place.

00:31:01.720 End quote.

00:31:04.060 Resistance is always situated.

00:31:06.880 Symbols shift with context.

00:31:09.480 As witches calling in just futures, we ask, stability for whom?

00:31:16.760 Morality by whose hands?

00:31:21.180 All I can say to myself is stay true to the beating ethical heart of your craft.

00:31:28.980 And thou harm none, do as thou wilt.

00:31:31.680 the whole of the law, love each other as

00:31:35.680 ourselves, and follow our own

00:31:39.240 lanterns. But how?

00:31:44.700 In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel taught

00:31:47.420 Most people experience feelings of being powerful

00:31:51.520 so infrequently they try to hold on to them. By doing

00:31:55.500 nothing, they hope to preserve their magic moments.

00:31:59.220 But we can really hold onto power in our lives only by constantly discharging it.

00:32:05.720 By releasing creative power, we open ourselves up to receive a further flow.

00:32:11.240 The spectator at the football game, even the possessed churchgoer,

00:32:14.680 will find their excitement gone after the event that triggered it has ended.

00:32:19.520 But the craftsman, or scientist, or teacher, or for that matter the tarot reader,

00:32:25.060 will find the power increase over the years.

00:32:28.320 the more they discharge it into physical reality, end quote.

00:32:35.860 Which as we build our power and the light of our guiding lantern becomes a north star

00:32:41.760 by discharging our energy into physical reality, put what feels electric and true to you into the

00:32:50.260 material world, into your practice, into your activism, into your interrogation of the depth

00:32:57.040 of your soul and mind into the workings of your hands, your story crafting, your art making,

00:33:02.320 your cooking, your care. See these acts in the embodied world as steps in a dance with the

00:33:08.740 present that shapes both the future and the past. This letting go of power,

00:33:16.740 gifting it into the web of the world, builds a resonance machine.

00:33:21.480 in forest of souls rachel writes the various formulas the famous tall dark stranger or journey

00:33:30.580 by water connect our reading to a kind of world all its own a sort of artificial universe that

00:33:36.580 we lay over the real one the fact that people have used these formulas for centuries gives them power

00:33:43.460 how does that artificial world of fortunes connect to the real one

00:33:48.880 Is it possible the cards and their traditional meanings act as a kind of electrical transformer

00:33:55.280 to connect real events, including future events, to a way we can understand what they mean?

00:34:02.820 Transformers step down the raw energy of electricity to a useful form.

00:34:08.500 In the chariot, we will ourselves to reach into a river of pure energy.

00:34:15.460 End quote.

00:34:18.880 This is the best way for me to begin to describe what happened to me in those weeks when I danced and hiked and moved, always half in a trance, calling forward my life, reaching into a pure river of energy, feeling the way my body was a black box of flipping coins, more cancer or no cancer.

00:34:41.480 The woods were lit up. Birds looked me in the eye as they hopped just in front of me down the path.

00:34:49.220 I saw X's everywhere suddenly. Everywhere I put down my foot or touched my hand. Great cracks in

00:34:56.000 the rocks and fallen branches. A hike I did every day was changed as though someone had gone through

00:35:01.820 it with a highlighter, going, look here, here, look here. My family is Nordic on one side,

00:35:09.740 going back thousands of years. We've built up grooves over hundreds of generations with those 0.99

00:35:14.600 stories and symbols and gods, so I checked the rooms and X is for your gifts. The tenth card

00:35:23.900 in the major arcana is the wheel of fortune, positive change. My hoser shaman friend Miranda

00:35:31.140 told me I was drinking from a fire hose of spirit. She told me the reason I hadn't been told

00:35:36.340 definitively that this was more cancer was because there was a chance it wasn't. And there was power

00:35:42.280 in acting as if while we waited on the samples and the message from the ticking half-life of

00:35:48.280 nuclear medicine. We all have cancer cells in us all the time. And all cells are called daughter

00:35:56.980 cells. And when things are working well, they all should receive the history, the pattern, for how

00:36:02.760 to be the kind of cell their mothers were, but some lose the plot

00:36:06.580 and become sociopaths and colonizers, but I sang

00:36:10.820 to mine every day a song about healthy multiplying

00:36:14.520 and letting go into the river of pure energy.

00:36:18.720 we are healthy and wealthy and wise

00:36:34.220 we sing songs of our money

00:36:38.300 since we multiply 0.88

00:36:40.560 oh love must she breathe

00:36:47.020 Oh, Lalashe, breathe

00:36:52.800 We are healthy and wealthy and wise

00:36:59.180 We sing songs of our mothers as we multiply

00:37:05.540 Oh, Lalashe, breathe

00:37:12.000 Oh, la-la-she-pri

00:37:17.200 We are healthy and wealthy and wise

00:37:23.940 We sing songs of our mothers as we multiply

00:37:30.400 Oh, la-la-she-pri

00:37:35.900 La lâcher prise is a French expression

00:37:50.100 which means the letting go.

00:37:53.120 It's not just an action, it's kind of a noun.

00:37:56.960 The letting go.

00:37:59.240 Like slipping into a river.

00:38:01.440 sing with me into the river of hopeful flourishing

00:38:07.580 for all ourselves and all their daughters

00:38:12.160 and all the great web of the world

00:38:16.940 tarot in Pollock's hands becomes a question-making instrument

00:38:23.800 which is a world-making instrument

00:38:27.320 in forest of souls she asks what if we asked tarot about god's soul what if tarot was the

00:38:36.900 blueprint god used to create the universe what was that spread like how would we create the

00:38:45.620 universe anew the point is the generative power in the question where is my death now

00:38:52.980 where will my soul go

00:38:55.820 how will we know

00:38:58.100 the rapists regimes

00:39:00.000 are crumbling

00:39:01.020 how do we hold

00:39:04.460 each other

00:39:05.180 in time

00:39:06.500 ask the most haunted

00:39:09.900 questions

00:39:11.240 there's power

00:39:14.760 even in just saying

00:39:17.820 those questions out loud

00:39:20.000 salve and coagula

00:39:24.540 break down what is false

00:39:27.520 and recombine what is true

00:39:29.700 letting go

00:39:32.840 into the river of pure energy

00:39:50.000 Rachel wrote throughout her life in fiction, comics, poetry, magic.

00:39:58.560 She practiced representation as spell work,

00:40:02.120 imagining characters who look like us, fight like us, dream like us.

00:40:08.700 Her novels transported us.

00:40:11.380 Unquenchable fire imagines magic as civic infrastructure.

00:40:15.620 Godmother Knight makes queer love and death mythic powers.

00:40:18.900 There is science fiction that sees the future or makes the past alive like Octavia Butler could channel.

00:40:26.860 And then there's Pollock who writes what feels like something just below the surface of the over-culture.

00:40:33.880 Another dimension of the multiverse.

00:40:38.520 I used to use the phrase the living world a lot before reading Unquenchable Fire.

00:40:44.160 And so I was system glitched and jaw dropped to see it so crucial to the fabric of her fictional world and the complex, ambivalent power of it, not pastoral, romantic, magical nature, but spirit beings like animals with sharp teeth or cool breezes that can become sucking floods and rip through toxic, emergent bureaucracies wearing the garb of ancient magic.

00:41:14.160 This phrase has become woven in to the fabric of how we think and talk about what we yearn to be connected to.

00:41:25.080 Days after I started Unquenchable Fire, I saw this wink from her in an Instagram post from At Earthly Education that read,

00:41:34.180 We're told to frame climate action as good for the economy, as if profit is the language of life.

00:41:39.760 But that logic is what's killing us. Endless growth, extraction, domination, the idea that nature only matters if it makes money. If we want to survive, we need to remember we're part of the living world. Not above it. This isn't about saving the economy. It's about breaking the mindset and culture that's driving mass extinction.

00:42:00.820 end quote the living world the humming energy

00:42:09.100 the physics spirit animus mundi animism ancestry and ancestries the world of this humming that i

00:42:21.240 hear just as i'm typing you can't make this shit up a hummingbird just out of sight and when i look

00:42:28.460 for them, all I see is the jewel red heart flashing past the eye of a birch tree. The 0.95

00:42:35.260 world that interpolates each body and mind in waves through time. After all my journeys

00:42:45.240 and spirit walks and singing, I emptied my office of all the death things. Shells, coral,

00:42:54.040 birch bark, wings, bones. I took them all down to the moose skull that guards a lilac-bowered

00:43:01.780 spirit beach where the snakes sleep, 20 feet away from our small, sandy, friendly swimming beach

00:43:09.060 on the land that keeps us. I brought my dried flowers. I brought all the moss and lichen out

00:43:15.820 of my writing room, which had been my learn-to-nurse-a-new-baby room, and then my recovering-from-mastectomy

00:43:23.560 room, and then my chemo room. I took the death altars out of there, and brought them to the

00:43:31.980 bones by the beach, and talked to my death there, and told her I'd be ready when the

00:43:39.040 time came, but that it wasn't now. Now was the time of the stream, of the wands, of flourishing

00:43:49.520 after many hard years.

00:43:52.940 We'd finally made it to the safe shore

00:43:55.520 or at least a new stable state

00:43:58.280 and I would love it all and love my people

00:44:01.140 and live in honor of love and death

00:44:04.060 and the living world, the world alive

00:44:07.120 for a little while longer.

00:44:10.340 Please.

00:44:10.980 rachel pollack died april 7th 2023

00:44:20.260 communities across tarot comics speculative fiction trans worlds witch worlds mourned her

00:44:30.440 but she remains she is a wave spread across time and bodies resonating and refracting

00:44:40.820 in her work, in her students and readers,

00:44:44.300 in the symbols and stories that layer and sing.

00:44:49.660 She modeled how to live such that craft, myth, politics, and joy

00:44:54.960 become one enchanted body,

00:44:57.400 and that body is stretched across the web and the land.

00:45:02.120 A shining tribe.

00:45:10.820 draw a card ask how do i keep the flame unquenched where i stand

00:45:20.980 how do i ask the next brave question

00:45:26.260 walk through your underworlds see if you return with seeds

00:45:32.740 reach into your past and believe that you can weave the future

00:45:38.180 hold on to the life raft of your mythologies

00:45:42.400 pour your energy into the world and maybe together we can weave our culture back 0.96

00:45:50.840 into the living world blessed fucking be 1.00

00:45:55.940 you must be a witch 1.00

00:46:00.980 you don't have to know if you're a witch you just have to be curious

00:46:06.240 and ready to share in wonder.

00:46:10.040 Come find us at missingwitches.com.

Missing Witches - September 25, 2025

MW Rachel Pollack - The Future Is As Real As The Present

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