Missing Witches - August 21, 2023


＂New Moon Magic＂ Audio Book Excerpt - Chapter 7 New Moon In Libra： Geometry

Topics
geometry
＂New Moon Magic＂ Audio Book Excerpt - INTRODUCTION ＂New Moon Magic＂ Audio Book Excerpt - Chapter 8 New Moon In Scorpio： The Circle

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

138.03

Word count

1,517

Sentence count

74

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

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 If you want to support the Missing Witches Project, find out how at missingwitches.com
00:00:05.340 or order our new book, New Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools of Resistance and Re-enchantment. 1.00
00:00:13.200 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:19.740 You must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:22.180 In the lead up to an all new season of the Missing Witches podcast
00:00:26.300 and the release of our new book, New Moon Magic,
00:00:30.000 we're sharing with you, our coven, our listeners, snippets from the audiobook version of New Moon
00:00:36.180 Magic, Thirteen Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-Enchantment, by Risa Dickens
00:00:42.020 and Amy Torek. Enjoy. New Moon Magic, Thirteen Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and
00:00:51.320 Re-Enchantment, by Risa Dickens and Amy Torek. Narrated by the authors. Published
00:00:59.720 by North Atlantic Books. Chapter 7. New Moon in Libra. Geometry.
00:01:09.180 This circle is led by Risa, with expansions by Amy. The Libra new moon strives for balance.
00:01:17.340 Sometimes that manifests as sacrificing everything for folks to get along.
00:01:22.220 Other times it looks more like the poker-faced queen of swords, unafraid to wield its blade.
00:01:27.340 ruled by venus the libra new moon values beauty art and connection with other souls
00:01:33.700 it is the art critic the socialite the diplomat the lawyer the activist and the advocate
00:01:40.840 as motley as these roles may appear eliza robertson astrologer
00:01:47.980 the small yellow birds are back in the branches outside my window as i sit down to start this
00:01:54.860 chapter on geometry the leaves are ready with their colors for the fall they are the fires to
00:02:03.080 light the dark and they are dissolving into darkness the woods are wild with mushrooms
00:02:08.840 the vines of my fat squash tangle down the hill and the beans have formed a giant floppy witch
00:02:15.560 hat on the triangle of branches we made out on the lawn this is the libra new moon and it loves
00:02:21.840 balance and beauty, the extreme pleasure and comfort of putting things where they belong,
00:02:28.180 and the rhizomatic layering that, in these parts, comes right before everything crystallizes into
00:02:34.000 snowflakes. It turns out that the small yellow birds are goldfinches. They were with me at the
00:02:40.480 beginning of this book, in the bright balance of spring, and here they are again as I try to trace
00:02:46.040 out the resonant magic of geometry. And I'm glad to have their company because I've struggled with
00:02:51.620 this chapter. Vanessa Oliver Lloyd, artist, forensic anthropologist, and co-founder of the
00:02:58.640 now-defunct Art Witch Academy, helped me put this struggle into words when she said,
00:03:04.040 it was the idea of math as a universal language that pushed her to connect with geometry in a
00:03:08.800 magical way, and not in the, quote, super-triggering, traumatizing, mathematical way that I learned in
00:03:14.580 school, end quote. You might relate to this experience of math or sciences as part of high
00:03:20.160 school trauma. I think for a lot of us, a giant chasm opens up between the arts and sciences
00:03:25.580 around that age because of the way those concepts are taught. I spent my time in high school
00:03:31.240 assuming that math was full of only right and wrong answers, without room for imagination,
00:03:38.680 emotion, or speculation. When a teacher wrote a complex equation on the chalkboard,
00:03:44.740 one that couldn't be easily materially demonstrated with an apple pie cut in triangles,
00:03:50.160 I asked, my young mind curious about the humans behind the numbers,
00:03:55.840 the paths toward ideas, how do they know?
00:04:01.220 And she replied, they just know.
00:04:04.300 And sadly, I never really studied math again,
00:04:08.640 because I didn't know that she was wrong.
00:04:12.300 They didn't just know.
00:04:14.180 They guessed and imagined and calculated and theorized
00:04:18.280 and calculated some more in an effort to explain and connect with our universe.
00:04:25.660 Poet Jared K. Anderson wrote, quote, Dear Science, Humans conceptualize complex ideas
00:04:32.840 through metaphor, not jargon. You don't start with the jargon and move toward meaning.
00:04:39.420 Start with meaning and move toward jargon. You need communicators who understand how to capture
00:04:44.340 imagination. In short, you should hire poets. I have been stubborn about keeping geometry
00:04:51.620 in the book. I wanted to claim the power and poetry of this symbolic language for myself
00:04:58.320 and all of us, although I wasn't sure exactly why. I kept picking away at this and other chapters,
00:05:06.300 and meanwhile, the lake froze. And then, while skating in circles on the lake under a brilliant
00:05:14.300 sky. I dropped suddenly into a mathematical memory. When I was seven, my mother, my new
00:05:22.880 stepdad and I moved from snowy Waterloo, Ontario, where they had finished their grad school
00:05:27.660 programs, out to Los Angeles, where my stepdad got his first teaching job at UCLA. I mentioned
00:05:35.860 that Waterloo was snowy because that's the main thing I remember about it, being pulled
00:05:39.940 to school in a red sleigh by my mother through the snow. But actually, we moved in the summer.
00:05:47.420 My childhood memories of California are all disjointed sense memories, especially the quality
00:05:53.920 of light. Moving from Ontario to California was like stepping from a world drawn in pencil crayons
00:05:59.700 into a stained glass window. There were flowers everywhere, and the classroom had wide open
00:06:07.320 windows and the air smelled like pink jasmine and honeysuckle. And when we got there, they put me
00:06:14.280 in some summer program and it was about geometry. It was about making art with geometry. I learned
00:06:22.440 how to use a compass for the first time and how to move the compass point along the circumference
00:06:26.680 of a circle to make intersecting spheres, unfolding waves, a bright and steady blossoming.
00:06:33.260 i learned this and then everything disappeared
00:06:38.360 the memory is so clear there's no one in the room but me and i can't fathom why that would
00:06:46.180 be the case but there i am and the scene is palpitating with colored light and jasmine
00:06:51.960 i am alone for hours in this cool adobe room with the hot sun breathing in and out on a breeze
00:07:00.580 through a wild, unfurling jungle outside the windows.
00:07:05.000 I sit in a calm euphoria as I draw swooping spheres in bright, sharp colors.
00:07:11.860 I see the meeting points opening like flowers
00:07:14.920 into an infinity that spirals gently back.
00:07:19.140 This memory hovers like a hummingbird, strange and inexplicable.
00:07:24.640 That moment stained my memory.
00:07:27.420 It's a kaleidoscopic dream that changed forever how I saw the world around me.
00:07:32.840 I was very far from home.
00:07:35.420 I was at the edge and also in the center.
00:07:39.220 And where I was, the spheres were singing.
00:07:43.600 And so I want to sketch out an understanding for myself and for all us witches about geometry in magic
00:07:50.120 and the magic possibilities inherent in taking up geometry.
00:07:54.340 To begin, draw a circle around yourself in your mind.
00:08:00.660 Ancient Mesopotamians would draw zisuru, a magical circle drawn with flower,
00:08:06.820 around the bed of one who needed protecting,
00:08:09.560 or around the bull whose skin would become a sacred drum.
00:08:13.940 Once I went to a therapist who sat on the floor with me,
00:08:16.820 gave me a rope and invited me to use it to make a circle around myself while we spoke.
00:08:22.160 Whether you feel comfortable with ancient Sumerians or modern therapists,
00:08:26.920 the circle makes a space that's just for you and what you allow.
00:08:32.020 Within this sacred, ancient protection, orient yourself within the cardinal points.
00:08:38.140 Place something small to mark north, east, south, west.
00:08:44.000 A token each for earth, air, fire, and water.
00:08:47.400 use anything that works for you stone incense candle and a glass of water will work
00:08:53.840 and now you'll notice that you are in a square within a circle
00:08:57.860 now and always your breathing life force is at the meeting point of a living axis of dynamic
00:09:04.820 possibility the goldfinches are here to remind us that all our circles are spirals we are always
00:09:12.780 fluttering forward in that other dimension of time. All our geometries are partial. Our best
00:09:19.340 impressions of what we can imagine as we peer through our tiny bright viewfinders, lit in the
00:09:25.120 dark of our electrical minds. Quote, the task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope
00:09:30.940 while the left eye peers into the microscope. End quote. Wrote artist, novelist, magic maker,
00:09:37.760 Leonore Carrington. We can draw on geometry to help us orient ourselves in the vastness,
00:09:44.180 both minute and massive, to see the birds as well as the patterns they trace in flocks across
00:09:50.940 millennia. By flying in a logarithmic spiral, falcons take advantage of the curve's unique
00:09:57.200 properties to maintain a fixed gaze on their prey while retaining body alignment.
00:10:02.500 nature loves the logarithmic spiral from sunflowers seashells and whirlpools to hurricanes and spiral
00:10:10.160 galaxies we discover this extraordinary form at all scales from the microscopic to the cosmological
00:10:16.960 end quote i want to consider geometry as a tool for seeing the vastness
00:10:22.720 for keeping our gaze fixed and for retaining our alignment 1.00
00:10:26.940 you aren't being a proper woman therefore you must be a witch 0.92
00:10:40.200 you must be a witch if you want to support the missing witches project find out how 0.96
00:10:49.780 at missingwitches.com
00:10:51.700 or order our new book,
00:10:54.260 New Moon Magic,
00:10:55.480 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools
00:10:57.220 of Resistance and Re-Enchantment.