00:00:56.760to the Missing Witches podcast. Welcome, friends. Welcome to this cauldron that we create in the
00:01:07.000dark between our ears, this place where we meet with all of our tender and flawed and fertile
00:01:14.780offerings. Whatever fears we carry, wherever we're at, whatever box we're in with whichever cat,
00:01:22.680We're here today with Dr. Cindy Brannan, Hecatean priestess, teacher, psychologist, leader in an exciting and thrilling blend of ancient reverence with grounded practices, evidence-based practices of psychology, and author of a book that's been keeping me great company.
00:01:50.260Thanks so much for being here. We are really tired or emotionally excited by this idea that
00:01:56.580you are not obliged to be the person you were five minutes ago. So while there are so many things that
00:02:02.760we get to know about you from your work and your bio, who are you today? Who's coming into this
00:02:09.320conversation with you? That is such a great question. We are definitely not who we were
00:02:15.560five minutes ago. And I think I'm going to lead with something I said in my advanced leadership
00:02:23.580course that I teach, something I said yesterday, we ran in a hard conversation. Sometimes it's
00:02:29.200necessary. And I said, we are not defined by what we do or don't do for other people. And that is
00:02:38.160still thrumming and working through me. I said it on the spur of the moment because we were talking
00:02:43.580about leadership and I just said that and that is part of who I am today because after I said that
00:02:51.040I started to explore like do I do this do I define myself or value myself in terms of what I do or
00:03:01.060don't do for other people I think that's part of who I am today and because I am fortunate enough
00:03:09.600to live in a part of the world where the sun is shining and the weather is perfect today in
00:03:15.700coastal Nova Scotia I bring all of that energy I spent time in the garden like I do every morning
00:03:22.020this time of the year so I bring all of that with me wild roses mugwort and perennials so I think
00:03:31.460that's what I'm that's who I am bringing to our circle today what a heavy and liberating idea
00:03:40.680that we're not defined by what we do or don't do for other people that's a really hard one
00:03:47.040to wear or to take off wearing I'm not sure which I have to do but I definitely think a lot
00:03:53.940about how I will be remembered and whether it will be through the lens of how I touch people
00:03:59.960what I did especially these days I think about that a lot it is our legacy those ten of pentacles
00:04:07.060if you're familiar with tarot like what our legacy might be and how that I think that you
00:04:14.000raise a good point because how is that connected to our own identity and how we define ourselves
00:04:20.100you know as an author of books you know that idea of how other people might see me from my books
00:04:29.500Or that my books are an act of service, like radical service to the readers and an offering to Hecate and the Divine Feminine and all that I try to do justice to when I bring it into the world.
00:04:46.560All that we try to do justice to. Yes, I feel that. Can you take me back? How longstanding is this relationship with you? When did Hecate make herself known to you? And how did that relationship start?
00:05:03.280It was over 15 years ago. I had been a seeker of the divine feminine for years at this point. Artemis was my first goddess crush. And then I kind of moved on from there.
00:05:18.400I was alone late at night and I just heard this voice inside my head say it's time and I knew it
00:05:26.780was Hecate. I had some peripheral knowledge of Hecate. Hecate has really become much more widely
00:05:34.840known in the decades since that moment. I knew she was a goddess of witches. I knew she was ancient0.98
00:05:40.740and about crossroads. I just had this completely transformative moment. And I just started to
00:05:49.660build a practice, what made sense to me, because there were no books on Hecate back then. Just
00:05:57.160open up to her presence, like how she presented herself to me. I think that's really important.
00:06:03.660And as an author, an educator, and a priestess, I offer my work to others.
00:06:13.540And at the same time, I'm always saying, do what is right in your soul and trust how Hecate or whatever goddess or spirit that comes through to you, trust how they show themselves to you.
00:06:28.320Trust in that, because that's how they are meant to appear to you.
00:06:33.660Do you ever have to code switch in your mind to put your experiences with the divine feminine or with a spirit, with Hecate, into a language that your psychologist self can accept?
00:06:55.400It's been a long time, so I have a lot of harmony within the two worlds now.
00:07:01.480but originally even though i'd always been like a seeker of the divine feminine there was a hard
00:07:08.520line between my spirituality and my public career in health research and you know teaching
00:07:15.240psychology over the years like this is that crossroads this is where hecatine abides right
00:07:22.340it's the crossroads it's the meeting point the meeting point of psychology with spirituality
00:07:28.840and that's become my comfy place. That this has become just the world that I occupy. At first
00:07:38.000there was a lot of tension. I gave up my old career to do what I do now. I'm not registered
00:07:43.660as a psychologist anymore because in some areas I'm too woo-woo. This has just really
00:07:50.420become my home base there is so much intertwined with psychology especially depth psychology
00:07:59.780archetypal psychology and also more what we might think of like as mundane types of psychology
00:08:06.960like dialectical behavior therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy or internal family systems
00:08:13.980There's so many different ideas floating in that sea that when you look at modern witchcraft, those ideas are already present in modern witchcraft.
00:08:24.140They might be called something else, but the underlying idea of internal family systems.
00:08:30.340So IFS, founded by Richard Schwartz, is the idea that we are multiple and that within these multiplicities, there is a capital S self.
00:08:46.120And when we look at witchcraft, we see that we hold ourselves in multiplicity.
00:08:53.360there is this idea that there is a greater self or a soul or something more than just this mundane
00:09:01.260experience. Over the 20 years I've been doing this, it's just this, oh, this idea is like this
00:09:06.820idea from spirituality or this type of religious practice, weaving together all of these threads
00:09:13.660like into a crossroads in a way that I hope people find accessible and helpful, like a way to help
00:09:20.820them find more meaning and healing by weaving this all together. Can you talk more about death
00:09:26.980psychology? I'm not as familiar with that phrase. Death psychology is a catch-all phrase for
00:09:33.220describing psychology that more or less, even tangentially, flows from the work of Carl Jung.
00:09:41.700So archetypal psychology, you know, working with archetypes, which we would call spirits,
00:09:46.540you know same thing you're just calling it something slightly different james hillman
00:09:52.380marion woodman another canadian that you may have heard of that whole area in psychology
00:09:58.180where the emphasis is on deeper work going deeper than a cognitive behavioral technique
00:10:05.420like thought stopping this is about soul work so that's depth psychology in a nutshell we think
00:10:11.020about archetypes a lot. My parents are psychologists and I started to practice and
00:10:17.420explore witchcraft as a meeting point of art and spirituality activism. I have to code switch a lot
00:10:23.600to try to put those pieces together for inside my own brain for the way I was raised. I didn't
00:10:28.480study psychology. I was just raised by them. Another question I have thinking about
00:10:34.860the time that you've spent with her she can be used in such as i don't mean to be dismissive
00:10:47.120but she can be used in a way that can be sort of self-helpy hecate i mean or or symbolic of just
00:10:53.420all dark side of witchcraft dark feminine the sort of shakespearean version as you reference
00:10:59.780in your book, but you offer us seeds, tendrils, roots that go back way deeper and that give a
00:11:09.240much more diverse picture of her. Can you talk a little bit about that, Hecate? Animus Mundae
00:11:17.180Hecate, like take us deeper. This is such a great question. Hecate's history is so fascinating to me
00:11:24.300and I've been studying it now, since she first called me going back a couple of decades.
00:11:31.080The way Hecate was first known to me as this kind of goddess of witches, she was dark and scary.
00:11:41.200She might get you, but it would be for your own good. I think the prevailing view back in the
00:11:47.04090s and early 2000s of Hecate. And I connected with that in some ways, yet there was this
00:11:57.280difference between like how Hecate was coming to me and what people were saying about Hecate back
00:12:06.720then. I got curious about her history. I am a trained scholar. So although it's in psychology,
00:12:12.720I used my research skills and my access to academic libraries to start to do a lot of research on the actual history of Hecate.
00:12:23.240So, you know, the Shakespearean scary Hecate started to come forth in plays and stories circulating in what we think of like the late classical era and the early Roman era.
00:12:40.500The ground cleaved and out came dreadful Hecate with her hounds and her serpents and, you know, and the guy who was always the center point of the story. The guy had a reckoning with Hecate in, you know, in these different stories or in plays like Euripides Medea, for example, stories about Cersei where Hecate figures in that.
00:13:03.600in different works of art, Hecate was always depicted thus. Sometimes benevolent, but she was
00:13:10.520a force and it was a moment of truth. Hecate would turn the hero's world upside down. And I thought
00:13:22.960that's really interesting. It's kind of what she does in Macbeth too. So there's something there
00:13:27.360about Hecate disrupts the hero's journey and I thought well that makes sense to me I feel like
00:13:35.240you know I don't really identify with the hero's journey but in my own life you know it was this
00:13:39.800call to be present in my own life to be accountable for my own life and to live according to what was
00:13:46.960real and beautiful and true for me on the inside and then I went further and further back and many
00:13:53.960of us would be familiar with the story of Persephone and Demeter. Hecate's role in that story
00:14:00.440of Persephone really intrigued me because in the Homeric hymns, they are thought to be
00:14:07.040much older. So the versions that we have today, I think they date back at least 2,500 years,
00:14:14.880but they're likely much older stories that were just recorded for the first time and exist in a
00:14:21.840way that was transmitted and we have them today but in this story she's very benevolent she's
00:14:27.460hecate she's persephone's helper no one else will comfort persephone hecate comes to her aid0.73
00:14:34.060demeter is losing her shit hecate helps demeter and then when the whole deal is brokered about0.96
00:14:41.860persephone going down to the underworld with hades for part of the year and then being above ground0.99
00:14:48.540with Demeter for the other part of the year, in some versions of the story, it's Hecate,
00:14:54.880sometimes accompanied by her frequent companion Hermes, but sometimes not. And sometimes it's
00:14:59.940just Hermes. It depends on the story. But Hecate is her guide back and forth between the two.
00:15:07.320And that, for me, felt so right. And I thought, well, I'm going to do more research on this,
00:15:12.940because this makes sense. This is the Hecate that I feel. I don't feel she is just this reckoning0.90
00:15:21.820force that comes along to shake the life into you, you know, scare yourself back into living
00:15:27.640your own life. I feel like there's more. So that led me to exploring her religious history, how she
00:15:35.820was venerated in religious ways. And there's a lot of evidence from a temple in Anatolia,
00:15:44.120modern day Turkey, which is called Lagina. It's an ongoing excavation. It's been going on for
00:15:49.620over 20 years now. And if you are on Instagram and you type Lagina into the search bar, you'll
00:15:55.920actually, they have a page on Instagram where you can see all the archaeological work being done
00:16:01.400at the temple of Lagina, which is located near a town called Stradonacea. And so there's a lot
00:16:08.120of records and it talks about Hecate as being like this expression of the great mother goddess
00:16:14.380associated with keys, crossroads, but also to do with the celestial, to do with the heavens
00:16:23.000and the ascension of the soul beyond the mundane. But throughout all of these different
00:16:28.620representations of her across these thousands of years, she's always this guide, this divine
00:16:35.880mediator. You know, in an ancient philosophical channeled text called the Chaldean Oracles,
00:16:44.580she's depicted as like source, anima mundi, soul of the world, and also this connection with the
00:16:52.440moon we need to kind of put on our lenses and try to see as the world was seen back then when these
00:17:00.880were channel because the moon in terms of understanding astrology the moon is always
00:17:08.160this divine mediator you know the moon is the one that transmits and moderates the sun for example
00:17:15.640you know we look at the lunar cycle the thinking was all of the planets the moon is kind of like
00:17:21.060this membrane that everything has to go through. And of course, in ancient times, there was no
00:17:25.960separation between astrology, religious practice, philosophy, they were all together. So astrology
00:17:31.940was very much part of their knowing. So to position Hecate as the like, metaphorically,
00:17:38.700this moon that transmits the greater energies of the celestial, you know, it speaks to this
00:17:45.080energy is being like the soul of the world because she is that divine intermediary it's a really0.78
00:17:55.140unique function compared to a lot of other goddesses that may be more linked to fertility0.77
00:18:01.640or Gaia consciousness which is the earth itself Hecate is fluid she can be in any of the worlds0.68
00:18:09.960at any of the time but what she's always doing she's always guiding mediating supporting she's
00:18:16.280not meant to be the star of the show she is meant to be the one that helps us always as we are
00:18:22.680mediating different forces or going through our life and that she's very much associated with the
00:18:30.260earth and i think this is something that gets sometimes missed when you know we kind of see
00:18:36.140like the more mainstream or pop culture version of Hecate, is in the ancient world, all of this
00:18:43.780mapped onto her earthiness. This is not the same as underworldly or hellish, but to them they meant
00:18:54.220like this deep earthiness, like she is connected to nature. She is physis, and physis is one of
00:19:02.240her epithets that really resonates with me even like when we look at chthonia or her chthonic
00:19:07.540aspects chthonic means of the earth it doesn't mean just of the afterlife so there is this
00:19:17.460really beautiful portrait that emerges that she is here with us as humans she is earthly
00:19:22.860and at the same time she is this divine intermediary that can help us with our soul's
00:19:30.580progression or whatever terminology you want. Sure, she can be portrayed as this great upheaval,
00:19:36.980scary witch, ruining Macbeth, and all these other things. But at the same time, there's so much more
00:19:45.080to her than that. You know, for me, this idea that she keeps the cosmic keys really links back to
00:19:52.500how households in the ancient Mediterranean were run, because women couldn't own property in the
00:19:57.800ancient Mediterranean. So what was done instead was that even though the man had to own the
00:20:03.380property, if the wife was an honorable woman, she held the keys. When you think of it this way,
00:20:11.560it's like, again, it's that divine intermediary. She holds the keys to the house of the spirits,
00:20:18.620the soul, whatever, the celestial, whatever you want to call it. She has this really rich tapestry
00:20:23.740And there can be a lot of diversity in how she comes through to us.
00:20:27.240I want to pick up on this idea of the diversity of how she comes through to us.
00:20:31.560I was so moved reading your book, reading through the epithets.
00:20:36.540And I'd love if you could explain that concept more for listeners.
00:20:39.500But in particular, Triformis, the idea that it wasn't this three-part goddess that was this narrow version of a feminine experience.
00:20:53.740That it was land, sea, and sky. It was our soul stretched out across the earth with her in some way. Can you talk more about the epithets? Talk more about a specifically Triformis, and then maybe how this version of the divine feminine is accessible or open to those of us who are on a queer version of the hero's journey. What's in there in those epithets and those stories for us?
00:21:22.360I love talking about all of this. So Triformis, and there's other triple epithets associated with
00:21:30.120Hecate, Trioditis. There's a bunch of them. Trivia from the Romans. Historically, what they meant
00:21:36.940when they called her those things was her power to abide at the crossroads. You know, that there
00:21:45.760were triple Hecate statues placed at boundaries to towns and at important crossroads and at the
00:21:53.540entrance to temples. All of this had nothing to do with Maiden Mother Crone because the ancient
00:22:00.020Greeks and Romans and others in the ancient Mediterranean didn't have this idea.
00:22:07.680They did not see the divine as being a specific age other than vaguely adult.
00:22:15.760So I've always thought that's interesting that this maiden mother chrome business, which came out of the early Wicca days and the pagan movement and books in like the 50s and 60s and 70s and even into the 80s.
00:22:29.180I think this idea, the divine feminine, white women, we have three neat and tidy different
00:22:35.760bodies, the young body, the young nubile, innocent body, the mother body, and then the0.85
00:27:50.120You know, we make these homes in the margins, these comfortable for us queer places and dark edges.
00:28:00.840People come to magic, come to witchcraft for all kinds of reasons, but it can come with some trauma.
00:28:08.300It can come with illness, physical or mental.
00:28:13.400We can come with some really sharp edges.
00:28:16.020can come in crisis you know googling coven at the at the peak of of mental health crisis like
00:28:22.840how do you deal with that in your coven do you have advice for people who are making coven spaces
00:28:30.140that they're trying to keep safe to try to offer these tools and this magic and this kindness
00:28:35.820but not overstep where really sometimes therapy is more appropriate does that make sense yeah it
00:28:43.560makes a lot of sense when you were talking about the frantic googling like i can't go on like this
00:28:48.480and mainstream health services it's just not working with mainstream health services
00:28:53.900i like to call them come to hecate moments you know that there's something about her as a spirit
00:29:00.340or a force that offers sucker and support in our darkest hours and maybe that's why some people
00:29:13.320have kind of seen her as this scary dark goddess because like that's really scary for us if that's
00:29:22.440where she abides is when we are in the pit of despair we might conflate Hecate with the despair
00:29:29.660rather than that she's there to shine the light and be supportive the despair is one thing Hecate
00:29:35.880is a guide and a support during those times I just wanted to say that I've been leading
00:29:42.280an online coven for years now and before that I've led rituals and was involved in different
00:29:49.380groups there is something about those of us who just plain old don't fit in
00:29:56.020in what we think is the mainstream world or what we're being told is normal that are called to
00:30:05.840witchcraft, call to spirituality, call to ritual, because we have been pushed to that well of
00:30:13.760despair. And it's like when you look in the well of despair, there is a choice you can make,
00:30:20.540right? You can find hope and meaning in the well of despair, or we fall in and we're consumed by it.
00:30:25.680I think that frantic come to Hecate moment, it can be that time when we find hope and meaning.
00:30:32.020maybe we do live with chronic pain or maybe we do have other conditions or whatever we're dealing
00:30:40.580with and yet there is so much to live for because we have found this beautiful practice
00:30:48.900of witchcraft and we find purpose and meaning through ritual not only that but it can heal us
00:30:57.300because we know, you know, going to mainstream medicine, it's, it's only, it only can do what
00:31:04.920it can do. But for many of us who have trauma or who have chronic disease, and oftentimes the two
00:31:12.820go hand in hand, early childhood trauma and chronic health condition, they go together.
00:31:19.040From a science perspective, they're starting to be understanding about that. But from a soul
00:31:24.140perspective like when we have soul damage or crises when we're early in life of course they're
00:31:31.920going to impact our physical self and so i think there's something intuitive something deep that
00:31:39.080knows we may need mainstream health care things to help us we may need our prescriptions and
00:31:45.780treatments and all those things and yet there is something deeper that we can unlock through our
00:31:52.880practice and we know this on some level right we on some level we know meaning is the way through
00:32:02.480I think the other part of your question was about
00:32:06.140given the fact that these are my people we are neuro spicy we are queer very divergent
00:32:15.880in all sorts of glorious ways. How, as a spiritual leader, can we respect the autonomy of people0.97
00:32:25.640and not overstep boundaries? And this is interesting because I teach a class about
00:32:34.840spiritual leadership, and we were talking about this yesterday, about boundaries. When someone
00:32:40.880is struggling clearly in crisis for example that's time for them to go to health services
00:32:47.520whatever that looks like for them it's not our job to solve other people's problems or not know
00:32:57.460what our scope of practice and that's a very psychological term you'll know it because of
00:33:02.380your parents but to not know what our scope of practice is so yes send energy and there's so
00:33:08.840much that we can do with serious and mature energy work for each other to bring some comfort to
00:33:16.080people and at the same time to not provide psychological treatment and to not deny the
00:33:24.940role of health services it's very important it's something that anyone who endeavors to lead a
00:33:33.100coven this is something to seriously think about like what is your scope of practice how can you be
00:33:40.720ethical and know what it is you're capable of doing like what your skill set is one of my big
00:33:51.520boundaries is I don't provide individualized services for my coven members we're there to
00:33:58.200support you and help you with the content. But if we can't do it for everybody, we can't do it for
00:34:03.980one. That's one of our maxims. And I think that's so important before you offer to do anything for
00:34:10.580anybody. If you're the leader of an organization, if you can't do it for everybody in your
00:34:16.160organization, you can't do it for one. And I think just understanding that when people come in
00:34:23.840to your organization as a spiritual leader. And there's a lot of beauty and strength and power
00:34:30.980and diversity. Their autonomy needs to be respected. Don't try to fix people. When I was
00:34:38.240younger and I've seen others do this as well as like, well, I'm just going to give this person
00:34:44.740all of this advice. Their autonomy is they ask you for help and you give help that you are able
00:34:52.000to give and don't overextend yourself either i mean that's kind of a rambling answer it's a super
00:34:57.140juicy answer thank you i do want to go back to something that i think will be more directly of
00:35:04.660interest to people who arrive at this conversation feeling like hacky-tay like i don't know why the
00:35:14.120name has popped up for me is this for me what is this like who who is calling me will you talk
00:35:19.900about some of the ways she shows up. Recently, I found what basically looked like a gravestone
00:35:26.440that I had never seen near my mother's house where she's lived for 30 years. My husband noticed it,
00:35:32.080we walked over to it, and there was a set of keys sitting on top of it right after I had read that
00:35:36.440part of your book about how she shows up with keys. And my daughter was like, can we put these
00:35:40.960roses there? And we did. So I felt like that was one. That's one. This is interesting when you're
00:35:46.940talk about psychology and spirituality earlier we can pull from an idea from a carl young here
00:35:53.340his idea of synchronicity that the world of archetypes and spirits works on a deeper level
00:35:59.500and yeah hecate in the keys so often synchronicities you notice something you never
00:36:07.420noticed before and there's keys or something similar on it and i want you all to keep in mind
00:36:13.500that it may be literal keys, but it may be things that are keys for you. Like when you think of what
00:36:21.100a key does, it unlocks and opens the way to something. So it may be an actual key, but it
00:36:27.480could be a rose. It could be a figurine. It could be a stone. You know, don't just think Hecate only
00:36:33.700speaks with literal keys. They can be symbolic keys as well. To you, they unlock something for
00:36:39.520you personally this often happens the black dog I've heard so many stories about the keys like
00:36:45.660you know like people just finding keys heart-shaped keys they're walking down the street and there's a
00:36:52.280key like so yes definitely Hecate loves her to send synchronicities and then there's the dogs
00:36:58.340the black dogs heard so many stories about people minding their own business and this black dog
00:37:05.740comes out of nowhere i've heard so many stories that one way that hecate communicates is through0.63
00:37:11.460synchronicities and i think it links to she is a goddess of the earth like she's earthly so it
00:37:19.940makes sense that we find these inexplicable treasures along our path because that's who she
00:37:27.100she's here with us she's not floating in the sky she's not like sky daddy somewhere far away she's
00:37:33.360like right here amongst us so however this works and i love the mystery of it all that's definitely
00:37:38.580a phenomenon pay attention hecate is always at work and it's not that she's distant from us our
00:37:46.480work is to pay attention sometimes it's loud like you said here's a grave here's a set of keys super
00:37:53.580loud she wanted your attention sometimes it's more subtle you know it's like us as witches
00:37:58.880developing our skill set that we are more attuned to these energetic frequencies rather than
00:38:08.500you know just sitting around waiting for a huge sign it's like oh there can be this little sign
00:38:14.620there can be this bird that comes right up to me and looks at me a certain way as you know as birds
00:38:20.460can and it's like oh that is not just a bird then of course dreams and this is another interesting
00:38:28.240one to map that if people are like is this Hecate calling me look to your dreams has there been
00:38:35.360what you could classify as a female figure some people actually have dreams where it's like oh
00:38:42.400yeah that looked like what I think Hecate looks like but it could be any type of figure who is
00:38:47.880doing this kind of soul guiding like showing you around a dreamscape leading you from one place to
00:38:55.200the other. And then maybe that's how Hecate is coming through because the dreams are really her
00:39:02.600realm. She's here in the everyday with us. And as mortals, you know, like the dream is our parallel
00:39:08.800world that we go into and she's in both worlds. So I say, look to your dreams, pay attention to
00:39:16.760if you meditate or anything that you do as a spiritual practice, like you might
00:39:22.620read your tarot cards or meditate or study astrology pay attention to the images that
00:39:30.760have a lot of resonance for you and see if that's how Hecate is communicating with you
00:39:37.500she understands us humans and she communicates through tools that we work with in different
00:39:45.500ways. Remember that she tends to speak the symbolic language, you know, that the deeper
00:39:53.280world speaks anyway, rather than our super rational language. So she may give us something
00:39:59.200and then a typical Hecate fashion, then we need to figure it out or not figure it out. Just trust
00:40:07.840in whatever has come through. It's meant to be what it is. So I think, yeah, just pay attention.
00:40:14.300She's in your dreams. She's sending you synchronicities. She's in your cards. She's there in your meditations. Just open up and trust.
00:40:24.580I wondered if you could talk about this new book, position it within the arc of the others, this journey that people can go on with you and really with your coven through the stories you tell in these books.
00:40:38.820so this is the third book in a series of Hecate books that I've been writing for
00:40:44.980Red Wheel Weiser that's the publisher this book is a book I knew I wanted to write
00:40:52.180for quite a long time it is more like a book of shadows that I'm sharing my own notes my own
00:41:01.120rituals my own spells my own reflections so it's a true compendium of many different things