00:06:56.720I find it very enriching on a two-way.
00:07:00.180Yeah, I can imagine my limited experience delving in and playing with decks
00:07:06.600and starting to just listen to what came up for me and listen to what came up for them.
00:07:12.500It definitely feels like you're slipping under some rational knowledge.
00:07:19.900Would you talk more about how you started to work with tarot or maybe how that transition happened for you from leaving the sort of Mormon world or Mormon structures of thought into having access to that mythopoiesis?
00:07:38.500Well, let me start out by saying that I'm writing a memoir, and the title of the memoir is A Witch in the Land of Mormon Oz, because there's magic on both sides of that sort of fence.
00:07:54.240Initially, tarot was very much a transgressive act and a healing act as well.
00:07:59.880I was born within a Mormon faith and very devout.
00:08:05.440um i married at age 17 kind of under the i was very very common with in mormon culture
00:08:13.540um to an elder who just basically said on the second date you know god has said i'm to marry
00:08:18.760you and that was the end of the questions this wasn't like cat like casual mormons this was
00:08:25.400you're right exactly this is deep deep mormon theology there is always god in the bed between
00:08:31.900you. And so it never even occurred to me that I would say no, even though I didn't even really
00:08:39.200know who I was marrying. And so it started a journey of raising children and living a Mormon
00:08:46.060lifestyle when inside I was insatiably curious and pushing all of the boundaries I could. And0.87
00:08:53.920it seemed like I was continually on a cycle of disobedience and then repentance and then more
00:09:00.380disobedience and um but i loved the the uh mormonism is a very occult religion even though
00:09:08.240um my guess is latter-day saints would not see it those who were inside because it took getting
00:09:14.800outside for me to look back so from a very young age i was sort of taught a form of magical thinking
00:09:20.660that just developed naturally that's so interesting to hear you say that my my friend was telling me
00:09:26.500about some of the aspects of his faith and he's Mormon.
00:09:29.660And I read more about, is it Joseph Smith?
00:09:33.480And he had a stone that allowed him to read the early documents.
00:09:37.520So I was like, you and I have more in common than I realized.
00:10:06.080It's a deeply, deeply occult religion, especially the temple ceremony.
00:10:11.460And so I kind of developed a love of ritual and a love of the sense of feeling like there was a magical way
00:10:21.940to look at the world when I left and I left kind of in very much of a political move um I was of
00:10:29.800course told that I was going to go to hell and and damnate you know the whole thing that comes
00:10:35.440with shunning and um and so I wasn't really sure exactly what was going to happen I remember the
00:10:41.860first women's studies class that I taught after I finished my doctorate I was sitting down getting
00:10:46.960ready to go to the class and the twin towers were hit with the planes and I remember sitting
00:10:53.120in that chair thinking what am I doing and what you know I'm they're right the world is coming0.99
00:11:00.280to an end and I'm going to hell and and yet I had this inside curiosity that said feminism is the
00:11:06.640most honest theory and practice I've ever experienced in my life and so I thought you0.72
00:11:13.380You know, if it's hell that it is, then okay, I'm going to walk into it.
00:11:17.600And so my entrance into women's studies was very cataclysmic.
00:11:22.340It was the same time that Prop 8 was in California, very, very homophobic kind of legislation.
00:11:30.220And I stood up against that loudly and was kind of given a line.
00:11:35.380And so my response to that was, wow, this is a great time to do street theater and ritualize it.
00:11:43.380And so I not only went out, but I went out in an incredibly public way and, you know, kind of hosted a witch burning between me and a few other women and some Catholic gay priests that were also being excommunicated.
00:11:58.400And so my response has always been to be very, very, very public.
00:12:04.120But the magic that I found out was that all of the terrible things that I was told that would happen didn't happen.
00:12:11.920I was the same person. I had the same ability to tap into magic. I had to stay the same love of
00:12:18.920the occult. I just didn't have all of the obedience and behavioralism that went with it.
00:12:25.420And so I don't really see myself as outside anti-Mormon trying to tear down, you know,
00:12:32.040the great and abominable patriarchy. I see myself as someone who understands the intersectionality
00:12:38.920of our worlds and that culturally that is the place I come from and there's so much of me that
00:12:46.580still holds that culture I don't hold the belief system anymore or any of the practices
00:12:53.480but I still feel a kinship and I think I always will like like for example most people are
00:13:00.480absolutely you know turned off by polygamy I'm not at all it was just such a natural normal thing
00:13:09.320growing up that although I would never be in a polygamist relationship myself I don't necessarily
00:13:15.820see that as outside the realm of possibility for other people and so my journey out of Mormonism
00:13:23.060was one which was profoundly political and assuming the name of which was at first a
00:13:31.840political act that the sense of i'm going to claim this identity because it seemed like the only
00:13:39.100identity that wasn't a cultural appropriation of some other identity because you know when you
00:13:45.320when you're when you leave a culture that has been 100 of your life then there is an identity
00:13:51.800crisis as well as a crashing of faith that you're left in a vacuum of you know who am I what do I
00:14:00.720call myself and and do I want to actually take this term on and what does it mean for me as far
00:14:08.100as my own evolution in my own spiritual journey I certainly know what it means for people who
00:14:14.300are active LDS it's an incredibly put off to them but the last couple of years I've just just0.90
00:14:21.160decided to fully own that identity in every imaginable way both spiritually culturally1.00
00:14:27.180um you know and politically and use that not only as a platform for my own personal work and writing
00:14:34.380but for my my academic so I actually came out as a witch to my students this semester
00:14:41.620tell me about that I thought that I would just get you know tomatoes thrown at me
00:14:49.140but they were very excited and wanted to know where I would be and they were interested in
00:14:55.760the blog that I had been writing and I got a very positive experience a very positive response from
00:15:03.340most of my academic colleagues as well kind of like well we kind of already knew right but I
00:15:12.140gave a speech at a local college as a professional witch and I was sort of talking about you know
00:15:18.260what is that container and what does that actually mean um and what are the superstitions and how has
00:15:26.360it been signified by patriarchy and religion and so when I first introduced myself and this was a
00:15:34.140forum on multiculturalism religious multiculturalism and so I assumed that it would be fine
00:15:38.440and um a third of the audience got up and walked out really and um and so that was a little shocking
00:15:46.520to me and um but those who remained um I think fully embraced the idea I had lots of people
00:15:56.360especially young people afterwards who kind of wanted to oh tell me how to do it yeah kind of
00:16:02.860what I would call a Wicca 101 right but I am not affiliated with a coven right um I have an absolute
00:16:12.380aversion because of my mormon upbringing to any kind of organizational or authority structure
00:16:18.380yeah i can see that yes and so i consider what i do to be open boundaries and very eclectic yeah
00:16:27.740my practice evolved organically pretty much by myself yeah you've used the term um word witch
00:16:36.080yes yes can you talk about that i when i when i read that that really lit up for me and part of
00:16:43.460how i think about where my own power comes from sometimes and i i really i i also don't really
00:16:51.500identify with a coven or or any idea of kind of um i don't really like rules or or hierarchy in
00:16:59.560my practice that's not why that's not what i'm looking for in a in a spiritual identity and the
00:17:05.020only coven I kind of identify with is this this loose and messy and improvised one that we have
00:17:10.300online with each other you know yes but a word word which really um that that really sings to me
00:17:18.380yeah well first of all it's the power of language and the power of naming um the power of writing
00:17:27.960and then again as an educational anthropologist um I study those communication systems um I have
00:17:34.800found in the past that the power of the word whether it's a visual image because i consider
00:17:41.000that communication as well or whether it is a written language has the ability to not only
00:17:49.640promote change but take you to another whole sphere of thinking and so i love the idea of
00:18:00.000making our lives mythopoetic, living the poetry, writing the poetry. And I think part of it has
00:18:07.420to do with my beginnings. When my faith crashed around me, it was the same time that a divorce
00:18:15.480happened. Because when you leave Mormonism, your whole family leaves you. It's a total,
00:18:20.440absolute total. And I was kind of living in a completely empty house and had just finished my
00:18:28.580doctorate my mother had just passed away from Alzheimer's and I was in this space where it's
00:18:33.380like I I don't know who I am I don't even know if I really exist and I picked up just by chance a
00:18:40.340copy of Paul Coelho's The Witch of Portobello I don't know if you've read that or not but it's
00:18:45.640it's a piece of fiction but it's a glorious story about a woman who finds her identity through
00:18:50.940energy and um and I read that and and what I felt that was that I didn't know what I could trust in
00:18:59.500my life and so I I basically kept the an empty home and made a kind of a covenant with myself
00:19:06.920that I wouldn't let anything back into my life unless it was truly authentic to who I was that
00:19:12.440it really resonated with my energy and so the first thing that I noticed was the moon and I
00:19:19.400started to study the moon and its cycles and we started to have kind of circle ceremonies with
00:19:24.740myself alone beating a drum because the drum kind of told me okay you're still alive you have a
00:19:30.480heartbeat you can feel your heartbeat and the moon is still in the sky and it's dependable
00:19:35.420and uh and so i i wanted um a level of what i call spiritual evolution that was coming from inside
00:19:45.980coming literally from inside of me I didn't want any influences from the outside
00:19:50.400and so that involved a lot of writing and a lot of saying you know what what does what do we mean
00:19:58.100literally when we talk about even kind of the kitsch term spelling in the sense that you know
00:20:03.540putting our intention out into the the world through words and then making those words more
00:20:10.980powerful through visual sigils or through ritual so that you not only begin to write it in your
00:20:17.720mind but it's written in your body and that was really important for me because our cellular
00:20:24.120memory carries so much and you can mentally take yourself out of the space but then you know
00:20:30.800mormonism was in my dna and uh and everything just felt that way so my daughters and i we decided to
00:20:37.640do something that was creative. And, um, so we decided that since this book of Mormon
00:20:43.440affect up our lives so much that, uh, that we would imagine what if we were prophetesses0.85
00:20:50.180and what if we created in our own religion through our writings, what would that sound
00:20:55.980like? So we took about a year and a half, uh, and we each journaled. And the only rule
00:21:02.320that we had was that we had to be fully present, in first person, and as honest as possible, just
00:21:09.260raw. And so we just wrote for the whole year. And then we would get together and read it. And then
00:21:15.640we realized at the end of a year and a half, we had written a work. We had written a work of art,
00:21:20.120which was very powerful. And so it was kind of, what do we do with this? Maybe this isn't just
00:21:25.360about our healing journey. Maybe this has a bigger purpose. So we decided to ritualize it in kind of
00:21:31.840a fun magical way we thought let's go to the mountains let's find a mound of a hill and let's
00:21:36.520bury it because you know let's imagine you know if someone finds it 2 000 years from now what kind
00:21:43.020of a religion or belief system would it create and it was just so deliciously wicked um yeah
00:21:50.020and it was so incredibly healing and it was like taking a cellular memory and unwinding it and
00:21:57.100rewinding what was authentic and that's where that sense of word which and which identity so we did
00:22:04.680we we buried it up in the mountains and kept a copy for ourselves um but but then some other
00:22:10.840people read it and it's like this is amazing and so we we produced a production called the
00:22:17.560mormon monologues and where we performed it at colleges and it was this very kind of similar to
00:22:25.260vagina monologues, this monologue of transition, of healing, and of awakening, and finding that
00:22:32.440sense of earth-based, more, well, what I would call eminence. You know, when you grow up in
00:22:40.140patriarchal religions, it's all about transcendence. It's all about overcoming the body, and overcoming
00:22:45.300the world, and overcoming everything. And then if you're in a religion that says, if you're a woman,
00:22:49.460and you really have to overcome a lot, then it's so body-denying that I felt like, wait a minute,
00:22:57.980why do I want to live my whole life for a promise of continued marginalization in the hereafter?0.79
00:23:05.080And so when I recognized that the Mormon heaven wasn't the place I wanted to be, it lost its power.0.82
00:23:11.280And then I became fascinated with the idea of what does spiritual eminence look like,0.95
00:23:16.360where it's messy and it's embodied and it's raw and it's without rules and
00:23:21.800boundaries and it embraces all of what we experience um as manifested human
00:23:27.820beings um it i always kind of saw spirituality that was kind of grounded
00:23:35.980like the idea of mother theresa who is in a jail holding a prostitute's head
00:23:40.740while she throws up all over her and i just i saw that as such a powerful
00:23:45.040image of the sense of being willing to literally be with the people on the ground connected to the
00:23:51.000earth in a way that was fully present fully eminent and fully messy and um and that's how
00:23:57.980my life has been whether i've been uh arrested or whether i've done work in women's studies
00:24:05.300classrooms um in academia i don't think i could use this term with other faculty but i see myself
00:24:13.060as a shaman in the classroom i see myself using shamanic pedagogy as a healer especially when
00:24:22.000you're teaching critical consciousness or when you're teaching critical race theory and you're
00:24:25.960doing the kind of work that that sense of critical consciousness is um or you know liberation
00:24:33.940pedagogy um it's it's very much about healing healing people's world views giving them a place
00:27:21.060and those default judgments just happen continually.
00:27:23.660And so I try and introduce them in the sense that there are multiple ways of being in the world which are coexistent and equally valid.
00:27:34.560And that we're not trying to find the winner or the best one.
00:27:38.960We're trying to find the bridges between them or kind of like a quilt with mosaics.
00:27:45.440Each mosaic brings its sense of identity.
00:27:48.180But once you bring them together in a quilt, the whole quilt can warm you.
00:27:52.040and um so students struggle mightily with that i struggle mightily with the idea of moving from
00:27:59.800between those two spheres so because when you're doing tarot reading or you're or i'm writing as
00:28:06.180a witch i go into a zone which is very subjective and very liminal and um where time and space
00:28:15.660suspense itself and there is just sort of like a flow of information that I'm just capturing
00:28:22.960and then you have to put that aside and go do the dishes you know or or get in a car and drive
00:28:28.500and so I've had to incorporate in my personal practice ways in which I can ground continually
00:28:36.000continually ground okay you've been in this space and this flow now for four hours
00:28:40.820you're going to be too dizzy and too hypnotic to drive so you're going to have to wait a few
00:28:47.040minutes walk by the river have something to eat and kind of bring yourself back into that
00:28:52.800you know mundane reality and then you're safe to get behind the wheel of a car
00:28:57.740my part of my exit um my early years in mormonism and struggling to try and be a mother and a wife
00:29:07.140with four children was trying to live within a worldview that I that I told that if I just if I
00:29:12.520just obeyed things would work but it didn't it didn't work for me and I so I kept thinking if
00:29:17.840I could just understand it better I could make it work and so I would have moments of clarity and0.99
00:29:24.020then I'd lose it again and eventually I came to a place in my 30s when I just said you know fuck0.99
00:29:29.380this this is absolute brain talking and I'm not going to do it one more day I'd rather die strike0.99
00:29:34.620me to hell um and i decided to see a therapist and um the therapist took me through two and a0.85
00:29:41.840half years of extensive um kind of primal uh hypnotic regressive therapy which was wonderful
00:29:50.760by the way absolutely incredibly healing um but it it what it did for me is it made that
00:29:56.980subjective state of sort of suspension than my natural state it's the place that I normally go
00:30:05.820to and uh and so I I guess what I'm saying is I struggle with with the very question that you put
00:30:12.360to me you know how do you um because it isn't about fitting in I finally recognized there isn't
00:30:19.660any place that i am going to fit in i'm the bridge just i am i'm the bridge person and um i'm going
00:30:28.980to have to accept the fact that other people have the power of naming even if i resignify that they
00:30:36.940still have the power of judgment naming they may have position power they may have organizational
00:30:41.740power and so there are times when you have to just sort of dare to be silent there are times
00:30:48.020when it's probably not safe but then there are other times when i think that you can
00:30:52.240sort of push the envelope and you can be more completely public and and allow people to evolve
00:31:00.380now as far as my actual ritual practices um initially i bought spell books and stuff like
00:31:09.360that you know and and you know wondered whether or not i had the right candle the right color
00:31:14.000And was I doing it right? And, and then I saw the deeper pattern underneath it. I saw, you know, this is really about finding a way we can embody our intention and embody the sense of a connecting. It's a bridge. The props are a bridge.
00:31:29.560they're an important one because they hold meaning and um but that's all it's the magic
00:31:37.280is always within us the props are the way we embody it and sort of move it into a cellular
00:31:43.920memory and the more we repeat it the more beautiful it becomes and the more embedded it becomes and
00:31:50.560the more mythopoetic it becomes and um because it doesn't really matter what religion you're
00:31:56.660taking a look at if they if they have a belief system and they have a way of ritualizing that
00:32:02.120that ritual creates culture and creates tradition and creates identity
00:32:06.480and um and so i'm not even remotely against ritual i just think our rituals should be
00:32:13.660very conscious and understood you know what are we doing this writing these um messages on our
00:32:22.060bodies our cellular memory is important stuff but we better really know what we're doing
00:32:25.980because i would argue it's much harder to deprogram that cellular memory than it is to
00:32:33.620change your mind or to to learn something critically to think critically does that
00:32:39.400answer it somewhat yeah i mean and it opens so many more questions but in such a good way
00:32:45.540I admire so much the the bravery of that moment that was obviously many years coming of saying
00:32:57.960no not not one more fucking day of this like I'm going to make my own rituals because I
00:33:03.760I do know a little bit about how much you lost maybe when you did that or I can guess from other0.96
00:33:11.320people i know like how much community how much support and how much like whole world view um and
00:33:18.200so it's so incredible that you were able to build that again with your daughters in a text that
00:33:23.960lives on a mountain somewhere right exactly i i compare it to um um judaic hasidias the city
00:33:32.820excuse me judaism conservative fundamental of judaism which is a 100 percent lifestyle
00:33:40.300style separated isolated mormonism has a little bit more public view but in internal to it is
00:33:46.420very much about you're outside of the world you're not connected to the people around you you can put
00:33:51.000that face forward always be a wonderful ambassador make sure that whatever you do reflects on the
00:33:57.020goodness you know of the faith um and so it's a more of an ideological boundary yeah but it's
00:34:03.500still profoundly um isolated just profoundly so and so when you leave and you have like a
00:34:11.020shattered faith crisis you do you lose everything um you you lose family you lose a marriage you
00:34:19.200lose friends you you have an army of people who now see you as evil and apostate and um and then
00:34:28.300they they want to they want to prove to themselves how bad you are and so it can get vicious and in
00:34:35.120my sort of moving into women's studies it got incredibly vicious um with mean-spirited acts
00:34:41.720like the first time we ever performed the mormon monologues a group of lds students decided to shut
00:34:47.320it down and so they pulled a fire alarm or there would be mean-spirited letters sent um there was
00:34:54.120just a lot of an or a bishop would come and say you know you really need to fire her and
00:34:58.480to my dean things like that and so there was this 10,000 people that I always envisioned as an army
00:35:06.460around me you know trying to destroy this very very very public person and my response to that
00:35:14.980has always been um the sense of you know your silence doesn't save you and my safety was in my
00:35:24.780public performance of ritual and i had some position power because i was a professor and
00:35:31.700i did have a doctorate and so it was harder for them to just dismiss me and um i mean i just had
00:35:39.360this happen at the university that i teach at i got a letter saying you know we want to push
00:35:43.920against this structure of oppression but you're not tenured so maybe we really shouldn't have you
00:35:49.160on the list and sort of like we'll protect you by by striking your voice away and my response to
00:35:56.560that was no way that sometimes when you're in the margins you have a stronger voice and that I'm not
00:36:03.600going to be silenced and I never have and I never will be and yeah that might mean some consequences
00:36:11.640But nothing could be as scary to me as losing my family and losing a job.
00:37:30.420But, but I would have LDS students would flock to my classes. And so the other professors would maybe have 1%, you know, Mormon student occasionally, I'd have 30, 40%. And I would get three types of students, I would get the the Mormons, who were the acronym that is used as TV, I'm totally believing Mormon, who were there to prove me wrong, to prove that I was a bad person.
00:37:58.240And so they were in my class to quote, bring the bitch down. And then there were a lot of gay Mormons, a lot of LGBTQ Mormons who were just trying to survive. They were just trying to live. And then there were these questioning ones that they just, they wanted to have a straight answer for someone who knew both what it was like to be inside the culture and outside the culture.0.99
00:38:19.140and so there was this alchemy going on all the time of these students who would want to speak
00:38:24.660to me and I would continually have to say I have to take my professor hat off
00:38:30.420if we're going to have this conversation and I that negotiation doesn't happen too much here
00:38:38.700in Idaho I'm not as well known I left Mormonism in California and so I don't really have that kind
00:38:45.460I'm much more known as a witch than a Mormon here.
00:38:49.140And so if people are put off by me, it's probably put off more by the sense of witch.
00:40:21.700So I was, I was reading it and then I thought, Oh God, I'm so tired.
00:40:25.040I think I'm just going to go take a nap.
00:40:26.220and the moment I laid down this just this incredible impression came to me you need to
00:40:31.680get up and you need to go out into your bar to parlor that you've created and you need to do an
00:40:36.880ancestral reading you you actually need to do this and at the time I thought oh that you know boy
00:40:43.520that's really pushing the elbow if I'm not going to do it but it wouldn't go away and so I did
00:40:48.040and it was profound so let me put this out there it's just something that people can try
00:40:53.120and you can try it with automatic writing you can try it with tarot you can try it with journaling
00:40:58.720you can try it with art is take a moment to imagine someone who's passed on in your life
00:41:07.940that was dear to you or important to you
00:41:10.300get their image in your mind say their name silently allow their full presence to come
00:41:21.360into your visualization, feel your emotion, make it as tactile as you can, remember the
00:41:30.280smell, maybe add a little bit of music that they loved, and when you feel yourself sort
00:41:39.880of merging into the sense that their presence is there, then allow them to speak to you
00:41:47.120through any kind of symbolism you choose.
00:41:51.360You create a container, but the voice is coming literally from beyond the veil through you, through your intuitive, subjective knowing, and then capture it.
00:42:04.120you can capture it in tarot cards so you can basically sit down and say i did it with my
00:42:10.240mother mother you're here you're present i saw her smile i could smell her wind song perfume i
00:42:16.500she loved madame butterfly i brought in madame butterfly i waited until it was her i could hear
00:42:22.200singing madame butterfly and then i said okay you know it was her hand shuffling cards um now tell
00:42:29.160me what of a message do you have for me and it was an absolutely rivetingly powerful experience
00:42:37.740of giving um this whether that ancestral knowledge was coming from inside of me i didn't worry about
00:42:44.440where it was coming from um because i lived with my mother so of course her essence is in me
00:42:49.740um so it didn't require a strong belief system in a hereafter it just required the sense of
00:42:56.200of knowing that within us we are repositories of generational understanding and i am fascinated
00:43:03.360with that sense of generational knowledge and and then allow that message to come forth
00:43:10.060whether it is writing a letter to yourself whether it is journaling your thoughts and feelings
00:43:14.540or whether it is allowing maybe four tarot cards to capture that message and um so what i did was
00:43:23.180I captured that message, I stayed with it, I pondered it for a moment, I actually created
00:43:28.660sacred space beforehand, and then I stayed in it maybe about 20 minutes until I felt
00:43:36.160this sense of completion and closure, and then I closed the circle and sort of let it
00:43:44.200go and and I'm so glad what I did was I followed the messages that came inside of me you know that
00:43:55.760I don't know whether you'll call them intuition or soul messages or psychic messages that said
00:44:00.380I want you to do this because this is very real and and so it's one of the things of the toolkit
00:44:07.460that I've added to my readings because I recognize that it was a wonderful opportunity to tap into
00:44:16.120generational knowledge and that the tarot as a dream language can do that beautifully
00:44:21.960and it doesn't necessarily have to be a situation where you're sitting with somebody and it's like
00:44:28.260you have to prove to me that you are actually channeling or speaking to someone in my family
00:44:33.240that you can bring their essence into into that space i mean we call in our ancestors all the time
00:44:38.920when we have sacred circle and and so i would to put it out there to to try it to to allow yourself
00:44:48.480to go beyond the boundaries of what you think being a witch is or or what you think that you
00:44:54.560can actually do because what do you have to lose you really you really don't have anything to lose
00:45:00.880and everything to gain and so i tried it yesterday in reading a few times it was a little bit scary
00:45:07.980you know this idea of calling in someone's ancestor or generational knowledge but it
00:45:14.420worked beautifully and i think the parting word that i would leave is it trust that once you
00:45:24.040have that seed of spirituality which is growing kind of like the um the empress card it's a life
00:45:31.340force that you have to nurture and protect and keep alive but eventually it will evolve into a
00:45:37.960life of its own and it will be authentic and it will just be something that enriches the world
00:45:44.420and enriches your life and so i would say you know just trust lean into it hold space and trust