Rune Soup

This week we welcome to the show Ryan Edward. Ryan is an artist, designer and deck creator. In fact he is responsible for one of my favourite Lenormand decks, the Maybe Lenormand. He joins us today to talk us through the process of deck creation, how design informs fortune telling function, the story of the Lenormand cards through time, the difference between divination and fortune telling and what it was like growing up in a funeral home. Super fun chat. Show Notes Get the Maybe Lenormand. Ryan's newsletter. Ryan on instagram.

This week, we are joined by artist and adventurer, Lucy Delics. Originally from England, Lucy has lived all over the world and currently lives in the Cusco area of the Peruvian Andes where she created The Visionary Path Tarot. Lucy joins us today to talk about finding one's creative voice, making art with plant medicines, healing personal and ancestral traumas and living in Peru. Great stuff! Show Notes Get The Visionary Path Tarot. Lucy and her husband's website and blog. Lucy on Instagram.

This week, adding to our growing number of triple-header interviews, we welcome back to the show Mitch Horowitz and welcome to the show for the first time Richard Smoley. Mitch, as regular listeners would be aware, is a public intellectual and occult historian with an expertise in New Thought. Richard is a writer, editor and public speaker specialising in esoteric thought. He is the author of numerous books including the classic (and one of my personal favourites) The Dice Game of Shiva. Mitch and Richard join us in this episode to explore the antecedents to New Thought, differing theories of mind and what is and isn't genuine skepticism.  (Note that this is a video discussion on YouTube as well.) Show Notes Mitch's article for Boing Boing on James Randi. Mitch's website. Mitch on Twitter. Richard's website.

This week we are joined by philosopher, professor and speaker, Matt Segall. We discuss Platonism vs Neoplatonism, theories of mind and the natural world, and how it is we can or might know anything at all. A really rich and thought-provoking conversation. Show Notes Matt's website, Footnotes to Plato. Matt's YouTube channel. Matt on Twitter.

This week, we welcome to the show Dr Bayo Akomolafe. Bayo is a psychologist, educator and philosopher working and playing principally in the fields of decoloniality and ecology. He joins us today for a very special episode to celebrate the culmination of the premium member course on Custodianship, to talk about making sanctuary, fugitive spaces and post activism. "What if the way we respond to crisis is part of the crisis?" Show Notes Bayo Akomolafe's website. Bayo's essay, The Allegory of the Pit or The Irony of Victory. The Emergence Network. Interview with Bayo: Let Us Make Sanctuary. Interview with Bayo: Unlearning Mastery.

Another swapcast this week, with the lovely Joanna Farrer of Coffee and Divination. We talk to each other about our shared love of tarot: where it began, when it began, best approaches, that sort of thing. And we also talk about homesteading and navigating right relation with both land and home spirits. Two of my very favourite things. Oh, and if you're reading this in your podcatcher, I should tell you we did this as a video recording. Show Notes Coffee and Divination. Joanna Farrer's personal and music site. Joanna on Twitter.

The one and only Khi Armand returns to the show this week with some medicine for our extremely challenging times. What lessons are we being invited to learn? What sort of healing might be available in this moment and no other? What kinds of Ceremony are best for now? Really good stuff. Also some travel stories and 30 Rock. Because that totally counts as being with this moment.     Show Notes Chiron's blog and website, Impact Shamanism. Chiron on Twitter. Chiron on Instagram. Chiron's Amazon author page.

An unusual solo show this week. We have an introduction from me and then it's a recording of a classic Michael Parenti lecture, Conspiracy and Class Power, which you can also find in the show notes. Speaking of show notes, they're rather extensive everywhere but YouTube, and best found at the actual post page. Show Notes Firstly, the rest of the 'series' in which this show would reside, were it a post. How you play is what you win. Hypostasis of the farmers. The nightingale of eternal meaning. Alien invasion as self care. Medicine songs. Talking The Invisibles. Secondly, the Parenti lecture, its inspiring TMBS clip, and a bit from Ben Burgis on populism and liberal scolds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jsua0m6GreY&feature=emb_title   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8OeVaydBJQ   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EEP7hsrC58   Next is a quotation from the blog draft that won't see the light of day, followed by links to what I consider three very useful posts from the rebooted archonology series a few years back: Jupiter is still in Capricorn. One way of being with this is to see him as a teacher of hard truths. The other side of that is that you are or should be learning just what it takes to run the world. To administer the physical plane. To see how the sausages are made and what they are made of. The great teacher has shined a light and I worry that some of you shut your eyes. Open them, please. This is very serious now. If you would like to understand who is 'behind' this in large part. Call them the Anglo-Americans, the Atlanticists, the dollar syndicate, Mr Global. Who cares? It is the interlocked shelob's web of supranational organisations and think tanks that evolved out of the Round Table model. Call them the Davos class. Then you need to understand both how and why they run the world the way they do. And that's here with Miles Copeland. And finally -doing triple duty as a Rune Soup recommendation by also being a limited hangout, and written by a shaman- you need to see how the syndicate uses economics to have entire countries do what they say. (This is the system Russia and China are doing their best to extricate themselves from for obvious reasons.) Next is Charles Eisenstein, and an excerpt from his conspiracy essay. “Conspiracy theory” has become a term of political invective, used to disparage any view that diverges from mainstream beliefs. Basically, any critique of dominant institutions can be smeared as conspiracy theory. There is actually a perverse truth in this smear. For example, if you believe that glyphosate is actually dangerous to human and ecological health, then you also must, if you are logical, believe that Bayer/Monsanto is suppressing or ignoring that information, and you must also believe that the government, media, and scientific establishment are to some extent complicit in that suppression. Otherwise, why are we not seeing NYT headlines like, “Monsanto whistleblower reveals dangers of glyphosate”? Information suppression can happen without deliberate orchestration. Throughout history, hysterias, intellectual fads, and mass delusions have come and gone spontaneously. This is more mysterious than the easy conspiracy explanation admits. An unconscious coordination of action can look very much like a conspiracy, and the boundary between the two is blurry. Consider the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) fraud that served as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq. Maybe there were people in the Bush administration who knowingly used the phony “yellowcake” document to call for war; maybe they just wanted very much to believe the documents were genuine, or maybe they thought, “Well, this is questionable but Saddam must have WMD, and even if he doesn’t, he wants them, so the document is basically true…” People easily believe what serves their interests or fits their existing worldview. In a similar vein, the media needed little encouragement to start beating the war drums. They knew what to do already, without having to receive instructions. I don’t think very many journalists actually believed the WMD lie. They pretended to believe, because subconsciously, they knew that was the establishment narrative. That was what would get them recognized as serious journalists. That’s what would give them access to power. That is what would allow them to keep their jobs and advance their careers. But most of all, they pretended to believe because everyone else was pretending to believe. It is hard to go against the zeitgeist. The British scientist Rupert Sheldrake told me about a talk he gave to a group of scientists who were working on animal behaviour at a prestigious British University. He was talking about his research on dogs that know when their owners are coming home, and other telepathic phenomena in domestic animals. The talk was received with a kind of polite silence. But in the following tea break all six of the senior scientists who were present at the seminar came to him one by one, and when they were sure that no one else was listening told him they had had experiences of this kind with their own animals, or that they were convinced that telepathy is a real phenomenon, but that they could not talk to their colleagues about this because they were all so straight. When Sheldrake realised that all six had told him much the same thing, he said to them, “Why don’t you guys come out? You’d all have so much more fun!” He says that when he gives a talk at a scientific institution there are nearly always scientists who approach him afterwards telling him they’ve had personal experiences that convince them of the reality of psychic or spiritual phenomena but that they can’t discuss them with their colleagues for fear of being thought weird. This is not a deliberate conspiracy to suppress psychic phenomena. Those six scientists didn’t convene beforehand and decide to suppress information they knew was real. They keep their opinions to themselves because of the norms of their subculture, the basic paradigms that delimit science, and the very real threat of damage to their careers. The persecution and calumny directed at Sheldrake himself demonstrates what happens to a scientist who is outspoken in his dissent from official scientific reality. So, we might still say that a conspiracy is afoot, but its perpetrator is a culture, a system, and a story. The Conspiracy Myth - Charles Eisenstein Lastly but the opposite of leastly, is Whitney Webb talking about the next three or four months. (And if you are a premium member, this goes well with yesterday's Q&A with Alison McDowell.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SU7VuX-Ip8

This week, we continue to play with some novel show formats. I am joined by three of the conveners of the upcoming Nura Learning course, Cohering the Radical Present: Integral Consciousness in Daily Life. We have two first time guests: Dr Barbara Karlsen, a practising somatic psychotherapist and continuum movement instructor. Jeremy Johnson, founder of Nura Learning, author and president of the International Jean Gebser Society. And one returning guest: Brandt Stickley, practitioner and professor of Classical Chinese medicine at multiple academic institutions and senior instructor and board member of Dragon Rises seminars. The subjects under discussion today fall entirely under staying with the trouble: how to, why to, and who best to show us. Really good, important stuff. Show Notes Cohering the Radical Present: Integral Consciousness in Daily Life. Barbara Karlsen. Jeremy Johnson Jeremy on Patreon. Jeremy on Twitter. Jeremy's book, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness. Brandt Stickley Brandt's website and blog. Brandt on Twitter.

Keeping the swapcast train rolling this week, we are joined by author and fellow podcaster (obviously), J. David Osborne. David is the author of multiple novels and is a fellow superfan of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Who better, then, to talk about the series' heightened value in These Capitalised Times, as well as the role of creativity in responding to and thriving in eras of unrest? A super enjoyable conversation! Show Notes Listen to The JDO Show and No Country here. Follow J. David Osborne on Twitter here. J. David Osborne's novels: By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends. Black Gum. A Minor Storm.