Back from the Borderline

For thousands of years, the Western image of God became increasingly male. Anne Baring has spent much of her life studying what we lost when the feminine disappeared from our understanding of the divine.

Born in 1931, Anne is an Oxford-educated historian, Jungian analyst and co-author with Jules Cashford of The Myth of the Goddess. We begin with the ancient Great Mother and the work of Marija Gimbutas, before moving into Anne’s account of how Western religion gradually separated spirit from nature. She takes us through Asherah and Sophia, the feminine Holy Spirit, Mary Magdalene and the Christian traditions she believes preserved an older teaching of love and wisdom. We also talk about power, self-deification, the body, and why Anne believes the loss of the feminine divine changed the way Western culture came to treat the Earth and one another.

Anne is 95, and this is the first in a series of conversations we’ll be recording together. Future episodes will give us time to stay with subjects we only scratch the surface of here, including Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Companion, the Essenes, the Cathars and the sacred marriage. This first conversation ends with Anne speaking personally about prayer, service and how her understanding of God has changed over the course of her life.

Explore Anne Baring’s Work

Official website: https://www.annebaring.com/

Books by Anne Baring
Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford
The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul

Books and Writers Mentioned
Marija Gimbutas: The Civilization of the Goddess
Marija Gimbutas: The Language of the Goddess
Erich Neumann: The Great Mother
Riane Eisler: The Chalice and the Blade
Margaret Barker
Elaine Pagels
The Gospel of the Beloved Companion, translated by Jehanne de Quillan

Related Episodes
My episode on Gnosticism, Sophia and the Gnostic creation myth
My previous episode on Mary Magdalene

House of Cards: In this episode, I mention my ongoing tarot series, House of Cards, during this conversation. We’re studying the cards one by one through mythology, religious history, occult philosophy and the Western wisdom traditions that regularly appear on the podcast. Join the Patreon and listen to House of Cards at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline
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In 2020, I almost paid $4,000 for a shadow work course. One of the first books I was told to read was Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink. I read it, tried to understand what I was being sold, and kept getting the same bad taste in my mouth. It’s been six years since then, and I’ve come back with receipts. I understand why it bothered me now.

This episode digs into the history behind some of online spirituality’s favorite borrowed ideas, Jungian shadow work, Tantra, sex magic, Thelema, Babalon, occult initiation, manifestation, the Left Hand Path, passive mediumship, and the modern spiritual coaching industry that learned how to package this material into high ticket programs.

I look closely at Carolyn Elliott’s work, what Carl Jung actually wrote about the shadow, how Western neo Tantra differs from older tantric traditions, and the ethics of a teacher who can reinterpret your hesitation as resistance, scarcity, fear, or evidence that you need their teaching.

We also need to talk about why psychologically intense spiritual work can go badly when authority outruns training, why so much ancient wisdom being sold online has a surprisingly modern family tree, and why people sometimes leave these spaces burned enough to decide that every form of esotericism must be "demonic".

If you’ve ever looked at a $3,000 retreat, a spiritual certification, an initiation, or an Instagram teacher promising transformation and thought, what the fuck am I looking at, this episode is for you.

For my full exploration of Aleister Crowley, Thelema, and sex magic, you can listen here.

If you want to join my card-by-card study of the Tarot through Christian Hermeticism and deep symbolic study, you can start from the beginning on Patreon. Click here or visit patreon.com/backfromtheborderline.
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Aleister Crowley had a beautiful idea, and then he built a religion around himself.

This episode takes Thelema seriously enough to examine what Crowley was actually teaching. True Will sits at the center of it, alongside The Book of the Law, Aiwass, the Aeon of Horus, sex magick, Babalon, and Crowley’s claim that humanity had entered a new spiritual age. He drew heavily from the Golden Dawn and Hermetic Qabalah, then remixed and recast those traditions through his own revelation and his own ideas about freedom, sexuality, and authority.

I’m interested in the point where spiritual freedom starts giving one man an extraordinary amount of interpretive power. Crowley’s treatment of women, the role of the Scarlet Woman, the use of sex as magical technology, and the theology built around Babalon all deserve much more scrutiny than either Satanic Panic or Crowley worship tends to allow.

True Will can absolutely be understood as disciplined vocation rather than appetite, and many modern Thelemites read Crowley critically while taking consent and individual freedom seriously. The harder work here (that I attempt to undertake in this episode) is taking a hard look at the actual religion without turning it into either “evil” or “enlightenment”.

This is a study of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema from inside the Western mysteries, with plenty of sympathy for the questions Crowley was actually asking and very little patience for the places I think his answers went badly wrong.

Next week, we’ll be following Crowley’s massive influence all the way into online spirituality, Existential Kink, modern shadow work, sacred sexuality, and the high-ticket coaching economy.

CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)

If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
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I’ve spent a lot of this series thinking about what happens when the body gets so used to effort that it forgets how to stop. By the time I got to this final episode, I found myself somewhere I didn’t expect. I was thinking about grace, and the spiritual cost of living as though everything depends on your ability to stay useful, vigilant, and in control.

In Part Three of The Braced Body, we’re taking everything we’ve learned about chronic tension and nervous system bracing into much deeper spiritual territory. I’ll get into the old argument between Augustine and Pelagius about human effort and grace, why Sabbath has something to say about our inability to stop working, and how ideas like kenosis and alchemy can help us think about surrender without turning it into weakness or self-erasure.

We’ll also spend some time with Meister Eckhart and the older mystical traditions that understood spiritual life as something we participate in rather than something we manufacture through enough effort.

Somewhere underneath all of this is a problem I know very well in myself. You can get very good at understanding/taking care of /improving yourself, and still be living as though receiving anything you didn’t somehow earn is dangerous as hell.

I wanted to know what happens when that habit reaches our spiritual lives too, and whether the body might know something about grace that the intellect has been trying to understand for centuries.

CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)

If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Your body can be exhausted and still refuse to rest. You lie down, your jaw stays tight, your shoulders keep working, and some part of you remains ready for the next demand.

This is Part Two of a three-part series on chronic bracing. We move from why the body learned to stay tense into what it can do instead. Drawing on Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Hubert Godard, bodywork, and basic physics, I look at why yielding has such a bad reputation, how the floor and the bed support movement, and why “relax your shoulders” often changes almost nothing.

We also talk about the exhale, the fear of letting another person help, and the difference between yielding and giving up your choices. You’ll hear a few small practices that can help your nervous system notice support before it adds more effort. If you haven’t heard Part One, start with The Braced Body, Why You’re Tense Even When Nothing Is Wrong. Part Three will move into grace, surrender, and what it means for spiritual trust to reach the body.

CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline

You’ll get:
☆ Weekly bonus episodes
☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)
☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts
☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)

If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/
MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

Artwork credit: “Surrender” by Tom Sullivan (Saatchi Art China)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.