Coven

For our first episode of season 4, we welcome natural perfume pioneer, author, and educator, the absolutely iconic Mandy Aftel. In this episode we look at her natal chart, discuss her past life as a counsellor, get virtual a tour of her scent organ, learn about bibliomancy, dive into her latest book, Symbolorum, and hear all about her journey into the world of natural fragrance creation. If you're in the Bay Area, do yourself a favor and visit her museum, the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, in Berkley.

Arabella Thais is a philosopher, writer, and researcher whose work explores the metaphysics of time, symbolic systems, and the aesthetic structure of reality. She is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy and physics at the California Institute of Integral Studies, lectures internationally, and serves as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Physics. Her research engages with retrocausality, depth psychology, and sacred number—drawing on influences from Heidegger to Hildegard von Bingen. Arabella is also the founder of The Temple of Truth, a mystery school devoted to consciousness, cosmology, and high-frequency living.
We were honored to virtually sit down Arabella for our season finale, and as expected, this conversation was so rich and inspiring. We discussed a wide range of topics, from her perspectives of time, to chaos theory, to addiction, to petrichor as a state of consciousness, to her upcoming book "On Being and Becoming", to aspects in her own natal chart and so much more.

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) was a linguistic alchemist, translator of the invisible, and stream of consciousness poet, best known for her novels, Agua Viva, Near to the Wild Heart, and The Passion According to G.H. Often compared to eccentric existential authors such as Albert Camus and stream of consciousness royalty like Virginia Woolf, Lispector remains undefinable, opting to linger in the land of the intangible and formless. The Ukrainian-born, Brazilian-raised writer left a legacy behind as a household name in much of Brazil, while remaining relatively obscure in the American zeitgeist. In this episode we discuss her natal chart, her limitless attitude, her trance like writing, her tumultuous upbringing, her natural genius, and her incredibly inspiring unbothered demeanor. Sources:https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/https://bohemianbookslut.substack.com/p/the-witchcraft-of-clarice-lispectorhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IiGkkQAcAghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1zwGLBpULshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMn0oigmfYUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nipf2pMtZYhttps://www.thenation.com/article/culture/clarice-lispector-apple-dark/#https://medium.com/@afmeurer/how-clarice-lispectors-literature-destabilizes-existentialist-philosophy-5f8dbfc2dfcehttps://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2024/05/27/me-a-witch/https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/14738/i-am-an-object-loved-by-god-rereading-clarice-lispector/#https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/obituaries/clarice-lispector-overlooked.html#:~:text=lispector%2Doverlooked.html-,Overlooked%20No%20More%3A%20Clarice%20Lispector%2C%20Novelist%20Who%20Captivated%20Brazil,welcome%20the%20attention%20she%20received.

In this episode we had the pleasure to sit down with our mentor and professor, Becca Tarnas. Becca is a scholar, artist, and archetypal astrologer. She is currently a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Red Books of Carl Jung and J.R.R Tolkien. She's also the author of Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, an editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, and is working on a biography of transpersonal psychology legend, Stanislav Grof. In this conversation, we discuss everything from the history of archetypes and mythology, to her research on Stan Grof, to motherhood and the lens shift that followed, to her own natal chart, to her experiences being raised by the iconic archetypal astrologer and historian Rick Tarnas (author of "Cosmos and Psyche"), to the complexities of binaries, to the Witch vs the Wizard, and so much more.

In this episode, we explore the life and work of Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), a groundbreaking science fiction writer and visionary widely considered a prophet for her eerily accurate predictions about our current world.Born in Pasadena, California to a working-class Black family, Butler overcame poverty, dyslexia, and systemic barriers to become one of the first major Black women in science fiction. Her work explored themes of power, evolution, and survival through an unflinching examination of social issues, becoming foundational to Afrofuturism and feminist science fiction.Butler won the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 1995, the first science fiction writer to receive this honor. Her most famous works include Kindred (1979), a time-travel novel confronting slavery's legacy, and the Parable series (1993-1998), set in 2024-2027, which predicted climate-fueled fires, political authoritarianism using the slogan "Make America Great Again," wealth inequality, and social collapse with startling precision.She passed away unexpectedly in 2006 at age 58, leaving behind an unfinished vision but a legacy that grows more relevant each year. As she once said: "I began writing about power because I had so little."Sources:"A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler" by Lynell George"A Few Rules For Predicting The Future" by Octavia Butler"Octavia Butler, The Grand Dame of Science Fiction | It's Lit" PBS YouTube"Octavia E. Butler." Wikipedia"Biography of Octavia E. Butler" - Biography.com (https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/octavia-e-butler)"Octavia Butler" - Yale Dyslexia (https://dyslexia.yale.edu/story/octavia-butler/)"Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents" by Octavia ButlerPBS Digital Studios documentary transcript on Octavia ButlerVarious interviews and essays by ButlerRecent coverage of LA fires and Butler's predictionsAcademic analyses of Butler's work and influence