By the petals and thorns alike, we wish you a merry Feast of Saint Rose of Lima! We hope you have had an august August and invite you to join us for a stroll through the RFG ramble-garden with us.

We begin our promenade of featured topics with the hagiography of Santa Rosa herself, the first person canonized in the Americas; in which we consider penance, mortification, sweet-smelling funeral miracles, floral saint-masks, and the fine line between Catholicism and being goth as holy hell.

Hooting and scooting along, we admire our long-legged Demon of the episode, Stolas, and discuss night-ravens, bogeymen, and the flocking cast of corvid spirits of the goetic spirit-lists.

Our Magic of the hour is Sleep Deprivation, in which we discuss how hypngogic apparitions and illusions, ordeal, and how spirit and psychological models do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.

In these restless nightly wanderings and ponderings we look to the mineralia of the Moon to talk selenite and its many overlaps and with moonstone and other varying reports of lunary stones; from its phlegmatic virtues for sailors and the pregnant, to noting the simplicity of divination via a mouthful of moonrock to know and fix in both heart and mind a course through the darkness.

Our nocturnal journeying leads us to the crossroads of Conjunctio, and the mysteries of combinations, the coagula, and ‘troublesome wit’; where X marks the spot, the sealed kiss, and the signed name on a contract you might not have read as thoroughly as you should; as well as considering some of the meanings and cautions of its counterparted Odu Iwori Meji.

Such crossed paths and ships in the night bring us to the romances beneath the Rose, our episode’s beloved Herb; crossroads emblem of unfurling mysteries, pallid innocence, red-blooded passion, divine and profane love, and the cartographer’s compass of the scented winds by which we orient ourselves.

Our Arcanum of this rosy adventure is naturally The Lovers: a card which has reflected at various points in its storied history political marriage, frisky couplings, Edenic blossoming and the love that Falls back, and the tensions between domestic responsibility and the dangerously adventurous.

Finally, our celebrated Dead Magician is Maria Sabina, the Mazatec spiritual worker who became a somewhat unwilling celebrity-psychonaut of the magic mushroom counterculture; prompting conversation on the folk healing of curanderismo, the ceremonies and historiography of the velada, and a commemoration of the profound poetry of psilocybin medicine, as well as the tragic and enraging colonialist consequences of Western bioprospecting.

We hope the ruby petals in our mouths sweeten our words to find their rambling way to spark your own interests, passions, and bloody-but-unbowed loves through the barbs and stings of the world, and that if you find yourself in a restless night of turning at the crossroads of sleep/lessness you may find some hypnopompic insight in the moonlight. Which is to say, as always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it. Thanks as always to our friend and editor Cooper for wrangling this garden out of our weedy words.

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.