The Hagstone Podcast

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The fourth episode of The Imbas Transmissions. This time, we chat about initiation as a translator of the ineffable, the perennial influence of Austin Osman Spare well beyond chaos magic, and ergodic literature as Imbas transmission. You can receive full episodes of The Imbas Transmissions by either becoming a paid subscriber or joining Chad’s Coven of …

Greetings Hagstone Listeners!Writing to you from the edge of an unintentional, and honestly much needed summer hiatus from post, don’t you worry regular content will resume when the time is right. For now check out today’s episode and a very special workshop announcement!See you soon, IMBAS willing.On today’s episode Chaise speaks with Erik Ohlsen. Erik is a Permaculture teacher, an author, herbalist, storyteller, and practitioner of Nordic magical traditions. He is the founder of Permaculture Artisans and The Permaculture Skills Center.

Since 2000 Erik has worked with the Reclaiming Tradition, mentored under a Swedish Galdrakarl gathering the living traditions of ancient Norse galdr and authentic rune lore and he has spent years mentored under a globally recognized teacher of a Nordic Magical Folk Tradition called Trolldom.

In their conversation they speak about building a magical practice that is centered on relationships. Particularly relationship with ancestors and relationship with the earth. We hope that you enjoy the episode.For more information about Awakening Our Earth Body, the workshop Chaise is co-hosting with Erik in October, please follow this link.To join the Imbas Transmissions crew you can sign up over at the dedicated Hagstone Podcast Substack, or on the Radical Elphame Patreon.

Join us for a weekend of deep, embodied connection with place. Together, we will explore practices rooted in ancestral traditions to support ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth.

Many of us were raised without a sense of cultural grounding or practices for cultivating relationship with place and its spirits. The legacy of colonization still impacts our communities and our bodies. Whether as communities of diaspora, grieving lost ancestral ways, or as first nations people, reclaiming culture from erasure, we gather to explore what it means to be people of place and reciprocity.

Real folk magic has always been about what is actually needed to survive, heal, and thrive. Throughout our time together we will explore and build upon magic rooted in ancient traditions while also welcoming new and emergent impulses that result in practical and relevant spells for the times of crisis we live in now. This is more than just a program about the old ways, this is two days of intense magical exploration, embodiment of the elements, and active sorcery for our world.In these times, the longing for connection across difference feels urgent, and rooting back into the living earth becomes an even stronger imperative. As beings of the land, the basket that holds our magic is—and always has been—the earth-body, our body: the source of all magical and ceremonial protocols, stories, songs, and dreams.

This invitation is less about scholarship of old cultures; it is about a living practice, as we heed the call of the all too used metaphor, “tend the flames, not worship the ashes.” We will be courting our embodied relationship with the more-than-human-world and walking away clearer in our unique style of listening, sensing and magic making.In this spirit, we invite you to a weekend of immersive practice with three deeply seasoned practitioners of magic, story, and ceremony. We will steep ourselves in the old lore, stories, and ceremonies in service to place, here on Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok land.

What you will learn:

Traditional generational magic systems

Wisdom encoded in story

How to use perception of yourself and the elements in magic

Embodied Spirit connection

Spadom: divination technique

Magical herbalism

Methods for creating spells for healing, binding and luck

Date & Time

Saturday, Oct. 17th 10-4pm followed by 6-9:30pm Potluck & Ancestor Ritual

Sunday, Oct. 18th 10-4pm

Location

Ohlsen Homestead in Sebastopol, California

(address w/ registration)

Tuition

$275 early bird (by September 11th)

$325 regular price (after September 11th)

$500+ for those with means that wish to support scholarship ticketsf

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hagstonepodcast.substack.com

Greetings dear Hagstone Listeners, Happy William Blake to those who celebrate, the legend goes that he passed away at 6 PM London Time on August 12th 1827. As you know Blake haunts the writing and podcasting coming through this channel, made all the more potent by the height of the eclipse today occuring at just about the time of his passing.

Expect mor…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hagstonepodcast.substack.com

Enjoy a Patreon preview of the second episode of The Imbas Transmissions the new Patreon exclusive podcast collaboration I am doing with Chad Andro of Radical Elphame. This time, we sit down with Teagan West to talk animism, weaving the web of wyrd, and imbas as the dance between hunter and hunted. You can receive full episodes of The Imbas Transmission…

Greetings all,

Excited to bring you a glimpse of the first episode of a Patreon exclusive series I’ll be doing with, friend of the pod, Chad Andro of Radical Elphame. We wanted to find a way to expand on some of the conversations we’ve been having behind the scenes and share them with the kind folks who make an offering to the digital tip jar on our respective Patreon and Substack pages.

All future episodes of the Imbas Transmissions will be available here to paid subs, or on my Patreon page I think this show is very much a living thing, and likely will evolve and change. This episode is us jamming on some possible directions. The flagship Hagstone Podcast, and all essays will continue to be freely available.

SHOW NOTES:

Theme Song: “Move it” by dunhamm

My Patreon

Chad’s Substack: The Foliate Head

Radical Elphame

Outro Song: “Maiden Voyage / Everything In Its Right Place” - Robert Glasper

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What does it mean to reclaim your cultural heritage in service to struggle? And what do you owe the people whose land you live on when you don’t know your own songs?

This month Chaise sits down with Ben Reid-Howells — Scottish-Canadian community organizer, co-founder of Deep Roots Alba.

Ben’s story begins in so-called Canada, growing up with immigrant parents and a longing to answer to the question: what are our people’s creation stories? That early hunger set him on a path that included a three-and-a-half year motorcycle journey from India to Scotland with his friend Prashant (the Vasudhaiva Ride, named for the Sanskrit phrase meaning “the whole world is one family”), a year building a grassroots climate justice center in Bihar, working with asylum seekers in the refugee camps of Lesbos, getting rooted into working-class Glasgow communities, and finally being brought into Gaelic culture by tradition bearers.

Deep Roots Alba grew from all of that. The work brings together people reclaiming Gaelic and Scottish heritage at the intersection of solidarity activism, specifically in relationship with communities facing systemic oppression globally. It’s about not showing up as “hungry ghosts” — culturally empty, collecting and leaching from other traditions — but arriving with nourished Roots and something to offer: your own songs, your own protocol, your own bread to put on the table.

Upcoming: Deep Roots Alba’s next gathering is Healing Across Waters: The Highland Welcome, July 1–6 at the Sheeland Collective in the north of Scotland. This gathering is designed specifically for diaspora, to grieve the rupture of disconnection and return people to culture in a grounded, powerful way.

Find Ben and Deep Roots Alba: Website: deeprootsalba.org Instagram: @deep.roots.alba

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Todd Elliott farms 30 acres on a ridgetop in Owen County, Kentucky, and his magical practice grows directly from that land. His book The Cunning Farmer: Agrarian Magic, Mythology and Folklore (Inner Traditions International) is the ground this conversation rises from, but the roots go much deeper.

Chaise and Todd begin in the practice of utiseta, the Old Norse art of sitting out on the land at night to receive what comes, and find immediate common ground. From there the conversation moves through bird language and the ecology of silence, the intelligence that lives inside wind and weather, Scandinavian folk magic traditions including trolldom and the art of the charmer, and what it means to tend relationships with the dead on the land you work. Todd also speaks about his encounters with the ancient inhabitants of his land, the Adena and Hopewell peoples, and how those contacts have shaped his practice over years of sitting out.

The episode closes on the question of who this book is really for. Todd is clear that while farming is the lens, the deeper subject is a way of seeing, an animistic worldview that runs from soil and root up through the planets and the super-celestial forces beyond them, and that almost anyone willing to attend to the world as alive and speaking will find something here to work with.

The Cunning Farmer: Agrarian Magic, Mythology and FolkloreThe Cunning Farmer Substack

Todd Elliott is the author of The Cunning Farmer: Agrarian Magic, Mythology and Folklore, published by Inner Traditions International. An organic farmer, father of two boys, husband, magical practitioner, earth worker, healer, and astrologer, he has been certified as a Reiki Master by Insight Holistic Health and as an Astrological Magician by Renaissance Astrology. A life-long student of organic agriculture, mythology, religion, folklore, and esoterica, he lives, writes, studies and works the land on a 30 acre ridgetop farm in Owen County, Kentucky, where he and his family run a CSA program, ethically raising vegetables, fruit, and livestock.”

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In this month’s episode of The Hagstone, Chaise Levy sits down with Dutch-based oral storyteller Simon Hodges, known as Lindenbauer, to wander the marshlands between land and fairy, cultivation and wildness, memory and responsibility. Beginning in the drowned farmlands of the Biesbosch, a tidal landscape shaped by flood, war, and beaver teeth, the conversation opens into a deeper inquiry. What happens when we slow down enough to perceive the intelligence of place?

Drawing on lived encounters, landscape history, William Blake, David Abram, and the discipline of oral tradition, they explore the subtle threshold where land encounter becomes fairy encounter. The episode moves from childhood visions and ash tree vigils to hazel charms and dragon weather, asking what it means to enter into relationship with something more than human, and what happens when we fail to uphold that relationship.

Throughout, storytelling emerges not as performance but as practice, a way of returning to the same place until it begins to speak through you. The teller becomes less a personality and more a threshold, someone willing to falter, to lose control, and to allow truth to move through the room. From Shakespearean stages to marsh edges, from cultivated Dutch peatlands to California’s flood prone plains, we trace how perception shifts when language becomes an organ of attention.

Ultimately, the conversation gestures toward a quiet but demanding reorientation. Enchantment is not spectacle. Fairy is not novelty. Relationship requires responsibility. Story, carried mouth to mouth across centuries, may be one of the last bridges where the more than human world still waits for us to listen.

New Theme Music: Taliesin, written and performed on Tenor Guitar and Mandolin by Chaise Levy

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In this month’s episode of The Hagstone, Chaise Levy sits down with Scott Richardson-Read to trace the living force of story shapes nations, roots itself in land, and moves through communities as something more than metaphor. Beginning with the claim that “all we ever really have is story,” the conversation travels from Scottish political identity to digital worlds, from local hillsides to role-playing tables, asking what holds people together when institutions falter.

Drawing on folklore, landscape memory, online gaming culture, and oral storytelling practice, they explore story as a form of belonging. We track how shared imaginative space also for identity to be tested, inhabited, and transformed. The episode considers how a wide variety of otherworlds can function as contemporary mythic terrain, how communal storytelling generates a kind of “group body,” and how the teller becomes less an author than a mouthpiece for something moving through the room.

Ultimately, the conversation gestures toward a radical reorientation: imagination is not escape, but participation. Story is not distraction, but ground. What would it mean to recognize narrative not as illusion, but as the medium through which reality becomes livable, contested, and enchanted?

New Theme Music: Taliesin, written and performed on Tenor Guitar and Mandolin by Chaise Levy

Scott Richardson-Read is a working-class writer, folklorist, and alternative cultural historian with a deep connection to Scotland’s folk heritage. As the creator of Cailleach’s Herbarium, a platform dedicated to reviving and preserving Scottish folk traditions, Scott has spent years researching and sharing the stories, practices, and beliefs that define the working-class and animistic roots of Scottish culture. His work reflects a blend of deep archival exploration, oral history, and personal experience in the landscapes of Scotland.

With a background steeped in human rights, ecology, activism, and traditions, Scott’s writing bridges the past and present, offering fresh insights into the enduring significance of folk belief. Through his decades-long journey, he continues to advocate for the preservation of Scotland’s sacred sites and cultural heritage.

When not writing, Scott is often found exploring Scotland’s wild spaces, old libraries, and archives, drinking tea with his cats, or engaging with the vibrant communities keeping traditions alive.

You can find Scott’s work on his website Cailleachs Herbarium or in his incredible 2025 book Mill Dust and Dreaming Bread: Exploring Scottish Folk Belief and Folk Magic.

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In this months episode of The Hagstone, Chaise Levy sits down with Chad Andro of Radical Elphame to explore what Chad calls fairy apologetics, a reexamination of fairy lore that pushes back against fear-based, extractive, and overly dualistic approaches to the Otherworld. Drawing from folklore, Romantic poetry, animist philosophy, entheogenic experience, and personal practice, the conversation challenges the modern tendency to demonize or sentimentalize fairies, arguing instead for a relational and ecological understanding rooted in openness and transformation.

Together, they explore the collapse of strict boundaries between this world and the Otherworld, critique capitalist and colonial mindsets that seek to control spiritual experience, and trace how Romantic figures such as William Blake preserved a vision of fairy as a force of fullness that holds joy and terror, innocence and experience, creation and destruction in dynamic balance. The episode ultimately asks what it would mean culturally and spiritually to re-engage fairy not as danger or fantasy, but as a living mode of relationship with the animate world.

Connect with Chad Andro

Instagram: @radicalelphameSubstack: Chad Andro Podcast: Radical Elphame, available wherever you listen

New Theme Music: Taliesin written and performed on Tenor Guitar and Mandolin by Chaise Levy

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