The Death Archetype (XIII in the Major Arcana) features pretty heavily in this episode. But fear not, no one dies, and no one gets hurt. That's because Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese, the one with the line in it about letting the soft animal of the body love what it loves, features even more heavily. 

If you would like to continue on the Poems For Ma path with us, that will now be occurring on a daily basis here, as well as here.

All our pain and most of our pleasure it would seem, resides in our peculiar human predilection for wanting to have our cake, whilst at the same time also eating it.

How does the Magician archetype get us into, but also perhaps out of this conflicted, cakey business?

MUSIC:

All We Do For Love - Benny Sings (MNLA cover)

Break-ups suck.

Here's a final spell to help us get through and over, based around a Tarot card that accompanied me and helped me to heal (get over/get through in a therapeutic way) my last break-up: The Two of Cups.

PS: This podcast has been designed to be listened to on 🎧

⚡ SPELL THREE: A Spell for Beholding ⚡

Ingredients:

The Two of Cups x 3 

Your Anima/Animus expressed through music, writing (or some other creative pursuit) 

Hope, Faith, Love

Music used in this episode:

Villagers - "Everything I Am Is Yours" (Live/Acoustic)

Jacob Collier - "Make Me Cry"

Dirty Projectors + Björk - "On And Ever Onward" 

Jacob Collier - "Feel"

Glen Hansard - "Love Don't Leave Me Waiting"

Glen Hansard - "Bird Of Sorrow"

Glen Hansard - "The Song Of Good Hope"

Spotify Playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4nykZuTSPEpgWL1OMv5aJb?si=74b08bf29c4847d9

Break-ups suuuuck. 

Here's another spell to help us get through them.

PS: This podcast has been designed to be listened to on 🎧

⚡ SPELL TWO: A Spell for Connection & Centering ⚡

Ingredients:

2 tbsp of Lauren Groff's Annunciation (listen online)

1/2 tsp of Lazy Susan

a handful of polyvagal chanting/singing

100g of Florence William's The Science of Heartbreak

500g of Emma Jung's Anima and Animus [PDF]

a sprinkle of Catrine Clay's Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis 

a cup of John E. Sanford's The Invisible Partners: How the Male and Female in Each of Us Affects Our Relationships [PDF]

Music used in this episode:

Benny Sings - It's Not Enough

Yola - Dancing Away In Tears

James Blake - Limit to your love (live piano cover) - Nico Casal

Loudon Wainwright - Therapy

This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) - Afrobeat Brass Funk Cover by The Brighton Beat

Overjoyed (Stevie Wonder) Gerald Situmorang/Jacob Collier #OverjoyedChallenge

Spotify Playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4nykZuTSPEpgWL1OMv5aJb?si=74b08bf29c4847d9

Break-ups suck.

Here's are a few spells to help us get through them.

PS: This podcast has been designed to be listened to on 🎧

⚡ SPELL ONE: A Spell for Connection & Centering ⚡

Ingredients:

200g of Alice Oswald's poem Sisyphus [PDF]

a sprinkling of musical scales and polyvagal chanting

7 large slabs of Sitting Shiva dark chocolate

1/2 a cup of Anne Carson's The Glass Essay

3 1/2 teaspoons (or one tbsp) of Carson's Eros: The Bittersweet [PDF]

2 tablespoons of Elvis Costello talking about his new album

1/2 a teaspoon of Antonio Pascual-Leone's How to Get Over The End of a Relationship

500g of Loving The One You're With

250g of Florence William's The Science of Heartbreak

500g of Emma Jung's Anima and Animus [PDF]

14 kg of Maxie-Jacks

1 tablespoon of Catullus 85

a handful of Jaws/Moby Dick

a sprinkling of Schopenhauer and The Sorrows of Young Werther

2 tsp of Lazy Susan

Infinite Emptiness

Music used in this episode:

Jóhann Jóhannsson - A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulder

Hot Chip- Bathful of Ecstasy

Elvis Costello - Farewell, OK

Joep Beving - Sol and Luna

Stephen Stills - Love The One You're With (version: The Hindley Street Country Club)

Stephen Stills - Love The One You're With (piano - Andy Milne)

De Profundis Clamavi A Te, Domine (From the Depths, I Have Cried Out to You, O Lord - Gregorian Chant)

What has the archetype of the Magician got to do with John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, the colour we now call Schoolbus/Safety Yellow, Extended Mind theory, entropy (physics), depression (metaphysics), and ring-tailed lemurs wanting to be antelopes? 

Links: 

The Sound of The Sun (poem) by George Bradley

Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul (poem) by Frank O'Hara

The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul

The phylogenetic roots of human lethal violence (Gomez, Verdu, Gonzalez) - 2016 article in Nature

Music:

Lost With You: Patrick Watson

Wiz Ofuasia: Magic

Hot Chip: Bath Full of Ecstasy

In this one I explore what it means for the fool to be "high", making a distinction between The Natural Fool (symbolised by the pooch at their side) and the Fabricated Fool who is just about to step off the edge of a thought into the abyss.

I present five fools, both ancient as well as modern, so that we might together play the guessing game we end up playing with ourselves and others most of the time anyway: Good/Upright Fool vs. Bad/Reversed Fool. You decide. 

L'chaim!

What the Fool can teach us about gravity: i.e. the ups and downs of life.

We learn about Henry Patenson, Sir Thomas More's family fool, and how the Fool archetype (as well as those who embody it) present a way of being in the world that is candid, truth-seeking, but also deeply playful.

"The ‘trickster’ figure that anthropologists have identified in ancient myths and legends, the chaos-makers and sower of discord, who frighten the hell out of us, but also appeal in their vitality and creativity, might at some point become bound and contained in a mutually advantageous partnership with a tribal chieftain or king; advantageous to the ruler because they provide him with necessary recreation (fools could often play musical instruments, sing, tell stories and jokes) but also, because the fool possesses little social capital themselves, they are not vying for status like everyone else, they are nothing but that form in which they manifest moment to moment, having through circumstance or by conscious choice, stepped out of zero sum game of status and the being of a somebody which seems at times to be the only glue that holds the human animal species together."