Hekate has always lived at the crossroads — between worlds, between forms, between ways of being. In this episode, Dr. Cyndi Brannen, former psychologist and director of research turned Hekatean priestess and teacher, joins Risa to explore Hekate’s innate queerness, fluidity, and multiplicity. From myth and archaeology to lived experience, they trace how Hekate guides us through thresholds, offers radical autonomy, and reveals the sacred in the margins. From her home on coastal Nova Scotia, Dr. Brannen smiles and declares: “Queer is normal around here.”
https://keepingherkeys.com/
[00:00:00] Risa: The missing witches coven is trans-inclusive, anti-racist, feminist as hell, and welcoming to men and all people. We are pro-science, anti ableist, and utterly full of love and awe. If you've been searching for a community that believes resistance is sacred, and re-enchantment is necessary, that feminism is a spell, we're still weaving all together that care is radical, that the future depends on our collective imagination.
You found us. We're always learning from each other. We'd be lucky to get to learn from you too. Whether you claim the word witch or not, if you're hungry for this work, this is your circle. Join us@missingwitches.com.
Welcome back to The Missing Witches
podcast. Welcome friends. Welcome. To this cauldron that we create in the dark between our ears. This place where we meet with all of our tender and flawed and fertile offerings, whatever fears we carry, wherever we're at, whatever box we're in with whichever cat. We're here today with Dr.
Cindy Brannan priestess, teacher, psychologist, leader in an exciting and thrilling blend of ancient reverence with grounded practices, evidence-based practices of psychology, and author of a book that's been keeping me. Great company. Thanks so much for being here. We are really tied or emotionally excited by this idea that you are not obliged to be the person you were five minutes ago.
So while there are so many things that we get to know about you from your work and your bio, who are you today who's coming into this conversation with you?
[00:02:11] Dr Brannen: Oh, that is such a great question. We are definitely not. Who we were five minutes ago, and I think I'm gonna lead with something I said in my advanced leadership course that I teach something.
I said yesterday, we were having a hard conversation. Sometimes it's necessary. And I said, we are not defined by what we do or don't do for other people. And that is still thrumming and working through me. I said it on the spur of the moment because we were talking about leadership, and I just said that, and that is part of who I am today because after I said that, I started to explore like, do I do this?
Do I define myself or value myself in terms of what I do or don't do for other people? I think that's part of who I am today. And because I am fortunate enough to live in a part of the world where the sun is shining and the weather is perfect today in coastal Nova Scotia, I bring all of that energy. I spent time in the garden like I do every morning this time of the year.
So I bring all of that with me. Wild Roses mug, ward, and. Perennials. So I think that's what I'm, that's who I am bringing to our circle today.
[00:03:36] Risa: What a heavy and liberating idea that we're not defined by what we do or don't do for other people. That's a really hard one to wear or to take off wearing. I'm not sure which I have to do, but I definitely think a lot about how I will be remembered and whether it will be through the lens of how I touch people, what I did, especially these days.
I think about that a lot.
[00:04:04] Dr Brannen: It is our legacy, those 10 of Pentacles, if you're familiar with tarot, like what our legacy might be and how that, I think that you raise a good point because how is that connected to our own identity and how we define ourselves? You know, as, as a author of books, you know, that idea of how other people might see me from my books.
That my books are an act of service, like radical service to the readers and an offering to hete and the divine feminine and all that. I try to do justice to when I bring it into the world.
[00:04:46] Risa: All that we try to do justice to. Yes. I feel that. Can you take me back like how. Longstanding is this relationship with you.
When did Hakuta make herself known to you, and how did that relationship start?
[00:05:03] Dr Brannen: It was over 15 years ago. I had been a seeker of the divine feminine for years at this point. Artemis was my first Goddess Crush, and then I kind of moved on from there. I was alone late at night and I just heard this voice inside my head say, it's time.
And I knew it was Hete. I had some peripheral knowledge of Hete Hete. It's. Really become much more widely known in the decades since that moment. I knew she was a goddess of witches. I knew she was ancient and about crossroads, but I just had this completely transformative moment and I just started to build a practice.
What made sense to me, um, because there were no books on Hete back then, just opened up. To her presence, like how she presented herself to me, I think that's really important. As an author and educator and a priestess, I offer my work to others, and at the same time, I'm always saying, do what is right in your soul and trust how ate, or whatever goddess or spirit that comes through to you, trust how they show themselves to you.
Trust in that because that's how they are meant to appear to you.
[00:06:34] Risa: Do you ever have to code switch in your mind to put your experiences with the divine feminine or with a spirit with hete into a language that your psychologist self can accept? And if so, how do you do that?
[00:06:51] Dr Brannen: Well, this is my life.
[00:06:52] Risa: Yeah, right.
[00:06:54] Dr Brannen: Most of the time. It's been a long time, so I have. A lot of harmony within the two worlds now, but originally, even though I'd always been like a secret of the divine feminine, there was a hard line between my spirituality and my public career. In health research and you know, teaching psychology over the years like this is that crossroads.
This is where Hete abides, right? It's the crossroads, it's the meeting point, the meeting point of psychology with spirituality, and that's become my comfy place that this has become. Just the world that I occupy at first, there was a lot of tension. I gave up my old career to do what I do now. I'm not registered as a psychologist anymore because in some areas I'm too woo woo.
This has just really become my home base. There's so much intertwined with. Psychology, especially depth psychology, archetypal psychology, and also more what we might think of like as mundane types of psychology, like dialectical behavior therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy or internal family systems.
There's so many different ideas floating in that sea that when you look at modern witchcraft, those ideas are already present. Modern witchcraft. They might be called something else. But the underlying idea of internal family systems, so IFS founded by Richard Schwartz is the idea that we are multiple, and that within these multiplicities, there is a capital S self.
And when we look at witchcraft, we see that we hold ourselves in multiplicity. We don't think we are just one thing. There is this idea that there is a greater self or a soul or something more. Than just this mundane experience over the 20 years I've been doing this. It's just this, oh, this idea is like this idea from spirituality or this type of religious practice.
Weaving together all of these threads like into a crossroads in a way that I hope people find accessible. And helpful, like a way to help them find more meaning and healing by weaving this all together.
[00:09:26] Risa: You talk more about depth psychology. I'm, I'm not as familiar with that phrase.
[00:09:29] Dr Brannen: Depth psychology is a catchall phrase for describing psychology that.
More or less even tangentially, flows from the work of Carl Young. Um, so archetypal psychology, you know, working with archetypes, which we would call spirits, you know, same thing, you're just calling it something slightly different. James Hillman, Marian Woodman, another Canadian that you may have heard of, that whole area in psychology where the emphasis is on.
Deeper work going deeper than a cognitive behavioral technique like thought stopping. This is about soul work. So that's depth psychology in a nutshell.
[00:10:10] Risa: We think about archetypes a lot. My parents are psychologists and I started to. Practice and explore. Witchcraft is a meeting point of art and spirituality, activism.
I have to code switch a lot to try to put those pieces together for inside my own brain. For the way I was raised, I didn't study psychology. I was just raised by them. Another question I have, thinking about the time that you've spent with her, she can be used in such a. I don't mean to be dismissive, but she can be used in a way that can be sort of self helpy ate, I mean, or, or symbolic of just all dark side of witchcraft, dark feminine, the sort of Shakespearean version as you referenced in your book, but you offer us.
Seeds, tendrils roots that go back way deeper and that give a much more diverse picture of her. Can you talk a little bit about that? Hete animus? Mue Hete, like take us, take us deeper.
[00:11:19] Dr Brannen: This is such a great question. He, CTE's history is so fascinating to me and I've been studying it now since she first called me going back a couple of decades.
The way Hete. Was first known to me as this kind of goddess of witches. She was dark and scary. She might get you, but it would be for your own good. I think like the prevailing view back in the nineties and early two thousands of Hete and I connected with that in some ways. Yet there was this difference between.
How Hete was coming to me and what people were saying about Hete back then. I got curious about her history. I am a trained scholar, so although it's in psychology, I use my research skills and my access to academic libraries to start to do a lot of research on the actual history of hete. So, you know, the Shakespearean, scary Hete started to.
Come forth. Plays and stories circulating in what we think of like the late classical era and the early Roman era. The ground cleaved and out came dreadful hete with her hounds and her serpents and you know, and the guy who was always the center point of the story. The guy had a reckoning with hete in, you know, in these different stories or in plays.
Um, like Uri Madea, for example, stories about cce, where Hete figures in that in different works of art, HETE was always depicted, thus, sometimes benevolent. But she was a force and it was a moment of truth. Hete would turn the hero's world upside down. And I thought, that's really interesting. It's kind of what she does in Macbeth too.
So there's something there about Hete disrupts the hero's journey, and I thought, well, that makes sense to me. I feel like, you know, I don't really identify with the hero's journey, but in my own life, you know, it was this call. To be present in my own life, to be accountable for my own life and to live according to what was real and beautiful and true for me on the inside.
And then I went further and further back and many of us would be familiar with the story of Persephone and Deter. He's role in that story of Persephone really intrigued me because in the Homeric hymns they are thought to be. Much older. So the versions that we have today, I think they date back at least 2,500 years, but they're likely much older stories that were just recorded.
For the first time, and it exists in a way that was transmitted, and we have them today. But in this story, she's very benevolent. She's Hete. She's Persephone's helper. No one else will comfort Persephone. Hete comes to her aid. Demeter is losing her shit. Hete helps Demeter. And then when the whole deal is brokered about Persephone going down to the under rule with Hades for part of the year, and then being up above ground.
With Demeter for the other part of the year. In some versions of the story, it's Hete sometimes accompanied by her frequent companion, Hermes, but sometimes not. And sometimes it's just Hermes. It depends on the story, but, but Hete is her guide back and forth between the two. And that for me, felt so right.
And I thought, well, I'm gonna do more research on this because this makes sense. This is the Hete that I feel, I don't feel she is just this reckoning force that comes along to shake the life into you. You know, scare yourself back into living your own life. I feel like there's more, so that led me to exploring her religious history, how she was venerated in religious ways, and there's a lot of evidence.
From a temple in Anatoli of modern day tur, which is called Laguna. It's an ongoing excavation. It's been going on for over 20 years now. And if you're on Instagram and you type Le Laina into the search bar, you'll actually, they have a page on Instagram where you can see all the archeological work being done.
Um, at the Temple of Laguna, which is located near a town called Stre. And so there's a lot of records and it talks about hete as being like this expression of the great mother goddess associated with keys, crossroads, but also to do with the celestial, to do with the heavens and the ascension of the soul beyond the mundane.
But throughout all of these different. Representations of her across these thousands of years. She's always this guide, this divine mediator, you know, in an ancient philosophical channeled text called the Chaldean Oracles. She's depicted as like source and ma soul of the world, and also this connection with the moon.
We need to kind of put on our lenses and try to see as. The world was seen back then when these were channeled because the moon. In terms of understanding astrology, the moon is always this divine mediator. You know, the moon is the one that transmits and moderates the sun, for example. You know, when we look at the lunar cycle, the thinking was all of the planets, the moon is kind of like this membrane that everything has to go through.
And of course, in ancient times there was no separation between astrology and religious practice philosophy. They were all together. So astrology was very much. Part of their knowing. So to position Hete as the, like metaphorically this moon that transmits the greater energies of the celestial, you know, it speaks to this energies as being like the soul of the world because she is.
That divine intermediary, it's a really unique function compared to a lot of other goddesses, so that may be more linked to fertility or Gaia consciousness, which is the earth itself. Hete is fluid. She can be in any of the worlds at any of the time, but what she's always doing, she's always guiding, mediating.
Supporting. She's not meant to be the star of the show. She is meant to be the one that helps us always as we are mediating different forces or going through our, our life. And that she's very much associated with the earth. And I think this is something that gets sometimes mist when, you know, we kind of see like the more mainstream or pop culture version of Hete is in the ancient world.
All of this. Mapped onto her earthiness. This is not the same as under worldly or hellish, but to them they meant like this deep earthiness, like she's connected to nature. She is physics and physics. One of her epithets that really resonates with me. Even like when we look at catia or her cathartic aspects, Catho means of the earth.
It doesn't mean. Just of the afterlife. So there's this really beautiful portrait that emerges that she is here with us as humans. She is earthly, and at the same time, she is this divine intermediary that can help us with our soul's progression or whatever terminology you want. Sure. She can be portrayed as this great upheaval, scary witch ruin in Macbeth.
And all these other things, but at the same time, there's so much more to her than that. You know, for me, this idea that she keeps the cosmic keys really links back to how households in the ancient Mediterranean were run because women couldn't own property in the ancient Mediterranean. So what was done instead was that even though the man had to own the property, if the wife was an honorable woman, she held the keys.
And when you think of it this way, it's like, again, it's that divine intermediary. She holds the keys to the house of the spirits, the soul, whatever the celestial, whatever you wanna call it. She has this really rich tapestry and there can be a lot of diversity in how she comes through to us.
[00:20:27] Risa: I wanna pick up on this idea of the diversity of how she comes through to us.
I was so moved reading your book, reading through the epithets, and I'd love if you could explain that concept more for listeners, but in particular, trius the idea. That it wasn't this three part goddess that was this narrow version of a feminine experience. It wasn't maiden mother crone that it was Lan and sky.
It was our soul stretched out across the earth with her in some way. Can you talk more about the epi episodes? Talk more about a specifically Trius and then maybe. How this version of the divine feminine is accessible or open to those of us who are on a queer version of the Hero's Journey. What's in there in those epithets, in those stories for us?
[00:21:22] Dr Brannen: I love talking about all of this. So Tri Forus and there's other. Triple epithets associated with Hete Trius. There's a bunch of them. Trivia from the Romans. Historically, what they meant when they called her those things was her power. To abide at the crossroads, you know that there were triple hete statues placed at boundaries to towns and at important crossroads and at the entrance to temples.
All of this had nothing to do with maiden mother chrome because the ancient Greeks and Romans and others in the ancient Mediterranean didn't have this idea. They did not see the divine as. Being a specific age other than vaguely adult. So I always thought that's interesting that this maiden mother Chrome business, which came out of the early WCA days and the Pagan movement of books in like the fifties and sixties and seventies and even into the eighties.
I think this idea, the divine feminine, like women, we have three neat and tidy different bodies. The young body, the young Nile, innocent body, the mother body, and then the crone and there, there can be a lot of beauty in that. And at the same time, like you said, it kind of silos experience. And if that's how you see Hete is in body in the maiden mother in cr, that's fine.
I'm not here to argue with anyone's personal experience, but what I'm saying is historically that's not what was meant at all. It was about liminality. Um, being at the crossroads. It was about triplicity. She's given in another one of the most ancient references to Hete by Hessia. She's given dominion by Zeus over land, sea, and sky.
We see this triplicity kind of in her symbols, like the different symbols in antiquity she would be associated with. So you see this repeated again and again, this idea that she is a goddess who abides in all places and can see all things. Um, her name means most likely, means one from afar. So the, the triplicity is about, I like to call it Hete vision.
Right. You know that she can see all ways at once. She can dwell in all places at once, and that she has multiple forms, but those forms historically were not made in Mother and Chrome. Your second question or your second part of this question is about Haan queerness. It's a great question. I love talking about this.
And I'm gonna stay with the epithets for a minute. Something that's always kind of intrigued me is that Hete has many ancient epithets. Epithets are titles, descriptors of her characteristics and abilities that different ancient authors. Gave to her. Even, I wanna say also like regular people. 'cause we do have things like the Greek magical pappi and curse tablets.
So there's also sources just from regular PE how regular people 2000 years ago felt about hete. So she has many. Epithets, like, uh, KMOS is an example, which means like glorious one that's a masculine epithet typically assigned to Hermes, who is very gender fluid. And that's how we would see Hermes today.
And Heroes peer, the sacred fire that's masculine. So she has many epithets that are. In the masculine sense, and I mean this in the linguistic way, I'm not talking about gender roles. We're dealing with a language that is masculine and feminine. And these titles, when they're translated, they are a masculine, they come from a masculine Greek or Latin.
So I think that's always really intrigued me that she has these masculine epithets and a few of them I have followed the trail and you know, the original source, it is a masculine epithet. So then the question becomes, well what's this all about? Why was she given masculine epithets in terms of the research about why this was, you know, hete and some minor stories does have a husband and children.
I think in one, she's married to a version of Zeus and in another, she's married to a version of Pronos. I think Saturn, most of the time you see a hete who may or may not be the mother of CSA and made, or she's at least their aunt. That comes from like a lot of the fiction that we have, the plays and the stories rather than religious practice.
Typically in religious practice. In ancient times, she has no children, has no husband. She's very unique. Almost like Artemis, you know, that she is the one from afar. She doesn't have these kind of relationships. Frequently partnered with Hermes, but not married to Hermes. So, you know, I think as a goddess, she does embody the divine masculine and the divine feminine in fascinating ways.
You know, even looking at the idea of anima mundy world soul, that is a genderless idea, but it indexes to this idea, you know, of the, I guess you would say like the primordial womb, that we all come from the dark, wet womb. That's not about being a mother in the maiden mother crow model. It's about this primordial idea that we all come from the mother.
The mother of the Earth and my experience over the years is that hete, you know, personally, hete, abides in the margins where queer people like myself, where our comfort spot is, right. We're not meant to be of the mainstream. And I think she has a special resonance with anyone who identifies as queer. Um, whatever that looks like.
You know, I, so that's just my personal experience. I always say that, you know, queer is normal around here.
[00:27:49] Risa: Right? You know, we make these homes in the margins, these comfortable for us, queer places and dark edges. People come to magic, come to witchcraft for all kinds of reasons, but it can come with some trauma.
It can come with illness, physical or mental. We can come with some really sharp edges. We can come in crisis, you know, Googling coven at the, at the peak of, of mental health crisis, like how do you. Deal with that. In your coven, do you have advice for people who are making coven spaces that they're trying to keep safe to try to offer these tools and this magic and this kindness, but not overstep where really sometimes therapy is more appropriate?
Does that make sense?
[00:28:43] Dr Brannen: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense when you were talking about the frantic Googling, like, I can't go on like this and mainstream health services, like it's just not working with mainstream health services. I like to call them come to ate moments. You know, that there's something about her as a spirit or a force that offers sucker and support in our darkest hours.
And maybe that's why some people have kind of seen her as this scary dark goddess because like that's really scary for us. If that's where she abides is when we are in the pit of despair, we might conflate hete with the despair rather than that she's there to shine the light and be supportive. The despair is one thing.
Hete is a guide and a support. During those times. I just wanted to say that I've been leading an online coven for years now, and before that I've led rituals and was involved in different groups. There is something about those of us who just plain old, don't fit in, in what we think is the mainstream world or what we're being told is.
Normal that are called to witchcraft, called to spirituality, called to ritual because we have been pushed to that well of despair. And it's like when you look in the well of despair, there is a choice you can make, right? You can find hope and meaning in the well of despair, or we fall in and we're consumed by it.
I think that frantic come to Hte moment can be that time when we find hope and meaning. Maybe we do live with chronic pain, or maybe we do have other conditions or whatever we're dealing with, and yet there is so much to live for because we have found this beautiful practice of witchcraft and we find purpose and meaning through ritual.
Not only that, but it can heal us because we know, you know, going to mainstream medicine. It's, it's only, it only can do what it can do. But for many of us who have trauma or who have chronic disease, and oftentimes the two go hand in hand, early childhood trauma and chronic health condition, they go together.
From a science perspective, they're starting to be understanding about that. But from a soul perspective, like when we have soul. Damage or crises when we're early in life, of course they're going to impact our physical self. And so I think there's something intuitive, something deep that knows we may need mainstream healthcare things to help us.
We may need our prescriptions and treatments and all those things. And yet there is something deeper that we can unlock through our practice. Uh, and. We know this on some level, right? We on some level we know meaning is the way through. I think the other part of your question was about, given the fact that these are my people, we are neuro spicy, we are queer, very divergent in all sorts of glorious ways.
How as a spiritual leader can we. Respect the autonomy of people and not overstep boundaries. And this is interesting because I, I teach a class about spiritual leadership and we were talking about this yesterday about boundaries. When someone is struggling, clearly in crisis, for example, that's time for them to go to health services, whatever that looks like for them.
It's not our job to. Solve other people's problems or not know what our scope of practice, and that's a very psychological term. You'll know it because of your parents, but to not know what our scope of practice is. So yes, send energy, and there's so much that we can do with serious and mature energy work for each other to bring some comfort to people and at the same time, to not provide.
Psychological treatment and to not deny the role of health services. It's very important. It's something that anyone who endeavors to lead a coven, this is something to seriously think about. Like what is your scope of practice? How can you be ethical and know what it is you're capable of doing, like what your skillset is.
One of my big boundaries is I don't provide individualized services for my coven members. We're there to support you and help you with the content, but if we can't do it for everybody, we can't do it for one. That's one of our maxims, and I think that's so important before you offer to do anything for anybody, if you're the leader of an organization, if you can't do it for everybody in your organization, you can't do it for one.
And I think just understanding that when people come into your organization as a spiritual leader, and there's a lot of beauty and strength and power and diversity, their autonomy needs to be respected. Don't try to fix people. When I was younger, and I've seen others do this as well, it's like. Well, I'm just gonna give this person all of this advice, but their, their autonomy is they ask you for help and you give help that you are able to give.
And don't overextend yourself either. I mean, that's kind of a rambling answer.
[00:34:56] Risa: That's a super juicy answer. Thank you. I do wanna go back to something that I think will be more directly of interest to people who arrive at this conversation feeling like. Like, I don't know why the name has popped up for me.
Is this for me? What is this? Like who, who is calling me? Will you talk about some of the ways she shows up? Recently, I found what basically looked like a gravestone that I had never seen near my mother's house where she's lived for 30 years. My husband noticed it. We walked over to it and there was a set of keys sitting on top of it right after I had read that part of your book about how she shows up with keys and my daughter was like, can we put these roses there?
And we did. So I felt like that was one.
[00:35:44] Dr Brannen: That's one. This is interesting. We were talking about psychology and spirituality earlier. We can pull from an idea from a Carl Young here, his idea of synchronicity that the world of archetypes and spirits works on a deeper level. And heck yeah. Hete in the keys so often synchronicities.
You notice something you never noticed before and there's keys or something similar on it, and I want you all to keep in mind that it may be literal keys, but it may be things that are keys for you, like when you think of what a key does. It unlocks and opens the way to something. So it may be an actual key, but it could be a rose.
It could be a figurine, it could be a stone. You know, don't just think hete only speaks with literal keys. They can be symbolic keys as well to you. They unlock something for you personally. This often happens, the black dog. I've heard so many stories about the keys, like, you know, like people just finding keys, heart shaped keys, they're walking down the street and there's a key like so.
Yes, definitely Hete loves her syn to send synchronicities. And then there's the docs, the black dogs. Heard so many stories about people minding their own business and this black dog comes out of nowheres. I've heard so many stories that one way that Hete communicates is through synchronicities, and I think it links to she is a goddess of the earth, like she's earthly.
So it makes sense that we find these inexplicable treasures along our path because that's. Who she, you know, she's here with us. She's not floating in the sky. She's not like sky daddy somewhere far away. She's like right here amongst us. So, however this works and I love the mystery of it all. That's definitely a phenomenon.
Pay attention. Hete is always at work, and it's not that she's distant from us. Our work is to pay attention. Sometimes it's loud. Like you said, here's a grave, here's a set of keys. Super loud. She wanted your attention. Sometimes it's more subtle, you know, it's like us as witches developing our skillset that we are more attuned to these energetic frequencies rather than, you know, just sitting around waiting for a huge sign.
It's like, oh, there can be this little sign. There can be this bird. That comes right up to me and looks at me a certain way as own, you know, as birds can, and it's like, oh, that is not just a bird. Then, of course, dreams, and this is another interesting one to map, that if people are like, is this heck calling me?
Look to your dreams. Has there been. Uh, what you could classify as a female figure. Some people actually have dreams where it's like, oh yeah, that looked like what I think ate looks like. But it could be any type of figure who is doing this kind of soul guiding, like showing you around a dream scape, leading you from one place to the other.
And then maybe that's how Hakuta is coming through because the dreams are really her realm. She's here in the everyday with us and as mortals, you know, like the dream is our parallel world that we go into, and she's in both worlds. So I say, look to your dreams. Pay attention to if you meditate or anything that you do as a spiritual practice.
Like you might read your tarot cards or meditate or study astrology. Pay attention to the images that have a lot of resonance for you. Um, and see if that's how Hete is communicating with you. She understands us humans, and she communicates through tools that we work with in different ways. Remember that she tends to speak the symbolic language.
You know that the deeper world speaks anyway, rather than, you know, our super rational language. So she may give us something and then it's a typical hete fashion. Then we need to figure it out or not figure it out. Just trust in whatever's come through. It's meant to be what it is. So I think, yeah, just pay attention.
She's in your dream. She's sending you synchronicities. She's in your cards. She's there in your meditations. Just
[00:40:21] Risa: open up and trust. I wondered if you could talk about this new book, position it within the arc of the others, this journey that people can go on with you and really with your coven through the stories you tell in these books.
[00:40:39] Dr Brannen: So this is the third book in a series of Hete books that I've been writing for Red Wheel. Wiser. That's the publisher. This book is a book I knew I wanted to write for quite a long time. It is more like a book of shadows that I'm sharing my own notes, my own rituals, my own spells, my own reflections. So it's a true compendium of.
Many different things. There's Tara readings, there's spells, there's rituals, there's he's history, there's her companions. So it, it is like peering into a book of shadows rather than like a linear, progressive book or course. My last book entering Haase Cave. Was focused on the metaphor of Heta Cave and that kind of deep soul healing and shadow work that we can do.
So that was a very specific book, very psychological, as much as it was spiritual in nature. And then the book before that was all about botanical witchcraft, hete garden, because you can't talk about hete and not talk about herbalism. The connection to the natural world, and my first book about Hete was the Keeping Her Keys book, which has a different publisher and that is like a self-directed.
Version of a course on really finding your potential. It's merging witchcraft, spirituality, and psychology into something that you can do on your own through ritual and reflection to move yourself towards the life that you feel called to live, and a deeper connection to ate and a strong practice of witchcraft.
So those are my four books about Hete in a nutshell. In the Coven, which is called the Covina Institute, we have, uh, one course called He's Keys. That is a foundational program. It consists of four seasonal spaces. Through rituals and it weaves together all of my books in different ways. We do a lot of witch crafting.
We have the astrology of the moon, call it the Moon Day series. We go deep into the astrology, which is something I don't write much about publicly and haven't got there with a book yet. Writing about Kuan. Astrology keeping your keys.com is the website where you can find out more about. Everything that I'm up to.
[00:43:25] Risa: I want to talk about magic with you forever. Thank you so much. It's such a bal. You used the word sucker. It is. It's such a calming and at the same time really fertile and rejuvenating. Hmm. Story archetype conversation to get to be with, ate in all of these different forms. While the world is in such transition, I, I really appreciate everything that you have done to unearth her and to share her with us.
So thanks just for being here.
[00:44:03] Dr Brannen: Thank you for having me.
[00:44:04] Risa: We often say, uh, blessed fucking bee.
[00:44:06] Dr Brannen: Blessed fucking be Hail
[00:44:08] Risa: Hackaday. Hail hack.
[00:44:10] Dr Brannen: I'll give you another one. Just hete the fuck out of it. That's what we, we'll say Hete the fuck out of it. Just heck
[00:44:16] Risa: the fuck outta that. Let's do it.
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