The astrologer and teacher Adam Elenbaas kindly invited me to do an Astrologers in Profile interview, in which we discussed my journey into becoming an astrologer and scholar. Doing the interview was a deeply meaningful and moving experience for me, and I am so grateful to Adam for the opportunity to share my story in this way. Our conversation ranged through a wide variety of topics and ideas, and we dove into some rich philosophical and spiritual eddies.
I was invited to participate in a wonderful, wide-ranging astrological conversation with Philip Daniel Miles for his website Unifying Perspectives. We spoke about the power of language, death and rebirth, the archetypal experience of being in the womb, and the evolution of archetypes, as well as what it means to participate in the transformation of our current moment.
On Tuesday, October 23 I will be offering a presentation for Adam Elenbaas’s Nightlight Astrology School on “The Astrology of J.R.R. Tolkien“! This talk brings together two of my greatest loves and areas of expertise: the practice of astrology and the biography and writings of fantasy author and linguist John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. The presentation will be hosted online, at 4:00 pm Pacific time, 7:00 pm Eastern. Please visit the Events page of the Nightlight Astrology School for details on how to log in to the meeting.
J.R.R. Tolkien is best known as the author of the fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, first published in the mid-1950s and now translated into almost 40 languages. Tolkien first began writing about the world of Middle-earth during World War I, and continued doing so almost until the end of his life in 1973. Although he is best known as a writer, Tolkien was also a visual artist and an extraordinary linguist, holding a position as a professor of philology at Oxford University in England. As his close friend and colleague C.S. Lewis once said: “He had been inside language.” Drawing on an archetypal astrological perspective, this presentation will explore the natal chart of J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as his transits during the creation of some of his major works of art and writing.
To view my schedule of upcoming events, please visit my Events page!
I have the honor of joining 22 astrologers, scientists, and spiritual leaders in an extraordinary online conversation that will take place September 23-29, 2018. This free event is called Astrology Summit 3.0: Raising Consciousness & Deepening Your Spiritual Path, and is available to anyone to join.
The focus of the summit is to bring together ideas from astrology, spirituality, and science to reflect on the meaning of life, connect astrological studies and spiritual pursuits, gain practical tools for connecting to a higher consciousness, align to the deeper wisdom offered by astrology, and explore divination, prediction, transpersonal psychology, empowerment, and transcendence.
I will be speaking on the subject of “Astrology As A Spiritual Practice” in conversation with Amanda Pua Walsh, and will participate in a Live Q&A Panel with Patricia Walsh and Adam Sommer on Tuesday, September 25 at 4:00-5:00 pm Pacific time.
Each day between September 23-29 the Astrology Hub will release 3-4 summit talks that the audience can view for 48 hours from release date.
The live Q&A Panel broadcasts will be each day between Amanda Pua Walsh & the speakers whose talks were released that day (see schedule below).
After the 48 hour viewing period, you will need to purchase the Upgrade Package to access the Astrology Summit 3.0 recordings.
The schedule will be (all times listed are in Pacific):
Interviews released at 7:00 am Pacific each day.
September 23: Rick Levine, Meru Matu, Jennifer Sodini, Carolyn Elliott
Q&A Panel will be 2-3pm PT
September 24: David Palmer, Eric Meyers, Saharah Rose
Q&A Panel will be 4-5pm PT
September 25: Becca Tarnas, Patricia Walsh, Adam Sommer
Q&A Panel will be 4-5pm PT
September 26: Henry Seltzer, Julene Louis, Donna Woodwell
Q&A Panel will be 4-5pm PT
September 27: Nadiya Shah, Ron Baker, Vic DiCara
Q&A Panel will be 4-5pm PT
September 28: Teal Swan, David Cochrane. Nadia Smirnova-Mierau
Q&A Panel will be 4-5pm PT
September 29: Tashi Dos Santos, Sherene Vismaya, Adam Elenbaas
Q&A Panel will be 2-3pm PT
Gordon White, the fantastic host of Rune Soup, kindly invited me back on his podcast to discuss the practice of active imagination and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It was such a pleasure to drop back into conversation together two and a half years later, and to see how my research has evolved since my first interview with him back in 2016! The podcast is available for download or can be listened to directly below.
Since I was 9 years old, I have been a devotee of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and an avid explorer of the world of Middle-earth. I am therefore beyond excited to be teaching an online course through Nura Learning this autumn on Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings. I feel as though I have been waiting half my life to teach this class, and at last such an opportunity has arisen. If you have never read The Lord of the Rings before, or wish to return to Middle-earth to deepen your connection with this remarkable tale, I would be delighted to have you in this course.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien has been a beloved story to several generations since its publication in the mid-1950s. The story has a timeless quality to it, and engages with a complex struggle between good and evil, death and immortality, power and freedom. The Lord of the Rings blends otherworldly romance with the high rhetoric of epic mythology, at times interwoven with the internal depths of the nineteenth century novel and the political climate of the twentieth century. As Tolkien’s close friend and colleague C.S. Lewis once said: “Nothing quite like it has been done before. This book is like lightning from a clear sky . . . here are beauties which pierce like swords and burn like cold iron.”
The Lord of the Rings is a text treated by many as a sacred text, one to be returned to year after year, or read aloud with loved ones. The Lord of the Rings, for many, has become a myth for our time. This course offers a journey through Tolkien’s magnum opus in a community of learning, guided by a scholar who has spent more than two decades engaging Tolkien’s writings and artwork. This course is designed both for newcomers to Tolkien’s narrative, and for veteran travelers through Middle-earth’s many realms. Together we will explore the grand themes and hidden nuances of Tolkien’s epic story, connecting The Lord of the Rings to the larger mythology of Middle-earth, and situating Tolkien’s process of writing within his own powerful experiences of the imaginal realm.
To learn more and register, please visit: Nura Learning: Journey to the Imaginal Realm
I joined Renn Butler on his podcast The Astrology of Dreams: Explorations in Archetypal and Holotropic Astrology for a two part conversation on archetypal astrology and the upcoming Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto triple conjunction. We shared how we each came to the study and practice of astrology, and spoke of our experiences working in the field and some of the spiritual, philosophical, and psychological insights we have come to. Finally, we turned to the current and upcoming transits, looking back to earlier periods with the same alignments, so that we could come to some understanding of what may be in store personally and collectively in the next few years.
Part 1: Astrology as an Invitation to Cosmic Ecstasy
Part 2: The Upcoming Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto Conjunction
This Thursday, I will be making my way to Chicago for the United Astrology Conference, the largest gathering of astrologers I have ever attended. Astrologers from all over the world, representing a vast diversity of astrological lineages and perspectives, will be presenting on their research and practices, insights, discoveries and awakenings.
I will be offering a presentation entitled “Astrology as a Spiritual Practice,” which brings transpersonal spirituality and participatory theory into dialogue with the discipline of archetypal cosmology and the practice of archetypal astrology. Coming into relationship with the cosmos through the art and discipline of astrology is a life-long practice. Astrology opens up realms of knowledge to its practitioners that fundamentally challenge dominant perceptions of a disenchanted universe, awakening us to deeper participation in the spiritual meaning permeating the cosmos. I will be exploring how astrology can be lived as a daily practice with profound relational and psychospiritual implications. My presentation will take place on Monday, May 28 at 4:30-5:45 pm.
For those unable to attend UAC, I will be speaking on this same subject later in the summer for the Metropolitan Atlanta Astrological Society on Thursday, August 16 at 7:00-9:30 pm, Eastern time. Whether I connect with you at either or both events, I look forward to deepening the exploration into the spiritual dimensions of the cosmos in which we all participate.
My dissertation defense took place on February 26, 2018 at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
The Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion ProgramInvites You to
Room 607 & Online via Zoom (details below)
Beginning in the years leading up to the Great War, both C. G. Jung and J. R. R. Tolkien independently began to undergo profound imaginal experiences. They had each stepped across a threshold and entered into another world, the realm of imagination, the world of fantasy. Jung recorded these initially spontaneous visionary experiences, which he further developed using the practice of active imagination, in a large red manuscript that he named Liber Novus, although usually it is referred to simply as The Red Book. The experiences narrated in The Red Book became the seeds from which nearly all of Jung’s subsequent work flowered. For Tolkien, this imaginal journey revealed to him the world of Middle-earth, whose stories and myths eventually led to the writing of The Lord of the Rings, a book he named within its own imaginal history The Red Book of Westmarch. There are many synchronistic parallels between Jung’s and Tolkien’s Red Books: the style and content of their works of art, the narrative descriptions and scenes in their texts, the nature of their visions and dreams, and an underlying similarity in world view that emerged from their experiences. The two men seem to have been simultaneously treading parallel paths through the imaginal realm.
The revelations of this research hold deep consequences for modernity’s assumptions of a disenchanted world, and bring to the surface implications concerning the nature of imagination and its participatory relationship to the collective unconscious. In this dissertation, I will point to the possibility that Tolkien and Jung are preliminary guides on a journey to the depths of an ensouled cosmos in which imagination saturates the very foundations of reality.
Dissertation Committee Chair: Jacob Sherman, PhD
Dissertation Committee Member: Craig Chalquist, PhD
Dissertation External Member: Daniel Polikoff, PhD
