Wyrd Words, the Nonbinary Nature of the Universe, and Casting Spells with Everything You Say
Welcome back to Living the Spiral: Magicians!
So this one was a wander.
I sat down with Petah Raven, editor, writer, and the mind behind Pandora’s Lost Gift on Substack, and we just... followed the threads.
To give you a little context for how we found each other: I’m an astrologer and Human Design guide, and for the last year a significant thread running through my work has been the myth of Inanna - the Sumerian queen of heaven and earth who descends through seven gates into the underworld, stripping away everything she knows, and returns transformed. I’ve been painting her, and I’m writing a book called The Great Below that maps the stages of her descent to the body and the wheel of the year. She has been a real presence in my life and work over this Fire Horse year, not just as a symbol but as something I’d call a genuine visitation.
What really got me was what happened after his visitation: he went and looked up the asteroid Ishtar in his chart and found her sitting exactly on a significant transit point at that moment. She had shown up in the sky to mirror what had happened in the meditation.
That sent me straight to my own chart, and I found her right on my Mars in my first house - conjunct the planet of desire and will, right at the surface of the body and the self. It reframed so much for me. Mars in the first house is the part of you that leads, acts, desires, and moves into the world without apology. And there she was. The queen of heaven and earth, the one who descends by choice and comes back fiercer than she left, sitting right on that point.
It changed the way I read my own personal mythology. And finding a male-bodied writer engaging thoughtfully and personally with goddess mythology from the inside was rare enough that I wanted to have a longer conversation.
I’m really glad I did.
We started with the origin story behind Petah’s Substack name (Pandora’s vessel was a jar, not a box, and it wasn’t actually Pandora who opened it), and from there we were off.
We talked about words as spells - which is where the episode title comes from. The Old English wyrd is where we get both “word” and “weird.” Spelling is casting spells. We are all, at any given moment, weaving something with our language. That thread ran all the way through, from runes to propaganda to the magician card to what it means to build a narrative versus just having good intentions.
We got into the goddess, polytheism vs. monotheism, and why Petah thinks anything “mono” is kind of a bad idea spiritually and psychologically. We talked about the non-binary figures in the Inanna myth, imaginal cells, the tai chi symbol, Fuxi and Nüwa (see their image below!), and how yin and yang in Chinese is actually one word - because they were never meant to be separated.
There was a moment where we talked about the internet as a hyperlinked oracle and then mourned the scroll replacing the surf. And another where Petah made the point that magic gets dangerous when you hand it to people who haven’t earned the wisdom to wield it, which feels very true right now.
The whole thing was that kind of conversation where you look up and an hour has passed and you’ve somehow gotten from Pandora’s jar to Tolkien to the Daoist cosmogony to the etymology of Thoth’s name.
Petah has a book coming out soon called The Living Language of Tarot, and I cannot wait to work with it.
You can find Petah’s writings on Pandora’s Lost Gift here on Substack.
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About Alison & Living the Spiral
Alison Dale is an artist, writer, astrologer & human design guide based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives at the intersection of ancestral systems that track the seasons and the planets, embodiment practices, creativity, and earth-based spirituality. She hosts the podcast Living the Spiral, and offers astrology and human design readings as well as 1-on-1 astro-somatic coaching packages at hearthandspiral.com.
Join her here on Substack by clicking the button below, and follow along on Instagram at @hearthandspiral.
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