Back from the Borderline

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1. You’ve Studied the Mysteries. But Have They Changed You? (Anne Baring, Part 9: Epilogue)

   27 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 55 min

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   We’ve learned so much about healing, but have we learned how to love? Lees meer

   After eight conversations with 95-year-old Jungian analyst and author Anne Baring, I found myself questioning some of the beliefs I’d spent years defending, including my own understanding of spiritual development.

   In this deeply personal epilogue, I’m reflecting on our generation’s hunger for spiritual wisdom, the temptation to romanticize forgotten traditions, and a culture increasingly fascinated with extraordinary experiences while struggling with the much quieter work of personal transformation. We’ll explore the spiritual ego, the sacred marriage, and why understanding ourselves so thoroughly can sometimes prevent us from being changed.

   These conversations with Anne have affected me in ways I never anticipated. Some of the most meaningful lessons came from experiences we never recorded.

   This episode stands on its own, but I recommend listening to the full series for a deeper understanding of the ideas explored here.

   LISTEN TO THE COMPLETE ANNE BARING SERIES

   This is the ninth and final installment of my series with Anne Baring. Across eight conversations, we explore the history of the feminine divine, Sophia, Mary Magdalene, Christian mysticism, and the sacred marriage.

   If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

   EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK

   This series draws primarily on Anne’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

   Listen to Anne’s complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself.

   Explore Anne’s books and research on her official website.

   FURTHER READING

   For listeners who’d like to investigate some of the ideas discussed in this epilogue:

   Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism

   Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life

   Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective

   Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul

   Jes…

2. The Way of the Rose: Healing the Heart & the Sacred Marriage (Anne Baring, Part 8)

   20 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 5 min

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   For seven conversations, Anne Baring and I have been investigating the forgotten feminine face of God. We’ve explored Sophia, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, and the religious traditions that preserved aspects of the sacred feminine. Now, in our eighth and final conversation, we’re asking what all of that knowledge is supposed to do to us. Lees meer

   We start at Chartres Cathedral in France, where a medieval labyrinth invites pilgrims to walk toward its center before returning to the world. From there, Anne and I explore the neglected wisdom of the heart, the relationship between childhood wounds and religious ideas about guilt, and the sacred marriage, or hieros gamos, as a way of understanding the divisions within ourselves.

   After months of investigating religious history, we find ourselves confronting a much more personal question. How do we allow these teachings to change the way we live?

   This is Part 8 of an eight-part series. New listeners are encouraged to start with Part 1. Next week, I’ll return with a personal epilogue reflecting on how my own thinking has changed throughout these conversations.

   EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK: This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her books and research on her official website at annebaring.com.

   MY TWELVE PART SERIES ON CHILDHOOD EMOTIONAL NEGLECT: Click here to start episode 1.

   BOOKS & FURTHER READING

   Anne Baring & Jules Cashford: The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image

   Banafsheh Sayyad: Dance of Oneness: Embody Love and Luminosity to Transform Your Life

   Peter Kingsley: In the Dark Places of Wisdom

   Neale Donald Walsch: Conversations with God (audiobook edition discussed in the episode)

   Charles Spencer: A Very Private School

   PLACES & PRACTICES

   Chartres Cathedral: Medieval labyrinth and rose windows

   HeartMath Institute: Heart-focused contemplative pra…

3. The Cathars, the Inquisition and the Women Who Defied Rome (Anne Baring Part 7)

   13 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 46 min

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   In medieval southern France, a woman stood up during a religious debate and challenged the men who claimed the authority to speak for God. A Catholic cleric told her to return to her spinning, because theology was no business of hers. Her identity was Esclarmonde de Foix, and she belonged to a Christian religious culture in which women could teach, exercise spiritual authority and administer sacred rites. Lees meer

   This is Part 7 of my series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying Christian mysticism and the forgotten feminine dimension of divinity. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

   ☽

   In the last episode, Anne and I explored the Black Madonna, the Grail and the possibility that teachings associated with Miriam Magdalene survived in medieval France. Now we enter the Languedoc and the world of the Cathars, a Christian religious movement whose beliefs brought them into direct conflict with Rome.

   Through Esclarmonde’s life, Anne introduces us to a society where women could participate in theological debate and religious leadership, and where Christianity was understood in ways that would eventually be condemned as heresy.

   The Catholic Church launched a crusade against these communities in 1209. What followed remains one of the most devastating episodes in medieval European religious history. Anne believes the Cathars may have preserved teachings associated with early Gnostic Christianity and Mary Magdalene.

   After our conversation, I return with some personal reflections, including the extraordinary experiences that first led me toward Esclarmonde years before these interviews. I also discuss recent reading that has challenged some of my own assumptions about Catharism and made me reconsider how easily we can romanticize the religious past.

   ☿

   EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK

   This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Fa…

4. The Black Madonna, the Grail and the Survival of the Feminine Tradition (Anne Baring Part 6)

   6 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 18 min

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   A spiritual teacher dies, her community has to continue without her, and centuries later the written record can no longer tell us exactly how her teachings moved from one generation to the next. What, if anything, survives? Lees meer

   This is Part 6 of my multi-part series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying Divine Wisdom, Christian mysticism and the feminine dimension of divinity. Each conversation can stand on its own, but they build on one another. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

   ☽

   Last week, we focused on Miriam Magdalene and early Christian writings that present her as a woman with spiritual authority of her own. This week, Anne takes us west.

   In the tradition Anne works with, Miriam travels to Gaul after Yeshua’s death and spends the rest of her life teaching there. After her death, the historical record gets much harder to follow. Centuries pass before medieval France gives us another dense concentration of religious images, stories and devotional practices that Anne believes deserve serious examination.

   That gap sits at the center of this episode. A book can be confiscated or burned, while people can continue visiting a statue, singing to her, asking her for healing and teaching their children to make the same pilgrimage. How much religious knowledge can survive that way, even when later generations no longer fully understand what earlier generations were preserving?

   Anne takes us into the Black Madonna tradition, sacred caves and medieval devotion, and later into the Grail stories and the wounded king whose dying country can only recover when someone finally asks about his suffering. We also spend time with the Lady of courtly love and an old attempt to teach men trained for war another relationship with women and power.

   After Anne and I finished recording, I kept reading Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, which Anne recommends during our conver…

5. Mary Magdalene, The Beloved Companion (Anne Baring Part 5)

   29 september 2026 · 1 uur 16 min

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   Mary Magdalene has spent nearly two thousand years buried under other people’s interpretations of her. Repentant prostitute. Devoted disciple. Apostle to the apostles. Mystic. Wife of Jesus. Suppressed leader of early Christianity. This episode asks us to actually meet Miriam before deciding who she was. Lees meer

   This is Part 5 of my multi-part series with Anne Baring, a writer and Jungian analyst who has spent decades studying the Goddess tradition, Christian mysticism, Divine Wisdom, and the feminine dimension of divinity. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

   ☽

   Our previous conversation explored the Essenes, the Therapeutae, and the religious culture Anne believes surrounded Yeshua. Here, we focus on Mary Magdalene as a spiritually educated woman and an initiate in her own right.

   We look at early Christian writings in which Mary repeatedly understands teachings that other disciples struggle to grasp, then ask the question at the center of this episode. How much spiritual authority did Mary possess?

   Her relationship with Yeshua is part of that investigation. We discuss The Gospel of Philip, the Greek word koinōnos, traditions concerning their possible marriage, and the consequences of understanding Mary as Yeshua’s spiritual counterpart.

   We also discuss The Gospel of the Beloved Companion and Annine van der Meer’s Mary Magdalene Unveiled, which examines proposed connections between the Beloved Companion material and the canonical Gospel of John. These claims are extremely controversial. Anne finds the case persuasive, and so do I. I’ve included key sources below so you can examine the material yourself.

   Near the end, Anne reads an initiatory teaching attributed to Miriam concerning ascension, direct spiritual knowledge, fear, and power. After the interview, I return for a longer reflection on why I think this teaching deserves serious contemplation.

   ☿

   EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK

   This series draws on Ann…

6. The Essenes and the Women Around Yeshua (Anne Baring Part 4)

   22 september 2026 · 1 uur 22 min

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   What kind of spiritual world could have formed Yeshua before Christianity existed? Lees meer

   This is Part 4 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend beginning with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, and following the series in order.

   ☽

   Christianity often starts its story when Jesus begins preaching. In this conversation, Anne and I go further back and ask what was already there.

   Anne takes us into her understanding of the Essenes and Therapeutae, contemplative communities she believes preserved an older Wisdom tradition concerned with healing, direct experience of the divine and disciplined development of consciousness. They called themselves Children of the Light. Anne places Yeshua inside this religious world and describes him as an elder brother and teacher who had gone further in his spiritual development and could show others what a human being was capable of.

   We talk about what spiritual training was actually for. Anne describes meditation, inner vision and ascension, along with an understanding of healing based on restoring harmony within the person. The heart served as an organ of discernment, while religious knowledge was expected to alter how someone lived rather than remain an idea about God.

   The women around Yeshua come into focus in the second half of the conversation. Anne describes Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene as advanced initiates and teachers rather than the passive figures many of us inherited through Christian tradition. We talk about women as healers, the spiritual education of children and Anne’s beautiful description of motherhood and caregiving as forms of initiation into love and service.

   Some of Anne’s reconstruction draws on historical and late-antique texts, while some comes from modern channeled material, especially the work of Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis. I spend time in the introduction explaining these source…

7. Gnostic Sophia and the Suppressed Christian Mysteries (Anne Baring Part 3)

   15 september 2026 · 1 uur 25 min

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   What if early Christianity contained a path centered on direct knowledge of the divine within us, and that path was pushed outside the Church that survived? Lees meer

   This is Part 3 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend beginning with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, followed by Part 2 on Marija Gimbutas and the civilization of Old Europe.

   ☽

   In this conversation, Anne and I enter the world of Gnostic Christianity and a Yeshua many of us were never introduced to: a teacher concerned with awakening human beings to the divine light within themselves. That understanding of Jesus sits uneasily beside the Christianity that eventually gained institutional power in Rome.

   We start with Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose surviving poem describes a journey into darkness, guidance from the daughters of the Sun, and knowledge received directly from a goddess. Anne sees him as part of a more ancient visionary tradition that continued into Gnosticism, where gnosis meant direct knowledge of the divine rather than religious belief alone.

   From there, we get into the Gnostic Yeshua, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, and why a Christianity built around the divine light within the human being came into conflict with the Church that gained power in Rome.

   Sophia is at the center of the episode. In Pistis Sophia, Divine Wisdom descends from her celestial home, becomes lost, and has to find her way back toward the Light through thirteen metanoias, or changes in consciousness. Anne compares her story with the Christian interpretation of the Fall, especially the guilt and disobedience that became attached to Eve. Sophia gives us another way of understanding what has gone wrong. She has lost touch with where she came from and mistakes a lesser light for the true one. Her task is to wake up, learn to see differently, and remember.

   We also spend part of…

8. The Lost Civilization of the Goddess (Anne Baring Part 2)

   8 september 2026 · 1 uur 6 min

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   What if the history of Europe contains a civilization most of us were never taught about? Lees meer

   This is Part 2 of my multi-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September and October 2026. While each episode can stand on its own, I recommend starting with Part 1, The Forgotten Feminine Face of God, which introduces Anne and the larger history we’ll be following together.

   ☽

   In this conversation, Anne takes me into the work of Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and the world she called Old Europe, a network of Neolithic cultures across southeastern Europe that she spent decades studying through figurines, vessels, settlements, burial sites, goldwork and recurring religious imagery.

   Anne explains why Gimbutas believed this world was centered on the Great Goddess, how she read birds, snakes, spirals and water as part of a shared sacred language, and why she argued that these societies were matrilineal, broadly egalitarian and unusually free from organized warfare.

   We also talk about the later movement of steppe peoples into Europe, the fierce opposition Gimbutas faced during her career, and the later ancient DNA research Anne sees as supporting an important part of her migration theory.

   The conversation also becomes beautifully and unexpectedly personal. Anne speaks about growing up with a mother who received channeled writings, the out-of-body experience Anne had at thirteen, and the dream that brought Jules Cashford to her and eventually led to the ten-year writing of The Myth of the Goddess.

   Anne also remembers seeing the objects from The Lost World of Old Europe in person at the Ashmolean Museum, including the great painted vessels that left her speechless. We end by asking why this history still matters to her, and what she would say to Marija Gimbutas if she could sit across from her now.

   ☿

   EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK

   This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. Y…

9. The Forgotten Feminine Face of God (Anne Baring Part 1)

   1 september 2026 · 1 uur 29 min

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   For thousands of years, the Western image of God became increasingly male. Anne Baring has spent much of her life studying what we lost when the feminine disappeared from our understanding of the divine. Lees meer

   This is Part 1 of my eight-part series of conversations with Anne Baring, recorded across September 2026. Over the course of the series, we’ll explore the work Anne has spent much of her life devoted to, from the ancient Goddess and the Western wisdom traditions to Mary Magdalene, the Divine Feminine and the sacred marriage. This first conversation introduces Anne and many of the ideas we’ll return to in much greater depth throughout the series.

   Born in 1931, Anne is an Oxford-educated historian, Jungian analyst and co-author with Jules Cashford of The Myth of the Goddess. We begin with the ancient Great Mother and the work of Marija Gimbutas, before moving into Anne’s account of how Western religion gradually separated spirit from nature. She takes us through Asherah and Sophia, the feminine Holy Spirit, Mary Magdalene and the Christian traditions she believes preserved an older teaching of love and wisdom. We also talk about power, self-deification, the body, and why Anne believes the loss of the feminine divine changed the way Western culture came to treat the Earth and one another.

   Anne is 95, and this is the first in a series of conversations we’ll be recording together. Future episodes will give us time to stay with subjects we only scratch the surface of here, including Mary Magdalene and the Beloved Companion, the Essenes, the Cathars and the sacred marriage. This first conversation ends with Anne speaking personally about prayer, service and how her understanding of God has changed over the course of her life.

   EXPLORE ANNE BARING’S WORK

   This series draws on Anne Baring’s book, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God. You can listen to the complete audiobook for free on YouTube, narrated by Anne herself, and explore her bo…

10. How to Tell When a Spiritual Teacher Is Full of Shit

    25 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 58 min

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    In 2020, I almost paid $4,000 for a shadow work course. One of the first books I was told to read was Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink. I read it, tried to understand what I was being sold, and kept getting the same bad taste in my mouth. It’s been six years since then, and I’ve come back with receipts. I understand why it bothered me now. Lees meer

    This episode digs into the history behind some of online spirituality’s favorite borrowed ideas, Jungian shadow work, Tantra, sex magic, Thelema, Babalon, occult initiation, manifestation, the Left Hand Path, passive mediumship, and the modern spiritual coaching industry that learned how to package this material into high ticket programs.

    I look closely at Carolyn Elliott’s work, what Carl Jung actually wrote about the shadow, how Western neo Tantra differs from older tantric traditions, and the ethics of a teacher who can reinterpret your hesitation as resistance, scarcity, fear, or evidence that you need their teaching.

    We also need to talk about why psychologically intense spiritual work can go badly when authority outruns training, why so much ancient wisdom being sold online has a surprisingly modern family tree, and why people sometimes leave these spaces burned enough to decide that every form of esotericism must be "demonic".

    If you’ve ever looked at a $3,000 retreat, a spiritual certification, an initiation, or an Instagram teacher promising transformation and thought, what the fuck am I looking at, this episode is for you.

    For my full exploration of Aleister Crowley, Thelema, and sex magic, you can listen here.

    If you want to join my card-by-card study of the Tarot through Christian Hermeticism and deep symbolic study, you can start from the beginning on Patreon. Click here or visit patreon.com/backfromtheborderline.

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