Mothers of Magic with Perdita Finn

PodcastSpiritual Ecology
Written By Geneva Tolentino

Show Notes:

Something in us already knows the Mother is larger than any religion, and Perdita Finn helps us remember why.

Welcome to our episode with Perdita Finn, a writer and teacher whose work opens a living dialogue with the dead, the unseen, and the more-than-human world.

Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors, and, with her husband Clark Strand, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. She teaches sought-after workshops on connecting and collaborating with both the dead and the animate everything, inviting us to remember that we are held in a vast root system of ancestors, spirits, and earthly kin. Perdita lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains, where her daily life and landscape continue to infuse her work.

In this podcast conversation, we explore the return of the sacred feminine, the “root system” of the Mother beyond lineage, and how our relationships with the dead and the living Earth can transform the way we love, grieve, and belong.

Listen now to the full episode and share it with anyone who is yearning for a deeper, more enchanted way of being in the world.

In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:

  • (00:00:01) The Rose Lineage and the Sacred Feminine

  • (00:02:38) The Role of Mary Magdalene and Cultural Repair

  • (00:05:03) The Archetypes of the Rose Lineage

  • (00:08:44) Perdita Finn’s Journey and the Search for the Mother

  • (00:11:36) The Root System and the Mother’s Way

  • (00:17:12) The Hail Mary Prayer and Its Symbolism

  • (00:24:00) The Three Books by Perdita

  • (00:28:27) The Role of the Mother in Modern Society

  • (00:32:10) Redefining “Mother” Beyond Gender/Biology

  • (00:36:30) Remembering her Grandmother

  • (00:42:16) The Way of Rose Community and the 5 Petals

  • (00:45:28) How to Pray with your Heart’s Desire and Connecting with the Divine Feminine


Helpful links:

Your host:


Brought to you by Rosebud Woman, Award Winning Intimate and Body Care:



Christine Marie Mason

@christinemariemason

@rosebudwoman

Founder, Rosebud Woman

Co-Founder, Radiant Farms and Sundari Gardens

Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation: 

Listen, Like, Share & Subscribe on Apple Podcast |  Spotify



Transcript

Christine Mason  0:01  

When I call and ask the dead for help, the dead show up, just like when my kids call mom. Mom answers the phone whether they need a recipe for how to cook potatoes or a patient ear. I'm ready to offer it, and the dead show up, also ready to offer blessings to us of all kinds, but we have to ask, hello, loves. It's Christine Marie Mason, and this is the Rose Woman Podcast I am recording today from Europe, where I am for a few months doing various retreats and programs and things, but I am also walking myself around in a lot of ancient churches and cathedrals and spaces of worship. And one thing I see at almost every turn, particularly in southern Europe, are shrines to Mary, and that seems very appropriate to comment on. As Today, my guest is Perdita Finn, and we're going to talk a little bit more about the magic that she's been weaving around the return of the sacred feminine. But before we begin, I really want to spend some time together looking at what the rose lineage is. When I started the podcast and I named it Rose Woman, and I started the company, Rosebud Woman, I was really thinking more along the idea of being like rising into your fullness, awakening, blossoming, blooming, being resilient, all of these physical aspects of the rose. I wasn't so much thinking about the formal rose lineage a la da Vinci codes and all of these mystical Catholic practices of the lineage of the Magdalen. I have been seeing the rose come up so many places. Laura swans, the rise of the rose, my friend Lucy Ning, her new temple, Rose Lumina. There is a vast array of people doing rose priestess work, line of the Magdalene, etc. So what is this rose lineage? What is this thing? And why is it happening now? And why does it matter? The short answer is, it's not one thing, not an institution or a trademark curriculum or a denomination. There's no popes of the rose but what I see happening is a worldwide reawakening organized around this symbol that predates almost everything we think of as modern civilization. The Rose symbol is older than Christianity, older than the goddess traditions that preceded it. Fossil records show physical roses blooming 35 million years ago, which nobody planted or owned. They just kept coming back and growing. And something in us keeps coming back to them. The Rose shows up everywhere. The Divine Feminine has been honor in the Hail Mary, in the black Madonnas of medieval Europe, in the alchemical traditions, in Sufi poetry, in the iconography of ISIS, in the courts of love in the folk practices of ordinary women who never were really writing theology, but were keeping the devotional quality of being alive to beauty and strength vitally moving in their kitchens and gardens and prayers. At the center of this reawakening of the rose is a specific figure, Mary Magdalene, a woman close to the spiritual truth whose role has been diminished, distorted and written out. When I'm walking here in these ancient cathedrals, you can see exactly how it was done. You find Mother Mary with the infant, and you find Mother Mary receiving the body of Christ from the cross. In museums, you find imagined paintings of the Magdalen often shown in disarray, like clothing falling off her shoulder or in grief and sadness. But what you don't see is her in her apostolic magnificence, the teacher, the one who carried the resurrection story when no one else would the figure that was quietly and systematically removed, both from the walls of the cathedral and from the thought processes of our formal theology, and now across cultures and traditions and in communities that have never spoken to each other, she is being put back. There's a wonderful woman, Meggan Watterson, who wrote a book called Mary Magdalene, revealed not a small part of this overall movement. She is a Harvard theologian. And then there is, of course, Renee Blodgett's book, the Magdalene's Journey. I mean, many people are approaching the retelling of her story and the reimagining of her story, much of it historically backed, but even if you're not a religious person, you are almost certainly living inside this architecture because centuries of Madonna and horror programming don't require belief to take hold of us. They just require culture, and we are all downstream of it in how we judge women who are powerful and how we distrust women who are both sort of embodied and spiritually authoritative in the subtle, persistent sense that a woman must be either pure or fallen, either elevated beyond the body or condemned by it. The Magdalene was the original target of that split, and her reclamation is, among other things, an act of cultural repair that belongs to everyone, religious or not. So when people say that the. Magdalen is alive or are exploring the rose lineage. They don't mean it abstractly. They mean something is moving, a quality of being, devotion, embodiment, unflinching, spiritual authoritativeness, a quality of being that has been suppressed for centuries, is now being named and lived by real people in real time, by real friends, by real women, who are questioning inherited systems. They are reclaiming their voice and reframing these stories that sort of live in our early narratives. The arc of the Magdalene diminished and then reclaimed mirrors exactly what many people are living through right now. Carl Jung wrote about archetypes surfacing when the conditions are right, and that's what it feels like to me when many people are tapping into the same archetype simultaneously, it starts to feel alive again, like recognition, like something long underground, is finally breaking through. So that's what this rose language is holding. For me, the rose becomes a way of articulating something otherwise almost impossible to name, because it's got all of these embedded qualities, opening, remembering integrating softness and strength, a heart centered sort of authority. So when you see these phrases, way of the rose rose priestesses, Rose lineage, those aren't institutions that come directly from the Magdalene's birth lineage. They are identity frameworks and ways of saying, I know what I am now. I recognize this in myself, and I recognize it in you. So right now, these conditions are aligned in a way they haven't been for a long time. More space to question authority, more visibility of alternative narratives, more connection between people who are arriving at similar insights from different directions, people in different places across the earth, using similar symbols, finding each other and recognizing each other across the distance. So I don't think that what's happening in these rose lineage dialogs requires us to prove a continuous Magdalen lineage stretching unbroken through history, because the power doesn't live there. You might sort of think you're pulling power from that, but the power actually lives in the reclamation of this shared pattern of them and in divine authority that is happening at scale in real places. The Magdalen and the rose are the language women are using to make sense of it. So I want you to imagine that you are in the presence of one of these blooms and notice how it doesn't grow in a straight line, how it spirals out from the center, how it thorns, how it drops its petals and appears to die, but then comes back from what looks like dead wood more extravagant each time something in the human soul is doing that right now, and today's conversation is with one of the people I most respect in this space, at the intersection of spirituality, femininity and magic. She has a new book coming out called Mothers of magic comes out Mother's Day. I really would encourage you to find the book and to order it when it comes up for pre order and, you know, have it land on someone's doorstep. I guarantee you, because of all of the stuff that she's written, that it will offer you quite a few new insights, just like this episode does. So I want to say thanks for listening to this rose lineage part, but also say that maybe lineage isn't even the right word. That's something we explore in today's conversation, because lineage is a word built for straight lines, for ownership and for tracing who came from whom in a single unbroken thread. And what's actually happening with the rose, maybe something much older and stranger than that, a root system, entangled plural, running underground, feeding many things at once, without any of them knowing exactly where that nourishment is coming from. Thanks to Perdita for introducing me to this idea that we are of a root system, not a lineage. So we will start there. Welcome, Perdita Finn,


Perdita Finn  8:44  

I went searching for the mother, you know, it's hard to find her when I was a young woman, and hard to find her and that anti religious culture. I, of course, like a lot of women you know, then, identified with the very masculine forms of spirituality. You know, I got involved in Zen Buddhism and and then finally, when I had my own children, right around the time my father came to visit me, I kept saying, Where are the mothers? I was so isolated. And, you know, kicked out of the Zen monastery for nursing. I kicked out of the church for my kids being too loud, and I began to say, what's happened to the mother. And that was the beginning of what would become a decades long question and exploration of what has happened to the mother, the Great Mother, the blessed mothers of so many different kinds.


Christine Mason  9:40  

That's an incredible journey. I mean, I can feel in an anti religious household, as you called it. The uncool aspect is like religiosity had become such a dogmatic form of overlaying the essence of the individual soul for so many centuries. That they think they're doing something of service, but kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater to sort of deny the essential longing for meaning making and devotion and surrender and the recognition of this great lineage. So I love that you could see it as a protective instinct and and also recognize your own essential longing and the through line of your birth gift.


Perdita Finn  10:22  

Yeah, yeah. It took a long time. You know, I in my next life, I want to hit the ground running. You know, I want a parent who says, Oh my gosh, we got a live one here. You know? I mean, like,


Christine Mason  10:33  

well,


Christine Mason  10:33  

as you, as you're doing for, for your, for your littles, I feel also that there's, there's something to be honored in the fact that you did go through both the atheist environment, because you got an understanding of that, and you went through these dominant religious cultures, so that the gap is directly experienced, and then your own ministry can feed right into that gap,


Perdita Finn  10:55  

absolutely. And we, and a lot of times we go looking, you know, patriarchy is a hard thing to escape because it's so insidious and it's brainwashed us in from so many different directions, right? It has even the use of the word lineage, which we, so many of us use, right? But what we've forgotten is lineage is a word that's used to describe male proprietorship. It's used to distinguish who owns what. And in fact, in in cultures that are centered on an idea of the mother, we see not lineages, but root systems entangled spheres of belonging. And in fact, if you go back seven centuries, you have over 200 mothers and grandmothers. You have a root system. You don't have a lineage. You don't have a straight line. Anyone who's done ancestry knows you're always veering this way and that way, and suddenly you're, you know, you're in a forest of wondering. And in fact, the mother's way, the way of circles, not lines, is a way of discovering how many mothers there are and how many mothers we belong to we we are so longing for belonging, and we have so been deracinated from that belonging. We've had our roots cut off from us that trying to find it again can be so hard. You know, I converted to Catholicism in my at age 22 I mean, I will tell you that I had an abortion the day after my baptism. That was the end of that, you know, because the old mothers are very they're playful with me, you know, they're playful with me. You know, I was sort of trying to kind of keep the whole sex question out of the equation when I was converting to Catholicism, I said, Why don't we play with that?


Christine Mason  12:41  

Well, just stepped into the root system of the mother. You've got the direct root system that you can name all of these exacting faces of the grandmothers and great grandmothers that come in your DNA line. But the root system also contains these archetypes. And those archetypes, I had to go all the way to India to find those archetypes,


Perdita Finn  13:01  

course. And also, if you go to India, there's not one version of Durga. There are 108 versions of Durga. What I mean, like the mothers, know, you need more mothers in the room. The idea of God as a singularity is ridiculous, right? Because nature isn't singular. Nature is multi flora. Nature doesn't make one kind of Apple or one kind of beetle or one kind of tree or flower. It says, how many different kinds can we make? And the same is true of the Divine. I mean, I think one of the things is sometimes for me, it for me, the way of the mother isn't simply replacing God with goddess. It's replacing an abstract singularity with an embodied diversity. My mothers are everything, and that's not a symbol or an idea. That's a literal reality, because I don't just have a human DNA. This DNA of my soul is Hemlock trees and whales and bears and salamanders, and it is mountains and oceans, and I have ocean mothers and seal mothers and amlock mothers who quite literally show up for me when I call


Christine Mason  14:17  

I love in the Lakota way when they talk about Your that your ancestors are anything that predates your arrival


Perdita Finn  14:23  

Exactly. That's it. That's it, right? You know your mothers. I always say all the dead are your mothers, and to die is to remember that we're all each other's mothers. Would we imagine dropping a bomb on anyone if we remembered that we were all each other's mothers? Of course not, course not. Ah, okay, so we have been baptized into the Catholic Church, and we have left the Catholic Church, and so while we find our way back to the practice of the Rosary, that's an interesting navigation. It was for me, it was, it was, you know, it's interesting. I felt, you know. When I studied to become Catholic, they never taught me anything about Devotion to Mary, because it was a pre Vatican two. Vatican two, which most people don't realize, was about expunging Devotion to Mary from the church. And it was really about getting rid of the divine feminine. And it was about getting rid of all of these really pagan folk practices, the fun parts, the good stuff, the juicy stuff. And so it was, you know, Jesus all the time, and and there was a lot of great stuff in my in my practice of Catholicism, about social justice and liberation theology, I met a lot of very wonderful, devoted, interesting people. But I didn't get what I was looking for, and I didn't know what I was looking for. You know, I speak it lightly that I had an abortion two days after I converted to Catholicism, but it was a devastating experience and and it's often the way this, you know, our spiritual mothers will make our path clear to us, you know. And I went to visit a friend in Europe that summer. Before I started work, I had graduated, just graduating from college, and I found myself she, of course, fell in love just before I got there, so she was radically unavailable. Got myself going and spending a lot of time in little churches, feeling like I was looking for something alone. I didn't go to services or anything. I just looking for something. And in one church in Vienna, I found this Black Madonna, powerful Black Madonna. I stood in front of her. And you know when you meet the black Madonna's they, these are not compliant, obedient, pious, boobless girls. These are mamas. These are, you know, these are the black holes of the universe from which the worlds are born. They stare at you, and they look at you and, and, and I realized that she was who I was looking for. She didn't care what my religion was, but she knew that being a mother meant sometimes making really hard choices, and I felt her say to me, You're a mother. Only a mother can make the choice you made. You made a powerful choice. That's all fine, but to make a responsible choice like that takes a mother's heart and a mother's honesty, and in front of this little Madonna was the Hail Mary prayer, and I began praying it. And it's a prayer that it's so interesting to me, I began to learn about it. It's a prayer in devotion to maiden mother in Chrome. It's a tripod prayer. It's a prayer that takes us from the womb to the tomb and back again. And I said this prayer, not really feeling all this, not knowing that much yet.


Christine Mason  17:59  

And


Perdita Finn  17:59  

eventually I let it go, because I went back to the boys club, as we do, and then I got involved in Zen. And I didn't know that Zen also has a devotion at its heart to the Great Mother that the boys have hidden, you know. And finally, one day, as a young mother, I my husband, who's a very much also, we share a tremendous spiritual yearning and curiosity. Then he had been a Zen teacher and had left Zen, and had left Buddhism, and spent his whole time exposing the sexual and Financial Crimes of almost all the Buddhist teachers. I used to say, show me a Buddhist teacher married to his first wife, and I'll show you enlightenment, you know, and and he had found himself praying that rosary, I said, will teach me the rosary. I never learned it. My grandmother prayed the rosary, and he taught it to me. And it was if those prayers went right to my heart, my heartbeat began to synchronize with the prayers. I think as a child, that three year old little girl was probably praying the rosary in front of that statue.


Christine Mason  19:06  

Didn't even like have an awareness of it. Can you say the prayer and break it down, and how you see how that prayer ties to this tripartite


Perdita Finn  19:14  

Yeah, absolutely. But here's the traditional prayer, Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. That's the first part Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Second part, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen, womb to death. Okay, there's that's the traditional prayer, and that prayer grew out of the Folk practices of European people in the Middle Ages. It wasn't a prayer that was given to them from on high. It grew out of the first part of the prayer is the angelic salutation that Gabriel says to Mary in the Bible. And the second part comes from the Magnificat, and the third part just arose out of folk tradition.


Christine Mason  19:59  

So.


Perdita Finn  20:00  

But let me break that prayer down, because it's a really interesting prayer, because the people who from whom it came and emerged as an oral tradition who created what is the most popular mantra in the world, had been devoted to the Goddess in their villages as long as they could remember, long before Mary, she had been called many other things. She'd been called Freya, she'd been called Bridget, she'd been called ISIS. She'd called been called shibele. She'd been, you know, she'd been called Athena. She had been called so many other names. In fact, many of the black Madonnas are statues to Isis that are just refashioned. Isis and Horus are refashioned into Mary and Jesus. And for these people, you call the mother, whatever you want to call her, and she's still the mother. And the prayer is really this Hail Mary, Hail Maiden, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Well, what does that mean? And the medieval era, they thought it meant that that is the moment that God impregnates the mother. And so what you're really looking at is the moment that God and God has come together in sexual union, and you are devoted to that erotic alchemical power of Lord and Lady. God and God is darkness and light, Sun and Moon. It's this alchemical you know, sun and water that creates life on Earth, the Lord is with the and in the Middle Ages, they wrote about the erotic power of that angelic salutation, and even said that Mary loved to hear it because it reminded her of that moment of conception and sexual climax. They knew that when they said that prayer is Catholic prayer. The little old ladies say that's what they knew. That's also in my tradition, they say


Christine Mason  21:48  

that the Shiva and Shakti are one movement, that if you're an embodied person, feminine or masculine, that the animating force of the Divine is always in you. The Lord is always in you. So this is like a beautiful reminder for me to see it that could be seen through a tantric lens. And it's


Perdita Finn  22:06  

like those incredible like Tibetan Tantra paintings of the


Christine Mason  22:09  

Lord


Perdita Finn  22:09  

and Lady and sexual union right under even you know that to imagine your own conception, to see the great conception of the universe, to feel the meeting of these energies. So that's the first part of the prayer. The second part is, Blessed art thou among mothers, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb life? Blessed art thou? So that's the mother. That's that full moon. The Mother we have the maiden, then we have the mother who's pregnant, the pregnant moon, she's and she's about to give birth to the planet, to the cosmos, to life itself. Frequently, Mary was shown pregnant with the whole universe. Finally, holy Crone, Queen of the cosmos, pray for us now at the hour of our death. Amen. And there is that Dark Mother. There is the Crone. There is the other side of Kali. There's Kali, the creator and destroyer, right? I will make you and I will bring you home, and then I will rebirth you and remake you. And that is the Hail Mary. It's this, actually, this really wild, organic devotional prayer. I always invite people to make it their own, to change the words they want. I do.


Christine Mason  23:29  

It's so beautiful. That second, that second phrase where her body becomes the incarnating temple, like the that's so stunning. And then the last one of sort of inviting the unitive consciousness to be with you. Also, like, pray for us. Bring your blessings down into our life. I love I love this so much. But we're up into our life, or something like that. I'm still working, even despite all of these years on stepping out of ascension theology.


Perdita Finn  24:00  

Oh, right, it's so hard, isn't I mean, I mean we are, and it's like, it's like, how can I get back down to the ground again? You know?


Christine Mason  24:08  

So, so you go from the rosary to the ancestors in in the way of the rose, there's a lot of eco feminist wisdom inside of all your work. And then you you wrote, take back the magic and that kind of opened ancestor practice to anyone. And now this mothers of magic. It seems to be the most autobiographical synthesis. Yet, looking at the arc of the body of work that you've done, like, how do you see those three books in particular tying together? What's your understanding of the arc of these books? The way of the rose take back the magic and mothers of magic


Perdita Finn  24:42  

circles, not lines. How do we really decolonize our brains from patriarchy and our hearts from patriarchy? How do we begin to live in the generous circles of the natural world? You know, the natural world says we have one. The civilized world tells us. We have one life to get it right. Nature tells us everything dies. Everything dies. The moon dies, the sun, the sun sets at night. For the ancient Egyptians, the sun's rising every morning was the rebirth of a new sun. Everything went and returned, and that brings us into a very different way of living, and it disrupts our human centered agenda. And I am very interested in disrupting the human centered agenda and living again in those very generous circles of the long story of our souls. And for me, my my work with the dad is, is, is also goes back to three years old. Also goes back to many experiences. And what I've learned about the dad is that To die is to remember the long story of our souls. It is to remember that we have all been each other's mothers. And I mean that literally. I don't mean that as an archetype or a symbol. I mean it is to remember that in one lifetime or another, we have all birthed each other. And if we knew that, if we could recover that heart centered intimacy with each other and all that is the world we lived in would look very, very different indeed. We wouldn't put our children in factory farms. We wouldn't put our children in internment camps. We wouldn't put our children into oceans filled with debris and pollution and plastic. We live the way we live because we have forgotten how to live in the generous cycles of the mother's way. And so all of my books are about that. I wrote a book about the rosary with my husband about reclaiming the tripart. The Rosary is a three part prayer that plunges us into the ancient Mediterranean mystery cults of birth, death and rebirth. And just as those cults devoted to Dionysus and Osiris and Isis. They were a way of learning birth, death and rebirth with our bodies, right? How do we live inside that truth I write about the dead that don't go anywhere. Dead are all reborn. We're all coming back. You know, it's very frightening day. People are being very violent in our world. They're ecocidal, they're suicidal, they're violent. My daughter said to me, I hope we're all here tomorrow. I said, even if we're not, we'll find each other again, because we always find each other.


Christine Mason  27:34  

Yeah, this is a very powerful knowing like that the dead aren't gone, but liberated it to a larger knowing. You talk about that in the book,


Perdita Finn  27:42  

and how do you get to know the dead aren't gone? That's not a belief or a creed I've memorized or committed myself to. It's not a theology. It's an ecological reality I live inside of, and that is when I call and ask the dead for help. The dead show up, just like when my kids call mom. Mom answers the phone, whether they need a recipe for how to cook potatoes or a check or a patient ear. I'm ready to offer it and the devil also ready to offer blessings to us of all kinds, but we have to ask,


Christine Mason  28:17  

I think, the generational blessing to generational curses, that that combination that you're talking about too, the dominant stories that were told in your family about the women in your lineage. I mean, what you're getting at here is like a direct dialog that reframes the stories into like a direct experience. Can you see more about that?


Perdita Finn  28:39  

Sure, you know I mean, I mean, and that's, and that's one of you know, my more, more recent book is really looking intimately at how hard it is to be a mother in our culture. Being a mother, I am not talking about a gendered term or a biological singularity, and I need to be really clear about that, because in pre civilized cultures and hunter gatherer communities, indigenous communities. Mother is not so much a biological experience of proprietorial ownership as it is in patriarchy, it's more a sense of community responsibility. And so many women may nurse a child, many men may experience themselves hes having offered parts of their body to the healing of that child, and they think of themselves not as fathers, but as mothers. And no and young women who haven't had children think of themselves as mothers. Young teenage boys think of themselves as mothers. And what would it be like if you go into many churches in France, as I've done, you frequently find a really interesting Tableau, which is in a side chapel, there will be a Madonna, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and then on either side of her are two very interesting figures. On one is Joan of Arc, full armor, sword, shield, helmet on ready to go, and on the other. Here is st Anthony, and he's wearing his monk's robes and hair, holding flowers in his hand and cradling a baby next to his shoulder. And what I think we're looking at, it's hard to see, is neither of these figures had biological children, yet both of them are expressions of divine motherhood. A mother can be fierce and carry a sword into battle. Joan is Kali ready to go. You know what I mean, like she is ready. And a mother can be a man who is gentle and nurturing. There's no these, these weird sort of ideas of, you know, gender and identity that we have in this culture are so divisive to us because we've all forgotten how to be mothers.


Christine Mason  30:52  

So beautiful to me. Perdita, this idea that the agentic, masculine, traditionally masculine aspects can appear in the body of a woman, as with Joan, and the receptive, beautiful qualities of the, what is traditionally considered the feminine, appear in the body of st Anthony. And they're, they're there with her, like all of my children carry me and the father, in equal measure, very It's very beautiful. Never heard that before. That's just stunning.


Perdita Finn  31:21  

You know, I'll know that we're getting closer to the mother's way when teenage boys dream of becoming mothers and want to become mothers. Now I say that and people go, Oh, my, not gonna happen. You gotta have a son, a 29 year old son who's one of the great mothers in the world.


Christine Mason  31:38  

Yeah. I mean, and if you brought in, if you take it, if you degenerate and take it to nurturing and caring and uplifting and reverential towards all life, then definitely,


Perdita Finn  31:49  

we all know them. You know. We know what a great mother in the world looks like. We know they look like. Martin Luther King. We know when we meet, you know, we know when we meet a great mother in the world. And it doesn't have to do and the mother. The people who've mothered me have been male, they've been female, they've been animals, they've been trees. So many different beings can mother us. What this meant for understanding my own mother is and my next book is about my relationship with my own mother and my relationship with the mother's way, as you know, patriarchy dooms mothers because it says you have to be everything to your children,


Christine Mason  32:29  

makes them so responsible. Do you have children? Christine, I have six children. So you know what I'm talking about. I mean, one thing the kids and I did was I have four biological children, two girls that I raised from two and eight to adulthood and then, well, teenagehood, and then two additional children that I spend a lot of time raising. And so we made a pact that we would keep growing together, that we would one time my children came home from the two youngest kids came home from school college, and they walked into the house and they said, All you guys, keep us in a prison of who we used to be, the youngest children, and we want you to see us with fresh eyes. We sat down with the family, and we removed all of the photographs of their childhood, and we put up only photographs of the current year, so they would not be held of prisoners of our memory. And that included me, that we could continue becoming together.


Perdita Finn  33:28  

What was I'm going to do this with my own kids? I love this. I mean,


Christine Mason  33:33  

it was, it was really fun. I still, of course, as a mother, had my little box I can go to to, like, so cute, but, but and also, you know, I was doing my own awakening and doing collective trauma work, and so I became interested in what would happen if I became an open field of receptivity for their complaint.


Perdita Finn  33:52  

And you know, to me, also, part of the long story of a soul is knowing that children are our elders come back. They are our grandmothers and great grandmothers come back. And so, you know, some Zen master on his fourth wife is, you know, is not exactly a repository of wisdom, but a child comes into our lives, specifically with lessons and teachings for us and and and love and treasures and riches.


Christine Mason  34:25  

I was birth of my grand, my oldest grandson, and he opened his eyes, and I was like,


Perdita Finn  34:31  

hi dad, like a complete feeling tone of that was wild. I'm so glad you recognize that. You know most people don't. You know I have, I have had the great privilege of meeting both my parents. Come back, and it's information I keep fairly private, but it's really a wonder. And I think a lot of our job as grandparents is to recognize who people are in the community, right? Like, if we know, I mean, I. I wish my parents could have known that little girl was a fierce devotee of the divine feminine and really helped me recover every I mean, I write my books to help my parents in my next life say, Oh, we got her. Here she is. She's come back.


Christine Mason  35:15  

You know that in the in the tantric traditions, they say the first beneficiary of your sadhana is your own mother, whether you know it or not, like you can't help but the work you do aggregates to them or like so. So it's very beautiful, I think, the expansion of the idea of the the mother as animal, the mother as the body of the Earth, like all of the things that nurture us and raise us awakens like a really deep feeling of reverence as you're speaking about it. Plus you talk like a poet, which is like, you know, I could listen to you talk all day long. Basically,


Perdita Finn  35:52  

my grandmother had the gift to Irish gab and be careful.


Christine Mason  35:57  

Well, you've been, I just speak to that sort of creative impulse for Irish gab or whatever, but you also written, like, 70 children's books or something I've read in your in your material, and amazing. So just like a true like, that's the combination of the storytelling impulse from your father and those frosted flake knights, along with sort of your own magical incarnation. It's just like to be consistently in service to the magical, the numinous. It's quite a life you've made. I think we all have the potential


Perdita Finn  36:30  

to make our lives. You know, we if we can, if we can really replace those photographs, if we can stop looking backwards and look forwards at the world we have right now, which is what you do your children asked and what you honored them by doing, then we find they're really new stories. They're always new stories to tell, right? You know, we don't want to keep our children or ourselves stuck in the same old stories. And, you know, in my new book, I mean, I think you referenced it like I grew up hearing the story of my mother's mother, and the story was, you know, she was, you know, manic depressive, mostly depressive in and out of mental hospitals, a real burden to her children, a burden to the world, not a very interesting woman. And then she died, you know, and that was a really depressing story to be told. And I had the great extraordinary experience of this woman I knew only as a kind of frail, diminished stroke victim in our nursing home who died when I was 10. After my mother died, I found a steamer trunk filled with her daily diaries. She'd kept a daily diary her whole life, and suddenly she was a person, but she was a what a woman. Oh, and, you know, this book is for her too, because she wasn't just a depressed lady, and she had experienced such trauma. She had been a war on the front. She had been a nurse in the front lines of World War One, and she had lost her beloved during the war, and here she had been. I mean, she was, and what was it like to be part of that generation where you every man you knew was dead, and you'd see mangled body after mangled body, I mean, trauma. And then she was expected to get married, and she did. She married an American man. Was horrible. She didn't know him, and she ran home two weeks later, like, Oh, get me out of this. And found out she was pregnant, and in 1921 if you were pregnant, you stayed married and get a divorce. So in her diary, she was also diarying about nature. She sort of turned her, it seemed to me, like Nellie, turned her focus from the misery that she was living in in this structure to like what was magical. And here's the other thing I remembered about her was she was an extraordinary garter gardener. She founded the Long Island Garden Club. What? Yes, yes. And, and I can read these psychiatric reports. It says has no interest. Fairly boring woman. I'm like this woman could make anything grow. She transplanted all these plants from her gardens in England. Brought them. Her gardens were the most magical place. As a child, I would out in them, and I remember, and it was hard for me to equate this lush roses and apple trees to climb and hollyhocks falling over themselves, and bees buzzing all around and little moss laden Glens she'd created, and to see that this little, sad, gray woman was making the most beautiful place in the whole world. And the other thing she grew is my mother, you know, and she. Gave everything to it. And I like to think, you know, biologically speaking, you know, we begin forming in our grandmother's bodies. When our mothers are conceived in our grandmother's bodies, they already have the eggs that will become us inside their bodies. So it's like those Russian nesting dolls, grandmother, mother, Maiden, and I like to think that I knew my grandmother's dreams, my grandmother's loves, her desires, that she was gardening me that the life I live is the life I was gifted by her.


Christine Mason  40:38  

Such a grief arising right now as you're speaking, feeling the grief of all of the people whose dreams and natural expressions have been dulled by the horror of violence, the numbing and feeling the grief of all the peoples whose beautiful, radiant, playful spirits have been dimmed by cultural constructs that keep them in some sort of subservient or narrow role, and really wishing and seeing a future in which that's not the case, yeah, that the essence of each being that comes in is recognized, seen, uplifted, nurtured, expanded, yeah, just a new story, as you would say,


Perdita Finn  41:19  

a New Story, and it's like, Who are these kids? We have a lot of cleanup to do as human beings, and if we're going to do it, we're going to have to come in ready to go in our next life. I mean, it's so interesting. There's a woman in my town, and she I've sort of known her off and on for decades, and she's always, like, brimming with medical information when I run into her, and it can be a little overwhelming, to be perfectly honest. And the other day, I ran into her and she was going on and on about some medical thing, and she just said to me, you know, I didn't get to be a doctor in this life, but in my next life, I'm going to be a doctor, and I'm going to learn so much before then. And I looked at her, and suddenly I got it, and I said, I hope you're my doctor. And she said, Sure, I would. That's who I want to be my doctor. I want someone who's been studying for lifetimes and preparing


Christine Mason  42:16  

beautiful so as we're as we're winding this up, I want people to hear a little bit. You know, this book sounds amazing. There's some parts in it where you're, you're have some channeled sections, messages from the old ones in the mothers of magic and and just it feels to me like there is, of course, a large piece of this that is perdita's work. But I feel throughout everything that you've written, that it is coming through this root system. You describe that it's like feeding in through your hands, through your words, through your mouth and and there is just such a beautiful collection that you've created. And I wonder if we can talk about how you're bringing people together, the way of the sort of the institution, the community, that you're building around the content, because that seems equally vital that people aren't alone in their exploration of this topic.


Perdita Finn  43:07  

There are two ways. One, I do offer a lot of ways for people to come together in conversation and exploration of these topics through various workshops. I offer a monthly gathering through my substack, but my husband and I also have been really interested in what would spiritual community look like beyond patriarchy. And so we have created a community called The Way of the rose. In that community there we say we're an open hearted community of beings dedicated to the Forgotten Earth wisdom of the Rosary and the mother by any name you want to call her. And we do pray the rosary together, but you can make the words your own. You know. You can pray to whatever goddess you want, or any mother you want, or a tree you want. There are five principles of the five the original roses all had only five petals. And I've been fascinated by Rose lore and the five petals of the original roses nearer the five petals of the human hand, and there's roses are older than human beings. Roses taught us about devotion. Roses taught us about love. And there's a reason why roses are so primal to the human spiritual experience of the mother and the five petals of our way of the rose community are that we, everything we offer is 100% free. We don't charge for anything, and there's no money involved. We don't even have any building campaigns. We don't have any buildings. We don't pay anyone anything. And the other thing is, we don't have any experts. We have no we don't know how long you've been praying the rosary? How many lifetimes? We don't have any entrance exams, any exit interviews, and we don't have any authorities, teachers, priests or priestesses, just circles of friends. And I've seen eight year olds lead our rosary circles, and everyone's welcome at every meeting. We're completely inclusive. Anyone can come to any meeting. We do. Have like affinity meetings. We'll have LGBTQ meetings or men's meetings or witches meetings, but you can come to any meeting, and we support one another as friends, praying for our heart's desire. What do we want? Truly, Madly and deeply? It is a foundational question, and it's the question patriarchy suppresses. What do you want so much that you would pray seven lifetimes for it?


Christine Mason  45:28  

How I would invite you, if you're willing to do this, to close us out with an example of how one might pray for the heart's desire,


Perdita Finn  45:38  

I will. I'll share with you. I'll tell you my heart's desire. The heart's desire is like a labyrinth. And people say, I don't know my heart's desire. Of course, not. Patriarchy is designed to tell us what we want. We don't know what we want, you know. Let me win the lottery. Let me have an you know? And it's like walking a labyrinth, right? And there's the heart of the labyrinth, and then there are all these twists and turns and prayers. And at one moment we might be praying, you know, for work that's remunerative. At another moment, we might be praying for healing with a family member. These are all deep heart concerns. Talk to us a little bit about how you came into this investigation of the sacred feminine. I know that you had a long story with your family, and that you would, you know, sit as a small child, even exhibiting some connection to the divine feminine. Kind of unusual part of reclaiming the way of the mothers the divine mothers, is reclaiming what it means to live in circles instead of straight lines, and means to live in the generative circles of our long story, where we don't have one life to get it right. We all arrive into this life with traumas and treasures, and we also arrive into this life with prayers that have been in our lips for lifetimes. And I did too. I'm no different than anyone, and I arrived in 1962 into a bohemian atheist family with no religious interest and an aggressive disinterest in religion. Do you know what I mean, that it was uncool, that it was dangerous, it was superstitious. We're not going to do that in our family. We might. They. My father made sure my grandmother never took us to church, you know. I mean, there was nothing. I don't think I knew what a bible was, you know, is very, very secular, you know, except for the New York Times, which was the Bible. And any case, and my father was a surgeon in a small rural hospital, where he was also the emergency room doctor always on call. And as a child, I remember some really, I was the youngest blessed evenings where we would he would get home from the emergency room in the middle of the night, and my memory is that he would wake me up and bring me downstairs with him, and he would tell me stories about polar bears and pirates and mermaids. He's a magical storyteller, and we would eat Frosted Flakes with cream in them. Oh, my God, that was so good. Frosted Flakes at midnight, my body said it was our special treat, stories and Frosted Flakes. And we'd sit there together. And eventually he'd carry me up and put me to bed. And it was just, it was, it was the best part of my father and a magical part. And I wasn't until I was later, that I realized that he was coming home from having watched people die, and not just any people, but his neighbors and his friends. And, you know, he was the person on call to put people back together again, if he could after the car accidents or the suicide attempts, and he also needed to tell stories to a child and be with a child after that experience. So my heart sort of went out to him, but I did not discover until I had my own children, and I had found among my mother's things this broken statue of the Virgin Mary. And it wasn't really a Nativity scene Mary, because her arms were crossed in the position of the Maria Dolorosa, sorrowing mother. And it was a very odd thing to find in my mother's stuff after she died, my parents had long been divorced, and I had an altar at that point to Buddhas and saints of all kinds, and I stuck it up on the altar, and my father came to visit me and gasped when he saw it. I said, How did you find that? I said, what I assumed it was like some leftover piece of a Nativity scene or something. I don't know. I don't know what I thought it was. Put it up there. And my father then told me the real story of my childhood, and that was that when he would come home, he would find me at age three. Down on my knees, praying to the statue I had found, and no one knew where I'd found it. And it so unnerved him, so bothered him. Where was this what he considered religiosity, but I know was devotion. Where did this devotion come from? And to distract me from it, he told me stories and gave me a treat in the middle of the night, he didn't want me praying, and my father was frightened of the long story and didn't understand it. And when I was a mother and my own children exhibited certain signs of their previous enthusiasms and devotions. My job was to cultivate it. So where did my devotion to the Divine Feminine begin? I don't know where it begins or where it ends. It's what I brought through with me from lifetimes. But what is the prayer we would carry from one lifetime to another. What was the prayer of that little girl in front of the Mary statue? And I think I know what it is now. I've been praying in the way of the rose community for 16 years with good friends, loving friends, and I think I know it and to draw my kin close, my soul kin, my fur kin, my odd kin. Draw my kin close, keep my kin close, Kindle my kin close. That is my prayer. It's what I said to my daughter. I'll never lose you. I'll always find you.


Christine Mason  51:46  

We're pretty remarkable family.


Christine Mason  51:49  

I'm pretty fond Do you know, do you know much about my daughter?


Christine Mason  51:54  

Or yeah, she's like, one of the most unique voices, like she's a modern mystic, she's one of the most unique voice is teaching it all today, anywhere on Earth, She's incredible. She's been like that since she was born. Well, clearly, so have you. So


Perdita Finn  52:09  

I don't know I'm a more grounded being than she is, but I need to be a psychic. I know once said, you've got your feet on the ground, and you got to keep that balloon from floating away.


Christine Mason  52:20  

The mystical line, the mystical root system. I'm going to keep saying root system instead of lineage. From this point forward, mystical root system, the attention to the natural world, the life of devotion and the outrageous productivity of you all shine through her and clearly also from Nelly, and probably also something in your mother, but like how amazing to hear to learn of it as this larger family fractal. I'm so beautiful, so I wish you utter success in the complete fruition of this beautiful vision you've set forth. This most recent book is mothers of magic. There's something in there about fairy godmothers that I'll just leave as a teaser that is another reason for people to go and get the book and to find the way of the rose community. If something in here has awakened in you, I think it's also like one of the clearest restorations of the divine feminine in the Western traditions. You know, so many of us have had to hop out to Egypt or India or South America to find some sort of lineage that is related, relatable from our European ancestry. And maybe we go back to the Bridget, or maybe we go back to the Sheila, Sheila gig, which I can never say, maybe we can find her in the Scandinavian or the Germanic things, but we've lost touch. And just just that, the step that that is like the mayor the Mary the Magdalene and Mary the mother invite us into a native sort of experience of the divine feminine. And there's so much to be reanimated in that. And so I'm just extremely grateful that you're pointing it out the mother principle more broadly and also inviting us into a dialog with our Northern European lineage. Thank you for being one of the great mamas in the world. Christine, thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome so much. We are in the middle of a series on new ways of relating to women in our lives. So we have mothers of magic with Perdita Finn. We have the way of the witch with Eva clay. We have the hive agreements, or the bee sisterhood with Nikki Fox, all sort of addressing different ways of these, these deep feminine wounds that have lived in our system. You know, people talk about the sister wound. What does that mean? Can you lean into someone? Are you competing for the same kinds of attention? What does it mean to be a good sister? The mother wound, you know, what is it like to have the mother inculcate you into systems that aren't really good for your soul's evolution? Or the witch wound, when you become wise and you become knowledgeable and become. Healer, and you speak out, you get burned at the stake. So we're talking about some of those big arc questions with some of the leading thinkers in those areas in this month surrounding Mother's Day. So please tune in and support these gorgeous writers who bring so much to all of us by attending their programs and approaching their material with the same kind of love and reverence you do with ours at rosebud. Okay, thank you so much for having listened today to Perdita. Please find her work and her daughter Sophie strand's work. Wishing you much rest in yourself and deep enjoyment. Thank you to Rosebud woman for sponsoring the production of this show. You can find the most beautiful body care and intimate care products and candles and lifestyle products at rosewoman.com 

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