Back From The Borderline

What if the history of Europe contains a civilization most of us were never taught about?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.☿ANNE BARINGOfficial website: https://www.annebaring.com/BOOKS BY MARIJA GIMBUTASThe Language of the GoddessThe Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old EuropeALSO MENTIONEDThe Myth of the Goddess by Anne Baring and Jules CashfordMessages From a Transcendent Dimension by Anne BaringJoseph CampbellThe Hermetic Order of the Golden DawnFederico FagginIain McGilchristSEE THE OBJECTSThe Lost World of Old Europe exhibition via New York University’s YouTube channel [click here to view]☽CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineYou’ll get:☆ Weekly bonus episodes☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

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.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 WorkOfficial website: https://www.annebaring.com/Books by Anne BaringDivine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of GodThe Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules CashfordThe Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the SoulBooks and Writers MentionedMarija Gimbutas: The Civilization of the GoddessMarija Gimbutas: The Language of the GoddessErich Neumann: The Great MotherRiane Eisler: The Chalice and the BladeMargaret BarkerElaine PagelsThe Gospel of the Beloved Companion, translated by Jehanne de QuillanRelated EpisodesMy episode on Gnosticism, Sophia and the Gnostic creation mythMy previous episode on Mary MagdaleneHouse of Cards: In this episode, I mention my ongoing tarot series, House of Cards, during this conversation. We’re studying the cards one by one through mythology, religious history, occult philosophy and the Western wisdom traditions that regularly appear on the podcast. Join the Patreon and listen to House of Cards at patreon.com/backfromtheborderline 

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.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.

Aleister Crowley had a beautiful idea, and then he built a religion around himself.This episode takes Thelema seriously enough to examine what Crowley was actually teaching. True Will sits at the center of it, alongside The Book of the Law, Aiwass, the Aeon of Horus, sex magick, Babalon, and Crowley’s claim that humanity had entered a new spiritual age. He drew heavily from the Golden Dawn and Hermetic Qabalah, then remixed and recast those traditions through his own revelation and his own ideas about freedom, sexuality, and authority.I’m interested in the point where spiritual freedom starts giving one man an extraordinary amount of interpretive power. Crowley’s treatment of women, the role of the Scarlet Woman, the use of sex as magical technology, and the theology built around Babalon all deserve much more scrutiny than either Satanic Panic or Crowley worship tends to allow.True Will can absolutely be understood as disciplined vocation rather than appetite, and many modern Thelemites read Crowley critically while taking consent and individual freedom seriously. The harder work here (that I attempt to undertake in this episode) is taking a hard look at the actual religion without turning it into either “evil” or “enlightenment”.This is a study of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema from inside the Western mysteries, with plenty of sympathy for the questions Crowley was actually asking and very little patience for the places I think his answers went badly wrong.Next week, we’ll be following Crowley’s massive influence all the way into online spirituality, Existential Kink, modern shadow work, sacred sexuality, and the high-ticket coaching economy.CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineYou’ll get:☆ Weekly bonus episodes☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you.  If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

I’ve spent a lot of this series thinking about what happens when the body gets so used to effort that it forgets how to stop. By the time I got to this final episode, I found myself somewhere I didn’t expect. I was thinking about grace, and the spiritual cost of living as though everything depends on your ability to stay useful, vigilant, and in control.In Part Three of The Braced Body, we’re taking everything we’ve learned about chronic tension and nervous system bracing into much deeper spiritual territory. I’ll get into the old argument between Augustine and Pelagius about human effort and grace, why Sabbath has something to say about our inability to stop working, and how ideas like kenosis and alchemy can help us think about surrender without turning it into weakness or self-erasure.We’ll also spend some time with Meister Eckhart and the older mystical traditions that understood spiritual life as something we participate in rather than something we manufacture through enough effort.Somewhere underneath all of this is a problem I know very well in myself. You can get very good at understanding/taking care of /improving yourself, and still be living as though receiving anything you didn’t somehow earn is dangerous as hell.I wanted to know what happens when that habit reaches our spiritual lives too, and whether the body might know something about grace that the intellect has been trying to understand for centuries.CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineYou’ll get:☆ Weekly bonus episodes☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you.  If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

Your body can be exhausted and still refuse to rest. You lie down, your jaw stays tight, your shoulders keep working, and some part of you remains ready for the next demand.This is Part Two of a three-part series on chronic bracing. We move from why the body learned to stay tense into what it can do instead. Drawing on Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Hubert Godard, bodywork, and basic physics, I look at why yielding has such a bad reputation, how the floor and the bed support movement, and why “relax your shoulders” often changes almost nothing.We also talk about the exhale, the fear of letting another person help, and the difference between yielding and giving up your choices. You’ll hear a few small practices that can help your nervous system notice support before it adds more effort. If you haven’t heard Part One, start with The Braced Body, Why You’re Tense Even When Nothing Is Wrong. Part Three will move into grace, surrender, and what it means for spiritual trust to reach the body.CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineYou’ll get:☆ Weekly bonus episodes☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you.  If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.Artwork credit: “Surrender” by Tom Sullivan (Saatchi Art China)

Do you clench your jaw without noticing? Do your shoulders stay tense even when you’re finally sitting down to rest? Does your body still feel like it’s working long after the day is over?This episode started with something completely ordinary. I was making the guest bed, lay down for a minute, and noticed that even though I was trying to rest, my entire upper body was still working. My shoulders were tense. My jaw was clenched. It was such a small moment, but it sent me down a rabbit hole. I wanted to understand why so many of us keep holding ourselves together long after we no longer have to.In Part One of this series, we’ll look at why chronic jaw clenching, neck pain, shoulder tension, and the feeling of always being “on” can become so familiar that we stop noticing we’re doing them. We’ll also talk about why understanding your childhood, your attachment style, or your nervous system doesn’t automatically change these habits, even when you know exactly where they came from.Along the way, I’ll borrow ideas from Moshe Feldenkrais, Wilhelm Reich, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I want to see whether their work can help explain why the body keeps preparing for demands that ended years ago, and why receiving support can feel so much harder than we expect, even if it seems really simple on the surface.By the end of this episode, I hope you’ll start catching the moment your body begins to brace. That’s where change begins. You can’t work with something you can’t see. This is Part One of the series. In the next episode, we’ll stop asking why we brace and start looking at how the body learns to trust support again.If you’re curious about trying the Feldenkrais Method yourself, FeldenkraisProject.com is a great place to start. The free lessons can help you notice how your body moves and where you may be using more effort than you need. You can check it out here: https://feldenkraisproject.com/.CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineYou’ll get:☆ Weekly bonus episodes☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/. MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you. If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

A lot of us are walking around with religious trauma and a God-shaped hole.I was raised inside a version of Christianity, and I know what it can leave in the body. Shame, fear, sexual repression, homophobia, spiritual surveillance, and the feeling that your body itself was a problem.Leaving can honestly sometimes be the only answer. For some people, atheism feels better than trying to rescue anything with Jesus attached to it. Others move toward witchcraft, occultism, or a private spiritual life built from candles, books, rituals, and scraps. At the same time, plenty of people are running back to traditional Christianity because the modern world feels hollow, lonely, and stripped of beauty.Both responses make sense. Burning the whole thing down can feel like the only honest answer when religion harmed you. Returning to the old Church can make sense when the alternative looks like “buy things, optimize yourself, and die.” At least the Church has ritual, saints, feast days, candles, moral demands, and a story larger than the self. But neither response heals the wound on its own.This episode is about the broken spiritual inheritance of the West, especially Christianity, and why we keep swinging between rejection and return. We leave the Church and lose old languages for grief, prayer, beauty, and moral life. Or we return and pretend the harm was exaggerated, as if shame, control, misogyny, homophobia, and fear of the body were just minor details. The Church absolutely preserved beauty, but it also caused immeasurable harm.I’m interested in what happens after you’ve left, told the truth, stopped pretending the harm/abuse was acceptable, and still have to decide what you’ll carry forward.This episode moves through religious trauma, Christianity, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, the Church of Rome, the broken masculine and feminine inside Western spirituality, and the problem of building a new spiritual life without pretending you made yourself from nothing.Not everything can be saved, but not everything should be burned to ash. Both things can be true.CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderlineYou’ll get:☆ Weekly bonus episodes☆ House of Cards (my tarot study group)☆ Archetypal tarot + astrology forecasts☆ Full ad-free archive access (every BFTB episode since 2021)If you want to actually work through it: Use MOODS → https://app.moods.world/ MOODS is a private place to take what’s coming up and see it clearly without performing it or involving anyone else. You can try it free for 7 days to see if it's right for you.  If you join my Patreon first, you’ll also unlock discounted access. See you inside.

This year, I had the chance to attend Contact in the Desert, which is a conference devoted to UFOs, psi phenomena, consciousness, and anomalous experience.  While I was there, I joined a live podcast panel hosted by my friend Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops. Also on the panel were psi researcher Adam Curry and Josh from the Polarity YouTube channel, so the conversation went exactly where you’d expect it to go, which is to say… EVERYWHERE.We dive into everything from UFOs and consciousness to the stranger and more fringe material underneath the usual disclosure conversation. Things like Carl Jung’s theory of the UFO as a mandala, CE5 (a contact practice where people use meditation and intention to invite anomalous lights or craft to appear), the unconscious mind, the body’s fear response, trauma, altered states, AI agents apparently inventing religious behavior, and one truly unforgettable story about raccoons creating a ritual around a quantum food dispenser. Yes, you read that right. :-)The central focus of the panel ultimately circles around the idea that anomalous experiences seem to depend on what an individual psyche can tolerate and what our deeper wiring permits us to perceive.I also talk about the orb sighting that completely changed my relationship to the phenomenon, and why my own work keeps returning to symbol, tarot, depth psychology, and archetypal thinking as tools for making contact with a deeper reality without losing my sh*t in this one.I think a lot of UFO and disclosure discourse tends to get stuck on “weird things in the sky,” beings, craft, government secrets, etc. And don’t get me wrong, I think those are important things to dive into. The problem is that they leave out the bigger (and weirder) problem sitting right in front of us. Which is that the human being is the one doing the perceiving.I hope you enjoy listening to this one as much as I enjoyed being a part of this panel with three awesome humans who I now consider dear friends.MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODEMichael Phillip [Host of Third Eye Drops]YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thirdeyedropsJosh [Creator of Polarity]YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PolarityJosh🜁🜃🜄TAKE THIS EPISODE INTO MOODS: MOODS is a private space for dream work, tarot, self-reflection, and exploring the ideas, questions, and patterns that emerge from episodes of BFTB—or your own life. Patreon members receive 31% off MOODS access with a 7-day free trial. To activate your discount, email support@moodscodex.com with “Patreon MOODS Access” and the email associated with your Patreon account. Read more about MOODS here.MEMBER SUPPORT: Patreon comments and messages are not monitored for support. If you need help with account access, billing, subscription changes, listening setup, or a technical problem with the membership, visit bftbportal.com. The portal includes an email where you can reach me directly, though replies are reserved for genuine membership or access-related issues.🜁🜃🜄