Katie: This week we welcome the author of Water Magic published by Llewellyn, and written by Lilith Dorsey.
Katie: Yay. Yay.
Katie: A little background on our guest today. Lilith comes from a Celtic Afro-Caribbean and Native American Spirituality. She's the editor and publisher of Oshun-African Magickal Quarterly, filmmaker of the documentary Bodies of Water Voodoo Identity and Trance-formation and the co-host of the YouTube show, Witchcraft and Voodoo, among many other accomplishments and books. Lilith, it is so amazing to have you on Knit A Spell today, welcome!
Lilith: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited we could get this going on. I wanna talk about everything with you two today. It's gonna be fantastic.
Jim: So excited to have you on. I've been wanting to connect with you for such a long time and this is thrilling for me.
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Katie: We've been talking all this month about water magic, the Scorpio season and who else better to have on to talk about this particular topic then Lilith the expert.
Katie: I thought we could ask first a little background about how your journey into the magical realm began?
Lilith: Part of my brain always wants to go back to when I was four years old, they made me the Virgin Mary in the Naivity play and they gave me a real baby and I kept it quiet for two and a half hours. Cause I thought, I was like, this is the divine feminine.
Lilith: I'm supposed to hold this baby and it's gonna be wonderful. So and I did it, it, it still cracks me up today that that's. But I felt like that was me taking my own spin on, I went to Lutheran school and things like that, and I knew there was something there, but I knew all of it wasn't for me, so it allowed me to express that in a performative way, in a magical way, in a way that I thought resonated with me on a deep level. Even though I was four years old. And my parents named me Lilith, so I really don't think I had any other choice.
Katie: No pressure.
Jim: Amazing that your parents were Lutheran and named you Lutheran.
Lilith: No, they just sent me to Lutheran school. Cause I was growing up in Brooklyn and New York City public schools. They didn't wanna subject me to that. So the Lutheran school was you could go there no matter what denomination, but they still made us go to church. So I know the Bible better than most witches, which is probably handy for, who we work and stuff.
Jim: Were your parents religious? Were you raised in a spiritual household?
Lilith: No, actually. Thank you for asking me this story. Nobody ever asked me this story. My mother grew up Catholic, but she renounced all of that. We never went to church except we would go on Christmas Eve, we'd get really drunk and trashed and we'd run in for midnight mass and crack up and laugh hysterically and then, run out and have more cocktails.
Lilith: So that's what I remember. Sounds like a good time. And my dad. My dad actually, was one of those original people at Stonewall. My dad was an amazing drag queen and so I grew up in that world, welcoming the performative and everything like that, it was fantastic.
Katie: Wow.
Jim: Amazing.
Lilith: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim: This is so cool. I had no idea.
Lilith: I know. Nobody ever asked me that.
Jim: Upbringing. I want the book. My dad was a drag queen, please. When's that book coming out?
Lilith: I know. I always think I should write my autobiography. It's like the true story of, stonewall and protests and voodoo and murder and all this craziness. But people tell me, oh, they won't read it. And I'm like, I think they would read it.
Katie: I think so too.
Jim: There's an important part of queer history that needs to be told, and I think that there's perspectives, especially external perspectives that can be so helpful for many of us that are yearning for that.
Jim: So I'm just here to encourage that. Cause, you had a front row seat.
Lilith: Maybe now that I'm like a best selling award-winning author, I can push through with the autobiography.
Jim: Okay, so the spirituality was, maybe it was a little more secular or maybe more embedded?
Lilith: Most people our age, I grew up watching Bewitched and all these things, and I remember, having spells and potions and hiding them from everybody and mixing things up and always doing that myself, and it was a personal journey.
Lilith: I think nobody ever encouraged me because I was, the latchkey generation. They just left me alone, and I did whatever I wanted. Yeah. And I remember, it's funny now. This is a Lewellen book, but I also have books with Wiser. I remember going into the old Wiser bookstore when I was about 11 or 12, and they wouldn't let me access the rare books cuz they thought I was a kid and I was gonna mess 'em up. And I was just like, screw you, I'll fucking show you.
Lilith: Thanks for discouraging me. I'm angry like that. And again, the scene in New York City when I was growing up in the seventies and the eighties, it was magical child. It was, the beginnings of enchantments.
Lilith: It was all these kinds of, like real first public, I think, places to be a witch, and that was wonderful. And I'm so glad. I just wrote a piece about Margot Adler, I'm so glad I had people like Margot Adler to look up to who were both activists and witches and became icons over the years and I think we resonated on that level.
Jim: When Lil talks about Magical Child and Enchantments, those were shops in New York. So for people that don't know, those were really famous shops and I think Enchantments still exist, but I don't think Magical Child is there anymore.
Lilith: No, magical Child has not existed for a very long time.
Lilith: Enchantments, I actually went to, when I was back in the city last month.
Jim: You go there and you're like, I feel like this hasn't changed since 1972.
Lilith: They just moved!
Jim: Oh, they did?
Katie: Trip to New York City in our future Jim!
Jim: Definitely the witch shops in New York are like no other.
Jim: So you identify as Celtic, Afro-Caribbean, native American spirituality. What was most accessible to you growing up, as a person of color in New York, was the Afro-Caribbean. Or was it easier to access the celtic stuff? How did that all come about for you?
Lilith: I think it was probably easier to access the Celtic stuff because, people were open about it and talking about it. Again, it seems no, they weren't really talking about it, but compared to the Afro-Caribbean stuff, as me going in a little kid who didn't really have, I mean my grandparents and my great grandparents did it, but nobody ever talked about it. You know what I mean?
Lilith: You would throw salt over your shoulder or, we always had this thing where we'd sweep the money in or something at new Year's Eve, so we had these first foot, all of those kinds of customs that come along with different, heritage traditions.
Lilith: But I see. Just thought that was something you did, it wasn't that, oh, this is a religion that you study and there's things like that. So I think the Celtic was more accessible just because more had been written about it. And my grandmother was Scottish in English and also a partpic dish as my mother reminds me.
Lilith: So that part of me was always something that I did know, at least part of the history about, if not the magical side of things. So that fascinated me and I wanted to know more. Wow.
Jim: Yeah. And then you started to embrace the Afro-Caribbean after that?
Lilith: Yeah. Yeah. I mean my best friend and I, we had like our own little two person cove when I was in high school.
Lilith: It was ridiculous. Cause nobody liked us. It totally was like The Craft, right? I love it. Those weird girls. And we were gonna do spells about it, and she went on to run one of the largest covens in New York City, and I just kept on doing my own solitary thing and joining in and learning.
Lilith: By the time I was a senior in college, I already had my first daughter, Aria, and I was like, wait a minute, I want her to be proud of her African American heritage. I want her to know that she's a black woman and that's okay, and that's something that's strong. And back then, she was born in 90, she's gonna get mad at me for giving away her age. But, back then it was no drumming at events. And, it was almost like footloose. Like we had such restrictions on our spirituality. And it was made me really angry.
Lilith: One of my degrees is in anthropology, and I had an anthropology teacher tell me, there's no such thing as magic in the modern world in the United States. And I was like, you're an idiot. Totally. I'm gonna prove you wrong. And that's right about when I first met my priestess Miriam, who has a temple here in New Orleans where I live now, the Buddist Spiritual Temple.
Lilith: And I've been with her for 29 years. So I started studying with her over time. I went on and also, Met Haitian Mabo, Bonnie Devlin, who a lot of people know as a musician. She's got a lot of music out there. She's no longer with us, but I initiated and Haitian Bo do through her. And I also initiated in Lare La Kumi, aka Sania with my priest, la who's also no longer with us, unfortunately.
Lilith: It really felt like family. All my godmothers, the first time I met them, it really felt like family, and a lot of my upbringing was full of trauma and stress and all of that kind of stuff. So the fact that I could have spiritual teachers that really welcomed me and nurtured me, I think was totally invaluable.
Lilith: And for about 15, 16 years now, I've had my own spiritual house. We're called the House on Maje, and I have about maybe 10 active members. So that's nice to be able to turn around and do that for the next generation. They call it Sankofa giving back, . Yeah. So that's always been really important to me to give back to the community.
Jim: So I see that you did this documentary, bodies of Water Voodoo Identity and Trance Formation TRANCE Formation.
Jim: I wonder if that predated your book on water magic. And so can you talk to us a little bit about your relationship with physical water, with spiritual water with the idea of emotions and magic and how that appealed to you.
Lilith: It never really occurred to me, because I'm an Aries with a Libra moon and a Libra rising, so I know, right? Yeah. So I just, I never really thought about water. The documentary, it was called Bodies of Water. I shot it between 2003 and 2004 in Brooklyn and in New Orleans.
Lilith: So for those of you math wise, that predated Katrina, and I, it was part of my grad work at NYU and I'd really gone back to grad school because I wanted to make a film about priestess, Miriam. I wanted to make a film about voodoo and all the African traditional religions based from a filmmaker that was actually in the tradition. Cuz at the time there was so many people from the outside, we're gonna tell you what your religion is. And we still see that today, unfortunately, but I wanted to have access to all the NYU equipment.
Lilith: My favorite story is we lost the $3,000 tripod at the airport on the way back. And I'm, I apologize to all the NYU students. I'm the reason they can't take equipment out of state anymore. They did find it eventually. There was much magic done and they did find it eventually at jfk, but, Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy.
Lilith: But just through talking through them, I really talking out when I, what I wanted to make the documentary about, I realized that, for me, the connection really was influenced by the water. I grew up in New York City right next to the Verrazano Bridge, which one of my priest friends reminded me is right where the river goes out to meet the ocean.
Lilith: So it's like this Ohsun place. This place that has all that sacred energy and is right next to the water.
Lilith: And everybody says the character of New Orleans is shaped by the water. It's below sea level. We're called the Crescent City because the Mississippi makes these crescent as it snakes around the city. So there's this total connection to the water and I started thinking about it. Our bodies are mostly water. Our brains and our hearts are an even higher percentage of water. So even if we don't identify with water or think of ourselves as water people, we are water. We're literally mostly water.
Lilith: So we better get right with it, right? Yeah, absolutely. Visually too. I think that shooting the documentary, I make experimental films, again, not something a lot of people do, but I think that, shooting the water and being able to have that transformation, that's why I called it tranceformation.
Lilith: Just by watching the screen and hearing the sounds and things like that. I thought that using water as an element to tell the story was something that would be really effective.
Lilith: And that was what, 2003? 2004. So then fast forward to this Water Magic, which came out last year.
Lilith: So that's many years later. And I was approached by Heather Green, my editor at Llewellyn, and she wanted to do an elemental series and she wanted it to start with me, and water was gonna be the first cuz they were releasing them according to the seasons or something like that.
Lilith: Water was supposed to be first. That's what they told me. And it was fun because I got to use all my anthropology knowledge. I really approached it like this is a cross-cultural look at water from all the different areas. In every way, shape, form per mutation. And it was a lot of fun.
Lilith: It really was. I remember once I was in New York and I'm writing about, water birds and everything, and somebody gets on the elevator at the downtown mall in Brooklyn where the movie theater is with a stuffed heron, and I'm like, what? A just got in the elevator with me while I was writing about water birds.
Lilith: This is too crazy. The water came to meet me.
Katie: I love it when that kind of stuff happens, right?
Katie: After writing that book, how did that change you as a magical practitioner?
Lilith: It was funny because it came out right in the middle of a pandemic. , so I think before I wrote it I was like, okay, I'm gonna finish this and I'm gonna take all these pilgrimages all over the world to see these fantastic amazing sites and no. I was really just at home.
Lilith: I moved during the pandemic and the first couple of times I talked about this book, my yard would flood. So it would be like, oh, okay, I need a boat. I guess I need a bigger boat, is really what the story is.
Lilith: It really allowed me to start thinking of, again, like I said about the internal water, about the fact that we all have water in our lives.
Lilith: I love talking about tap water as the spirit of place, cuz that snakes underneath, wherever it comes from, it's natural source and ends up in your home. So it's like it picks up all that energy, all the way along and gets to you so it has exactly what you need. And using that as a magical component when we can't necessarily go to, again, I was ready to go to Tibet, I was ready to go to Mexico.
Lilith: I was gonna go all over the world, but that didn't happen. So I had to reinvent how I was gonna connect to water and part of a lot of that time for me was about, okay, what are the benefits? There's a lot of things that are not benefits of this time, but what are the things that are benefits in this moment that I can just celebrate?
Katie: That's a great outlook. Not just for that particular time, but for any time. Trying to see the opportunities that's really inspiring.
Jim: And I love how this book is really a resource. But it's like a storybook too. So it's organized for folks who haven't seen it yet. I love how you bring that ethnographic perspective in and you start with like water throughout time, but then each of the chapters is like water and the divine. Water and sacred sites water in magic, water with herbs and botanicals. And so it's water in the perspective of these other aspects, and then there's these listings and these little entries that you can read about.
Jim: It's such a great reference. The other thing that I really appreciate is the washes that you have these recipes for washes. At least for folks that are practicing a lot more of the, like Wicca, I think we don't get a lot of the folk magic, remedies or recipes a lot of times.
Jim: And I think those are really interesting to include . So there are actual recipes and spells in here too.
Lilith: Yeah. I try to do that. Both of those things I try to do with all my books. I try to have it be, yes, you could read it to cover like a storybook, or you could just go, oh, I need this one thing.
Lilith: Let me pick this one thing out of it in this moment. Cuz that's what I'm working on right now.
Lilith: And the washes, I always feel like you're cleaning anyway, like you've gotta get in the shower, you've gotta get in the bathtub, you've gotta mop your floor. Why not make that a magical experience in addition to one that's just part of cleaning your home, and for me, when I add those botanicals or essential oils or something like that, it lifts all boats, right? Like it just makes everything rise to the occasion and it makes it that much more pleasurable, that much more magical, that much more effective, really.
Lilith: So many of these things that we use, I did a workshop on magical cleansing the other day. So many of these things that we use for cleansing also, Keep away bugs, keep away fungus and virus and all this other stuff. So it's oh, this has two purposes. The spiritual and also the actual, mundane, scientific purpose that it's gonna be used for. And I should utilize both of those to be the most effective person I can be.
Katie: Oh yes, you are speaking Jim's language. We constantly talk about living a magical lifestyle and how everything mundane can have magic in it with the right intent. And so yeah, you're just reinstating that for us once again, which is great. Definitely.
Katie: Another part that I really enjoyed about the book was that it had variations of water on it.
Katie: Like it's very easy just to remember like water, oh, a cup of water, a stream, a river, but like fog, mist. Things that aren't necessarily just literal water. Cause I can think of things very literally, sometimes I need help breaking out of that.
Lilith: I'm glad you enjoyed that. Because again I'm not necessarily one of those people that's gonna sit there praying to the garbage. That's for other people to do, but, there's enough things that aren't the garbage that we can expand our own magical life to and just recognize the beauty of it.
Jim: I was just reading the Seattle Times. There's an article about the five distinct types of rain that Seattle receives, and I thought about how I think the Inuit people have several different names for snow. , and we literally have. The meteorologist, like the paper, talking about five different categories of rain.
Jim: It's also really funny that whenever I visit New Orleans, people are always oh, you live in Seattle. It rains there all the time, and they're worried about it. But if people thought that it rains all the time in Seattle in the same way that it rains in New Orleans, I would understand why they would think it was horrible because when it rains in New Orleans you can't go anywhere.
Jim: It's like buckets.
Katie: The wall of water.
Lilith: Yeah, it is. It's like a tropical downpour, it just comes down in sheets and everything floods because, even despite all these hurricanes, our drain system is still crap. I had a guest here that I wanted to go and I knew it was gonna rain and I was like, you better go now.
Lilith: Go to the airport now before you get stuck. Come on. Leave. Call the car. you're not missing the flight. You're not getting stuck here for three hours. Cuz you tell me you're too stupid to know that it floods. Like I'm here to tell you now that it floods and you got to go.
Jim: But being from New York, you've experienced the autumn or the springtime drizzle for weeks like we have in Seattle where it just drizzles or mists. Rarely do we get storms that dump buckets.
Lilith: That's funny you say it just drizzles too, because I did a semester in London and my daughter did a semester in London, in England, and they again that's the rainy city, right?
Lilith: But it's not really rainy to us.
Jim: Seattle's weather is almost identical to London.
Katie: It's just damp. You walk right through it.
Katie: Let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about crafting with water.
Jim: Every year people have trouble finding the right gift for somebody. Does it fit, is it something they have to dust or that they're gonna re-gift?
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Katie: Always in stock and never outta style. That's James Divine.
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Jim: And we're back with Lilith Dorsey and her amazing book: Water Magic!
Jim: We were talking about the different types of water. The water that we experience in New York, the water we experience in New Orleans with the Mississippi River and the water we experience in Seattle. Katie was just in a pretty remarkable event that was all over the news.
Jim: It just so happened she was visiting her parents in. Southwest Florida and was in almost the heart of Hurricane Ian. . And on page 100 you talk about types of water: dew water, glacier water, lake water, snow water, rain water, pond water, spring water.
Jim: And of course the third one down is hurricane water. Hurricane water. Yes. Yes. So let's talk about the different ways people can craft with water. Especially water and where it comes from. So can you speak to this idea?
Lilith: Yeah, sure. Of course. I've been in a couple of hurricanes. Those are different down south too.
Lilith: I used to live in New England for a long time, not the same type of hurricane as being in Florida or Louisiana or any like the Gulf. No, not the same. For me, the hurricane is that, intense strong change. So when you're trying to get that change, blockbuster is really what I would call it.
Lilith: Like you're trying to break a situation, you're trying to change and transform a situation and start again from the beginning. That's what I would use the hurricane water for.
Lilith: And in the same way that we were talking before, you could use it as. Part of a floor wash. I'd like to do a lot of putting stuff in spray bottles, so like I will put my essential oils with my magic water in the spray bottle and then just carry it with me. I can spray it under my desk at work. I can spray my hands and my feet so that everything I touch will change the world around me. That I'm gonna be drawn to something different.
Lilith: And that would work any of the waters really you can use in that way. But hurricane is for the most extreme change and I really like that, just having it. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Every time I go out after the hurricane, I'll be cleaning up and I'll be like, Hey, wait a minute.
Lilith: I gotta save some of this water that was collected somewhere in this bowl or this cup, or whatever, and make sure I put that away in case I need it later in. In case either me or one of my students or my friends is in a situation that really needs some quick and effective change. So then I would pull that out.
Lilith: But you can use it for whatever you want to. I don't like putting limits really on people's kinds of magic, cuz I feel like everybody has their own kind of thing.
Lilith: I love to take baths, but when I lived in New York City, I actually rented the apartment without seeing the bathroom. And I remember calling the realtor, it took dogs and we had a big dog at that point.
Lilith: So it was like, oh my gosh, no one's gonna rent to us. And they said they would rent to us and they said it would be okay. So I didn't see the bathroom. I was just so excited. And then I called the realtor. I was like, does it have a bathroom? And she's yeah, it does. And I'm like, okay, good. I'll rent it.
Lilith: It's fine. Let's go. And then after I got. No bathtub. So for 12 years I didn't have a bathtub, so in order to do a spiritual bath I had to drag a tote into the shower and like pour stuff on my feet and crunch thing. I'm tiny crunch down in the tote in order to have the bath. Oh, you gotta want that.
Lilith: Yeah. No, I'm so happy. I have two bathtubs now I'm so happy I have my bathtub back, but maybe you don't have a bathtub. Maybe, all you have is a shower, so how can you make it work for you? If you're in the shower? How can you make it work for you if you are traveling? Like I said, that's why I put it in the spray bottle. A couple of ounces you can even fly with it.
Lilith: I love to get water from wherever I am because that sort of embodies the place of wherever I'm traveling to. So if I wanna have those memories, if I wanna have that beautiful kind of feeling that I had when I was traveling, I can have that back again.
Lilith: Since we're talking about water, I was thinking about last Christmas, I was in Amsterdam and I rented one of those houseboats, so I'm lying there, smoking weed, looking out the window. The cutest guy ever comes by on a surfboard in shorts. He looks like some sort of statuesque God. And I was like, I'm gonna remember this moment.
Lilith: I'm just gonna remember this moment when I feel down or low or sad. And I made sure I took some of the water and brought it home with me. So now I have that kind of vibe in the water and I can use it in my magic for whatever I wanna do.
Jim: When I teach the elements, I really teach that water the physical water is a metaphor for the spiritual idea of emotions and empathic ability and compassion.
Jim: And we've even seen some of the, I think in that movie The Secret or other things where people will freeze water or they'll put energy or love or different intentions into water.
Jim: And water will sometimes hold those things in the way that it forms crystals or something. It has an ability to hold our emotions in a very interesting way.
Jim: Is that something that you think is really an important connection also?
Lilith: Oh definitely. You're right. There's been lots of scientific studies, even if they just speak positive things to water, it changes its molecular structure. I feel like if I'm capturing it at that time, I'm having that good vibes or those travel vibes, whatever it is I'm trying to capture in that moment, it'll stay in the water.
Lilith: And the other thing I love about water is you can always make more water because scientifically it always retains the character from the original water. So I could take that tiny bottle of water I got from Amsterdam, add a bunch of tap water to it. It'll literally, like if you break it down, show exactly where it came from.
Lilith: It just layers on top of itself. And I love that property because I can't think of anything else that really does that. Yes, it's diluted, but it's more, it's like geometrically improved.
Jim: One drop of Amsterdam will make the entire gallon of water into Amsterdam water.
Lilith: Yes!
Jim: Yeah, exactly. And you'll have that whole vibe in an entire gallon of water.
Lilith: Yeah. Yeah. And I've had people, over the years tell me, oh, they have water from Greece and Ireland, or they have water from some other sacred site, and I was just like, you can make more water.
Lilith: You don't have to be sitting there like praying. It doesn't evaporate. You can top it up and have more of that water. Yes. And I just think that's so beautiful.
Katie: One topic that was in your book was divination using various waters to divine.
Katie: I'm curious what works best for you. What are your go-to divination techniques when it comes to water?
Lilith: I'm always somebody who needs something. I'm not one of these people that's really, I don't know. It doesn't matter how many psychedelics I eat, either I just don't hallucinate you know what I mean? So I could sit there and try and scry until the day is long and nothing's really gonna happen.
Lilith: Sometimes I might get something auditory or if I'm writing or doing automatic writing, I might get it. Seeing it just doesn't work for me.
Lilith: I'm much more likely to use water crystals for my pendulum or to use the water cards in the tarot to do a divination. The moon card is really good for that. Just like walking into it and seeing what's on the other side spiritually and emotionally and everything like that. Because a lot of times when somebody has a . Question or a reading or a situation that they're trying to find, it is something that's hidden.
Lilith: It is something that's emotional. It is something that's beyond our grasp. So using that as a way for me to move forward and I will use the magical waters in conjunction with my cards or with my pendulum or something like my dousing rods, literally. Like for looking for water, but. Those work better for me than just sitting there and scrying, although I haven't tried that. I talk in the book about that special black water that's like charcoal or whatnot. I haven't tried that yet, but maybe that works for some people.
Jim: Your go-to is tarot, is that your home divinatory practice?
Lilith: Yeah. Although I've been a professional reader now for what, over 30 years, so there's certainly times where, especially when I was starting out, that I would not have my cards with me, and Priestess Miriam does a geomancy system with stones and bones and roots and things like that.
Lilith: So I've certainly read that way. We could talk about palmistry. I've certainly read palms, but usually it's at an event. I'm like, $5 hand jobs.
Katie: Yes, indeed.
Jim: Same thing.
Lilith: It gets attention, I want a dollar, hand job, okay.
Jim: Come on over.
Lilith: I like the depth that tarot gives me. I like that I can expand and expand upon it. And then if I have a yes no, cuz I think everybody should have a good Yes no, I'll pull out the pendulum or the dousing rod.
Jim: Do you use wooden dousing rods or do you use the copper ones?
Lilith: I use the copper ones.
Katie: What's the difference? Just depends on the vibe?
Lilith: Yeah, I think so. Copper's always worked better for me, just in general. I like it as a metal and actually, I stole my copper rods from my mom. I replaced hers with some brass ones that she doesn't really like, but she ain't getting hers back.
Lilith: She never used them.
Jim: She won't know the difference,
Lilith: It's what works best for you, especially when you're talking about a divination tool that is gonna move. You know what I mean? If I pick up those rods and I have with me right now, but they'll like, they'll go nuts.
Lilith: I don't even have to do anything. I just hold them and it looks like somebody's spinning them an insane amount. Same deal with the pendulum.
Lilith: So I think that certain things are gonna resonate with people better, like I said, I don't wanna narrow people into one kind of thing. I know people who do yes nos with pennies. I know people who do yes nos with cards. So I think there's a lot of different ways. But I always seem to be mostly tarot if there's a reading.
Jim: Pendulums and dousing rods never really worked for me, but my husband, he loves them. It's fun to see how different people have different things that work for them.
Katie: In that vein could you tell us a story about a magical, memorable experience that you may have had, whether it was defining or working with water or whatever.
Lilith: Oh my gosh. I got a lot of stories.
Jim: Tell us one. We have our popcorn. Tell us a story.
Lilith: Oh, okay. A magical story. There's a few that I talk about in the book.
Lilith: And it was funny cuz I actually just saw this mofo the other day he came to visit for Halloween. But I remember, I'm having a relationship, oh, I'm gonna go to the river, I'm gonna leave an offering for this relationship. I'm gonna leave roses and all these other things and it's gonna be beautiful.
Lilith: And I get to the river right near his house and I go to put it down and there's a bunch of dead fish and honestly. If that wasn't an answer from the universe, I don't know what.
Lilith: I have a lot of cautionary tales too. One of my favorite stories, which I don't think I've written about anywhere, is I had a client, and I don't do this anymore, but I had a client that wanted to win the lottery.
Lilith: This is when I first started out. She's like, I have to win the lottery. The gas bill, I haven't paid it for three months. I need a couple hundred dollars. I have to win the lottery. So we didn't do divination, we just did some working for her to win the lottery and she won the lottery. And then the next day her husband died.
Lilith: And I don't think it was because she'd won the lottery, but I think her focus was off. And ever since then, I require people to do divination before I do any work for them, because you think your problem is this $300 gas bill, your real problem is your husband's really sick and he's gonna drop dead really soon unless we do something.
Lilith: So I think that people's focus can be off a lot and I very early on made that shift in there from, okay, we're not gonna do the work, we're gonna do a reading and then we'll figure out what work is best for you. It's like going to a doctor. I don't wanna equate it to medicine, but magic is medicine and everybody doesn't need the same prescription.
Lilith: Some medications will be really messed up. My grandfather had an allergy of penicillin and he had to take sulfur. We'd all be dead pretty much if it wasn't for penicillin, but he couldn't take it. That would've killed him. Everybody needs to find out what's exactly gonna work for them.
Lilith: And through divination I can figure that out and then we can move forward. I think that's really been my focus for a long time.
Jim: I think that's a great tip too is the role of divination prior to crafting in whatever way is, how do we use divination prior to it?
Jim: I know that sometimes people use divination in nefarious ways to say, oh, you have a curse on you, and now you know, I to sell you a $500 curse removal. When it's not done as a con, when it's actually done to say, okay, you want some work done? Let's do diagnostic process and divination and let's discover what's there.
Lilith: Yeah, cuz it's easy to let, if you have a situation or a problem, it's easy for that to get outta control, and it's ultimately always gonna be what can I do in this situation? And my godmother used to put in for my most highest good. Like we used to do divination panels together and she'd be like, it's always for my most highest goods.
Lilith: So everybody has their own highest good that they can achieve in that situation, and that's what we're going for. We're not going for, I need this job, or I need this relationship, or I need this house because you don't know. Maybe that job, that relationship and that house would be really horrible for you.
Lilith: So you need to find out ahead of time exactly what the right thing is for you. And I can bet you that it'll be even better than whatever it was you thought was your thing. That was, you were owning that thing and branding it and it was yours forever. No. Open it up to something bigger.
Jim: We call that when people have a lust for results it can blind them to the bigger picture.
Jim: Maybe we got it from Star Wars. The more you tighten your grip.
Katie: That's right. I like that. You can't grab onto water, you just have to float.
Lilith: It's true. Definitely. I'm glad you brought that up. Star Wars. I do a lot of sci-fi magic cuz that's my other
Katie: degree is what does that mean?
Katie: Wait, what does that mean? What does that
Jim: mean? Sci-fi. Sci-fi. Magic. All right. Let
Katie: Tell me more. Dish.
Lilith: I do a workshop about it. I do a workshop about how, we can see in science fiction so much of these archetypes from Jung. And we can align ourselves through that magically. And yes, it's obviously the hero and the villain and all of these things.
Lilith: And that in a way also equates to tarot journey. You know what I mean? We each have these stages that we're going through. But there's also, and you, find this with Gene Roddenberry and so much of the early sci-fi masters that there were things that they couldn't say in the mainstream media that they could only say through the genre of sci-fi and fantasy.
Lilith: So I think that again allowed them to have this sort of magical truths, religious truths that they wouldn't be allowed to put out there otherwise. If it wasn't for this sort of little vehicle, that was another world, but it was really us.
Lilith: It's the same way I describe people's Mardi Gras costumes. People are really who they wanna be for Mardi Gras or for Halloween. That's their secret selves, and they let it out at that moment. So it's like we can, through the sci-fi or fantasy, we can let these things out and it shows us in a lot of ways who we really are.
Katie: Yes, I have thought about. So often lately it feels like every book I'm reading, like sci-fi, just for fun kind of a thing, fantasy, whatever. I'm like, who is this person writing it and what do they really know and why are they feeling like they need to hide it in all of this like story context? And maybe it's, they don't even know, like it's just, downloading and it's a creative imagination and they're just writing stories.
Katie: Or maybe some of these people are magical practitioners who just, like you said, aren't comfortable enough with coming out and this is how they can put bits and pieces out into the world without it being so serious, even though I'm sure they take it very seriously.
Lilith: Definitely. And if you look back to the origins it all goes back to Frankenstein. So we've got Mary Shelly, we've got like a feminist created genre, and I think that's one of the few we can actually point to. And I just was always so inspired about how she was exercising her own demons.
Lilith: Through that text and her own stresses and things of that nature, and allowed it to, what are we holding onto? What are we creating right? And are we creating a heaven? Are we creating a hell?
Lilith: And I think that equates to magic too. How many times have we see people get so wound up in back to lust of result gets so wound up in creating this thing.
Lilith: And what they create is nothing like what they intended because it can't be.
Jim: Wow, that's such a perfect metaphor for Frankenstein's Monster and for so many other things in sci-fi when it gets outta control. I also think about how many witches, pagans, magical practitioners also write sci-fi or fantasy. If they're writers, Rachel Polic comes to mind, so many others who are also witchy people, if I may use that word broadly.
Jim: I've always loved sci-fi and I love how it is able to coat truths in that chocolate coating to make it easier for us to swallow or absorb and yeah, I'm all over it.
Jim: Also with my sociology degree, I'm always looking at it for those anthropological eyes and deconstructing oh, I see what you did there.
Lilith: It's true. And I think it's almost we could bang, flip it and reverse it, like we wouldn't have ended up in those disciplines if we weren't really trying to figure out how humans interact and how they function. And then we get in there and we get more tools to look at how they interact and how they function and how it goes.
Lilith: So it just spirals around on itself in a nice way.
Katie: This has been extremely awesome. One thing we do have that's pretty exciting is we. A complimentary copy that we got from Llewellyn of your amazing book, Water Magic, which we are going to do a contest for. So go ahead and follow our Knit A Spell Instagram or our newsletter on KnitASpell.com and you'll get all the information on how you can enter for a chance to win a copy of Water Magic for yourself.
Katie: You will love it. A must for any person who needs reference for water or just magic in general. The whole series was actually really wonderful.
Lilith: And I have free stickers for everybody, so if anybody wants to email me [email protected].
Lilith: I've got free Water Magic Stickers and stickers for all my books, really.
Katie: We'll put the contact information in our show notes so that it's easy for you guys to reach out to Lilith. Very generous.
Jim: Definitely go to Lilith's website, again, it's in our show notes, lilith dorsey.com and check out all of your offerings. So you do readings for people?
Lilith: Yes, I do readings for people. They can contact me through the website. I have the largest voodoo blog in the world, which is called Voodoo Universe. So they can just Google Voodoo Universe and find that.
Katie: Do you have a newsletter? What's your social media? How can people follow you?
Lilith: I'm Lilith Dorsey. I'm still on Twitter. I don't know why, but, Insta, Facebook.
Jim: So Lilith Dorsey, everywhere. I'm so happy to have you on. This has been mind blowingly cool. Hanging out with you is just a joy.
Lilith: Yes. Yay. Thank you so much. I can't wait to hang out with you again.
Jim: Yay. I know.
Jim: In person soon, right? Yes. Yay.
Katie: Yeah, I look forward to that too. Awesome, everybody. Until next week, Jim and Lilith, thank you both so much for joining us and we'll see you next week.
Jim: Bye everybody. Bye bye.
Lilith: Thank you.
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