In this episode, we explore the spring equinox below the equator - from longer evenings and flowering wattle to nesting birds and unpredictable weather. We look at the difference between the equinox and Ostara, how to build a seasonal practice around what’s actually happening where you live, and why balance doesn’t have to mean giving everything equal time.

The episode finishes with a simple equinox ritual. You’ll reflect on what winter gave you, choose something you’d like to nurture this spring, and set one manageable action to take before the next full moon.

For the ritual: Bring two small objects - one dark and one light and something to write with.

If you’d like to explore a little further:

• Embracing the Equinox - NASA
  An easy-to-follow look at what happens during an equinox and why day and night aren’t exactly equal.
  https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/embracing-the-equinox/
• Solstices, equinoxes and the seasons- Bureau of Meteorology
  A useful guide to how seasons work here in Australia.
  https://www.bom.gov.au/news-and-media/solstices-equinoxes-and-the-seasons
• Indigenous seasonal calendars - Bureau of Meteorology
  Explore some of the seasonal calendars that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have chosen to share publicly.
  https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars
• Indigenous seasonal calendars - CSIRO
  More about seasonal knowledge connected to particular Countries, along with guidance on respecting the communities who hold it.
  https://www.csiro.au/en/research/indigenous-science/indigenous-knowledge/calendars
• Phenology by Theresa M. Crimmins
  A lovely introduction to noticing seasonal changes in the plants and animals around us.
  https://www.penguin.com.au/books/phenology-9780262551052
• The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton
  For anyone interested in taking a deeper dive into the history of seasonal festivals and the ritual year.
  https://academic.oup.com/book/1390

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

What happens when we look at the world and ask it to answer us?

In Part II of The Art of Seeing, we leave the Oracle of Delphi behind and follow the quieter, stranger history of divination through bowls of water, dark mirrors, birds in flight, marked lots and ancient oracle bones.

We step into the candlelit world of John Dee and Edward Kelley, explore Dee’s mysterious obsidian scrying mirror and its connection to the Mexica god Tezcatlipoca, before following mirror magic into folklore, superstition and the childhood terror of Bloody Mary.

From Roman augury and Germanic divination to scrying, omens and ghost stories, this is an episode about our very old desire to notice patterns, search for signs and glimpse something just beyond ordinary sight.

And at the end, we’ll try a little scrying ritual of our own.

Further Reading & References

Clucas, Stephen, ed. John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought. Springer, 2006.

Dee, John. John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic. Edited by Joseph H. Peterson. Weiser Books, 2003.

Dundes, Alan. “Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-Pubescent Anxiety.” Western Folklore, vol. 57, no. 2/3, 1998, pp. 119–135.

Olivier, Guilhem. Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” University Press of Colorado, 2003.

Campbell, Stuart, Elizabeth Healey, Yvette Balbaligo and Caroline Cartwright. “The Mirror, the Magus and More: Reflections on John Dee’s Obsidian Mirror.” Antiquity, vol. 95, no. 384, 2021, pp. 1547–1564.

Tacitus. Germania, Chapter 10. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. In The Complete Works of Tacitus. Random House, 1942.

Keightley, David N. Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. University of California Press, 1978.

British Museum. Dr Dee’s Magical Mirror / Magical Speculum. Museum no. 1966,1001.1. British Museum Collection.

British Library. Oracle Bone Collection 甲骨. Or 7694/1506–2125. British Library Asian and African Collections.

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

High on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, beneath the gaze of Apollo, people once climbed toward Delphi carrying questions they could not answer alone. In this episode, we follow them up the Sacred Way to meet the Pythia, the woman believed to speak with the voice of a god, and explore the strange, beautiful world of prophecy, ritual, myth and interpretation.Because sometimes the hardest part is not receiving an answer. It is deciding what we want it to mean.

Further Reading

Scott, Michael. Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by A. D. Godley. Harvard University Press, 1920.

Pausanias. Description of Greece. Translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod. Harvard University Press, 1918.

Plutarch. Moralia, Volume V: Isis and Osiris. The E at Delphi. The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse. The Obsolescence of Oracles. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. Harvard University Press, 1936.

Bowden, Hugh. Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Johnston, Sarah Iles. Ancient Greek Divination. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

What if a grimoire was never simply a book of magic?

Long before they were hidden behind glass in museums or wrapped in stories of spells and secret societies, grimoires were companions to everyday life. They gathered remedies, dreams, prayers, recipes, observations and the quiet moments their owners refused to let slip away.

Part history, part reflection, Ink, Memory & Living Magic traces the forgotten tradition of these remarkable books, from medieval manuscripts and herbals to the handwritten notebooks of ordinary people whose names have been lost to time. Along the way, it asks a gentler question: if a grimoire is simply a record of what we choose to notice, perhaps we have been writing them all along.

If you’d like to explore the history of grimoires, folklore and magical manuscripts a little further, these are some wonderful places to begin:

• Davies, O. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009).
• Lecouteux, C. The Book of Grimoires (2013).
• Hutton, R. The Witch (2017).
• Wilby, E. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005).
• Wellcome Collection – https://wellcomecollection.org
• Museum of Witchcraft and Magic – https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

There are stories that refuse to stay still.

Medusa has been carried through centuries as a monster, a warning, a figure placed at the edge of fear - and yet her story has never settled there.

In this episode of Hex & Muse, we return to Medusa with care, tracing her origins in ancient Greek mythology, her transformation through the writings of Ovid, and the way her image has moved through art, power, and culture across time.

We explore the meaning of her gaze; how it shifts the act of seeing itself and how her story has been reclaimed in the present, where Medusa has become a powerful symbol for survival, autonomy, and living within a body that has been changed.

This is an episode about myth, but also about what myth holds.

About who gets to tell a story.

And what happens when that story is taken back.

• Ovid - Metamorphoses, Book IV
  https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Metamorphoses4.php
• Hesiod - Theogony (Gorgons + early myth references)
  https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hes.+Theog.+270
• Apollodorus - The Library, Book II (Perseus myth)
  https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Apollod.+2.4
• Theoi Greek Mythology - Medusa & Gorgons
  https://www.theoi.com/Pontios/Gorgones.html
• Caravaggio - Medusa (c. 1597)
  https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/medusa
• Benvenuto Cellini - Perseus with the Head of Medusa
  https://www.museumsinflorence.com/musei/perseus.html
  
  

• Marina Warner - Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
• Mary Beard - Women & Power: A Manifesto
• Natalie Haynes - Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
• Jess Zimmerman -Women and Other Monsters
• Emily Wilson (trans.) - The Odyssey (for broader myth context and gender reading)

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

As the Northern Hemisphere turns toward the light, we arrive at the spring equinox - known in many pagan traditions as Ostara.

In this episode of Hex & Muse, we explore the stories, symbols, and seasonal rhythms that shape this moment. From ancient myths of return and renewal to the folklore of hares and eggs, we trace how these traditions have travelled through time - eventually forming what we now recognise as Easter.

Blending mythology, history, and modern ritual, this episode invites you to reconnect with the turning of the earth and the quiet beginnings that come with it.

Historical & Mythological Sources

• Bede - The Reckoning of Time
  (Primary reference to Eostre and early spring festivals)
• The Golden Bough - James George Frazer
  (Comparative mythology - Adonis, Attis, seasonal cycles)
• Metamorphoses - Ovid
  (Greek myths including Persephone-related traditions)

Pagan Traditions & Seasonal Practice

• The Wheel of the Year - Pauline Campanelli
• Ostara: Rituals, Recipes & Lore for the Spring Equinox - Kerri Connor

🐇 Folklore & Easter Traditions

• Stations of the Sun - Ronald Hutton
  (Origins of British seasonal customs and festivals)
• The Oxford Companion to Food - Alan Davidson
  (History of Easter foods, including hot cross buns)

Optional Modern / Accessible Sources

• The British Museum -seasonal festivals & ancient rituals
• The National Trust - Easter traditions & folklore

Witches wheel Episode

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-witchs-wheel/id1820752122?i=1000713487773

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

In this episode of Hex & Muse, we step into the Scottish witch trials — where thousands, most of them women, were accused and executed under the Witchcraft Act of 1563.

Through historical research and recorded testimony, we explore how fear became law, and how ordinary lives were transformed into accusation.

This episode was inspired in part by the work of the Witches of Scotland podcast:
https://www.witchesofscotland.com/podcast

References & Further Reading

• Goodare, Julian. The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context. Manchester University Press, 2002.
• University of Edinburgh. Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database. https://www.shc.ed.ac.uk/Research/witches/
• Larner, Christina. Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
• Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. Yale University Press, 2004.
• Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Routledge, 2016.
• Gaskill, Malcolm. Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2010.
• James VI of Scotland. Daemonologie. 1597.
• Sollee, Kristen J. Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. ThreeL Media, 2017.
• Witches of Scotland Campaign. https://www.witchesofscotland.com
• Witches of Scotland Podcast. https://www.witchesofscotland.com/podcast
• Scottish Parliament (2022). Statement by Nicola Sturgeon on the Scottish Witch Trials.

North Berwick Witch Trials (1590–1592)

Lilias Adie (d. 1704)

Maggie Wall (c. 1657, memorial)

Agnes Sampson (executed 1591)

Isobel Gowdie (confessions, 1662)

Janet Horne (executed 1727)

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

Through the Gilded Eye - Witches, Goddesses & the Power of the Gaze

How has art shaped the way we see witches and powerful women?

In this episode of Hex & Muse, we step into the painted worlds of Circe, Lilith, and the witch archetype to explore how female power has been framed across centuries of art history.

From the spellbinding tension of John William Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses to the introspective sorcery of Alice Pike Barney’s Circe, the gaze surrounding these figures begins to shift. Through John Collier’s Lilith and Kiki Smith’s haunting sculptural reimagining, we encounter a mythic woman whose body has carried centuries of symbolism - temptation, autonomy, rebellion.

But when witches enter the frame, the atmosphere changes entirely.

In Francisco Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (El Aquelarre), the witch becomes a spectacle of fear - a gathering framed through suspicion, darkness, and cultural anxiety. Yet in Leonora Carrington’s The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg), female power appears differently: expansive, cosmic, and deeply integrated with the rhythms of the world.

Together these works reveal something subtle but powerful.

Sometimes the image invites us to witness a moment of spectacle.

Other times, the figure exists within her own world - sovereign, self-possessed, and unmoved by the gaze that watches her.

Because the most revealing question in front of a painting may not be what we see.

But where the image has placed us.

• John William Waterhouse — Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses
• Alice Pike Barney — Circe
• John Collier — Lilith
• Kiki Smith — Lilith (1994)
• Francisco Goya — Witches’ Sabbath (El Aquelarre)
• Leonora Carrington — The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg)

• Art Renewal Center — Waterhouse, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses https://www.artrenewal.org
• Smithsonian American Art Museum - Alice Pike Barney, Circe https://americanart.si.edu
• Art UK -John Collier, Lilith https://artuk.org
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Kiki Smith, Lilith https://www.metmuseum.org
• Museo del Prado - Francisco Goya, El Aquelarre (Witches’ Sabbath) https://www.museodelprado.es
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Leonora Carrington, The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) https://www.metmuseum.org

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.