Episode 3: The Marriage of Tarot & Astrology

In this very special episode, Mariana and Cristina sit down with Hope and Matt Hughes, the creators behind the magical array of tarot and oracle decks, which they publish through their company, Ethereal Visions Publishing. The occasion for this chat is also very special--Cristina has joined forces with Hope and Matt, collaborating on their upcoming astrology themed oracle deck, the Musica Universalis!!! Tune in with us as we talk all about this exciting new project, and share insights on the role of oracle decks in our divination practices, how Hope and Matt go about creating the art and accompanying literature for their works, what it means to have a ritual practice that involves art, symbology, and self-reflection, and so much more. This is one of our "praxis" episodes, hopefully offering some helpful insights into cultivating ritual and spiritual practices of your own. Important to know! The Kickstarter for this fabulous book-deck will launch on April 30th, 2025! Find the link below to get notified when the Kickstarter is live, and take a look at the wonderful project so far. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evpublishing/musica-universalis-zodiac-oracle-deckLearn more about Ethereal Visions Publishing at their website here: https://www.etherealvisionstarot.com/Find Hope on IG: https://www.instagram.com/hopebowiehughes/And Matt on IG: https://www.instagram.com/matthughesart/

To be eclipsed is to fall into shadow. Astronomical eclipses occur about four times a year, when one of the luminaries is cast into darkness. We too can be cast into darkness, thrown into life experiences that bring us down into the depths of our personal underworlds. Just as the Sun and Moon go dark, so can we. Eclipses were seen as a malefic omen to ancient people, but we know that we need the symbolic dark in order to understand the part of life that is filled with light. In the hero’s journey, in myths, the experience of katabasis, of “going under” occurs when the protagonist travels to the underworld, to retrieve or discover some life-altering wisdom, enlightenment, or gift. There is fertility in darkness. Join us in this episode, which we created during “eclipse season” in the late winter of 2025, to explore stories of descent and rising, of occultation and resurrection. Our listener dream analysis focuses on someone’s dream of floating up in the sky. 

One of the most archetypal experiences we undergo in this lifetime is the search for the "other." We move through the world as individuals, learning and growing on our own path of development, but eventually, we begin to yearn for another to share space and time with. Enter the symbol of the lover. Is the beloved a mirror? A focal point of projections that teaches us something about ourselves? An angel? A secret challenge to our sense of self? How can we undo the tight laces of "Me" and unfold into a "We"? This episode explores these questions. With cues from the Lovers card in the tarot, the myth of Psyche and Eros, medieval romantic courtly love, and our own reflections on love, and the beloved, this episode is our Valentine's Day gift to the world :) At the episode's end, we analyze a dream that involves Hekate and wild animals. ANNOUNCEMENTCristina's signature class, The School of Astrological Arcana (formerly called The Art of Chart Interpretation, and The School of Divine Sympathies - forgive her Gemini Moon!!) is open for enrollment!! Use the code ASTROAA through February 15th for $20 off enrollment, as well as some rich freebies -- a 44 pages Archetypal Astrology guidebook, a free 90 minute seminar, "Myths from Underground."💓 Leave Us A Review 💓If you love our show, you can help us reach curious minds and hearts by leaving us a rating or review wherever you listen to your pods! Thank you so much for being a part of our podcast journey. 🌹 Advertise With Us 🌹Would you like your product or shop to be featured as an ad partner on Soror Mystica? Explore advertising options here!🧩 Share Your Symbols 🧩Do you have a symbol that pops up in dreams, in your tarot card pulls, or in your personal experience that puzzles you? If you’d like to hear us talk about your personal symbol on our show, feel free to share your story with us here.📸 Find Us On Instagram 📸Soror MysticaMariana LouisCristina Farella

The collective unconscious lives and breathes between us all, a mysterious web of connectivity, sign, and symbol. Join us in this fresh episode where we contemplate the origins of the concept of the collective unconscious, and how it’s functioning in its highly activated state, in our present moment. The primordial forms of the archetypes are activated, and emerge into the world. We’re currently witnessing the hugeness of prominent archetypes—the tyrant, the assassin, the folk-hero, the outcry of collective pain. Sit with us in this conversation where we explore how to understand what it feels like to encounter the collective unconscious, and how to stay aware of its vast power, when living our lives day to day. We explore a listener’s dream of running from wild animals, in our dream portion (thank you to our dreamer!)ANNOUNCEMENTSMariana’s wonderful TAROT AND PSYCHE seminar begins January 14th! Enroll here: https://www.jungarchademy.com/tarotpsycheJoin Cristina for her annual Year Ahead Astrology Forecast this Saturday December 21st: https://www.cristinafarella.com/the-2025-forecast-eventGet on the waitlist for Cristina’s upcoming class ASTROLOGY FOR BEGINNERS starting this January: https://awesome-crafter-9275.kit.com/15961c6301💓 Leave Us A Review 💓If you love our show, you can help us reach curious minds and hearts by leaving us a rating or review wherever you listen to your pods! Thank you so much for being a part of our podcast journey. 🌹 Advertise With Us 🌹Would you like your product or shop to be featured as an ad partner on Soror Mystica? Explore advertising options here!🧩 Share Your Symbols 🧩Do you have a symbol that pops up in dreams, in your tarot card pulls, or in your personal experience that puzzles you? If you’d like to hear us talk about your personal symbol on our show, feel free to share your story with us here.📸 Find Us On Instagram 📸Soror MysticaMariana LouisCristina Farella

We're back! After a break (and by the way, how fitting that our previous episode was about retrogrades and reversals), we've returned to the pod, to explore the symbol of alchemical marriage. This discussion is inspired by the fact that Cristina got married in late September, with, of course, Mariana as her maid-of-honor :) Together we explore common conceptions around marriage, sexist expectations of women as they approach their "big day," and other contemporary wedding-madnesses. We then turn towards the symbol of marriage as it emerges in myth and alchemy, to find a deeper reframe of something that our patriarchal institution has taken the magic out of. The Witch TriumvirateJoin Cristina in an exciting new three-part class, The Witch Triumvirate, a series of lectures designed to reconnect you with your own ritual practice this fall. With a lecture on astrological magic, astro-herbalism, and spellcrafting, this class will bring you back to your magical center. Check it out here. 💓 Leave Us A Review 💓If you love our show, you can help us reach curious minds and hearts by leaving us a rating or review wherever you listen to your pods! Thank you so much for being a part of our podcast journey. 🌹 Advertise With Us 🌹Would you like your product or shop to be featured as an ad partner on Soror Mystica? Explore advertising options here!🧩 Share Your Symbols 🧩Do you have a symbol that pops up in dreams, in your tarot card pulls, or in your personal experience that puzzles you? If you’d like to hear us talk about your personal symbol on our show, feel free to share your story with us here.📸 Find Us On Instagram 📸Soror MysticaMariana LouisCristina Farella

What does it mean to be forced to reverse course? How do we contend with the moments in our lives where we cannot push forward, as expected? In this episode, we explore the concept of reversals, retrogrades, and what it means to embrace moments of inversion, or opposition. In Mariana's modality, tarot, reversed cards are often frustrating to querents, and can bring anxiety about thwarted goals, or dreams deferred. In Cristina's modality of astrology, planetary retrograde is often lamented as a time of frustrated action. But we believe that there is great meaning, and great possibility for fertility, in these surprising changes of course. Join us as we contemplate all things retrograde, reversed, and revelatory in this special episode. Mariana's Archetypal Tarot School is now open for enrollment!!!!! Check it out here. Mariana will also be having a live discussion event with fellow tarotist Alyssa Polizzi on Thursday, August 15th at 11am PST. Enroll for this free event here. 💓 Leave Us A Review 💓If you love our show, you can help us reach curious minds and hearts by leaving us a rating or review wherever you listen to your pods! Thank you so much for being a part of our podcast journey. 🌹 Advertise With Us 🌹Would you like your product or shop to be featured as an ad partner on Soror Mystica? Explore advertising options here!🧩 Share Your Symbols 🧩Do you have a symbol that pops up in dreams, in your tarot card pulls, or in your personal experience that puzzles you? If you’d like to hear us talk about your personal symbol on our show, feel free to share your story with us here.📸 Find Us On Instagram 📸Soror MysticaMariana LouisCristina Farella

The ocean is our primordial origin, the place from which all life emerges. Symbolically, the ocean represents the waters of the unconscious, which shape and give form to the solid earth on which we live. Join us in this episode where we explore the magic and mythos of the sea! From the stories of the great mother, Tiamat, Oceanus, and the anima mundi, the ocean has much to offer us in terms of explorations of life and death, the vastness of the dark, the depths of the psychic realms, and ways to connect with the unknown. 🐚 Join The Cloister 🐚Our new community membership space is up and running, offering a sweet community chat, bonus podcast episodes bi-weekly, a book club, and even a dream interpretation space! Join us here.💓 Leave Us A Review 💓If you love our show, you can help us reach curious minds and hearts by leaving us a rating or review wherever you listen to your pods! Thank you so much for being a part of our podcast journey. 🌹 Advertise With Us 🌹Would you like your product or shop to be featured as an ad partner on Soror Mystica? Explore advertising options here!🧩 Share Your Symbols 🧩Do you have a symbol that pops up in dreams, in your tarot card pulls, or in your personal experience that puzzles you? If you’d like to hear us talk about your personal symbol on our show, feel free to share your story with us here.📸 Find Us On Instagram 📸Soror MysticaMariana LouisCristina Farella

"As above so below, as within so without," is one of the most famous maxims of the occult world, a phrase shared and repeated by those who explore the wonders of the mythic and the magical, the symbolic and the unknown. This phrase comes to us from the Emerald Tablet, a Hellenistic text by Hermes Trismegistus. The meaning, though sounding like a riddle, is that what happens in the greater cosmos impacts and is a reflection of what occurs on the mundane, human realm, and that our experiences and potentials as human beings are a reflection of the cosmos. This episode explores the symbolic concept of the macrocosm and microcosm, our innate connection to the divine, and our place in the fabric of life. We define and give historical context from the macro/microcosms, and then turn to an exploration of how it is the sacred thread running through our tarot and astrology practices. Our dreamer this episode shares a dream of being haunted by a past lover. Just one week left to join Cristina's class, The Art of Chart Interpretation! Find al the details here.Special thanks to our ad partner, Sophia Kaur, intuitive consultant. Find her work here.🐚 Join The Cloister 🐚Our new community membership space is up and running, offering a sweet community chat, bonus podcast episodes bi-weekly, a book club, and even a dream interpretation space! Join us here.💓 Leave Us A Review 💓If you love our show, you can help us reach curious minds and hearts by leaving us a rating or review wherever you listen to your pods! Thank you so much for being a part of our podcast journey. 🌹 Advertise With Us 🌹Would you like your product or shop to be featured as an ad partner on Soror Mystica? Explore advertising options here!🧩 Share Your Symbols 🧩Do you have a symbol that pops up in dreams, in your tarot card pulls, or in your personal experience that puzzles you? If you’d like to hear us talk about your personal symbol on our show, feel free to share your story with us here.📸 Find Us On Instagram 📸Soror MysticaMariana LouisCristina Farella 

In this special episode, we had the rare opportunity to be in the same place at the same time! And so we sat on Mariana's couch, and answered questions submitted by our dear listeners. Tune into our thirty-eighth show, where we explore topics both personal and magical, chatting about the story of our friendship, building spiritual businesses, contending with family reactions to interest in witchy topics, favorite and least favorite astrology placements, and more. We love making this podcast, and are so grateful for the wonderful questions from the audience :) Special thanks to this episode's ad partner, Sophia Kaur, find her on Instagram @___sophiakaur.Doors are now open for Cristina's signature class, The Art of Chart Interpretation: An Immersion in Astrology and Its Mythic Symbols, which you can learn all about here!Get your free Archetypal Tarot book from Mariana here, and keep an eye out for the announcement for open enrollment for the Archetypal Tarot School! Join our book club! We meet on June 29th to discuss Sophie Strand's amazing book of essays The Flowering Wand. Be sure to leave us a review and rating, it helps our work find other like-minded souls :) 

While it's typical to, after a dream, turn to a dream symbol dictionary to puzzle out the meaning of what we saw while we were asleep, dream experts urge us to connect with the symbols and images of our dreams in a personal, particular manner. But how can we do that, when we feel we have no foundation for understanding the strange images of our dreams? Join us in this special episode, where we immerse ourselves in the practice of learning to interpret your unique dream language. We discuss approaches to the dream, noticing patterns in dreams, the way dreamwork can be life changing, and our favorite dream interpretation practices, like the amplification of dream symbols, seeking correspondences in myths, fairytales, and media, lucid dreaming, and building out our own unique dream vocabulary. Our listener dream explores the scene of a castle, a coffin, and a potential rebirth of self. Special thanks to our ad partner Sophia Kaur, who you can find on Instagram @___sophiakaur.Dream Resources mentioned:Alyssa Polizzi: theartemisian.cominstagram.com/alyssa.polizzialyssapolizzi.comMaria Nazdravan: https://www.instagram.com/beginagain.spaceExplore Mariana's Foundations of the Tarot workshop hereBook an astrology reading with Cristina here🐚 Join The Cloister 🐚Our new community membership space is up and running, offering a sweet community chat, bonus podcast episodes bi-weekly, a book club, and even a dream interpretation space! Join us here.💓 Leave Us A Review 💓If you love our show, you can help us reach curious minds and hearts by leaving us a rating or review wherever you listen to your pods! Thank you so much for being a part of our podcast journey. 🌹 Advertise With Us 🌹Would you like your product or shop to be featured as an ad partner on Soror Mystica? Explore advertising options here!🧩 Share Your Symbols 🧩Do you have a symbol that pops up in dreams, in your tarot card pulls, or in your personal experience that puzzles you? If you’d like to hear us talk about your personal symbol on our show, feel free to share your story with us here.📸 Find Us On Instagram 📸Soror MysticaMariana LouisCristina Farella