Hello friends– It's been awhile! This first quarter of the year has kept me busy with a number of projects– some of which have just wrapped up, and some which are just beginning. One such project is a new podcast I'm hosting called Occulted.
Inspired by the work of magical anthropologist Carl Abrahamsson, I hope to create a space where the unseen movers and makers of culture are celebrated for the magic they bring into the world.
The series starts in conversation with Arica Roberts– witch, practitioner, and medieval scholar where we talk about the healing power of academic pursuit and the holy wells of Ireland and Wales.
I hope to publish an episode a month, and look forward to sharing new episodes that are already in the works. If you'd like to appear on the podcast, or would like to get in touch with any thoughts you have on the show, send an email to occulted@spucchi.com
A More Regular Posting Schedule
As I tie off the last loose ends of a full-time project I've been working on for the past two years, I'll be dedicating more time to posting here and creating content. Thank you for being members of this space and for supporting me! If there are any specific topics you'd like to see writing and video on, please drop a note in the form on my about page. Look out soon for a post on Saturn's recent transit into Pisces.
Occulted EP 1 - Arica Roberts - Transcript
00:03
Jove Spucchi
My name is Jove Spucchi and I'm excited to bring you this conversation today with witch and medieval scholar Arica Roberts. My name is Jove Spucchi and I'm excited to bring you this conversation today with witch and medieval scholar Arica Roberts. Join us as we dive into the magical potency of academia, the holy sights of Wales and Ireland, and the healing power of ancestor work. Arica is a postgraduate research student at the University of Reading. Her interdisciplinary research is on gender and early medieval whales, with an emphasis on material culture, inscriptions, and hagiography. This work connects magical practices and root work through connection to land, ancestor veneration and the preservation of culture, language and teaching. Her past research explores the history and archaeology of medieval folklore, which crafts sex and gender at medieval Ireland and Wales. Arica has also written on feminist history, latin American history, and gender as it relates to religion.
01:34
Jove Spucchi
Thank you for joining our first show today. Let's dive right in. Tell me about what you've been working on lately.
01:41
Arica Roberts
Thank you so much for having me. I am currently finishing up my thesis on early medieval wells and gender and I study the inscribed stone and stone sculpture and I am a queer and I'm a witch, I'm an academic and I study archaeology and history. The threads of my research really pull together the relationship between the living and the dead. I'm really excited to talk more about it.
02:15
Jove Spucchi
That's beautiful. Sounds like you dive into it in a pretty interdisciplinary way.
02:18
Arica Roberts
Yeah, I do. Just more background on my most current research throughout my academic career. It's been seven years of grad school now and twelve years total of university. I study things like witchcraft, magic, sex, gender, the relationship between how we study past societies and their views of the occult. I think things that are still present with us today and a lot of the same questions that we tend to bring to our own society. Looking at how did they look at things like power and the land identity? With my specific research, it really brings together historical and archaeological methods to look at the inscribed stone monuments that are the surviving sources for early medieval wells.
03:19
Jove Spucchi
I know that in addition to more formal methodologies, this research has been informed by your own experience as a practitioner. What is your connection to spirituality in the occult?
03:29
Arica Roberts
The way that I connect to the occult, and I think the way that I pretty much naturally, I think, drawn to these topics is through my own family history and my own journey of connecting to my roots. I've identified as a witch since I was like, I think, ten.
03:50
Jove Spucchi
Do you have a family connection to witchcraft?
03:53
Arica Roberts
So I actually grew up extremely religious. I grew up Mormon and my entire family got very Mormon. I had a great grandmother who she was baptized Mormon when she was little, but she never really went to church and never really grew up in it, and she was still alive when I was younger. She actually didn't pass away till I was about 24. She was a big part of my life, and she was a practicing witch. My mother was very close with her. My mother tried to be very good Mormon woman, but even when I was young, she actually would always tell us that she was a witch. It's a little fun thing for her. I think because of that, there was always this other connection to something else that was much more empowering, I think, especially for women who grew up in a very patriarchal type of religion.
04:50
Arica Roberts
Mormonism, like, pretty much every other patriarchal religion, like priesthood is close to men only, and there's not really a lot of space to connect to female divinity or even like, a non gender divinity. It's very masculine. Even the Holy Spirit in Mormonism is seen as a male, and Jesus and God are seen as male bodied, actually, like humans. I have two sisters, so I have an older sister who's three years older and then a younger sister who's three years younger, and then there's three of us, so a lot of power of three type of energy going on. My older sister, she was very into occult things, and she really, I think, pulled us together and basically had her own little coven. We do just like, little spell work. We would walk to the library all the time because this is before the Internet, so we'd walk to the library all the time and just browse the bookshelves.
06:06
Arica Roberts
Always go to the magic section and all the books on witchcraft. I remember being, like, ten years old and reading a book that had to do with the feminine divine, and it blew my mind. I was like, wow, this is so different from what I'm learning at church or at home. I think it was a very elementary introduction into just looking at the occult, which I think appropriate for me as a ten year old to question like, okay, so you have all these past societies that have goddesses and what happened to them, and fast forward 20 years. I've spent a considerable amount of time studying religion, theology and magic, witchcraft, spirituality, very in depth. My ideas have evolved as well with those understandings and life experience, and I think it's something I'm still developing and still learning in this journey. I just feel, like, really grateful that I was able to have two witchy sisters with me in this existence and really hone into that type of power.
07:22
Arica Roberts
All three of us is so beautiful, really express it in our own ways and have our own relationships with the occult. I think it's what ties it together is really this power. I don't necessarily want to say, necessarily feminine power, but I think it's a lot of the absence of what were growing up with in church and in our home and in our teachings. That has definitely stayed with me as a source of empowerment and has led me to wanting to understand what it is that we don't see necessarily. And to me, that defines the occult. It is the shadow work. It's what's in the shadows. It's the obscure. My personal connection and my journey is still ongoing, but to my specific research within Wells, I have ancestral connection to the land and to the landscape. Using archaeological methodology, it's very focused on the landscape and the power of the landscape.
08:29
Arica Roberts
It was really important to me to connect with the land there. This since, I think, let's see, 2017, I was living in the UK and was able to really be physically present with the places that my ancestors were from. Even before that, I actually spent time in an excavation in Ireland as well. And yeah, very magical experience. I think that all of my research, whether it's been about St. Bridget and abortion, witchcraft, sexuality, and my more recent research, which has to do with the inscribed stone and stone monuments that were mostly used as memorial markers, from the living kin to honor the deceased kin and how their connection to the landscape especially placing the stone monuments usually on top of or next to Bronze Age mounds which spanned thousands of years before they even existed really speaks to a continuity of the human almost like the human condition.
09:41
Arica Roberts
What I have taken away a lot from my research is this concept of ancestor worship connection and ties to the land. In the cases of the excavation work I've done, the thinning of the veil, and I think of the tending to the bones, I think is another really good way that I would see my work and my connection to the occult.
10:05
Jove Spucchi
It's beautiful, the symmetry here of these sites and places of power that people keep returning to, but you also keep returning to them.
10:13
Arica Roberts
Yeah, I know. I think that is very beautiful. That's a huge theme in my research is this idea of honoring the people who came before them and consciously connecting to past ancestors and past people who become part of the land and you become tied to the land. It's something I'm continuing to do all these generations later.
10:35
Jove Spucchi
Well, there's a pilgrimage aspect as well, it would seem.
10:38
Arica Roberts
This is my first time talking about it, so I'm really excited. My great grandparents were from Holywell Wells in Flintshire, and it's in the north wells and Holywell is a place where essentially with all holy wells in the British Isles, there's most likely a more ancient element to the wells. We don't necessarily have records, but this is something that we've been able to infer as archaeologists through legends and stories and with Polywell, it is the largest pilgrimage site in the British Isles and it has been an active pilgrimage site for at least 1000 years. It's very ancient and the legend around Holywell, I do want to just say what it is. I think it ties into what we're talking about really well. There was a woman named Winifred and she had a suitor who was actually the Prince catalog in Wells. This is typical of a lot of the legends around female saints, is that she did not want to marry him and she wanted to basically marry Jesus and be a nun and kind of the piety story of like, look how pious I am, I'm only going to be married to Jesus.
11:58
Arica Roberts
There's always this act of violence that's done against these women who choose that life, which is really fascinating when you really, I think about things like gender and power and agency that you have to go through this journey of male violence against you to get there. She had her head cut off by Prince Kabo and where her head rolled, a spring appeared and then miraculously, her head was attached back to her body and this like resurrection story. Throughout these centuries, people have, from kings to peasants, have been visiting this Holy Well. I think King Charles was the last monarch who went there. You're able to go completely immerse yourself into the waters. Going back there, having that knowledge that my family is from that exact village was so fascinating for me because I did, I went in, I plunged myself in, and I think it was, for me, my own act of reclaiming a lot of my own agency.
13:10
Jove Spucchi
That's really beautiful. A self re baptism of sorts. How has that site changed over time and how did that visit impact your perspective on it?
13:21
Arica Roberts
It is currently owned by the Catholic Church. It was really interesting because when you walk in, there's a little museum that shows the history of the Holy well and a lot of Catholic propaganda. When you go out, there's an active priest who's also there. I went with my partner and when went, I was kind of just doing my own thing. I kid you not, there was an intense dark vibe that was there. There was the family there that I was just getting this really intense energy from. There was a moment where the other woman who was there's a space where the spring directly goes into the font. There's like a barrier, like the guests and the visitors are supposed to not go into that specific font where the spring is. This woman, she put her feet in there and the priest came and yelled at her.
14:23
Arica Roberts
It was really intense energy where I didn't even realize how much it took me a long time, I think, to process it, because to me, I was trying to have my own personal journey and experience, and I was like, off putting to in the middle of that, to have a priest come yell at this woman. I was just like, man at the time, okay, well, that's weird. I think as I've been processing it, I really do think it speaks to these same issues, these same things about power and authority and patriarchy and who has access to what and this culture. Growing up Mormon, growing up in this religion of a lot of rules and a lot of shaming and a lot of who can do what, and being chastised for things and punished for things. And, yeah, it took me a while to, I think, realize that I needed that to happen to pull together the reason why us living in the 21st century more than ever.
15:32
Arica Roberts
I think the disenfranchised are more empowered in certain ways, and I think even how it's taken me directionally to see the ways that even within the structures of academia, there are a lot of limitations and a lot of that still, I think, does have to do with the systemic issues around the patriarchy of academia. Even though it's shifting, it's one of those questions of, like, okay, just because you're inserting, I guess, quotas into a space, how much is that systemically changing things? I think that the accumulation of those experience has really pushed me to see that directing my energy even towards other platforms, even doing this podcast and wanting to open up about my own research and my connection to my research in ways that academia does not necessarily hold space for. Because of that, it's been a challenge, but I think it's also created an opportunity to hopefully, I think, reach out to other people who are in the system and structure of academia who understand that the research and the writing, that is all magic.
16:57
Arica Roberts
That is magic. I think we take it for granted, the fact that we're able to use this technology and be communicating to each other and sharing our ideas in such a accessible and fluid way more than ever before. I think that someone, as an archaeologist and a historian, I am hyper aware of that, because even with the inscribed stone monuments that I was referring to earlier in my most recent research, those monuments were commissioned by a very specific type of person. You had to be elite and a male to commission those stone monuments. The inscriptions are the names of male and their deceased kin. The language around it's a Latin, which came from the Roman Empire, and then the Ogum alphabet, which came from the Irish language that was used at the time. Those inscriptions, those were only really meant for the literate people as well, which was a very small group of people.
18:03
Arica Roberts
I think that putting that into so much context and understanding gender and power and even where they're placing these monuments in the landscape of reinforcing those ties to legitimate claims to the land is a reality that we do still live in. However, in many ways, I think a way to bring it to, I think, a 21st century audience to understand is if you look at your own cityscape, you look at your own landscape, what are the names on the buildings? Whose names are those, and who built those buildings? Who had the money to even build those buildings in the first place, and who's being displaced by building those buildings? I think those are really important questions that we should be asking, and I think a lot of people are asking in a lot of activist spaces, especially us, like, I'm talking about the British Isles, but us, I think even living in the US.
19:01
Arica Roberts
At the moment, we are on other people's land as well. I think that there's a lot of relevance to my research that is very relevant today, that those questions around just power and the type of magic and goes into the land and whether there's respect and whether there's deeper connection and actually taking the time to untangle, like a lot of the enigmatic parts of this. It's an extremely rigorous academic endeavor, and it is not something that I necessarily came up with concrete answers around. That is why I actually love academia. I think it gives a space for people to ask really hard questions and experiment, try something, come up with a methodology, come up with what your approaches are to this, try it out, see what you can come up with. It's a very privileged space to be working within. And I do want to acknowledge that.
20:03
Arica Roberts
On the flip side, I think that what ends up a lot of the times happening is that it becomes very void of the realness of the people who are actually participating in these practices and who are participating in this research.
20:18
Jove Spucchi
And the felts and lived experience, right?
20:21
Arica Roberts
That has been an interesting aspect of being someone who's drawn to wanting to do very deep work, deep research, ask hard questions. I'm someone that's very influenced by the magic and the occult that's behind it. Sometimes there's not really space for that to talk about in academia. I have found, for example, within archaeology, what actually really drew me to another aspect of wanting to really study the specific even time period that I study, it being this very obscure time period where the Dark Ages is really what it's kind of known colloquially. I think even within that, the connotations it's a problematic term, the Dark Ages, but I think what it has represented within academia and within popular culture is that there's something very unknown and very obscure about this time period. That in itself, I think, has driven me just in my shadow work of wanting to understand why is this so obscure, why is this so unknown?
21:35
Arica Roberts
I think that people who are more drawn to the occult or who embody the occult, they are people who are very much drawn to the shadow aspects of our society and our world and trying to understand it and don't really shy away from it.
21:54
Jove Spucchi
You mentioned ancestor work and connecting with the dead, specifically, and that's such a beautiful and important part of connecting with the power of place and land as well.
22:03
Arica Roberts
Yeah, I even want to just touch on that. I did my first excavation in 2015, and were working on a cemetery of a monastery and trim in Ireland, in County Meath. This experience speaks well to a lot of the disconnect between academia and occult practitioners, is technically, again, like it's a Catholic country. Ireland and the Catholic Church did retract their views on burial and resurrection. Basically, for archaeologists to be able to do the research on these populations, they have to excavate the inhumation burials, remove the bones, and essentially what we're doing is we place the bones into plastic bags and take them to a lab. They're looked at and they're analyzed very clinically. Before that, they go through this post excavation station where you spend time cleaning the bone, either using like, wooden chisel or toothbrush. Very delicate with them because these bones are seen as essentially data and very clinical approach to something that for me, it was like this occult practitioner.
23:18
Arica Roberts
It was so intense for me. I was like, Wait, what?
23:20
Jove Spucchi
Just a little cold and clinical necromancy what was interacting with the dead, like, in that context for you?
23:28
Arica Roberts
One of the burials that I was a part of uncovering was a woman who was in her early twenty s. I was in my early twenty s at the time. I was like, okay, that's this connection to that. I remember, I think I spent like two days cleaning her skull with a toothbrush. And it was intense.
23:47
Jove Spucchi
As someone who's magically connected, what did that feel like? Did you stand out in the group in the way that you were experiencing these things?
23:53
Arica Roberts
I definitely stood out in my group. We would have daily seminars, and I was asked I don't know, it was a question about osteology. I mean, again, we're learning about this from a very scientific, clinical perspective. I had a conversation I was living with a host family in Ireland and I had a conversation with my host mum. Who she's? This Irish woman who's lived in that town her whole life and how. She felt about us doing the excavation work there and essentially, like, taking these people out of their places of rest and analyzing the bones in this really clinical way. I think that there's a whole conversation that we could have about this of just, I think, the ethics of it, but also just the spiritual aspect of it. These were people. The way that the person responded to me when I asked this question, and I told him my experience talking to my host mom, how there was an uneasiness within the community sometimes about it.
25:01
Arica Roberts
However, there's that whole aspect of, like, but this is for research. We're trying to figure out what their diet was. This is important research, and I have a lot of friends who are osteologists, and I'm not, like, trying to talk s*** on it. It's just more an interesting way that I was experiencing it that was very different from the rest of people in my excavation.
25:24
Jove Spucchi
What I'm interpreting from the differences in these approaches, too, is there's what feels like a pretty patriarchal stance in this pursuit of knowledge and research over the human, over the connectedness.
25:36
Arica Roberts
Yeah, that is absolutely right. There are, I think, ongoing discussions within academia just on a larger level right now about when you look at the history of academic institutions, they were made for a very specific group of people. Even when you look at the oldest institutions of, like, Oxford, Cambridge, people were going there to study theology, and people who were elite women. Yes, they were given access to education even within the 15th, 16th centuries. But it was very focused, right? Like, it had an agenda, and you were learning the books of the Bible and how to read them in Latin and things like that. Fast forwarding into the 21st century. Again, we live in a time period where higher education is more accessible to the most people than it ever has been. I think with those shifts, you're also seeing the inevitable pushback that ends up happening where there are very established debates and discussions around things like the male gaze in academia.
27:00
Arica Roberts
That's a huge part of my research and part of my approach, my theoretical approach, is really about challenging that and, quote, unquote, flipping the male gaze. What that means is, within academia, you have 20th century, 19th century academics who are within archaeology going to these, quote, unquote, undiscovered places and looking at all these objects and peoples and material culture and then implementing this colonial and male gaze onto the so called subjects of the study. What was really radical what is really radical about my research is that I'm flipping that male gaze back onto the elite men of a particular society, and that can be done in pretty much any time period, including today. I think that bleeds into the conversations that are happening within academia around, okay, you have more queer people. You have the introduction of queer theory who are taking up space in academia.
28:09
Arica Roberts
You have people who are coming from all types of spiritual backgrounds and who are even, I guess, like me, who come from a very patriarchal Christian type of background but have actively been fighting against it.
28:27
Jove Spucchi
You've been a part of some pretty conservative academic institutions as well.
28:32
Arica Roberts
Yes, a little bit of background. I did my undergrad at Brigham Young University, BYU. And it is a Mormon university. It's owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. To go there, you have to follow like an honor code. The faculty also have their own code that they have to teach from that. Yeah, there are severe limitations in the type of topics you can talk about and the research you can do. And granted, yes, it's a private university. However, in the state of current affairs, because I graduated from there a long time ago now, it's almost been a decade, which is crazy. In my time there, the pros of it was that I completely stood out. I don't know, Joe, if you mind me telling. We met there and we're taking philosophy classes and I remember doing my research paper for that class was on Lilith.
29:31
Arica Roberts
Yeah, I remember reading it, talking about Lilith being this first wife of Adam and what that meant in not only just like the Hebrew tradition, because our professor, he was like a Near East scholar, but even how that would tie into almost like Mormon doctrine as well. There's nowhere else I could have written a paper like that and also nowhere else that would have maybe have had as much weight to it. So, like, I do think that being in conservative institutions because yeah, I do think that, like, all the universities I've gone to have been more conservative. That has made it, I think, in some ways extra difficult. A lot of topics can be taboo, essentially, but on top of that, it can be a positive is that you're essentially like being disruptive even by being.
30:28
Jove Spucchi
There, whose benefits to staying within the number of the occulted.
30:32
Arica Roberts
Right, right. Your existence is a disruption. Even at the time I was openly queer at BYU, which even today, ten years later, is a big deal. I was obviously outward with you, just with my parents. I think that things like that, they are a disruption to those systems. There's probably other universities that would probably just kind of fly under the radar. Maybe it wouldn't be as disruptive to them. However, I think in general, there are absolutely this feels controversial to say. That's why I'm taking a minute to say it, essentially. I mean, just putting people into spaces that have like a systemic history of disenfranchising other people, just placing in other type of people, is not going to change that. It can be very slow, gradual, like small changes, which you do see. However, overall, it is still, in my opinion, a very patriarchal culture of like, you don't bring in personal things because emotional, it's a bias that's seen as a bias.
32:01
Arica Roberts
It's just very interesting that is the way that we have developed into this way of gatekeeping emotional, spiritual. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
32:15
Jove Spucchi
Well, because it's a type of bias, but there are biases that are inherent to the patriarchal system and kind of methods of ontology that are accepted within academia that are almost equal and opposite. Biases. Biases towards absolute materialism.
32:31
Arica Roberts
No? Yeah, I agree with that. And I appreciate you saying that.
32:35
Jove Spucchi
I wanted to jump back too and just talk about the benefits of being in this occulted state or being in a place where your visibility matters. Standing out and being kind of weird means something, but also just kind of the magic of ordeal going through these spaces and the challenge that I think both of us experienced in being out queer people in a place that was not safe. Magic comes from necessity and need, and we sure as h*** had a lot of it there. Going through that ordeal, that push, I know, challenged us a lot and also helped us build community in a way that I don't think we would have had somewhere else where we would have had more space.
33:17
Arica Roberts
I like that line you said about magic really comes from necessity. I think that's another strand of there are a lot of common threads in my research. I think gender, feminism, power, magic, witchcraft, those are being, like, my keywords. That being said, I've gone through personal experiences that have been deeply magical and deeply spiritual, that have driven me towards certain spaces, certain people, certain topics, certain research, and have been a part of my journey of healing and of shadow work. It has been, I think, just like, so intense at times that the culture of academia just makes it feel so f****** lonely. That is, I think a really important thing to talk about is that people can be dealing with, really. I met so many people during my PhD that were going through such intense things, and myself included, and yet it's not a culture of community in a way that I think is a very real community that's really needed.
34:50
Jove Spucchi
I mean, I would imagine, too, that if there's not space for the emotional or the spiritual within these spaces and these groups, how do you connect on that human level? How can you show up for one another if those sorts of feelings and viewpoints and communications are seen as biased or less than or just devalued by the institution?
35:10
Arica Roberts
Yeah, absolutely. I think especially when you're studying topics that are intense and human.
35:18
Jove Spucchi
Yeah, we're talking about the lives of people here and their traditions and their spiritual traditions and things that were most important to them and going back to ordeal. The stones that you've been. Talking about creating these and putting them in these places of power for thousands of years. That's all about emotional and spiritual resonance, right?
35:36
Arica Roberts
Yeah, absolutely. It definitely felt that I was always I don't know, I mean, I guess like, in a poetic sense, it's like the black side of the moon. Like the moon's always hiding a part of herself. Right. And that is always how it felt. I'm on this journey of learning my own heritage, my own lineage, and trying to honor them by even bringing it into the present. I've been studying Welsh language for 13 years, and in that time I have learned so much about the culture, the history. And Wells is a magical place. It is extremely magical. I mean, everyone pretty much has heard of King Arthur and Merlin and all these the legends that come from there. To talk about all of this without, I don't know, even on an empathetic level, like emotionally connecting to these legends and these stories and these people and seeing what they left behind and the ways that they saw.
36:39
Arica Roberts
The world and connected to their own ancestors and how this is like continual journey. It is extremely I don't know what I don't know how to say. It just like weird to then not talk about all that would be hard.
36:55
Jove Spucchi
For me to imagine talking about them without some of the more soft and squishy parts.
37:00
Arica Roberts
Yeah, I mean, it is a heavy question, just because I think there's been different ways I do want touch more on the research that I was doing during my master's program had to do with St. Bridget and her abortion miracles. It's crazy. Essentially, just a little bit of context. Abortion in Europe is really seen through the first Penitential laws in Ireland, and these were compiled in the 7th century. And St. Bridget, her legends and her stories were compiled around the same time. She was very rare as a woman who had the spiritual authority to bless other people with a priesthood power. She had stories and legends of nuns who would come to her with pregnant bellies and they would essentially ask her for help and a blessing, and she would do like the sign of the cross on the belly or say prayer, and then the pregnancy would be gone.
38:23
Arica Roberts
Other academics have looked at these miracles as abortion miracles. While they're not wrong, a lot of what my research, I think, brought to it and what ended up actually being in turn becoming part of my spiritual practice was that abortion is a very politically loaded term in the 21st century that doesn't necessarily apply to some of these miracles. Essentially, the way that I looked at these miracles was womb healing is what I termed it. I think that in especially aspects of magic and witchcraft and midwifery and all aspects of the womb. Again, the veil of life and death. There is a lot of power there. Again, I think speaks to why in the 21st century, these things are so politicized. I really wanted to get to the root of it. Again, I really think that my research around archaeology and history, it's a root work.
39:37
Arica Roberts
It's about going to the roots. In doing that, I learned so much about just so much about all the things that women had to sacrifice to have agency over their own bodies and still do. Still do. Still do. This is so relevant. That's what's so oh, it's so relevant. In learning all of that, I had gone through my own abortion. Doing this research, I think, really brought me a completely different lens of looking at all of this. Again, stripping away the clinic, because when I had an abortion, I had to go to an abortion clinic and it was super impersonable, it was secretive. There were protesters outside, I just paid like a lump sum. You have just a random doctor, they don't even ask your name. It is so disconnected, I think, to how it could be. I know that there are practitioners, there's doulas out there are amazing people out there who are doing this work and who are doing the serious work of decolonizing and all of this in that at the time, I did not have access to any of that.
40:56
Arica Roberts
I had to go within these systems. In a way, that experience was very traumatic for me, but it didn't have to be. I think that's what I knew deep down, is that they didn't have to be traumatic. I did a ton of research and really delved into looking at it from these different ways, like studying medieval medicine, ancient medicine, just ideas around abortion, around the body, and agency and sexuality and magic and healing and what's considered healing, what's considered magic, all these different things and just within the church perspective and things. And it's fascinating. I think that it really helped me to incorporate all of these learnings into my own practice. When I was in Ireland, during that excavation, I took time to go to Kildare, which is where St. Bridget's well is. Again, like I've already talked about wells, they have these ancient roots and St.
42:00
Arica Roberts
Bridget is for sure a Christian saint who was taken from more ancient Celtic understanding of as a goddess. When I was there, I collected some water and it was about a year and a half after that my mother, she got uterine cancer. We had a little ceremony for her before her surgery to have a hysterectomy. And that's beautiful. It was so magical. She just had her closest, very witchy friends and myself and my sisters in law, and I brought her the water that I had gotten from St. Bridget's holy well, and we blessed her with it and it was very special and it was very, I think, empowering. It coincided about a year after she had a divorce from my father. She actually took on a new name and she legally changed her name to Bridget. It really came so full circle and my Irish roots are from her as well, so that was really special.
43:13
Arica Roberts
I think for me, this journey, it's always like the academic part of it that is just part of the work of me doing this deeper work. It's only just one facet of it. There are so many ways that I think that we encompass being human and being magical and doing the research. That's one aspect of me. Understanding and learning and doing the root work, tending to the bones, all these kind of things. It is like every facet of our life is magical. And I truly believe that fully.
43:48
Jove Spucchi
I mean, it's beautiful too. Your primary lived experience is surrounded by all of these powerful women who are working outside of these very strict patriarchal structures, but still being part of them or participating in them, but have not let go of this lineage of power and agency and this beautiful occulted space. To hear that being carried on, generationally and healing that's going on is just absolutely beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
44:18
Arica Roberts
Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate that because I really think it brought at the time of me writing and doing that research, I had no idea that I was going to have an opportunity to be part of a ceremony of womb healing myself. Not only just womb healing, the womb I came from, which is fascinating. I just think also the larger political issues that have unfolded. I had no idea things like Roe v. Wade were going to be overturned. I was focusing on Ireland. Within Ireland at that time, there were a lot of politics around abortion. There still are. These are really relevant issues. Thank you for drawing attention to that. Because the point that I really want to drive home is that academia is a mode, it can be a mode of magic because of what it entails are things like deep thinking and a lot of empowerment in questioning everything and looking for yourself, finding things for yourself.
45:18
Arica Roberts
I think as long as we're really aware of also what those limitations are, there's an opportunity where, again, in 21st century, there are a lot of conversations around just even the practicality of academia in things like finding jobs and funding and Internet. We have so much accessibility to information and what is the purpose of these institutions anymore? I think those questions are being directed at all types of institutions, religious institutions, government institutions, et cetera, that we are in a moment of being able to be really honest about that and.
45:58
Jove Spucchi
Challenging the status quo. Absolutely.
46:01
Arica Roberts
Yeah. This is something I think is really beautiful. That I do want to say, because I don't think a lot of attention has been brought towards this. This is something much more about than I do. The fact that the occult has continued even within spaces of technology and being even a byproduct of technology and being a part of technology again it is such an interesting, I think, thing for historian to look at.
46:42
Jove Spucchi
Because absolutely.
46:44
Arica Roberts
For example, when I'm looking at these stone monuments and I'm seeing these inscriptions that are carved onto these stone, the intention and the magic that goes into things like us creating language and creating it's like spellwork. Right. Me writing this whole thesis and I'm like typing on this computer how this is magic. I think that is something that within academia, for whatever reason, there's probably a lot of reasons it's taken for granted, almost. I think that there's a lot of just taking for granted the awe of what we are actually doing and what we're participating in. That is something that within archaeology has been very interesting because even within the history of archaeology, I talked a bit about the dark side, the colonial aspect of it, but also from my own time period, the occult is really what drove the existence of early medieval archaeology.
47:51
Arica Roberts
What I mean by that well, necromancy. Right? Right. So necromancy. Also what I mean by that is so there was the excavation of Sutton Who. That was in the 20th century. There was a woman named Edith Pretty. She was participating in Seances in London, and she in her farmland. She was a widow of a landowner. She knew there was something there, and she brought archaeologists there. Actually centuries even prior to that, during King Henry the 7th Reign, his court astrologer also began excavating that area. It did not go any further. It wasn't until the 20th century, much later, that this mound was uncovered. And it was in Sutton Who. It's a very famous excavation of ships, of a burial and hordes of all types of material goods were uncovered from that. That excavation is what was really the catalyst of this idea of early medieval archaeology, that there was this entire civilization and all these things going on after the Roman Empire and before the Norman Incursions.
49:10
Arica Roberts
That for all that time, people was calling it the Dark Ages and nothing was going on. We have no idea what their technologies were or what they were doing. This excavation brought all of that to light, illuminated so much for people. It is so interesting that is intrinsically tied to the occult. I don't know, I just find that really fascinating and part of the history of it that a lot of people don't really know. And, yeah, it's really interesting.
49:40
Jove Spucchi
The occult roots of academia in general, I think, are so largely overlooked as an astrologer. Definitely seeing the link between astrology and early medicine and astrology and astronomy and how there really was not a strong distinction between what was occulted knowledge or esoteric knowledge and was science. That's really inspiring to hear how enchanted the study of archaeology and things can be, even in these spaces that feel more conservative and have a lot of respect for you for carving out this space and doing what you're doing within these systems and patriarchies and institutions and still finding and making that magic as Pandemic has happened. I have found that technology has brought a lot of enchantment to my own life and being able to connect with folks who kind of on the borderline of doing academic research and study and also our practitioners and often magical service providers and whatnot.
50:39
Jove Spucchi
To see this overlap start to happen in this community being built online and in person is absolutely beautiful and I'm so excited to see that thread continue.
50:48
Arica Roberts
Absolutely. I think that as the generation that we're in, we do have a lot of credit to give to the Internet. Because even though when I first started getting into the magic and the occult, I would say that was revealing things about myself that were always there. It really was not until the Internet for myself that I was able to find just so much information and community and resonance. Yes, for sure.
51:24
Jove Spucchi
Shout out to crystal links. Right?
51:25
Arica Roberts
Yes.
51:26
Jove Spucchi
Crystal links.
51:28
Arica Roberts
Shout out to crystal links. Yeah. We're the guinea pigs. We were just thrown into the Internet what were able to create out of it and find from it. Yeah. I really believe we're just really on this cusp of understanding that there are things that we are outgrowing that perhaps maybe never served us in the first place, that we are finding and creating space ourselves and what our stories are and who we are and how to connect to other people. Because I know my research is extremely niche. I do not expect people to understand what I'm talking about when I say, like, inscribed stone monuments in early medieval wells. However, I think if I'm given like a second to explain it and talk about it and help people understand that we still live in a world that's very dictated by power and patriarchy and right.
52:28
Jove Spucchi
The same forces of power, the same collections of power. Yeah.
52:31
Arica Roberts
Same forces of power that it gives, I think people an opportunity to then look deeper and reflect how do I connect to the land that I'm on in this present moment and how do.
52:43
Jove Spucchi
I participate in the spiritual and natural ecologies that are present?
52:48
Arica Roberts
Yeah. That can mean something different for every single person and where you are. Yeah. It is so exciting to talk about this and I really appreciate being able to have the space to talk about it. It is so needed and it is my first time talking about these things in this type of way. I really do hope it came across to the listeners. Thank you.
53:09
Jove Spucchi
Thank you so much for being here and just opening up and sharing such personal stories and connecting your work to this real, lived and felt experience. It's been beautiful to explore that with you. What are you working on now and where can people find your work?
53:27
Arica Roberts
Yeah, so I think the easiest way to find my work is on academia.edu and then my actual thesis and work I plan to publish at some point. I think if you just follow me on there, that's the easiest way to access my work. Currently, I actually am taking parts of my thesis that I was not able to fully flesh out and talk about and bring it into spaces such as looking at stone monuments and more of the folkloric traditions around those monuments. I also have some other research that I'm working on. I don't know how much I want to share about it because it's still very preliminary. However, it still is very much tied to ancestral work and I think healing deconstructing and will still be all about things like gender, sexuality, and I'm excited to have more opportunities to bring together my research around, just even using more queer theory.
54:38
Arica Roberts
I think that is something that's very much developing and I'm obsessed with it. I love it. Yeah, I think that's all I can say for now about it.
54:52
Jove Spucchi
Yeah, excited to hear more and follow your work. Are there any places on social media that people can connect with you?
54:57
Arica Roberts
My instagram is not necessarily academic, but you can follow me. Elf siren E-L-F dot S-I-R-E-N. And we'll.
55:08
Jove Spucchi
Have this stuff linked in the description as well. Arica, thank you so much. It's been really great chatting with you today.
55:15
Arica Roberts
Thank you. Thank you so much.
55:18
Jove Spucchi
Thank you for being a part of the first episode of Occulted to Follow for future episodes and learn more about me, Jove Spucchi. You can visit spucchi.com. That's Spcchi.com.
