Art and Academia I Enjoyed in June 2025
This is a column I hope to post regularly. I was inspired by Karissa Love’s Art I consumed this Month, YouTube videos, and thought, I also consume a lot of art, but I’d like to combine that with the academia I read as well. I’m sure plenty of other people make this kind of content since ‘What I Consumed This Month’ is a huge trend, but I’ll give her credit since she’s the only one I’ve personally seen do it with art! (Though, truth be told, I don’t watch her videos much, only seen a handful. She has a cool, Western flower-child, love-witch vibe if you want to check her out!)
So, this is my monthly wrap-up of things I enjoyed in the spaces of art and academia. As a recent college graduate, I finally have free time to get back into my old hobbies, start new ones, and read topics of my choosing. I’ve also been making art a bit more regularly in the form of painting, digital drawing, handmade clothing, crafts, and even a bit of music.
To me, art feeds the soul and can help expand the mind; the act of creating helps to realign us with something greater than ourselves. That’s why I think creativity is so important to encourage within the pagan community. When it comes to academics, I think it’s important in general to always be learning and to stimulate your mind. After spending the last eight years in scientific academia, I’m now enjoying the chance to explore other realms of study. I still read about astrobiology and practice my programming skills, but lately I’ve been fascinated by the lifestyles of the ancient Egyptians, especially their practices of magic and mysticism. (And who knows, maybe one day I will write about programming if I can find a way to tie it into paganism!)
For the month of June, I’ve experienced a Norwegian Sauna Ritual, I’ve begun meditating to The Gateway Tapes (and failed to stay awake), listened to the only witch rock album I know- Enchantress, and I read thought provoking literature.
Norwegian Sauna Ritual at Son Spa
I wanted to include this experience because I consider the ritual to be a sort of cultural and spiritual performance. Although I’m a New England born witch, I currently live in Norway. In mid-June, I took a road trip across the country, camping and hiking the first half of the week, and then relaxing at a spa in the quaint coastal town of Son for the second half. I originally came to the area for the Moss Tattoo Festival, so the spa wasn’t the main intention, but wow, I’m so glad I ended up there!
Son Spa had several pools offering a variety of sensory and relaxation experiences, but the highlight, maybe one of my favorite experiences ever, was accidentally joining the Badsturitual (Sauna Ritual). Sauna culture is big here in the Nordics, and it’s especially powerful when paired with a plunge into the icy fjord waters. The spa’s saunas themselves float at the end of a dock, and as you walk down, you can see hundreds of starfish napping along the seafloor. I love the cycle of sauna – fjord – sauna, which leaves your muscles feeling relaxed and your body energized, like after a deep massage or full workout.
I wanted to get a sauna and dip in before the tattoo festival. I was just about to wrap up when a woman with a speaker playing meditation music came in. She introduced herself as the Badstuemaster (Sauna Master) and said she’d be leading the ritual. I’d never experienced one before, so I stayed. She set up a few props and began with a guided meditation, then lit palo santo and energetically cleansed everyone in the room. She placed a ball of essential oil–infused crushed ice on the stove, releasing an intense wave of scented steam. The steam was HOT. I of course, sat right next to the stove, so I had the hottest seat in the house, along with already doing my sauna and dip for a half hour already. The extreme heat was intense, but nothing I couldn’t handle.
With the powerful aroma of oils and the high-energy drumming of the folk-Viking music, my sensory system was so stimulated. Then, the Badstuemaster took out a very large foldable fan and raised it high above her head, in one quick swoop she brought it down, directing the gust at each individual. I expected this to give me some relief, but it thrusted a very hot gust of steam-wind all over my body. She repeated this process with two more balls of essential oil infused ice. For the third, she dipped a bundle of long grasses into a bucket of ice water and shook the droplets over us. It felt so elating. It was a nice little relief to the heat and suffocation our bodies were going through. Then she opened the door and invited us to cool off before round two.
Previously, I had been hesitant to jump into the fjord, but the crushed ice on the stove had pushed the sauna’s heat to extremes, base temperature around 85°C (185°F), peaking close to 100°C (212°F). That’s not something you can safely endure for long. I think I was in there a bit too long before the ritual even started, but I handled it fine thanks to some experience. The cold-water plunge after that was heavenly. I stayed in for the full 60 seconds, something I don’t usually manage. Fjord waters still feel ice-cold even in the summer. The water temperature that day was 15°C (59°F).
We returned to our seats for the second round. She repeated the process with three more ice balls, each time waving the fan to send hot steam sweeping over us. At the end, she invited us to stand and poured scoops of ice water over our heads. Oh my goddess, it was divine. I did another jump in the fjord, then climbed to the roof of the sauna, where she guided us through some gentle tai chi to help recenter and ground our energy after such an intense experience.
This ritual made me want to bring sauna culture home when I move back to the United States, it’s powerful, healing, and deeply connected to body and spirit.
The Gateway Tapes
I will definitely be diving deeper into this topic in future articles and maybe even some videos when I get further along, but for now, I just started and thought it would be fun to document the beginnings and compare the results over time.
I first discovered the Gateway Tapes this past winter and have recently begun experimenting with them. I listened to tape 0, the introductory tape, but I kept drifting in and out of sleep and didn’t successfully complete the tasks. If you haven’t heard of these tapes, they’re part of the training material from the CIA’s infamous Stargate Project. Stargate was a U.S military and intelligence program focused on investigating the potential of psychic abilities for intelligence operations. They focused on remote viewing (aka astral projection) for espionage purposes. The program was active from the 1970s to the mid-1990s and research was conducted by the Defense Intelligence Agency and SRI International.
The Stargate Project has since been fully declassified! Hundreds of pages of CIA and SRI documents, experiment logs, transcripts, and evaluations were released under the Freedom of Information Act and publicly available.
The documents are individually linked. You can access the files here:
Here is a key document which outlines the program’s objectives and structure:
STAR GATE PROJECT: AN OVERVIEW
The Gateway Experience – Wave I, Tape 0: Demonstration Exercise
This first tape introduces participants to Hemi-Sync audio and the concept of an Energy Conversion Box. You’re guided into a relaxed meditative state where thoughts, distractions, or stressors are mentally placed into an imaginary box, serving as a container to clear the mind and allow for focus. The Hemi-Sync audio used binaural beats to gently synchronize brain hemispheres, which is meant to help shift into an altered state of consciousness. Good headphones are necessary for this reason.
The tape introduces Focus 3, a lightly altered state where your mind remains alert, but your body is deeply relaxed. You must not fall asleep! So far, I keep falling asleep while listening to this one. I have a problem with trying to use my time efficiently when it comes to meditations, so I have been doing them right before bed. Doing it when you’re tired is the worst time to attempt these, so of course, this means I put myself right to sleep. But if you want to do it right, I have read that doing these exercises right after you wake up is ideal. You already slept and therefore shouldn’t risk falling asleep AND because you’re still in that dreamy, drowsy state, it’s easier to slip into the meditation. Some people also recommend doing it about an hour before your usual bedtime, when you’re winding down but not quite ready to sleep.
I listen to the tapes during the day, while at the gym or while doing housework, just to be aware of what’s in them, considering I can’t stay awake past tape 0. Tape 1 focuses heavily on separating your physical self from the non-physical. There are approximately 36 hours worth of audio and 36 tapes. While I’m genuinely participating as if I believe it will work, I will say I’m a skeptic. I mean, if this really were an ability that anyone could master, wouldn’t someone have remote-viewed the Epstein files by now and told the world exactly what’s in them?
Enchantress by Gypsy (2001)
I NEED more music like this in my life. It’s authentically good rock, with witchy sound and lyrics. This month I’ve been enjoying this album for the first time as an adult. I’m not sure where, when, or why, but in my early teen witch years, maybe 13-14, I came into possession of this album Enchantress by Gypsy Ravish. I don’t remember buying it, if it was a gift, I don’t remember by who gave it to me. I listened to it for a while, but during my atheist phase, it sat alone in dusty forgotten corners of my room for years. Eventually I got a job that required me to travel and live in hotels. So I got rid of 90% of my belongings and, unfortunately, this album was one of the items I didn’t consider worth keeping during that period. I do regret it now, but all her music is available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music. I regret a lot of the things I discarded in my minimalist phase. I’m a maximalist to my core and in my soul, yet I fell victim to the Instagram influencer’s era of white-wall minimalism.
She has other works such as Spirit Nation (2010), Giant’s Despair (2012), Gypsy (2022) and some early singles like I trance you (1992) and Funk de Fino EP (1994).
Here is the Enchantress track list:
- Magick
- Bring Back the Light
- Merlina’s Theme
- Two Witches
- Lady
- Medicine Song
- Celestial Intro / Enchantress
- Heaven’s Gift / Bell Choir
- We Want a World
If anyone knows what Gypsy Ravish is up to these days, let me know! I’ve tried tracking her down, but she’s not very active online. Her Instagram, @gypsyravish, only has 2 posts, the most recent one from 2014. Her Facebook page, Gypsy the Enchantress- Spirit Nation, has a bit more going on. It looks like she’s active within the witchy community and has Magickal supplies shops called White Light Pentacles / Sacred Spirit Products and Nu Aeon. It’s clearly an older website, which I absolutely love. I wish we can bring these back. These businesses were originally started by her late husband, Richard Ravish, in the early 80s. Wow! OG witches! Love it!! I’m very drawn to 80s and 90s culture, especially witchcraft culture. Everything today feels so fake and plastic. The 90s seems to be the last decade to have authentic materials and quality products. I do very much appreciate modern-day technology, but our plastic clothing constantly unravels, and the high-tech refrigerators-freezers don’t last like the ones from the 70s do. Most products got more expensive and worse in quality overtime. Community and communication back then was more raw and meaningful, but I digress, rant over! How lucky are those who got to experience the New Age back when it was forming.
While writing this article, I learned Gypsy Ravish is from Salem, MA. What a shame for me, since I used to live near there. Maybe I’ve missed any chances to see her perform live or meet her. Maybe I have shopped at her store and came face to face with her but never knew it. Salem is a great place, though increasingly packed in October. I’ve visited during the summer instead, and it was quiet but enjoyable. I went shopping, grabbed a beer at the brewery, and even went paddle boarding on a whim. A truly magical little New England town.
Native American Literature: An Anthology by Lawana Trout
I’m currently reading short literary pieces that are part of the Native American Literature: An Anthology by Lawana Trout. This text contains a collection of various poets, writers, thinkers, storytellers, and activists of Native American decent. I’m not an indigenous person, but I personally think that non-native people living in the Americas (and Europeans too, for that matter) have a responsibility to be educated on the culture that our ancestor’s nearly erased, and for some, have completely erased. No matter your opinion or perspective, there is no harm in being educated, but there is harm in not! And what a better way to learn than through the first and oldest literature of the Americas told directly through indigenous voices?
The stories within are both fiction and non-fiction, including oral traditional stories or hardships experienced up to the present. I read a handful of pieces from each section, but I’d like to tell you about 2 that I really enjoyed: “The Two Lives” by Evelina Zuni Lucero and “The Creation or Age of Beginning: Diné (Navajo) Origin Myths” by Hastin Tlo’tsi Hee and Aileen O’Bryan.
“The Two Lives” is a reflective essay that explores the tensions of living between two identities: Indigenous and modern Western society. The author refers to this culture split as an inner conflict many Native people experience and navigate. This piece represents cultural survival, identify fragmentation, and the psychological burden of colonization.
“November 13, 1983. Today the newspaper contains the usual stories: two countries negotiating money and peace, a space shuttle penetrating the sky, the U.S. government preparing to invade Nicaragua, thousands of Minneapolis teenagers in line to purchase tickets for a Prince concert, an infant girl rejecting the heart transplant of a baboon, children being abused….I want it to be understood that the opening paragraph, the news of November 13, 1983, is directly connected to this history (historical struggle of colonization), our stories, to the continuing destruction of the Third World and tribal people, and the exploitation of the earth.”
-Lines 1 & 3 of The Two Lives by Evelina Zuni Lucero.
Wow, I feel that. Just yesterday I was telling a friend how it should not be possible for us to be living in the same timeline where in one day we are looking at new images of never before seen galaxies in the deep deep universe while simultaneously bombing an entire country of people because they don’t believe in the same exact stories about the magical sky wizard (no offense to Pagans and spiritualists, this is more about the absurdity of organized religious dogma). Every day we get too much information that provides us with roller coasters of emotions. Scrolling social media, you will see a man promoting his art, seeing starving kids on a live stream in Gaza knowing that they likely won’t live much longer because the world is allowing their demise, evidence that the people in power of the U.S. are pedophiles and no one cares, a sleepy kitten, the national parks are being sold for oil and industry, an AI girl dancing. All within seconds. All day, every day.
This must be causing extreme psychological damage that we are not meant to deal with. The information and trauma overload making humans less empathetic, more robotic, angrier, stressed, desensitized, and disconnected. The older I get, the more I realize I will always grieve what life could have been: the people lost, the ecosystems destroyed, the wisdom silenced. I may not live the two lives Evelina Zuni Lucero writes about, but I do feel the fracture between the world we’re forced to live in and the one that could have been. And maybe that grief, that longing, is its own kind of resistance.
“The Creation or Age of Beginning: Diné (Navajo) Origin Myths” is a collection of the traditional Navajo origin story recorded by Tlo’tsi Hee and transcribed by Aileen O’Bryan. It tells of the Diné (Navajo) cosmology, describing how the Diné people journeyed through four worlds before arriving in the present one, known as the Glittering World. Each world introduced new spiritual lessons, sacred beings, and moral trials. Through the guidance of First Man, First Woman, and other holy people, the Navajo learn the importance of balance, harmony (hózhó), and living in right relationship with the Earth and its elements. More than just a creation story, this myth reflects a philosophy rooted in ecological respect, spiritual awareness, and community ethics, preserving Indigenous identity through generations of oral tradition.
It makes me wonder what other ancient stories have been lost to time and brutality, how many perspectives on life, nature, and existence we’ll never get to hear. I’ve definitely had my mind expanded from the knowledge of Indigenous people. For example, in many Indigenous languages, there isn’t a rigid separation between humans, animals, plants, and the land. Everything is understood as living and interconnected, part of a larger, relational web of existence. Rather than seeing nature as something outside or separate from humanity, it’s seen as kin. The trees, rivers, and animals aren’t “resources”, they’re relatives. Which really resonated with my own feelings and world views that I’ve had since I was young. It’s amazing to know that interconnectedness was not only a world view, but embedded within their language. It makes me wonder how much more evolved and humane our modern world might be if Indigenous peoples had been given the chance to shape it. The loss is immeasurable. It is a massive shame that we will never know how things could have been.
On that bummer of a note…Writing this article was such a joy! I hope reading it was enjoyable as well. I love sharing all the cool things I discover and I hope some of my finds can become your new treasures as well. <3
