Becoming Invincible: Gordon White’s Journey Into the Magical Cosmos

In this captivating episode of the Supernormalized podcast, host CeeJay Barnaby sits down with the renowned author, podcaster, and spiritual guide, Gordon White. Known as the “Dean of Rune Soup University,” Gordon shares his profound insights into the world of magic, spirituality, and the interconnectedness of all things.

Throughout the conversation, Gordon delves into his personal journey, from his early experiences with the supernatural as a child to his current role as a custodian of the land and a guide for those seeking a deeper understanding of the more-than-human world. He discusses the importance of shadow work, the power of blessing one’s food, and the misconceptions surrounding contemporary magic in the West.

One of the key takeaways from this episode is the idea of becoming “invincible” – a state of being where one’s perspective shifts, and the concerns of the material world become less significant. Gordon explains how this transformation can occur through various spiritual practices and experiences, ultimately leading to a cosmic frame of reference and a deeper sense of belonging in the universe.

The discussion also touches on the community aspect of Gordon’s work, particularly the RuneSoup Premium Membership, which has fostered a supportive network of like-minded individuals. CeeJay and Gordon share a powerful story of how the community came together to summon a “water dragon” to help protect Gordon’s farm during a devastating wildfire, demonstrating the transformative power of collective intention and magical practice.

Throughout the conversation, Gordon’s depth of knowledge, eloquence, and genuine passion for the subject matter shine through, leaving the listener with a renewed sense of wonder and a deeper appreciation for the mysteries of the cosmos. Whether you’re a seasoned practitioner or simply curious about the world of magic, this episode of Supernormalized is a must-listen, offering a glimpse into the profound and transformative journey that Gordon White has dedicated his life to exploring.

Learn more and join the membership for Rune Soup here… *HIGHLY RECOMMENDED… your life will change for the better!

https://runesoup.com/

Transcript

CeeJay Barnaby (00:02)
Today on Super Normalise we have Gordon White. He’s, for want of a better word, the Dean of Rune Soup University, I would call it.

It’s a place where people get to learn a greater magical understanding of themselves, their lives and the world. Gordon is a writer, ⁓ media producer, podcaster and a prolific one at that. And he has helped me understand personally how to connect with the world in a magical way that enhances and enhanced my life and the life of all the people around me.

The depth of this man’s knowledge is outstanding. He’s got multiple books out that are amazing.

I’m absolutely happy to have him on the show and to have him express his ideas towards the world. People need to know more about this connection that’s possible through magic. Now, if you’re interested in connecting to the world in a deeper way, this one’s for you on with the show.

Gordon (01:32)
Hello! ⁓

CeeJay Barnaby (01:33)
Morning, or actually good afternoon for you, isn’t it Mr. White?

Gordon (01:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. am

more than familiar with the early shift, trust me.

CeeJay Barnaby (01:40)
Yeah,

yeah, it’s pretty awful. But I’m getting used to it too. I’ve actually learned the trick. Get up an hour earlier, that way you don’t look like you’re still asleep.

Gordon (01:49)
Exactly. And I used to do that with work, like real jobs anyway, where I’d leave two hours early just so it didn’t feel like the whole day was my fucking job. It actually had time for me.

CeeJay Barnaby (01:59)
yeah,

yeah, yeah, I’ve learned that trick too and I end the other part of the day very early so I can actually have time to do other things. ⁓ Tell me why you in Ascunsion? Have you escaped because the boiling frog has showed an indicator?

Gordon (02:07)
Correct.

Well, I did that the first time. yes, it’s more about building out a second life. And the same thing happened when I first moved to Tasmania, which was… ⁓

I need a life that’s pretty good for an apocalypse that I also like if it turns out that the apocalypse doesn’t happen. So I have two, two versions of the future. One that involves the world war three that’s going to happen. And the one that doesn’t, and the one that doesn’t is me living my best Germaine Greer life. So for most of her life, I think she’s too old to travel now, but she would skip the English winter and go to Queensland and she had a place in the Dane tree. And so I’m doing that, but, ⁓ horizontally.

rather than rather than vertically. That’s that’s the general, that’s the general plan, because I do like it here. And it’s very good for work. And honestly, so I’ve been to Peru, going to Peru in a few weeks, again, that’ll be three times this year, which sounds impossibly indulgent from Australia, because it is. But here, it’s like going from Hobart to Sydney. It’s it’s a couple of hours on a flight. It’s the same like the internal flight to cheap.

CeeJay Barnaby (03:16)
Ha ha.

Gordon (03:24)
Certainly compared when I’m converting it back to Australian prices so I can get on a plane in the morning here in Asuncion and I can be in Cusco too early to check into my hotel on the same day and you and I both know that just doesn’t compute for Australians like what?

CeeJay Barnaby (03:42)
yeah, well that’s part of the reason why we don’t go to South America because the travel is ridiculous and the cost is ridiculous. yeah. ⁓

Gordon (03:48)
Yeah, getting there is ridiculous. Once you’re here, it’s

alright. Cost management.

CeeJay Barnaby (03:53)
Yeah, right, of course. Yeah, yeah. Now we’re actually, again, looking at the idea of Asia and ⁓ Penang has actually raised its head and said, how about you come and visit us? And so it’s been showing us a lot of things on the Algos and we’re like, ⁓ maybe, maybe that could be cool. You know, food capital of the world, apparently for really good foodie stuff. So that could be fun. ⁓ And the prices are ridiculously cheap. know, a price of our house there, which is amazing, is like 700,000. Where in Australia, that’s like three million.

Gordon (04:08)
Nice.

CeeJay Barnaby (04:23)
So it’s like, yeah, anyway. All right, so what I should do is actually introduce you and we’ll get into it. So I’ll say, welcome to Super Normalized, Gordon White. Now Gordon, ⁓ we’ve known each other now probably I’d say since 2016 when you started the RuneSoup members part of the…

Gordon (04:25)
I’m aware.

CeeJay Barnaby (04:51)
I’d call it the RuneSoup University. And you’re in a mission, it seems, to wake up the world to the potency and importance of magic. Do you say that’s true?

Gordon (05:06)
That’s very nice. might have been, it was maybe version one or the first half of the project would have been on a mission to wake people up. There was a hard pivot in or a realization, you know, in the, I don’t know, 2020 to 2023 era in Australia, where it’s like, actually, you can’t wake anyone up, but you can help people who are in the process of waking themselves up.

So it’s that now, it’s less ⁓ proselytizing. I’ve healed my inner activist if I talk about it like Kelly Brogan.

CeeJay Barnaby (05:46)
Well, I should ask you then, ⁓ because one of the things you used to ask on all of your podcasts was were you a weird kid? I know you were, but are you a weird adult?

Gordon (05:56)
No, completely normal. odd about me at all. Definitely don’t live in a shadowy South American country or a little farm in southern Tasmania. No, it’s, yeah.

CeeJay Barnaby (05:57)
Completely normal, okay.

You don’t

feel the need to wear purple and lots of rings and hang out in psychic inventions.

Gordon (06:12)
Talking about phases, we all go through them. And I have love for all of those phases, right? Like when you actually are called to perform your difference because you are affirming it. Like that’s, it’s all good. And it’s part of the journey. And honestly, some people crystallize in that form and that’s what they want to look like and that’s fine. But yes, if you scroll back through the Google Photos of life, you see a lot of phases.

CeeJay Barnaby (06:15)
No!

Yeah, I can attest to that too. I’m a bit of a chameleon. ⁓ I wear what’s best to blend, but there’s a lot of weirdness on the inside. So I stick with that. And one of the things I wanted to cover off was the idea that we do have a bit of apocalyptic mind when it comes to reality, but that also does blend in with the facts that the astrology is saying that there is some ugliness coming for us. ⁓ Front on, do you think that magic can help solve

at for at least part of society.

Gordon (07:18)
I don’t think you solve seasons, right? Like I don’t think you can solve the onset of winter with anything. You can mitigate and attenuate. And that is the role, that’s the archetypal shamanic role for a tribe is that it’s to essentially make sure they get through the season and not piss off the spirits and so on. So it absolutely can do that.

CeeJay Barnaby (07:42)
Yes.

Gordon (07:45)
When this is talking about the activist wound, right? Like there, you can have to say this without being too mean. Very often, especially with beginners on this journey or people who haven’t done the inner work, which is where all the change happens anyway, the desire for transformation is outwardly expressed in the form of cursing world leaders or what have you. And that runs up against

By our Komalafi’s perfect question, what if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis and you’re actually just putting more energy into the system? the wisdom and the insight and the transformation of the cosmos happens internally, which is then reflected externally. So if magic can get you there and plenty of other things can get you there as well, but if magic can get you there, then yes, you can, actually can, like Jung said, you can prevent nuclear war.

Depending on how many us integrate our shadow, we’ll be able to duck nuclear war, which is also why nuclear war is on the cards between now and 2028.

CeeJay Barnaby (08:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems like there is a great healing that is going on as people become more conscious. I remember as a youth talking to spirits and nearly all of them were saying that, yes, it’s coming, it’s coming. Be patient, be patient. People are going to wake up. And I’m like, how long do I have to be patient for? But it seems to be now that I can be around other people that I would…

previous time would have considered to be completely normal, but they raise all of these issues too now and they do so consciously with understanding what’s going on. And I can’t think of anyone that I know now that believes anything that’s being reported in any news whatsoever. It’s like the whole world is being turned upside down when it comes to consciousness and being conscious of what’s actually happening. So that’s a good thing, a good thing for sure. Now you’ve got such a diverse background spanning ⁓

chaos magic, shamanism, permaculture and media work. ⁓ How did these paths come together to shape who you are today?

Gordon (10:00)
⁓ arguably out of sequence. So I think about this often. I didn’t find out anything about permaculture until I got to London and that was in my late twenties. And that initially annoyed me because I’m like, hang on a minute. This is actually what I was looking for. I’ve told this story a few times elsewhere, but when I grew up in Newcastle, Australia, and we’re getting to the end of high school and I decided I wanted to be an environmental engineer because

I discovered magic and I was a bright young neo-pagan. And my mother said, why would you want to be an environmental engineer? They just dig out stormwater drains around business parks. And I’m like, no, they don’t. Because in my head, I’m picturing reforestation and all this cool stuff. And so we went to the Newcastle University Open Evening for kids who were graduating high school. And I go to the environmental engineering one. And the first slide is like, here is a stormwater drain we’ve built around a business park.

So needless to say that wasn’t for me, but it turns out like the career path that I was feeling into at the age of 18 would have been like permaculture. If I’d known, would have just gone up, Bill was still alive, but I would have gone up and interned with Jeff for a year or two and my life would have gone off in a very different direction, right? And none of that happened. And I did media, which turned out to be really good for magic. And then…

I used to joke that I was like the black widow of world economies because the New Zealand economy, which isn’t really a world economy, crashed when I first moved there after university. And then I showed up in London in 2008, just in time for the Lehman Brothers collapse. So, but what was quite good in retrospect about having a career that’s predisposed to layoffs at the best of times is you got pretty good at career magic. You got pretty good at forecasting. You’re pretty good at sigils and so on, because it was like a survival game. And so I had some wild adventures.

mixing the magic that I sort of discovered after some dream experiences when I was 13 in with it all. so that was the sequence that it went like magic and then ⁓ media and then sort of permaculture and sitting with how they all interacted as I’m like building out how I would like to participate in the world. Then there was a call to move eventually from London after 15 years out of, 16 years out of the country.

CeeJay Barnaby (12:12)
you

Gordon (12:18)
back to Australia, to New Zealand, to Tasmania to buy a little farm, which we did. And that’s what I did in 2016, 2017. So that’s how they all kind of, they came together out of sequence. And I definitely know that particularly on the farm and having to participate in its recovery from being overgrazed sheep paddocks into like an organic heritage cider orchard, which still doesn’t yield any cider because

heritage variety trees take quite a while to grow. One of the reasons you have, you know, modern high yield varieties is they grow so fast. We’re very happy with how it’s going, right? And so all of that custodianship and spirit work and being on country and noticing. So Lee Morgan, who actually lives up the valley from me and is a writer on witchcraft, ⁓ calls the site the noticing. He says, sometimes I think it should be called the noticing. And that’s so much better because

actually it gives it to everyone, but it widens out the permission field to really step into what that feeling is. Particularly when you’re in a custodianship relationship with land or kids or pets or what have you. That’s the function that allows you to participate in the more than human. So that came through out of sequence and then cohere in a quite joyous way in the last few years.

CeeJay Barnaby (13:44)
It sounds like throughout that there’s the thread of right relation coming to the fore and then living that.

Gordon (13:54)
Yeah, I would say so. It’s a belonging journey, which is archetypally a human incarnation, right? So my belonging, my feeling of belonging is, has always been more than human and even spooky more than human. Like I’m the shark kid, like that’s still like my cuddly animal. So, ⁓ but it’s, it’s, it’s finding where you belong. Right. And I think we all do actually belong in the cosmos. It’s just part of my journey in this incarnation is to explore that and

and to rediscover that which I suppose I deliberately forgot.

CeeJay Barnaby (14:27)
Yeah, I had a sky goddess as a girlfriend for a while and that was weird. It was weird but fun. ⁓ So tell me, ⁓ one of the things you actually talk about in a lot of your work is, well not a lot, but part of your work is becoming invincible and how that changes perspective on everything and when it comes to your experience of life and your experience of magic. When was your…

Gordon (14:29)
Yeah, you get it.

CeeJay Barnaby (14:56)
invincible moment that changed you exponentially and turned you on a different

Gordon (15:05)
So again, it came throughout a sequence because sequentially, I would want to say it is ⁓ some sleep paralysis recurrent experiencer events that happened when I was a kid, around five or six. But I didn’t realize that until I got into my 20s and was in a UFO phase and worked out that, hang on, that stuff happened to me. In practice, it was some of the early.

Early magic I did, like, because I found it at the age of 13. In my first ever ceremony, I’d read all of two and a half, upwards of three Llewellyn publications, and I was ready to do this. And it was all like Irish, like the sort of Irish magic that people who’ve heard about Ireland on the radio can put into book form. so…

I, my parents had a house that was, that had like terraces or levels on a hill in Newcastle looking at the water. was actually quite lovely to grow up there. So one of these terraces we didn’t really use for anything. So it was just grass on this terrace and there was some extra big rocks, boulders around. And I’m like, all right, I’m going to make myself a certain circle for this. So my parents had left, my whole family left. those rare opportunities, 45 to 90 minutes where you get the house to yourself as a kid. And you know, it’s either masturbation or magic. And I went with magic that time.

And so I out, I started laying out these stones in a circle and the grass, one of the reasons we didn’t use it was you couldn’t get the lawnmower on it because it’s very uneven piece of land. So the grass was about 20 centimeters high, which is also snaky, but anyway. And so I’m moving the stones around and this being, and it initially looked like Predator in his camouflage suit, which was about a little bit taller than or around the height of the grass, just moved.

and then morphed into view. it’s always made of the grass like a humanoid being and then morphed into view briefly in front of me and then off it went and it was a fucking fairy. And I’m like, wow, magic’s great. I bet this happens every time. ⁓ Which it doesn’t, but that was my first like, ⁓ hang on a minute. Like these precious books are dealing in real wisdom. So, and then when I speaking of another.

CeeJay Barnaby (17:03)
Cool.

Ha ha ha!

Gordon (17:19)
misfired attempt in Newcastle at Glenrock Lagoon, which is a, we used to be able to walk to it is a national park area. And it has a waterfall and talk about learning custodianship. did none of that. My friend Owen and I, and we went and did a, ⁓ self initiation into some kind of neo pagan wicker, drew a dream, a launch that we concocted. And we got followed.

You had to walk down a track beside the waterfall and then onto a Burwood Beach and then it was about four kilometers along Burwood Beach and then scramble up a hill to get to my parents place. And I mean like followed by spirit beings that we could both visibly see kind of like almost escorting us and making it go faster. We were absolutely not welcome and we had upset some beings when we were there. So when I say becoming invincible and it’s the same as the weird kid question for.

the podcast, if you were raised in a haunted house or had been alien abducted or for whatever reason, Discovery Channel’s done a show on your childhood home. Like you probably already know that the universe is too big to be contained really by anyone’s narrative, but most especially by official reality. Most especially and most certainly. And there’s no way back from that. You don’t ever play a smaller game ever. That’s what becoming invincible is.

your morality shifts, there are things that are worse than death. There are things that mean nothing now, things that mean nothing. ⁓ You know, what what perfect strangers think of you and so on, like it’s incredible. And that’s becoming invincible. That’s when you become like a ⁓ immortal citizen of the cosmos, you have a cosmic, a cosmic frame and a cosmic morality and cosmic concerns, which doesn’t mean that you don’t do the laundry. But it means that you

you can plan lifetimes, right? So I didn’t know this at the time, but it’s something Martin Prechtel said that I really took on board. It’s the, an intact culture is one that can perform actions whose outcomes it will never see. And if you look at that classic indigenous, total island indigenous idea that all decisions were made ⁓ for the benefit or the attempted benefit of seven generations hence.

That’s an intact culture. That’s culture that will make decisions for a future they will never see. And that’s not exactly what happens to you when you become invincible, but it’s like that. You have different timeframes. anything, it can be a trauma experience. It is for a lot of people to ⁓ blow up the puny controlling version of official reality. And then it’s up to you to play a bigger game.

and the game that you’re called for. And that’s the sort of thing RuneSoup is for.

CeeJay Barnaby (20:07)
Do you think that people are ⁓ in a way tapped on the shoulder for this change in their lives or does it happen to only certain?

Gordon (20:19)
⁓ It is technically available to everyone because everyone is an aspect of the one thing, obviously, like holographic instantiations of the one thing. That said, as with all we kind of do when we’re down here, we sign up for most of these choice points before we get here. And so ⁓ you tap yourself on the shoulder.

That’s kind of, and it’s like you only have yourself to blame for when that happens. But that’s how it, and it looks, very interesting. I actually just finished recording a video about this.

CeeJay Barnaby (20:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Gordon (20:58)
It’s a perception error being down here that everything looks preordained. It’s not quite that because you are continuously co-creating. That is the case before you get here and when you’re here. But there’s just like simple reframes you can do or think with that make that more efficient. But broadly speaking, it’s not for everyone in every lifetime, but nothing is because the cosmos is ideally exploring in the direction of novelty. So it actually does need new things and new combinations.

CeeJay Barnaby (21:28)
Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah. Part of that you said there is that we’re living in a space of co-creation, which is a firm belief that I have as well. And I came to that from ⁓ exploring myself with plant medicines, amongst other things. And ⁓ I came to the conclusion that this is the heaven that we all create together. ⁓ But it’s not necessarily that ⁓ we agree on it. It’s just…

whatever you’re putting into the world creates the world. And we observe the outcome of that creation in the everyday from even the smallest of thoughts and how we actually believe in ourselves and others. ⁓ Do you think that worldview is something that people are swinging towards or changing towards as we come towards this apocalyptic moment?

Gordon (22:23)
Yes, I think they can feel it more easily than they can describe it. So Charles Eisenstein is very good at describing this because he emphasizes that the last couple of centuries of our culture here have prioritized bigness and have prioritized material effects. And so it’s not good at seeing the thing that’s actually

CeeJay Barnaby (22:28)
Yes.

Gordon (22:52)
our felt experience of life, which is that the most powerful and transformative things are the smallest or the least physical or mechanical, which would be love and so on. So he’s very good at going like, we mistake bigness for effectiveness. And those are two different things. we just, ⁓ he’s so good at explaining it because he spent like 15 years visioning and imagining.

whole economic systems without like money and capitalism. So he’s very good at like living in a world where the curses and scarcity thinking that we have all inherited are quieter, right? Most of us aren’t. So we feel it in our hearts. That’s why it’s the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. And I think that’s part of the role of people who’ve woken up five minutes before the alarm like us that you will find it is

plainly part of your job to not tell people, but hold a field for them to discover that for themselves. Because at the moment it can’t be articulated. And that’s actually by design. Anything that can be articulated and planned and programmed is part of the world that’s going away. So you cannot get to it any other way than by feel. And to give people that permission is really, powerful. Because if it was…

If there was a roadmap, if there was 10 steps, it would be part of the system that is going away, that is a system of control. And it’s almost like this is how it hides or how it wins. It’s a very ⁓ using a hobbit to destroy the ring kind of energy. it can’t conceive of something that isn’t planned.

CeeJay Barnaby (24:38)
Hmm. Yeah, it seems like on one hand there’s pure creation. On the other hand, there’s distraction and it’s like you get the choice. Which one do you want? You know, and that conscious choice lead you down a path of ⁓ growth or stagnation. Yeah. Yeah. So you do permaculture as a part of your ⁓ farming practices and it’s definitely a fitting compliment to your magical work. And how does farming and ecological design inform or intersect with your spiritual practices?

Gordon (24:45)
Mm-hmm.

⁓ I’m not sure I have spiritual practices. there’s so at the moment I’m plant based, but we still have animals. We still have like chickens and ducks and geese and things. But in the morning there are tasks. is daily prayers. There’s like letting the birds out and so on. So it’s ⁓ being able to observe and have that mostly it’s the observation and participation. And that’s not even just

the things that are growing on my farm, having is really fun having is weird way saying it Eagles. When we lose a chicken to the Eagles, it’s a good day, like, my god. And they are huge, like there’s Tasmanian seagulls, like these wonderful, wonderful things just being so far down because we’re in southern Tasmania, technically, we’re closer to Antarctica than the top of Australia. So you get big, powerful, exciting weather and

CeeJay Barnaby (25:51)
Yeah.

Gordon (26:08)
unfortunately, because it is Australia, ⁓ lots of colonial ghosts and memories and stories. And this all feeds into what it is really anywhere to live, I think, in 2025. So in that sense, it feeds into each other, but also being able to observe really strange things like we had hundreds of chickens.

Most of them are much for muchness. And once in a while, you will get a hero chicken. And she will just, because it’s usually because we obviously they’re overwhelmingly female, she will just, we had one that I called Whitney, who would just like, leave, she would just open the gate, and she’d worked out that we don’t electrify the fences. So she’d just hop over it. And she’s quiet, she didn’t like the other chickens. And she just spent her whole day like she’d leave the farm.

and go off and do her own thing. She was laying, we found like 20 eggs somewhere, she was going somewhere else to lay. But she would also come up to my little wizard hut and look in the door and like chat to me and see what was going on. And this was some kind of, I don’t know, human or super chicken come back to earth. We called her Whitney because there was a male chicken that ⁓ we believed was leading her astray. So we called her Bobby and Whitney. ⁓ It was a beautiful doomed relationship. But it turns out she was leading him astray.

He died first, she carried on doing it after all of that. you just, see, you go through phases in an animist, in integrating and reintegrating animism back into your life. And so you move from dead universe materialism into, I guess it is all alive, that involved a little bit of anthropomorphization, right?

And that’s one of the criticisms and it’s fair early on as you’re building out your widest sense of community cosmos. And then you move further along and then actually some beings are different to other beings and of the same order. that’s when, that’s been one of the gems actually to understand that variety, you’re not making it up. Like there’s variety in the more than human and agency. Like this chicken.

was a CSIRO breed that is bred for eggs. That’s it. Like it’s a Italian leg bar CSIRO blend of some description. So it’s a ⁓ mutant of capitalism. But nevertheless, she was this like super chicken. And that’s good. That’s one of those encouraging like, huh, things. But broadly speaking, you learn to fold and this is actually advice.

Don’t separate the spiritual tasks from the farm tasks. In the morning, there’s prayers and let the chickens out.

CeeJay Barnaby (28:54)
Yeah, yeah, it speaks back to the Zen idea of chop wood, carry water before and after enlightenment. yeah, for sure. Shadow work and spiritual awakening are recurring themes in your ⁓ teachings. What advice would you give someone just beginning to explore those areas with their own magical practice?

Gordon (29:00)
Mm-hmm.

ShadowWork one.

is

So it’s difficult, right? Because it’s like, well, how much do you know about it? Have you just heard the term on TikTok? Because if that’s the case, then you want to do some reading first. You want to do some reading, but let’s assume that you understand the notion of the shadow as that which you excise from yourself and put in the corner, in the dark, so that you can build your ego, your egoic form to carry on in life. And that’s the, what I really like about Jung amongst many other things is that the ego isn’t bound.

Right? Like it’s a, it’s a necessary accretion that the psyche develops to be able to get through life. Like you need one. You can, it can certainly do with some improvement, a little touch up here and there. That’s for sure. But you know, little, little Botox, little PRP, but you don’t need to destroy it. And so the shadow is all the things that you hope other people don’t notice you really are. Right?

And that’s venal, that’s villain, that’s angry, that’s selfish, that’s all these things. And shadow work is the process of allowing and facing that, turning a friendly face to those things that you had understandably as a kid and adolescence excised so that you don’t keep bumping up against them in the form of other people and repeated situations and so in your life. So whatever process you need of coming to that awareness,

CeeJay Barnaby (30:45)
You

Gordon (30:51)
I usually tell people when you hit a repeated situation, ask yourself, how have I made myself a match to this? Like, what am I seeking to solve? The goal of shadow work is to stop bumping up against things that the psyche continues to show you in the hopes that this time you will alchemize them. So that would be the process. It’s like, get clear on what Jung means by it. And then however you want to do it, journaling, soul retrieval.

any of that kind of stuff. are innumerable courses ⁓ on how you integrate those things that appear as repeated patterns. And it’s the most powerful manifestation techniques because you are always getting in your own way. There’s no one else to do it. There’s no one else to get in your way but you. And clearing the path for all those good things is the shadow road.

CeeJay Barnaby (31:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, part of my major shadow road work for myself was actually my Saturn Return, which turned really wildly weird when I was attacked by a shaman on a walk in Byron Bay where he put onto me a couple of ⁓ entities to skin-ride me and I didn’t realise what was going on at time. I’d been warned about it by a psychic a year and a half before.

even the exact event and the exact day and told me what to look out for. at that time, I just didn’t recognize it. And it took me months to get it off. But as a part of that, I learned a whole lot more about myself. all credits to that shaman that woke me up in a certain sort of way, but it was a real hard kick in the pants. But sometimes shadow work can be like that. ⁓ So speaking about spirits and

being clear ⁓ how much of our, would you say our negative personalities are actually some sort of entities that just sitting on our shoulder and just whispering naughty things into us to distract us from the truth.

Gordon (32:55)
⁓ Well, interesting. I start the frame a little bit beforehand. So I have a shamanic view of the human psyche, which is as a ⁓ ecology, right? So as a community of beings, which it has to be if it’s going to, you know, hermetically be the microcosm to the same thing in the macrocosm. And so very often, ⁓ yes, it’s crowded in there, even without entities. And so you will have soul parts that

Trying to do the best thing for you are going to be running some really dark scripts in your head. And like the most famous one, which we kind of learned from internal family systems, like the inner critic, is criticizing you internally so that you adjust your behavior before you have the chance to be externally criticized. Right? So it’s actually trying to save you from the experience of being criticized as a child by caregivers and so on. So it’s crowded in there and often mean even before we get to entities where

⁓ You definitely do find them now. And they’re funny enough, you find more of them in the unintegrated West because we have all these parts that are still roaring around their heads. And those are typically the things that these other entities get their hooks into. And it almost comes back to the parts work thing, but it’s more like individuation, integration. There’s no way out but through. you can clear, and this happens, it’s happened to any practitioners, you can clear entities of people and they’ll come back by the next session.

And it’s because the thing that they’ve been hooked onto hasn’t been healed. They can still get back in. the dark thoughts can be in there. Now that being said, you can actually approach them. The only way out is through. You can and probably should in this era do some regular spiritual cleansing. So ⁓ I used to for years, still, don’t know, I don’t know why, but I used to have sea salt in a plastic cup in the shower and I would.

just fill that with salt water and say, asperge me with his sub lord and have that. I remember every morning to do an energy cleanse. I do that pretty regularly now anyway, but any of that stuff that you can do about clearing your own energy field using Palo Santo, anything like that, always good because it’s just like, well, if you pick the right plant ally, it’s not going to hurt. Salt is not going to damage anything in your energetic system and neither is Palo Santo, but it is going to make it cleaner when it comes to other beings.

So that’s kind of my answer to that. As for our world leaders, it’s a different story. ⁓ They’re definitely loud and unpleasant voices in the heads of people near the red button.

CeeJay Barnaby (35:40)
I think those same people are actually loud in people’s heads of people that don’t think all the way through too when it comes to whether those things should be influencing every part of their lives, if you know what I mean.

Gordon (35:50)
Absolutely. ⁓ Yeah.

The devil’s cleverest wail.

CeeJay Barnaby (35:56)
⁓ Okay, so as someone deeply involved in teaching magic authentically, what do you see as the biggest misconceptions people have about contemporary magic today?

Gordon (36:12)
This sounds has changed over time as well.

The West does have an authentic and valid magical tradition, current lineage. And it is not the, it can be the right hands, but it’s not like a 19th century golden dawn down to Thalima, down through whatever sex pest orders continue today under those brands. The Western tradition,

is a cunning tradition. It is and it has conserved practices across time. has ⁓ allies and prayers and spirits and all of these things. And we know this by comparison. It looks like Kurandurismo. It looks like traditions, lay traditions, if you will, peasant traditions around the world. So I would say the biggest misconception is

the necessity or the seeming necessity to like invent or, or hypothecate a tradition based on literally like the 19th century version of the new age and what have you. And when you do that, that’s again, it’s a permission field. It’s like, yeah. That my mother and I worked that out that her grandmother was one of these women in Ireland. And, know, these were the prayers that she would use and she used to say this and use these herbs. it’s like, my God, it’s

It’s been there. It’s been there the whole time. And it’s not some, know, ⁓ toby middle-class Englishmen in the 1880s talking to Horace. It’s, it’s,

Yeah, it’s prayers over crops and hanging little rosary beads over bassinets and all this kind of stuff. The West has a tradition and that scales up to summoning angels. But I think that’s the biggest misconception, that the West not only has a tradition, it’s a spirit tradition. That’s there. And once you have that, ⁓ and I think you kind of got to get right with that or get underneath that current one way or the other. And it doesn’t mean that once you find it,

You have to do rosaries every night and you have to work with St Anne and you have to work with mugwort. It’s not that at all. It’s like, ⁓ the shape of it is I have spirit allies and I have plant allies and I have a sacred calendar and I have the work to do. That’s the tradition. And that’s, think, people take a while to find that. Because once you’ve found that, whatever is on your heart and whatever beings want to co-create and work and play with you, well, that’s up to you.

always been up to you. If you look at the history of the witch trials, particularly in England and Scotland, they have, ⁓ it’s all different. There’s not even, Scotland is quite a bit of the devil, but like if you look at the English stuff, it’s fairies, it’s different, like we would say spirit guides now, but it’s familiar. And the familiar is the teaching them what herbs to use and helping them with prayers, ⁓ healing sick kids and all this kind of stuff. And you don’t necessarily need to go into that practice.

point is to look at the metaphor of magic and go, right, so it’s allies and prayers and timing. That’s the form. And we always had that. We didn’t need to memorize the Hebrew alphabet to mispronounce alleged Kabbalistic words while calling on Horace in like a Ladbroke Grove drawing room. that didn’t, if that’s your vibe, go for it. But that’s the biggest misconception, I think.

CeeJay Barnaby (39:54)
Yeah, yeah, I think as a part of my ⁓ growing up magically going from, can do anything anytime to actually doing things with bit of structure from learning from you. ⁓ At first, I thought I’ve got to do it a certain sort of way and to make it work. But then I actually figured out, no, no, no, you’re actually thinking too structured still. You’ve got to sort of blend those things together to make your

your own personal understanding that actually activates all of the things in the right way. And once I got that I was like, okay, no, no, don’t be so anal about it, just…

Gordon (40:30)
and it will be

yours and it will be your version of it. A really odd example now that I think about it or metaphor is driving. I remember when I was on my L plates, a friend of mine, Sarah, she had a boyfriend who was two years or a year and a half older, which means he was on his P plates. so he and I used to go driving and smoking because he looked old enough to buy cigarettes. And he said, you don’t know anything about driving.

When you’re on your L plates until you’re on your P plates and then on your main license and it’s because you learn the rules in your L’s but you become the driver that like so you still more or less obeying the rules when you’re driving. I mean you are in the sense that you’re not going off the road into a field. You might have you might play fast and loose with the speed limit right. That’s what magic you begin with the structure of like okay. it’s spirits and it’s timing and and it’s allied like his allies and it’s timing and noticing.

CeeJay Barnaby (41:15)
Mm.

Gordon (41:29)
start there and then as you did, like you find exactly what kind of magic driver you are. Like what does timing and allies and all of that stuff look like for you or for whoever?

CeeJay Barnaby (41:40)
Yeah, yeah. I found personally over time that I’m being backed up by a whole cadre of a spirit team and it’s a matter of directing that in the right direction to make things work. yeah, it feels good to be that sort of supported and to recognise that. Can you talk about the community aspect of your group, RuneSoup Premium Membership and how important is that connection with other practitioners for personal transformation?

Gordon (42:11)
I would say it’s very important, is honestly why it’s been a priority. When I started the podcast, so before I even knew the website was ever going to have a membership, there were barely were memberships. I remember growing up in Newcastle, Australia, which I don’t love. And I would read these books by like Peter J. Carroll, and he was one of the founders of Chaos Magic. And I’m like, who is this incredible, does he live in a tower? Like what, what is happening?

Because he’s, Peter in particular, is remarkably good. You will not find an image of him on the internet. I have no idea how he does it, but I’ve met him since and he does not look like any of the images when you Google image search it, which is fucking amazing. Anyway, so I had this, then I moved to London after New Zealand and whatever and ended up meeting some of these people, including Peter, and some of them became quite good friends. And I decided to do a podcast for Gordon, for like the kid in Boise.

or the kid in Newcastle who just knew about these people through books. then to be able, because I always found the podcast form very intimate. Like I was listening to them back when it was an actual iPod and it was pretty much just BBC podcasts back in Auckland. Because you put the earbuds in and you’re walking around the street and I would listen to radio plays and I’m like, this is a very intimate form. But nevertheless playing with the world. And I wanted that with, at least initially, the voices of these people.

So I always had, I guess it’s a little bit selfish, like myself as a kid in mind, but more, a lot of people, the majority of people on the magical path, just because it is solitary from a human perspective, do miss out on having colleagues, I guess. And just knowing that they’re there is enough. The membership over the years has gone camping together and we’ve done events in New Zealand and…

Alaska trips and people just, you know, meeting up for coffee. And as far as I know, no one’s got married yet, because people actually ask that. I think it’s because they’re all sluts. anyway, where the point is, like, it’s just it’s one of those groups of people that’s really nice to know is there, even if you’re not particularly involved. But you are because you’re like in the field of it in the in

in the college, right? In the sense of the invisible college, right? You’re part of the mission. And that’s always been, I mean, maybe there are other ways to do it, but that’s been my priority since before the membership, is that sense of collegiality. Because the word community is so overused. And it is a community, but yeah, for me, it’s always been that. It’s just been what I’ve wanted to see in the world.

That is my best effort in manifesting it.

CeeJay Barnaby (45:06)
Yeah, we’ve seen great benefits in that. mean, personally, I remember the time that your farm was threatened by fire and we all got together and petitioned and prayed and what happened.

Gordon (45:14)
yes.

We summoned the water dragon and it put the fire. That’s remarkable. That’s all on the internet and in my book. But yes, that was the, what was that? The 2019, 2019 Tasmania fires? Yes. So January, 2019 and that’s 60,000 hectare fire got within three, 400 meters of the farm. we used, we relied on some friends who had some very good Vedic astrological knowledge.

picked the right window to summon Vasuki, which is one of the essentially a water dragon from Vedic cosmology. And I saw exactly when it was going to happen and said it. And it was, it ended up being that Wednesday night after the Monday or something like that. And there was no rain on the radar because it’s February in Tasmania and we needed 20 mils and we got to put the fire out. That was according to the fire chief and we got 22 mils. It’s a remarkable experience. When I went back to the farm, you could feel.

because the clouds are obviously very low, it was pouring. And it was like a UFO event. I couldn’t see the being in the clouds, but it was as if a plane, not the sound or anything, but if a plane was flying low, you could just kind of feel it. That was the experience. It was remarkable. yeah, if you need a dragon, turns out you need to call up a hundred wizards.

CeeJay Barnaby (46:36)
Mmm.

⁓ I didn’t encounter anything that I needed to have ⁓ to fight against in that way except for when they installed ⁓ a 5G tower across the road from where I was living at the time. At that time we had the forums and I wrote into the forum, please help, please help. at that time I think about 20 people wrote all these different ideas and I did all the things.

Gordon (47:00)
I remember that. Yeah, I remember that.

CeeJay Barnaby (47:11)
And within a month of it being turned on, it was turned off with a sticker stuck on the side of it that said this has been turned off. And I was like, what’s going on? Looking in the news, the whole network had been turned off Australia-wide because it was actually based on Huawei. And they discovered there was backdoors in it. So it’s never going to be turned on. It’s in court battles forever.

Gordon (47:31)
Good.

We apparently have backdoors in those solar panels too, so we’ll see if they get turned off.

CeeJay Barnaby (47:37)
⁓ yeah, yeah heard about that too. So you have a series of books too and ⁓ the ones that come to mind right now are the Chaos Protocols, Pieces of Eight and…

The other ones have just left my mind right now. ⁓ what is your purpose and aim in your books? mean, they’re obviously directing people towards a connection to magic. Tell us more.

Gordon (48:06)
The first few books, there’s like the practical magic books, which is Chaos Protocols and Pieces of Eight. And Pieces of Eight in particular, or Chaos Protocols in particular rather, is a Llewellyn publication. And I was very grateful for that because my editor really held my feet to the fire to make sure that it was a beginner’s book. Like I said, this isn’t gonna be the first book people pick up on magic. And she’s like, yeah, but what if it is? She kept asking that.

And I’m like, all right. And so consequently, I’m quite happy with that as the introduction. The other books, so my Scarlet Imprint books, my Dot Trilogy, which is Starships and Animistic, is a different project. That’s my magical cosmology, right? So Starships, prehistory of the spirits, is telling the story genetically and mythologically of how what we know as, I guess, the…

the Western magical ecosystem came to us and is ultimately 100,000 years old, like as far as we can tell, probably earlier. That’s according to like official human timelines, which is a rabbit hole for another time. And Animistic is my book on animism and the more than human world and how we…

how we upgrade and transform our theory of mind so that almost like we no longer need a theory of mind, but that moves us into the cosmos as a community of beings. And the final one of them will be how they’re activated essentially. So all that stuff we spoke about with regards to the cunning traditions, it’s more in that direction, which is one of the reasons why I’m here. So I don’t know if I have a goal or an aim.

I’m going to finish that dot trilogy, but I don’t know if I ever got like, ⁓ I’m trying to do something different with the books. I definitely am. I think I’m just trying to express myself creatively. The book thing in 2025 is interesting because the, as an author, the things you get out of having a book is people engaging with your ideas and giving you feedback, which having mentioned the runes of community, like we all already have that.

CeeJay Barnaby (50:06)
Hmm.

Gordon (50:12)
It’s like, okay, I can shorten the cycle from the 18 month publishing cycle and just get feedback and share material that way. And that’s good and bad. Like it’s good for me and presumably good for the membership, but it’s bad if I ever want to get to ⁓ finishing the old bookie work. And I even noticed that when Animistic came out, from people would engage more even like online.

the internet, it was easy to track where things were being engaged online. So when chaos protocols came out, more people were still blogging. And so you could see people working with the ideas and wrestling with it. By the time animistic came out, I certainly wasn’t using Facebook, but in a social media context, you don’t really find anything like that. Just, it’s probably happening somewhere, but it’s not like, it’s not indexed like it is when it comes to like blogs or live channels.

So I was actually a bit disappointed. And the book sold really well and, you know, it was well reviewed and people loved it and whatever. I’m like, there’s a disconnect that I had, I guess, unconsciously solved to my own satisfaction by being in digital community. And that makes it a little bit challenging to, because writing a book is unpleasant, frankly. And for it to be an unpleasant experience followed by nothing.

You have to be mentally prepared for that. And I make the joke that I’m gonna read all the boring books of Plato. So I’ve read all the good Plato books already, ⁓ but I’m gonna read all the boring Plato that I haven’t read yet. And I’m gonna finish my own book during World War III. So that’s my plan.

CeeJay Barnaby (51:54)
Wow cool. All right look I can attest to the the

hard part of actually birthing a book. mean, for me now it’s 25 years. I’m still writing this same fucking book. And I’m so close to the end and my friend Nathan, you know, Nathan C. He keeps on kicking me in the butt saying, come on, give me the book. want to go through it. But I’m actually at the point now I’m looking, I’m not even sure if people want to read this shit. But yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gordon (52:21)
that’s normal. That’s absolutely normal. Like, yeah,

you need someone to tell you that my favorite, got four fifths the way through Starships and we were in New Zealand for a wedding or something. can’t remember. And I’d just been to, ⁓ just been to the museum in Wellington. it’s like, love Polynesian cosmology and I’ve always loved Maori cosmology and whatever.

I realized that there’s a bit quite a bit of Polynesian ⁓ mythology in like in a chunk in Starships. So I emailed Peter at Scarlet imprint and go, tell you what, I don’t know if this Starships book is any good. What about a book on Polynesian mythology? And like he took me down off the ledge of like, this is normal. Like, no, Starships is really good. Just just finished the damn book. This happens to everyone. I’m really glad that happened.

because I had lost my mind. honestly thought like, you know, I could just make that section bigger. And I have this book on and I genuinely believed it. I wasn’t panicked. It was this clear, what I assumed to be like an emotion free sober judgment that what I needed to do is scrap Starships and write a book on Polynesian mythology. And if I didn’t have someone to say no, there’s always a moment where you think this is the worst book in the world. And that’s probably where you’re at now always.

CeeJay Barnaby (53:43)
I’ll get to the end very soon, I’m sure. And I’m looking forward to that. Just to also see what happens. It’s been one of those books that sort of like echoed my life when it comes to this podcast, for example, Super Normalize. I’m trying to get into book format, the understanding that all of this magical experience of life is normal. And that’s basically what I’m trying to do. So hopefully that comes through. Okay, so.

Considering all that and your work with RuneSoup, I call it RuneSoup University, ⁓ what’s one powerful lesson or insight from Chaos Magic or Shamanism that listeners can start applying every day in their lives right now?

I know that’s hard to distill.

Gordon (54:33)
know if I have like power, not

so much the distill like a powerful insight. Because I almost want to steal one from Don Alberto from Alberto violdo because he writes like diet books as well as a medical anthropologist. And he gets asked like, what’s the single biggest ⁓ change people can make in their diet right now to improve their health. And he says, bless your food. And I want to steal that from an insight. The insight is like,

the, you run on energy. You run on energetics. And a lot of that, more than you realize, is you are sovereign over. I was about to say in your control. That’s wrong. You are sovereign over. And bless your food is, if you think like, oh yeah, I’m magic adjacent in my interest, cool, do you bless your food? Do that one. And that is enough. That’s from like a nutritional perspective, but also, oh yeah, it is a…

more than once a day call to be a citizen of the cosmos. So I think it’s something like that. Otherwise, it’s really nice, but glib stuff like you literally aren’t alone. ⁓ Death is a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. So there’s insights, but there’s also like actions that will rather than baby steps.

big step you into playing a bigger game, suppose. And that’s a deceptively simple one.

CeeJay Barnaby (56:03)
Yeah, I like the idea of blessing your food. We’ve been doing that a lot. ⁓ But I also take that to the next extreme and I bless parts of my life and I drive a lot and as a part of my driving I see roadkill and I always bless every animal and try to raise its soul and send it off to the next realm if it’s stuck there, if I feel that. ⁓ And I think just generally ⁓ having more of a

Gordon (56:17)
Same.

CeeJay Barnaby (56:31)
what you would say, a right relation sort of focus helps in every possible way. And a part of that story for myself is recognizing what isn’t good for me. And it took me a long time to get there and it wasn’t like obvious until it was really obvious. And a part of that was not involving myself in any… ⁓

content and media which is horrible and awful and just brings up more of the garbage that the world is and you know for example you know flicking on turning on Netflix or some streaming service and just watching people murder each other and in gore porn as if that’s normal that’s just not normal

Gordon (57:10)
And yeah, Netflix in general, right? Like it’s,

we have a book club in the membership and we are doing a book for the Zodiac each of the zodiacal months. And for Taurus, we did the Leopard. And that’s a limited mini series based on the same book on Netflix, which is apparently good. I will open up Netflix to watch that, but I otherwise don’t because the entire thing is either debasing or mind control. But yeah, this is a really good insight, right? Like guard your energetics. This stuff is all real.

CeeJay Barnaby (57:34)
Mm.

Gordon (57:40)
Develop that feeling body the the heart centered body that knows these things and to your point about the You know the roadkill which I do the same thing and it’s what you your experience earlier the psychedelic understanding your thoughts and your intentions there are no small Intentions back to what Charles said and and so on You it actually it is retained in the cosmos longer than the actual corpse of the the animal

will remain stable, like it will decay and your intention and your prayer will last longer. Like we’re switched. That is the real game. And whatever can get you there is really good. But it’s a really good one. Like be, sovereign and custodian of your energetics.

CeeJay Barnaby (58:26)
Absolutely. Well Gordon, we’ve come towards the end of the podcast and I wanted to help people find you. Where would they go?

Gordon (58:38)
RuneSoup.com obviously is sort of a hub where you can find everything, all the writing these days is on Substack, so runesoup.substack.com and there you’ll get, there’s links to the membership on either of them and I’m doing a lot more YouTube, I’m in a YouTube sprint, which I’m really enjoying for the next couple of months. yeah.

CeeJay Barnaby (58:55)
I’ve noticed it’s you’re prolific and it’s

fantastic. There’s so much stuff that you’ve come out with lately on YouTube that I plan. I’m like, my god, that was just like a therapy session. I have to play it again.

Gordon (59:06)
Yeah, I’m loving it. it’s just,

it’s funny. Like it’s the same thing with books. It’s, um, what’s my purpose with it? It’s like, I’m really enjoying it. I’m really enjoying the form. I don’t, it’s such a pretentious thing to say when it’s YouTube and I don’t mean it like that, but I’m just like, Oh, this is fun. I podcast a good, I’ve shifted the podcast to being almost more solo shows and whatever at the moment with some sporadic interviews, but it’s just creatively where I’m at. So I’ve got, um, I’ve got a bunch more and it’s just really fun. But yeah, if you just rune soup, you’ll find it anywhere.

CeeJay Barnaby (59:17)
No.

Gordon (59:36)
I’m not, I technically still have my ex account, but don’t, it will be a while before I get back to you there. I don’t really use any of these things. Exactly. Well, like sub stack, runesoup.com, all good.

CeeJay Barnaby (59:44)
Well, that’s a time hole in itself too, so I understand.

Mm, yeah, yeah, excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with everyone your understanding of the world of magic and your experience of it. It’s been pleasure. All right, I’ll say goodbye to the listeners.

Gordon (1:00:01)
You’re very welcome.

CeeJay Barnaby (1:00:09)
A huge thanks to Gordon for coming on the show. That was absolutely perfect. And I’m so glad that Gordon’s in the world because of the learnings I’ve got from his understanding and his ⁓ dedication that’s ⁓ very, very driven. If you’ve enjoyed today’s show, reach out to Gordon at RuneSoup and say thank you so much. That’d be really appreciated. And join the membership. That’d be really good. ⁓ And if you’ve…

liked this episode, like and subscribe. Or even if you didn’t, like and subscribe anyway. And ⁓ yeah, if you’re on a podcast app, give us five stars, say something really nice. And until next episode, it’s bye for now.