Episode Art: Mule Deer, Pen & Ink by Sarah Rose.

Magical practices – communicating and negotiating with the more-than-human to bring our desire into the world, through ritual, petitioning or augury – is the foundation of human thought and spirituality.

Hunting practices shaped our species and was the basis of our life-ways for all but the tiniest, most recent sliver of human history.

In my view, the first magical practices must have been tied to hunting success.

The earliest ritual action for which we have any archeological evidence is hunters worshipping a giant snake. 

In 2006, University of Oslo archeologists discovered a cave in Botswana where ancestors of the modern San tribespeople performed rituals for a snake deity 70,000 years ago, sacrificing 13,000 spear points to a carved stone python.

While both hunting and magical practices survive into modernity, there is very little overlap between the people who maintain these practices. So it’s been very exciting for us to meet Aspen at Yarrow and Bone. In this episode we talk about her experiences as a hunter and magical practitioner.

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