Lavinia Carey is a poet with a deep interest in spiritual tradition. She writes as a means of prayer, exploring what it means to have a relationship with the Divine and thereby with oneself. She is a member of Extinction Rebellion, an undergraduate in Philosophy and student at the Temenos Academy. Phyllis Koehler is a student of literature, critical theory and witchcraft. She is working on an undergraduate dissertation on Medieval Women’s Mysticism. Her artistic practice revolves around notions of ritual and its relationship to space, time, linguistic representations and society.

In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx states: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Turning towards our existence in a suffering planet, we inhale the steam of our raging hearts, dance to the sounds of our shouts into the void of a muted existence and lose ourselves in the ecstasies of our love to the universe. The earth is our lover, mother and goddess, and, re-connecting with traditions originating in Alchemy, Analytical Psychology and Witchcraft, we engage in self-created rituals to celebrate our desire for all that is excluded from the matrix of human supremacy. In the same way in which the Alchemists aimed at a total sympoietic tangling facilitated by the materiality of their earthly existence, this experimental workshop invites its participants to take part at an revelry of with-making, myth-making, worlding and un-worlding. Through these practices, we will endeavour to wake up or brighten the fundamentally spiritual love for the Earth that is already natural to us. Loving is something fundamental to being. These practices do not only aim to bring us closer to the Earth but to ourselves. We will create a space where environmental activism and spirituality engender practical tools for radical social transformation.