Transcript
Speaker: Now then, witches and beautiful souls, what's this? What's this little surprise offering? A little bonus, if you will, in the form of another's podcast, which I was actually a guest on.
Speaker: Impro Pod with Luke Tomlinson who I met at the London podcast show back in early May. We met at the little social after the second day. Spoke about our podcast and he was like, oh I should totally come on as a guest.
Speaker: And it's such a cool concept. a podcast where you tell your story and Luke is a piano player and he plays improvised music from your stories. Such a cool idea. I absolutely love it.
Speaker: And so I was like, yeah, I should totally do that, even though I much prefer hosting. and i feel a lot more confident as a host because i'm just such a control freak but i've got to walk the walk as well as talk the talk if i expect people to come on the bell which as a guest i totally need to go on other people's as a guest even though it's completely out of my comfort zone and i do cringe at myself which is weird i cringe at myself on other people's podcasts but not my own even though sound the same
Speaker: What's all that about swales? It doesn't make any sense. Silly. That's what that I guess it's because I can't over edit the ah all the stuff I say. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little bonus offering. And if you do like it, do go hop over there and follow Luke and leave him some stars.
Speaker: It lends itself so well to all different walks of life. And I love podcasts, mate. I listen to so many random... not witchy podcasts and witchy ones too big thank you to luke for allowing me to be a guest on the impro pod i need to stop babbling i'm gonna hit play on not my podcast do go over give him a follow give him some stars because as you know those stars really do help us little podcasts to shine
Speaker: Welcome to another episode of the ImproPod podcast. My guest today is Swales, the friendly green witch of the Bell Witch podcast. Bit of a mouthful.
Speaker: Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So can you tell me a bit about the Bell Witch podcast? Yeah, so this is a podcast mostly about witchcraft and paganism, spirituality and well-being in the 21st century.
Speaker: I do one one with me on my own, talking about stuff that I love, that ignites my soul, and one with somebody else known as a moot loot. Well, they have different guests that come on to talk about their spirituality, their witch businesses, their unusual take on like capitalism and magic and just living a wholesome life.
Speaker: So how did you get into this? I've always been a bit weird. I grew up as a goth when I was young. I didn't make that connection to witchcraft until I had my first baby be in my 30s.
Speaker: And that became my whole life really quickly. So like I started hanging out with mums and talked about goddess energies. And then I subscribed to a surprise box in the post.
Speaker: And one of the themes was witchcraft. And it had a book called Witch by Lisa Lister. And I read that whole book in probably two nights and was amazed at how much it spoke to me. And it was a bit like a massive revelation, like, oh my gosh, this is who I am. I can't believe it's taken me so long to figure it out.
Speaker: And it's pretty much just snowballed from there, you know, like meeting people and attending pagan events and camps, moon circles. It's like the floodgates have opened. do you ever feel superstitious?
Speaker: I love superstition, but it doesn't scare me. I'm more in interested interested in how it is manifested. love looking into conspiracies and things we do. And you'll be amazed at how much magic there is in just daily living, you know, that we don't realise is magic.
Speaker: For example, blowing your candles out on your birthday cake, that is candle magic. Every year, everybody does that. You're all practising witchcraft and you don't even know it. So with Christmas trees, hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree every season, every Yule time, that is also witchcraft because you're not worshipping, but you're like celebrating the soul of the tree for the festive season.
Speaker: So when you look into it, it is actually really commonplace. And so blowing your birthday candles out, what is the witchcraft significance of that? You're manifesting a wish by your intent is you're asking for something from the universe or wherever you believe energy comes from. And then you're doing an action to solidify that magic spell in lighting a candle.
Speaker: and then wishing for something and then blowing it out. That's basically a little spell that you've just done, like a ritual spell. And you do it every year, so every time you do it, it's like it builds up the magic. I see.
Speaker: So I have 32, I think. Yeah. You've got to believe it, though. It's one thing doing the action, you've got to believe it. So to add to the Impropod map then, Swales is based near the Bradford Leeds Airport in North Yorkshire.
Speaker: And the upcoming story about the sigil takes place in York. You can check out the map, which features the approximate locations of stories and guests at impropod.com.
Speaker: So I'm going to play a piece of improvised music. Okay. I'd like you to tell me what it makes you think of. So that's any kind of thoughts, emotions, ideas that come to your mind. And I haven't thought about it at all. There's no pre-planning that's gone into it.
Speaker: And so what did you think of that? In my mind, I could see an ocean, like a pleasant ocean's view. But then if you dived into the ocean, into the really dark bits of the ocean where there's all kinds of animals that you don't know even what they are and what they're doing, like a bit of foreboding feeling, a little bit of mystery and magic.
Speaker: Nice. So you've got several layers. Things aren't what they appear. There's a surface level and then there's a deeper level to it. And it's enormous and it'll carry on getting enormous the more you go deep down into the layers.
Speaker: So there's something about what I played that is expansive.
Speaker: That sort of idea, that sort of rhythm. Did you have an idea of what was below the surface? Mysteries. you have to open your mind to understand them, but it takes a lot from you, ah feel.
Speaker: How do you mean? It's kind of like you can't just think in life things will just come to you even if you're pretending. You're interested. You've got to seriously be interested and open to it and it might not be what you expect and it might not be as good or the right thing but you've still got to go in willing the willingness, I feel. It's about being willing to discover stuff that might not be the right thing to discover but you've still got to do it otherwise you wouldn't do anything.
Speaker: So there's a sense of you have to take the challenges that you're presented with. You can't just um do nothing. Yeah. Adapt. Adapt, yeah.
Speaker: I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind and I'm going to break the story down into sections and then improvise a soundtrack to it. Okay, so I think one of the stories I could tell you is about how I discovered sigil magic.
Speaker: For those of us who don't know, could you explain a bit about what a sigil is? It's a symbol that represents something you want to protect or manifest.
Speaker: So I have clients who come to me asking for a sigil to protect their family or to sell a house. I'd write down a sentence and then create a fluid kind of symbol symbol from the sentence.
Speaker: I used to attend a moon circle in York with a group of mums I'd met and we were doing sigil making that night. The beautiful thing was we were baking bread from scratch and kneading it with intention and things we wanted to manifest and things we wanted to let go and everybody had a different type of bread.
Speaker: And then when the bread was ready to go in the oven, we got food colouring and we painted this sigil onto the bread. And I did my first sigil, which was about growth.
Speaker: And ended up being a very powerful sigil. And I've got it tattooed on me today because it was such a moment of realisation. There was something about baking the bread and then eating the sigil. So it went inside yourself.
Speaker: and i always think about it with such delight because until then i had no idea and just that little moon circle when random thursday night or something changed everything about how i do magic and spells and stuff this sigil that i'm speaking about was growth as like a human so going forward and being allowed to just ride the change and trust the process very much was ah feeling of letting go and stop worrying and stop over processing and trying to over control stuff and it really was a big moment for me going to start with the sense of trying to control everything that happens to you then I'm going to go for this sense of release okay and then I'll try and get the sense of bread in there as well which is tricky I love bread
Speaker: The end of the day is very difficult time to get the same.
Speaker: What are your thoughts on that? liked how it evolved. Like it started almost timidly. And then I liked how it swelled in the middle and settled down at the end, but it was quite joyful at the end. So i was trying to go for this sense of letting go Did you get that? Yeah, because the way it changed, yeah.
Speaker: Starting off with quite dense, quite clustery chords, quite dissonant, and then spreading out so the notes become further apart.
Speaker: The notes are literally further apart on the piano, and felt that represented the sense of letting All of these elements are dispersing in your mind, to speak.
Speaker: It's very calming, isn't it, music? Like the way it... It can be. To me, it's proper magic. I can't play anything. And i it's one of the biggest regrets of my life that I'm not musically trained because I respect and appreciate and cherish music so much from lots of different genres. And yeah, so cool.
Speaker: And so do you see a relationship between music and witchcraft? There's definitely one, not so much for me, but I'm going to work to change that. I've purchased a drone machine, a shruti box and a drum. So they're like basic instruments that I can actually do.
Speaker: And I'm going to start using them within my own like rituals and stuff. This is a Shruti box and it's kind of like a little wooden briefcase that has bellows inside and little keys that opens them and a pumping system which pumps air through with the bellows in a lovely purple fabric.
Speaker: It's very simple, you just... pump air through through the mechanism by literally just pushing it in and out and that creates a really loud drone effect it's quite therapeutic to do it's a nice instrument to play and if you get it right it's one continuous drone but i'm working on that at the moment and so i think the keys are like a piano
Speaker: I got that one from Vinted for 40 quid, which was a bargain.
Speaker: Would you like to tell another story? Okay, so my second story is a tale of caution regarding manifesting and using magic to get what you want.
Speaker: few years ago, i was very into active magic and I was trying to manifest a lump sum of money for me and my family to do the house up.
Speaker: And this was a long process of lots of different rituals, burning bay leaves, planting stuff in the garden, rituals and around a fire, talking to the universe, writing checks, pretend checks to yourself and leaving them in your wallet and and stuff like that.
Speaker: I worked hard and I could feel that the magic had manifested and the message had been sent out there to the universe to manifest it. Shortly after this, my husband, who's got a really good job and has worked over 30 years in the same business, the same company, had a meeting and was told that he was going to be made redundant by the end of the month.
Speaker: which was a shock because you'd think he'd been there a long time, he'd not have to deal with this and we were just not ready for the blow and started to prepare for the worst. I made the connection that I'd done this magic and then maybe two weeks later he got told he was going to be made redundant.
Speaker: And I felt so guilty. One of the big reasons this was happening to us was because i had manifested this windfall, which was similar to the amount I'd asked for, which was similar to the amount that he was getting his redundancy pay.
Speaker: And so I worked really hard to reverse the magic, doing other rituals and talking direct to the universe in the morning and in the evening and doing story visualizations to try and correct it.
Speaker: And I was sweating, I tell you, I was sweating and I felt really guilty. And I did tell my husband about this and he wasn't convinced I had anything to do with it because he's not a witch, but I knew really deep down in my bones I did have partly to do with this.
Speaker: And we were preparing for the the date to come. And I think maybe two or three days before his redundancy date, which was the end of June, his boss randomly quit out of the blue and some other guy got promoted to his position.
Speaker: And then my husband's office realised that the company had broken the law by giving it to somebody else and not offering it to my husband. And they all started rallying around.
Speaker: And then his company offered his job back. And this was like two days before it was going to happen. And of course, he said, yes, I don't want to be made redundant. I want my job. So I kind of did a big sigh like, oh, that was close.
Speaker: And so you've got to be careful what you ask for in witchcraft and magic and manifesting because the universe wants to give you what you ask for, but you've got to be precise and detailed.
Speaker: You can't just say, i want to get rich. I don't care how. because the universe doesn't know right from wrong good or bad it can't be swayed and it doesn't have feelings towards any anybody in particularly it's just there just does and attracts it's attracted to the vibes you send out and so you be careful what you wish for and how you wish for it and how it comes to you try and detail exactly how you want stuff to come to you because it'll always find the easiest route and in my case It was my husband to lose his job to give the money that I asked for at the huge expense of losing his job.
Speaker: Right. You don't think there's a difference between asking for something that's good and asking for something that's evil in the way that the universe responds? no. It's up to us, the individual, the human, knowing our intuition and respect for other people and having to live with stuff. It is our job but to decide this. It's not the universe's job to know what's good and bad.
Speaker: It just is there doing its thing. It's not bias. Mm-hmm. Music
Speaker: I'm going to take the recording of the Shruti box and I'm going to put it on a loop and then um'm going to improvise a soundtrack to that story with the Shruti box, which will give it another element. I'm going to take this idea of be careful what you wish for.
Speaker: And so to start with, you have this kind of manifestation you want to become, you want some money. And so you ask the universe for money, but you don't realize the method in which will work.
Speaker: provide. you've got asking for the money initially and then this idea of redundancy and caution and then the putback, the reversal.
Speaker: you
Speaker: you
Speaker: I could really feel the panic, like in the middle. It started out really beautifully and quite magical. And I loved how it changed dramatically the middle and then slowly got okay again. You really captured beautifully the emotions that were going through at the time.
Speaker: And do you think that the drone had did an effect on it? it's It did, yeah. It's funny because in the beginning you could really hear it and then it faded out into the background but you knew it was still there. The Shruti-Box drone present in the background throughout the music, to me, represents the universe being observant of your life throughout the whole spell and the outcome and turning it all around. are quite like that, how it's continuous, no matter what you do.
Speaker: And sometimes you can't quite hear it, like when the music got very dramatic. It did drown out the drone, but you knew it was still there, which is kind of like living and then manifesting.
Speaker: So what did you get out of this podcast? It's completely out of my comfort zone. It's something I i haven't done at all ever. So it's it's really interesting to see how somebody with an ear who's musically trained can interpret my stories completely differently than what are you I'm used to experiencing.
Speaker: And I was quite eager to have that experience because, yeah, I've never had anybody interpret my stories in their musical instrument. Do you think you'll see those stories now from a different perspective?
Speaker: Yeah, definitely. Where can people find your podcast? So whenever you listen to your podcasts, the Bell Witch Podcast, I'm on Instagram, I'm on Spotify and Apple and the little ones and YouTube and you name it. If you Google it, it'll come up with a massive list.
Speaker: I absolutely love doing it. It is my third baby after my two children. And I'm also interested in collabing with other people into unusual things that aren't the mainstream, that aren't the norm.
Speaker: Spirituality wise, magic wise, yeah. Your latest episode, What's That About?, The latest one is with a singer called Shannon Pearl, and she's a witch pop artist, and she sings about folklore and goddesses. She does the art of culning, which is a way of singing really loudly and high-pitched using your vocal cords that is actually an ancient tradition of calling cows.
Speaker: which she didn't know that it was, it had that history. It was just a way she learned how to sing. And then she did ah TikTok and went viral because she was calling. yeah, go check her out, Shannon Pearl.
Speaker: That sounds fascinating. Can you tell me where these stories take place? So I've started doing this map project where the location of every story is marked with a green pin on a world map and the location of the guests is marked with a red pin.
Speaker: And so you can really explore the podcast in a completely new and unique way by navigating the world and following finding out where these stories take place and some of them take place very close to each other which is quite interesting it's such a cool idea i love it so the sigil discovery story was in york and whereabouts are you i'm near the leeds bradford airport so on the outskirts near north yorkshire thank you very much for being on the podcast yeah thank you for having me it's been a true experience that i've never had before
Speaker: Nice one. So you can check out the Bell Witch podcast, which is available on many platforms. Join us again for another episode of Impropod. Thanks for listening.
