Dark Moon and Poison Gardens

In this episode of Spirit Box, I sit down with Dr. Lenni George to talk about her new book, The Rites of Hekate: From the Dirt to the Divine. Released in December and praised by Peter Mark Adams, it’s a rare work that stands firmly in both scholarship and lived devotional practice without compromising either.

We explore how the book came into being, and the very personal experiences that shaped it. Lenni shares the story of creating her moon and poison gardens — six white-flowering beds dedicated to lunar rites, a Strophalos wheel set into the soil, and a dark moon garden of baneful plants. What began as a strange inner shove became something tangible, culminating in the discovery of an old key unearthed from the earth — a potent symbol for a goddess of thresholds.

Our conversation moves into a powerful regression hypnotherapy session in which Lenni encountered herself as a deaf beggar woman in medieval Europe. That experience took on deeper meaning as she was writing about Hekate’s hordes — the gathering of the lost and the forgotten. Later, while teaching in Greece, she saw how deeply that current resonated with others who recognized their own experiences of grief, death, and exile within it.

We also discuss:

• Hekate’s evolution from pre-Olympian titaness to Chaldean cosmic mediator — and her later distortion during the witch trials into a dark caricature of feminine power.

• How patriarchal narratives reshaped the image of the goddess, and why her resurgence now feels culturally significant.

• Lenni’s four-quadrant magical framework — beginning with dirt, ancestry, and embodied practice before reaching toward the cosmic and ceremonial.

• The necessity of critical thinking, ethical boundaries, and non-transactional devotion in serious magical work.

Lenni also shares her transpersonal work, including encounters within what she calls her “inner lab,” and a striking experience with an entity known as the Timekeeper that reframed a personal health crisis through symbolic ritual.

In the Plus Show, we go deeper into liminality — not as an aesthetic, but as a lived condition. We unpack Hekate’s role as psychopomp and threshold-walker, the metaphysics of in-between states, and why so many modern practitioners feel called to borderlands — social, ancestral, ecological, and spiritual. We talk crossroads rituals, altered states, hybrid identities, and the initiatory tension of standing between worlds.

This is a conversation about soil and scholarship. About lost souls and moonlit rites. About grounding devotion in ethics and lived experience while still daring to stand at the crossroads.

If you feel called to the threshold, this one’s for you.
Show notes:
Get the Book: https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/the-rites-of-hekate/dr-lenni-george/9781916756373?srsltid=AfmBOoqJkwtxuSU8BbDyfflNp0dyjadqJd2KLlCsGGCvn-2qyw6hGgpD
House of Zophiel (Events) https://www.houseofzophiel.com/
Voice of Zophiel Podcast https://houseofzophiel.libsyn.com/