Sage in the Sky

About Sage in the Sky

A soul-led podcast exploring shadow work, Tarot, Scottish folklore, and witchcraft for healing and self-discovery. Each Sunday, journey through myth, magic, and the mysteries within. Guided by a Scottish-rooted spiritual practitioner weaving stories, reflections, and ritual to help you reclaim your light through the dark.

Publisher

Carrie Barr

Category

religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

24 Nov 2024

Latest episode

20 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

66 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   20 Sept 2026

   The Light Over the Next Hill

   This is the twelfth and last of the series, and it's the equinox. Light and dark come level soon and then they tip, and from then the dark half has it. It isn't a recap and it isn't a big finish. What it is, is a doorway episode. We stand at the threshold for an hour, look back down the glen quickly without making a meal of it, and then say something over the going. The folklore is one of the Gaelic journey blessings, said standing at your own door before setting out. And it doesn't ask for what you'd expect. Not a safe arrival, not clear weather, not the business at the other end going your way. It asks for the earth beneath the foot to be blessed, and the path whereon I go. Nothing at all about the destination. There's a kindness in that which took me a while to see, because if you bless the destination you've given yourself something to keep checking on, and if you bless the ground you're standing on then it's already done. Then the gap you're about to be in, and why you'll probably misread it. William Bridges separated change, which is the external event with a date on it, from transition, which is the internal business of becoming somebody for whom that's now true. And transition begins with an ending rather than a beginning, and the bit in the middle where the old thing is over and the new one hasn't started is not a failure of the process. It is the process. I've included what it actually feels like, since people recognise the symptoms long before they recognise the description. There's also a passage in here for anybody who has listened to all twelve and still hasn't climbed the hill. Twelve podcast episodes were never going to shift something that has been in place for nine years, and I'd not have you turn that into evidence about yourself. And the card is the Fool, which is numbered zero, which takes it out of the sequence and lets it sit at either end of the deck. So finishing on it isn't a trick. The mountains are behind the traveller rather than ahead. The bundle is tiny. And Pamela Colman Smith didn't paint the fall, in either direction, which is honest. The practice at the end is a doorway one, and it finishes with the blessing and a turn. The letter carries on every week. The podcast comes back around Samhain. This week's card: the Fool. Numbered zero, which is why it can be the first card or the last one. What happens now The weekly letter carries on. If you'd like company through the dark half, that's where I'll be. The podcast is resting through the autumn and comes back around Samhain with a new series. All twelve episodes stay up, so if somebody you know is standing at the foot of something, they can start at the beginning whenever they like. Take the quiz You already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore, and you've met one or two of them across this series. At sageinthesky.com (https://sageinthesky.com)

2. 

   13 Sept 2026

   Who Are You Lighting Fires For?

   Back at Lùnastal we spent an hour asking who lit the fire on your hill. This is the other side of it. Who are you lighting them for. And I want to be careful, because the obvious version of this episode is one you don't need. You have been pouring yourself out for other people since you were about nineteen and it's a large part of why you're tired. So here's what I actually think. Most of what we call helping is doing things for people that they could do themselves. It doesn't light any fires. It makes them smaller and it makes you emptier, and those turn out to be the same process. There's a piece of family systems work behind that, from a psychiatrist called Murray Bowen, and it's the sharpest thing I've brought you in this series. He described over-functioning and under-functioning as reciprocal positions. They produce each other. One person's taking over is what creates the room for the other's stepping back, and the stepping back pulls more taking over. So the woman doing eighty percent of everything is not surrounded by useless people. The people around her have become less capable because she does it all. Same fact, seen from two ends. He was clear that this isn't a character flaw. It's a way of managing anxiety and it works, which is why it's so hard to shift. The line worth having is that both positions bring the anxiety down, and what neither of them does is help anybody grow. Then the alternative, which our people had. The taigh-cèilidh, the visiting house. Every township had one, and it wasn't appointed, it emerged, usually because the fire was good or the woman of the house was welcoming. People drifted there after the work was done. The news first, then the songs and the long tales that could run three nights. And over in the corner, out of the way, the children, half asleep, absorbing an entire culture. The folklorists call these houses informal schools. And nobody in that room was teaching anybody. The adults were doing the thing, well, in front of people who knew when you got it wrong. That's the whole method, and it carried the language, the stories and the music of Gaelic Scotland across centuries with almost nothing written down. And the Queen of Wands, who is the warmest woman in the deck and is sitting down. She isn't out looking for anyone. She's seated, holding her own sprouting wand, with a black cat at her feet that cannot be commanded by anybody. And her body faces you while her head is turned away, which is a very particular kind of welcome. There's a practice at the end about handing one thing back, and it's the hardest one I've given you. Next week is the last of the twelve, on the equinox. A note: none of this applies to somebody who genuinely can't do the thing. Small children, people who are ill, anyone in a crisis. Doing the work for a person who isn't able is care, and it isn't what this episode is about. The episode says so. Take the quiz You already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern that's been keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com (https://sageinthesky.com). Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.

3. 

   6 Sept 2026

   Life Doesn't End at the Top of the Hill

   There's a feeling I hear about constantly from women in their forties and fifties, and it never comes out directly. It sounds like: I've left it too late. That was the window, and I was busy. The interesting part has already happened and I wasn't paying enough attention while it did. Underneath all of those is a picture, and I want to get it out into the light. The picture is a hill. You climb, you reach the top, and then you go down the other side. Which puts a woman of forty-eight somewhere on the descent, not because of anything she's done, but because of the shape of the diagram. I've called this series Light Over the Hill, so I've been handing you that shape for nine weeks. This week I'd like to complicate it, and offer two others. The first is the Cailleach. The old woman who made Scotland, striding across the country with a creel of stones on her back, dropping the mountains behind her as she went. Blue-skinned, one-eyed, rust-red teeth, and nobody has ever tried to make her lovely. She rules the dark half of the year from Samhain to Beltane, washes her great plaid in the Corryvreckan whirlpool until it comes out white and lays it over the country as the first snow, herds and protects the red deer, and vanishes at Beltane. Her power and her age are the same fact. And there's a stone house in Glen Lyon where somebody still takes her family out at Beltane and puts them back at Samhain, every year, as far back as anyone can trace. I've also included the part that stops this being a pep talk, which is that she grieves. There's a poem twelve hundred years old in which the oldest woman in our folklore sits down and mourns her own youth in some detail. Both things are true at once. Then the research that has been arguing with the hill for twenty years, and I've given you the contested version rather than the headline, because the shape has been changing and it deserves honesty. What has survived every revision is that none of it is a hill. And the Wheel of Fortune, which floats in the sky with no ground beneath it, because on a wheel there is no summit. The top is a position you pass through. Next week we come near the end, and it's the other side of the Lùnastal episode. We asked then who lit the fire on your hill. Next week, who you're lighting them for. This week's card: the Wheel of Fortune. It floats with no ground under it, and the top is somewhere you pass through. Take the quiz You already know. So what are you waiting for? Nine questions, about three minutes, and at the end you get the name of the pattern that's been keeping you where you are. Each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. At sageinthesky.com (https://sageinthesky.com). Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings