Weaving Gold

About Weaving Gold

The Living Ancestor is an exploration of what it means to live as a fully embodied, 21st-century human still connected to our deep-time hunter-gatherer inheritance. It moves through ancestral healing, embodiment, magic, creative expression, and the long work of aligning with fate and destiny. At the heart of it is the art of divination and the way of the seer: contact with the broader forces at play, and the old craft of reading them. It is the practice of tending omens, of communion between spirits and humans, of listening for the deeper meaning held inside the mundane, and of divination itself, the reading of a single moment against the whole field of ancestry, land, and cosmos, and drawing forward the guidance, the blessings, and the sealed images that help a person walk their own golden path. eatingancientvirtue.substack.com (https://eatingancientvirtue.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

with Ramon Castellanos

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

7 Nov 2023

Latest episode

20 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

28 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   20 Jul 2026

   Disease as Prima Materia: The Alchemical Gold Seeded Inside Illness

   In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we continue the alchemical thread from the previous transmission and turn to a single idea: that nearly every illness carries within it a seed of alchemical gold, if we can learn to relate to it in the ‘right way’. Prima materia means the ‘first matter’, the raw and often despised starting point of any alchemical work. The old alchemists wrote of it as something cheap, freely available, held in contempt, easily discarded, and gone unnoticed. And that, it turns out, is exactly how most of us relate to our own dis-ease: the aches & pains, the shutdowns, the loss of desire and the places where we stop wanting to engage with life. We explore why chemistry and alchemy are not the same. Chemistry divorces the one doing the work from the material, while alchemy always includes the person. When you heat the matter, you heat yourself. When you dissolve it, you dissolve yourself. Because of that sympathetic link, working with illness becomes a way of working with the whole being, and ‘the war on disease’ gives way to a relationship with it. I also move through the classical phases as they show up in the lived experience of illness. The nigredo, ‘the blackening’…is when a diagnosis lands like the Tower card and everything you knew is turned to ash. The albedo, the long washing, which becomes the actual regimen of practice, diet, movement, and inner work applied over and over on a consistent basis. And the rubedo, the reddening, where the work coagulates into a new form, a gold that may be health, or may be an entirely different way of inhabiting your body and your life. Along the way I share my own story directly, the heart trouble that arrived in my late twenties out of a stressful stretch living at a wolf sanctuary in New Mexico, and how relating to the heart not as a mechanical pump but as the emperor of the organs, the orchestrator of the body, became one of the great catalysts of my life. I also offer a way of working across the three levels of xing, qi, and shen: body, energy, and spirit, so that whatever you are facing can be met at every layer of the self. There is no guarantee that every illness becomes gold, and to be really, really clear…it is not a claim that sickness is your fault. It is an invitation to set fault aside and take up response-ability, the ability to respond, and to let disease become a starting point rather than a sentence. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe (https://eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   15 Jul 2026

   An Alchemical Model of Health and Illness

   In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we step back and take a big-picture look at the healing process, mapping it through the lens of alchemy. While I do present a ‘model’, this transmission is it is not a theoretical exercise, for specifics have emerged from my own life and from years of counseling others. This includes my long experience inhabiting a body that has never quite functioned the way most peoples bodies function. At the heart of this conversation is what James Hillman called the redemption of matter. Western culture has inherited a deep habit of splitting spirit from matter, of demeaning the physical while pointing us always toward ascension…away from the body, the material. This habit has flowed into Western medicine, which has come to treat the body as a machine, a set of levers and functions to optimize while the being on the inside is quietly divorced from the whole. Alchemy, lovingly and longingly moves in the other direction: for the old alchemists, working with matter was already a soulful act. To heat, purify, dissolve, and coagulate a material was to work on the soul at the same time. Spirit and matter molded at the same time and in the same way. Auspicious. We explore how the language of nature is itself alchemical. Sun meets soil…which meets seed and water…and plant life follows. Water evaporates, gathers, condenses, and returns. The body is a microcosm of that same living world, an ongoing process of transformation, and the ancient elemental medicines of the Taoist, Ayurvedic, and Tibetan traditions understood it this way. In Chinese medicine each organ carries its own spirit, its own consciousness bequeathed upon us by our ancestors, and you cannot separate the consciousness of the organ from who you are as a being. From there we come to the core of the talk: disease as fragmentation. Drawing on a principle from osteopathic medicine, we explore the idea that a disease is a gift that keeps the system together, an intelligent process that forms where some part of us has split off from the whole. We trace those splits across every layer of a person, the ancestral, the environmental, the cultural, the karmic and past-life, the inner parts at odds with one another, and finally the personality itself with its idiosyncratic patterns. Health, then, is a movement toward wholeness, and ‘a healing regimen’ becomes something like an alchemical formula, brought in to reintegrate what has fractured and to transmute the system toward greater integrity. And so the disease becomes a catalyst for cultivation. It asks us to change, to sacrifice the versions of ourselves we have grown accustomed to at the altar of wholeness, and to become someone more vital, more integrated, and more authentically ourselves in the process. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe (https://eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   1 Jul 2026

   Ancestral Medicine: Health, Ancestral Patterns, and Genetics

   Hello my friends... In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we are going to take a deep dive into the intersection between ancestral patterns & health, a stem that branches from what could be called ‘Ancestral Medicine’. Ancestral medicine is a term I originally encountered through the work of Daniel Foor’s and his teachings on ancestral healing; however in this podcast, I refocus the medicinal layers, from the direct tending of ancestral spirits, to the ways in which the ancestral flows into, alters and shapes the living body. Throughout the conversation I move fluidly between the animistic and shamanic layers and the more contemporary ‘scientific language’, recontextualizing the clinical into the ‘animate’, for genetics are a modernized and mechanistic way to speak about ancestral patterns. The body is an ancestral phenomenon, which came out of a parent who came out of ancestors. Ancestral impacts on health are braided and multi layered, for there is the... The great ocean of deep time hunter-gatherer ancestors who shaped the human creature over hundreds of thousands of years, and the evolutionary mismatch that arises when modern life pulls us out of the life way we designed for. This results in the diseases of civilization: early heart disease, diabetes, the cancers, arthritis, arriving as the signature of that dislocation. Then the narrower scales: race and its genetic gifts and weaknesses. Then finally our own familial lines with their strange, idiosyncratic genetic preloading. All this is occurring inside the backdrop of direct relationships to ancestral spirits, and the state of our whole lineage. I also share the story of my wife Crystal, whose body seems need very large doses of vitamin B5 in order to function normally, because somewhere upstream an ancestral pattern molded her physiology with this quark...however this a phenomenon that highlights a core principle of this talk: the modern intermixes lines, diasporas, beliefs, and bodies at a scale our ancestors never faced, and it hands each of us a genetic inheritance that can be very hard to track. Finally I anchor all this back into into the lines themselves, the long time currents behind our eight great-grandparent braided behind us like a rope. In a healthy ancestral field that rope carries the blessings and the genetic gifts though it like a vibrating string. In our fractured world some strands run strong while others sit frozen or estranged, and a person raised inside a single troubled line becomes is anchored to something akin to a floating root, drawing up the troubles of that one current while the rest of their inheritance stays sealed off. Ancestral lineage repair is the work of reconnecting those strands, reaching back past the great ancestral disconnection and letting the flow return. Topics include: * Ancestral medicine and the health dimension of ancestor work * The multi-layered scales of ancestral patterns, from deep time to the familial line * Evolutionary mismatch and the diseases of civilization * Genetics as the physical expression of an ancestral pattern * Genetic expression, epigenetics, and the second genome * Behavioral and perceptual patterns mistaken for genetics * SNPs and idiosyncratic nutrient needs in the modern body * The eight ancestral lines and the braided rope of inheritance * Ancestral lineage repair and restoring the flow * Fate, destiny, and wholeness-making across the generations 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe (https://eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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