Ready to feel all the feelings? Sarah and Jane sit down with author and mystic Perdita Finn on the eve of the launch of her new book, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors — and the timing feels nothing short of divinely arranged. Perdita is also the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, and this episode picks up right where that book left off: the dead are not gone, they are available to help us. What unfolds is one of the most resonant conversations Medium Curious has ever had. Perdita brings her gift for poetic, grounded storytelling to questions that couldn't feel more urgent: What does it mean to be un-mothered in a culture designed to make mothers fail? How do we reclaim the grandmothers who were silenced, reduced to diagnoses, cornered by circumstance? And how do we connect with them now, across the veil, when we need them most? Perdita shares the story of her grandmother Nellie — a woman she only knew as a stroke victim, but who she discovered, through diaries found after her mother's death, to be a complicated, extraordinary soul worth claiming. She talks about the forget-me-nots blooming in her yard three weeks early on book launch day, carried from England to America by her grandmother, and what it feels like to offer this book to her. The conversation moves through the lost village of mothering — how before civilization, a mother was anyone who cared, regardless of gender or biology — to the very practical question of what to do with all of it: the grief, the rage, the overwhelm, the headlines. Perdita's answer is to delegate to the dead. She opens every morning with her worries and calls on her team on the other side, from her late dentist to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, trusting that the dead can hold what we cannot. This episode will leave you crying, laughing, and reaching for your own grandmother's hand across whatever distance separates you. Key Takeaways The dead are still available to us. Perdita opens every morning by calling on her team on the other side — ancestors, teachers, friends, even those we've lost to historical atrocity — and asks them to help carry what feels too heavy to hold alone. This isn't metaphor. It's a daily practice with real effects. Our grandmothers were more than the stories we were told about them. Many of us inherited a reduced version of who our grandmothers were — shaped by trauma, mental illness labels, silence, and the limits of the era they lived in. Their diaries, their objects, their dreams can give them back to us as full human beings. Fretting is a form of prayer. Perdita reframes worry not as weakness but as creativity at work — an act of turning something over, wearing away at a problem, spinning new possibilities into being. Our anxious minds are also our most generative ones. Before civilization, a mother was an adult who cared. Mothering wasn't defined by gender or biology. It was communal, expansive, and distributed across a whole circle of people. Reclaiming that definition is not just healing — it's resistance. We are all psychic, and we have been trained out of it. Perdita's own precognitive dreams were met with terror by her mother, and she shut them down. When we silence those gifts in children — and in ourselves — we lose our most essential line of communication with the unseen world. The goal isn't just your lifetime. Perdita encourages thinking in terms of 49 generations — roughly 1,200 years. What prayer would you want to still be praying then? What healing are you beginning now that you may not live to see complete? Quotable Moments "What we long for are the arms and the embrace of a circle of mothers — a circle of grandmothers, a circle of beings who know who we are and want us to be who we are." "If we weren't adored by a group of women who loved us in life, just know: you are adored by beings beyond measure who love you from the other side." "We need less children in the world and more mothers." "A knot, an obstacle, a problem, a rift — becomes an opportunity for magic with the dead." "If we remember we're all each other's mothers, we're going to stop clear-cutting the forest and mountaintop mining and putting each other in solitary confinement." Resources and Links Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors by Perdita Finn — https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/perdita-finn/mothers-of-magic/9798894140667/?lens=running-press Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World by Perdita Finn — https://takebackthemagic.com/ Artist Sarah Jarrett (cover art for Mothers of Magic) — https://www.instagram.com/sarahjarrettart/ Perdita Finn's Substack— https://substack.com/@perditafinn Previous Medium Curious episode with Perdita Finn — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-work-with-the-dead-perdita-finn-on-signs/id1726468626?i=1000739450990 Medium Curious’ Website: https://www.mediumcurious.com Explore the Intuition & Mediumship Course: https://www.mediumcurious.com Book a reading with Jane Morgan https://www.janemorganmedium.com/ Book a reading with Sarah Rathke https://www.sarahrathke.com/ Jane's Substack: https://janemorgan.substack.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mediumcuriouspod/
