Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of our Ancestors - Conversation with Author Perdita Finn

Thanks for being here to explore, unravel, and excavate with curiosity along with me.

Perdita and I have a conversation about her upcoming release of Mothers of Magic (Running Press, 2026) coming out May 1.

Support independent bookstores and purchase an advanced copy at the Golden Notebook (Woodstock, NY) for an autographed copy.

Perdita’s book invites us to ask ourselves: What do you want? What do you truly, madly, deeply want? What seeds are in your heart that want to spread, and grow and bloom?

Perdita’s book is primal as she urges the reader to remember the mother in her entirety, her body, the food she makes, and her ties to all the ancestral mothers of her lineage. She weaves folklore and stories of legends from the dead while blending the aliveness of nature, giving us signs everywhere, from the church you passed a million times, to it serendipitously comes into view, and you decide to stop the car to climb the hill to check it out. The unseen mothers are always at work, guiding and nudging us; we only have to be curious enough to see the messages.

Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the non-denominational international fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, rabbis, shamans, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Finn now teaches popular workshops in which she helps students explore how to draw on our Ancestral Mothers for help and healing--of ourselves and our planet. She is the author of Take Back the Magic (Running Press, 2023), and Mothers of Magic (Running Press, 2026) and lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.

You can also find more about Perdita on her website here: Take Back the Magic

I pondered our conversation and wrote a full essay inspired by it. Here’s an excerpt below or read the entire essay here.

In one of the exercises of the book, Perdita invites the reader to remember their mothers as an animal as the first protector of you as a child. What would she look like? What are her personality traits? She weaves this animist exercise to explore what it might look like to embrace the delightful ways an animal is free to be its truest self. For instance, would you see the characteristics of a bird in your mother who could support you to fly, soar for your dreams? Or perhaps a mother who can protect you with her venom like a snake? That nature itself is our mother there to support us and envelope us with her vast strengths and playful nature.

It was enjoyable to imagine my own mother as a flamingo. Beautiful, proud, communal and also with the desire to stand out. Strength, courage and beauty are characteristics of my own mother. Flamingos experience a duality of motherhood within it. Both joy and depletion as they undergo a profound transformation as they become mothers themselves. This transformation of fading a mother’s bright pink feathers when they care for their young symbolically represents sacrifice and love. They let go to give of themselves to nourish their young while they lose some of their own vibrancy. In a similar way that flamingo mothers give to their babies so do human mothers giving their time, energy and essence into their children. Mothers quietly give parts of themselves away in honor of their children to make room for a child’s growth. The choice is inevitable to transform in our own ways alongside this process and it isn’t that easy at times.