Welcome to Roon Soup, a podcast about Magic, Culture and the Paranormal, coming to you from Sunny West London.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. Enjoy.

Today on Roon Soup, we get to do something I've been chasing for 21 episodes now, and that is to talk about Tolkien.

Joining me from California is writer, artist, astrologer, editor of Archive the Journal of

Archa teapel Cosmology and doctoral student, Becker Tarnas.

Becker's current research is an examination of the convergence of images between Tolkien's work and Jung's work in his read book, as well as an exploration of the implications of such a convergence.

Becker, thank you very much for your time.

Oh, well, thank you for inviting me to come speak with you.

Always a pleasure, and I'm quite looking forward to the answer to the now traditional beginning question.

Becca, were you a weird kid?

Well, I went to a Waldorf school in San Francisco

from kindergarten actually all the way through high school.

And I think that's a place where if you might be defined as a weird kid in another context, you're not weird.

So I felt very at home in this particular form of education

that just allowed me to explore my imagination and live into all of the different

fantasies that I think childhood is so much about. So I never felt like a weird kid.

So to paraphrase Timothy Leary, you found the others early.

Yes, I did. Nice one. Nice one.

Yeah. So, the video will be in the show notes of your presentation, but what I would like to ask is when did you first encounter Tolkien?

Let's see I was nine years old and my fourth grade teacher

read us the Hobbit every day at lunch and when I was listening to it there was something that felt deeply familiar about this story. The names seemed to strike a very deep chord in me.

Names like Rivendell and Dale. I felt like I'd been there before. And something about

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