Hey everyone, welcome back to Seeking Witchcraft. I'm your host Ashley, and today I have on special guest, Mab Borden, who is here to talk about how to celebrate ancient holidays and the modern world and to discuss her upcoming series of books on this very topic. So Mab, welcome to the show. Could you please introduce yourself and give the listeners a little bit of background?

Hi, I'm excited to be here. I'm Mab. And I know this is

going to be a shock to everyone listening to Ashley's podcast. I'm a gardenerian high priestess.

Oh my goodness. And we've never had one of those on the on the show. No. But I'm also

Alexandrian and I also practice

Hellenic Reconstructionism, which

is celebrating

the gods and traditions of ancient Greece.

And I, my academic background

is in classics, which is the study of ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

So I wrote these three books that are coming out at the end of February.

It's a series of ancient holidays.

And there's coming out in February, there's ancient Egyptian holidays, ancient Greek holidays, and ancient Roman holidays.

So each of them goes into the specific festival year of that particular culture.

Awesome. So what, I guess I should ask to start with, what inspired you to delve into this research of ancient holidays and these three places?

So as a pagan generally and as a reconstructionist, I do feel like this is something that's kind of missing,

is this connection between the modern pagan world and ancient paganisms. So when I was in college,

I took a class on Judaism. And it was like such a great course. I learned so much.

But of course Judaism is this massive, massive topic. And so, you know, we just focused on what the professor

was interested in. And her research was in esotericism. So we learned about Kabbalah and we read

Tales of the Balshem Tav and we also read Sintalmud. And we spent a lot of time talking about like

the Jewish people culturally and how did the people living in Israel

...