18: Marianne Costa on Tarot and the subconscious, family trees, and healing transgenerational trauma

For more on Marianne Costa check out her pages below:
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The Way of Tarot 

Alejandro Jodorwski
Gugenheim Collection Venice
Le Tarot Pas a Pas
Stan Grof
Freud
Louis IV
Santiago de Compostella
Eliphas Levi
Italo Calvino
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
The Feldenkrais Method
Pythagoras
Quattrocento

Iboga

Eugene Gendlin
Gutenberg Bible
Tarot of Marseilles
Rider Waite Tarot
Eckhart Tolle
Bhagavad Gita
Deepak Chopra
Erikson
Jung
Gabor Mate
Auroville
Pachamama
Tamera
Psychomagic
The Holy Mountain
El Topo
Metageneaology
Roberto Rossellini
Ram Dass
Arnaud Desjardins
Prajnanpad
Yemanja
Where The Birds Sing Best
Aubrey Marcus
Descartes
Chögyam Trungpa
Alice Miller
Formentera
Becoming Nobody
Second Mountain, David Brooks
Medusa

Giancarlo: Hello, welcome to this episode of the Mangu.TV Podcast. Today, we have Marianne Costa. Marianne was born in 1966. She holds a master of arts in comparative literature and is a renowned Tarot expert. Together with Alejandro Jodorowsky, she authored the best seller, The Way of Tarot. She has published several books translated in various languages, collaborated with institutional museums as a symbology expert, more recently with the Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Her last opus is an essay on tarot history. Symbolist and iconography “Le Tarot Pas a Pas” tarot step by step, already available in French, Spanish, and Italian. Her polyphyletic career includes being a professional actress and singer, writing and translating poetry, novels and essay, and teaching groups worldwide in tarot, transgenerational psychology, and what she calls healing fictions, an original technique that combine and surpasses therapy, self-development, and artistic expression. Her base is in Paris and she has been a passionate tango dancer and singer for the last decade. Welcome, Marianne.

Marianne: Guilty as charged for tango.

Giancarlo: [laughs] Thank you very much for coming. So, just to give you a little bit of context on why you’re here. Mangu.TV is known mostly for psychedelic medicine, exploration in psychedelic sciences with our documentaries, our blogs, and recently with our podcast. That was the initial beginning of our production around psychedelic science and that triggered an interest in non-ordinary states, the healing power of non-ordinary states and what psychology called transpersonal psychology, so, what comes outside your biography. Stan Grof, who was the godfather of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy said that, “Freud was fishing, sitting on a whale.” I was always intrigued by this quote and I’m just now starting to understand what it means. So, there is a lot to unpack here. 

As usual, I’d love to suggest a maybe 45, 60-minute conversation. If we could, I would start with tarot, of course, because you are one of the world’s experts. Then I will talk about transpersonal psychology as well as what you do specifically, which is transgenerational psychology. I will talk about your methodology that we mentioned in the biography called healing fictions. And finally, I would like to see if we can integrate all these into what we like to call modern mysticism or modern seeking and eventually, also the importance of art and creativity in spirituality. So, tell us a little bit about what tarot is for people that don’t know. 

Marianne: Tarot initially, it’s a card game and it’s actually a fighting game like any deck of cards is. The idea is you have four realms represented by the four colors. In each realm, there’s a very specific hierarchy, where usually the king is the potency. Tarot was invented around the middle of the 15th century, probably in Italy. There’s a suit of cards in the tarot called the trumps or triumphs, which are 22 cards that are meant to defeat any of the four realms. The origin of tarot is for me is anchored in the obsession of the Middle Age and Renaissance for individual salvation. We could sum up the idea of salvation, whether it’s in a faraway paradise or whether it’s being established in what the Buddhists call the nature of the mind as losing the fear of death, which is for me very relevant to what you said about the psychedelics because the end result of such a state, where there is absolute connection, and freedom, and oneness with everything is that fear of death disappears unless you’re tripping in the bad way. 

Tarot was played, it was played at the Court of Louis IV, it was played throughout the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th century. The notion of trump was revolutionary in the game because it creates combinations of alliances and being able to play with three players, or four players, or five players is the ancestor of bridge and whist and all those games. At some point, it grew out of fashion in the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution happened and basically religion became politics. For me, the way I look at it at the way the masons, and the esoterists and also the card readers, the basic future fortune tellers rediscovered tarot as some language of the soul in the 19th century. It’s not just an abuse. The 19th century was reading anything like rats’ dung, or ashes, or candles.

Giancarlo: Coffee, yeah.

Marianne: Exactly. But the tarot was a way to reconnect because the trumps in the tarot, they’re basically the description of an inner and outer pilgrimage. It could be the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela, it can be an inner journey, it has connections with the alchemy, you have very scary figures like death or the devil, and very dreamy figures like the star or the Sun. Literally, its visual journey like the cathedrals were basically, comic books of the spiritual bath. Of course, it’s connected with the fixation of attention because playing cards needs you to focus your attention. Except that one in the 19th century, they start looking at those cards again and the masons say, “Oh, it’s the Egyptian symbolism.” Maria N., who was a very famous fortuneteller says, “No, no, it’s a device for reading the future.” Basically, people started to look at symbols that comes from the Renaissance and be touched by the impact of the poetic and spiritual impact of those symbols, and translating them into what was the new age of the time, which was talking to the dead, or trying to fathom the future, or the worship for high magic. Eliphas Levi, who was the great theoretician of high magic considered the tarot to be the key of the high magic. 

We need to go into the early 20th century to see the surrealist movement, which for me is a very important artistic ground for what we’re talking about. Look at the tarot as a naive cultural device and say, “No, it’s a map of the unconscious.” It’s a dream map. From then on, it stops being just a device for reading the future or anything, and it becomes a secret ally for psychology, for coaching, for storytelling until the writer, Italo Calvino realizes that fortunetelling and card reading is a way of storytelling and writes Il castello dei destini incrociati, The Castle of–

Giancarlo: Cross destiny. 

Marianne: –The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which he based upon a random tarot spread. That’s the way I work. I work with the tarot as a book that never tells the same story twice. As a myth that will be tailored to anyone’s question by fragments because you extract three cards from a pack of 78. As means for both fixating the attention, so that our brain works differently from the habitual everyday use, which is usually very left brain dominated, very like end goal oriented, very opinionated –  [crosstalk]  

Giancarlo: Rational, organized.

Marianne: And bound by the negative bias of survival, which is very important in neurology. Suddenly, tarot allows us to bond to the two sides of the brain because contemplating images activates the right brain. Now, we enter into the way I teach a basic attitude of grounding into the bodily sensations of voluntary, I would say, almost voluntary holiness of sainthood, voluntary empathy towards the other person. In the end, the linking of two nervous systems that lead to what we call telepathy, which is a natural human state. When you start activating the brain capacity outside the box, literally, the head. We are electricity. Our thinking is electricity. If we connect our hearts literally, physically, even at the distance of the podcast, there is a place where our bodies touch in a way, and our thinking touches, and by focusing on the images, the cards, the meaning, and effort to translate it into words, we reach a space of complete oneness, which is akin to dancing tango with someone, to some states that you can reach in contact dancing.

I’ve practiced the Feldenkrais Method. When someone is really very deeply touching your body in a way that evokes the learning capacity of the nervous system, you loop two nervous systems together and you get into a state of enhanced trance or in a high state of performance on the person who is on stage and the public are one. Tarot adds a vocabulary to that. There’s a whole learning of the grammar and the symbols, that is absolutely wonderful and that’s the work I do with museums, that’s the work I do with people who are interested in the verbal aspect of it. But the practice of it is actually very akin to a deep state of hypnosis.

Giancarlo: Fascinating. But let me ask that skeptic question. You mentioned the morphogenetic field in which we intertwine when we’re next to each other. We can talk about field of your heart, of your energy, which goes behind your body few meters, but can in your better words, explain a little bit, when someone takes these three cards –

Marianne: Yes.

Giancarlo: – what is the energetic situation happening there?

Marianne: I have no idea. I’ve spent the last 25 years of my life wandering and I think this is what keeps my marriage with the tarot alive, because otherwise I would get really bored. I spend maybe a fourth to a third of my active time working with a stupid pack of cards. 

Giancarlo: With clients? 

Marianne: With clients, with teaching, like I did In the Guggenheim Museum, I came and interacted. They had surrealism and they still have a surrealism and magic exhibit. I came and I did a series of performances and talked with the curator. I keep coming in and bringing back the language of the tarot, which is a decimal numerology inherited from Pythagoras, which is symbolism from basically the Italian painting period of the Quattrocento of the 15th century. At large, Christian symbolism and Judeo-Christian symbolism, which is just like playing the game that by choosing cards by chance you reach what this really is named as an objective chance, objective hazard, I don’t know how you can translate it, which is a way. 

I have only a poetic way of defining it. Even though I work with neurologists and stuff, there is an intelligence of life, there is an organic and cosmic intelligence of life, both in matter and in what is behind and beyond matter that we can access through playing. This is what [unintelligible [00:12:49] told kept doing. He kept telling his surrealist friends “So, let’s play.” Play, which is what musicians do, which is what actors do, which is what the tarot is meant for.

Giancarlo: And children, yeah?

Marianne: And children, which is what conditions in childhood our process of learning an error, which is the essence of creativity. By deciding, by making the pact that we will play with the pack of cards, the only thing I can tell you, with literally 25 years of experience at my back, is that I have a very specific keyword vocabulary for the cards. Any of my students can sit next to me, blindfolded, with something in their ears, so that they don’t hear. I do a reading and they will give basically 45% to 65% the same interpretation in the same words. What happens? People take the cards, and they talk about their current, or past situation that influences their question. Of course, then the art is to have a deep enough resonance with others, a deep enough set of tools, a deep enough set of skillful means, a deep enough understanding of human psychology, so that you can help orient the person further. That is the whole hidden part of the iceberg. But the vocabulary of the tarot is always accurate. I do not know why. It just happens.

Giancarlo: Yeah, it might be the vocabulary of the subconscious. I remember I had this two, three years practice with Iboga, which is a root from Gabon. The facilitator, the guide, the shaman was saying that the subconscious doesn’t speak English. The subconscious speaks in images, sound, and feeling. When you take the substance and the subconscious material comes out, it doesn’t come out telling you things in English. It comes in images, and you need to decipher that, and you need an expert to help you understand what does the red triangle mean, or that door, to guide you through that door. Like this imagery that you said was based on the Italian paintings of the year 1400 and 1500.

Marianne: Yeah.

Giancarlo: The fact that it is maybe archetypal material that triggers deep stuff that is in our subconscious and even in our DNA.

Marianne: Yeah, you make so much sense to me because one of the practices that I work with is something that is akin to Eugene Gendlin’s focusing or somatic access to the imagery of the body. I’m very interested in how the body expresses what we need, what it needs in terms of images, single words that are sometimes very paradoxical or associations of words that are paradoxical, and feelings that someone you cannot explain. The feeling of the Ganges River, for instance. That’s where poetry comes from. For me, a very important question is that in 1475 or 1550, most people didn’t know how to read. Language had to be much wider than what it has become, which is why the imagery was so important. 

With the prints, when Gutenberg printed the Bible with it came a huge industry of wood prints of images and they developed together. That’s where tarot comes from. I think the reason why it resonates so deeply with our time is that our time has a Barocco component in the fact that we’re flooded with images once again. Everybody has Instagram and so many screens. We are living in the image-dominated culture again, but without one clear direction for meaning, philosophy –

Giancarlo: Purpose.

Marianne: – guidance, purpose. I think that’s the reason why, because there’s such a vogue of tarot in the last, and especially, the Marseilles Tarot, because I’m talking about the origin of tarot. An English-speaking listener will most probably know the Rider-Waite tarot, which is a very recent artifact. It’s more like a novel. It was created by the Secret Society of the Golden Dawn at the beginning of the 20th century. It’s very interesting, very beautiful, but much less deep and rich than the tarot of Marseilles. It’s like having the Bhagavad Gita or I don’t know–

Giancarlo: Deepak Chopra.

Marianne: A holy book and then Ekhart Tolle. It’s all very nice. But you want to go back to the original like holy text, which is for me what the tarot is.

Giancarlo: Yeah, fascinating. This has been so interesting. So, can you talk a little bit about what transpersonal psychology and the most specific transgenerational psychology mean for you?

Marianne: Yeah. Transgenerational psychology basically is the idea that part of our subconscious is shaped not only by early childhood experiences, whether they are seen from the Freudian point of view or more like Ericksonian point of view, whether the subconscious is just a reservoir of repressed horrible things, which is – I’ve done Freudian psychoanalysis, so I can joke about it. This horrible little pervert who’s holding the key to inner hell, which is a summary of Freudian psychology.

Giancarlo: And instead, Erickson had a different approach. 

Marianne: Yeah, Erickson is a reservoir of resources. 

Giancarlo: Resource, yeah.

Marianne: We have basically those two main visions of the subconscious and Jung is somewhere in the middle with the collective subconscious. But basically, whether it’s for Erickson and allies or Freudian domain, it’s always about what I have experienced, maybe from the womb, if we go very far into childhood, into my early ages. The idea of transgenerational psychology is that an accident or trauma that happened to my grandmother or whatever, might somehow impact my own life. Now, we begin to have proof of that in DNA. That some very heavy trauma that can be transferred into DNA and into the next generations. That’s the science behind it. 

In my experience, what I call transgenerational psychology goes all the way into the great grandparents beyond that we enter society. The family tree would be me and the seven couples, basically, that bring me to life. My parents, both couples of my grandparents, and the four couples of my great grandparents. Whatever happened there, I need to know because this is where I come from. It goes hand in hand with all the cultures that care about genealogy.

Then there is a very French approach which is not mine, which is completely psychotherapeutical, only in terms of trauma, blah, blah, blah. There is a transpersonal vision of it, which is that the family tree is both what dooms us and what is really like the trap in our lives. You know, you will be a doctor like your grandfather or if my mother had a bad marriage, then there will be hatred towards men. I’m simplifying it to the extreme. In my case, three of my great grandmothers were widowed very young. I realized when I was 30 years old that I had always been scared that the man I was with was going to die. All my strategies was like, once I was in love with a terrorist from Corsica, once I was in love with a man who was going to fight in Bosnia, and then I fell in love with Jodorowsky, who was 37 years older than me.

Giancarlo: It’s so fascinating. 

Marianne: It’s a very simple way of talking about it, but it really has an operative aspect. But it’s also the treasure. There is the idea that by accessing one’s uniqueness, by accomplishing one’s purpose, which is always a betrayal of what the rational mind of the family tree wants. Because if we’ve truly become ourselves, we will always break the pattern and we will somehow heal the generations before us. This is very connected with all the Caribbean ideas of the ancestors, or the Chinese idea of honoring the ancestors so that even our dead ancestors can respond to our individual work. It would take hours to talk about it in detail, but it has one great quality. 

A lot of the people, who want to change the world and a lot of spiritual seekers, they’re aware of the global general subconscious and they’re somehow aware of their own history, most of the time. But why do communities so often fail? Because communities are like tens or hundreds of family trees made to live together with people who don’t understand that there is something in their subconscious that will create aggression, fear, survival strategies that are completely not working and they try to live together with 10 or 30 other people. We see that failing all the time because for me the family subconscious is bridging the individual to the collective. That’s the reason why it’s so important to have some awareness of it. 

I’m not saying that everyone has to undergo very deep psychotherapy. But to know what the knots are, there are some very basic idiosyncrasies in every family tree that can also help us overcome cultural differences. Very often, you see a couple get together, because they come from completely different cultures. While the hormonal and neurological craze is working, it’s wonderful. And then after three, four, 10 years, they divorce because the cultural differences literally become a war.

Giancarlo: A burden. Yeah. 

Marianne: Yeah. You relate to what I’m saying. I’m not delirious? 

Giancarlo: Absolutely, absolutely. No, it’s fascinating. I remember Gabor Mate was quoting this study that, “100% of the children whose mother was pregnant during the Holocaust had eating disorders.”

Marianne: There you go. 

Giancarlo: But what you are saying is fascinating because of course, we’re looking at this time for a way to transcend this tribalism, which is one of the main causes of the current state of affairs on this planet. I visited several communities, Auroville in India, and Pachamama, and Tamera in Portugal. In Tamera, they spend an awful amount of what they call it mirroring each other. They meet three times a week for hours, the whole community and they do this work where they tell each other what they think about this specific behavior out of love and trust, because they’ve been together for 50 years and they raised their children together. First, you build trust, and joy, and then you mirror each other. Because you were saying most of the community fails because people are not aware of the subconscious material that would create the psychological nodes that then would create tension in the interpersonal relationship. So, yeah, all this is fascinating. But so, you are integrating this notion of transgenerational psychology into a system that you created that is called Healing Fictions.

Marianne: Yeah. When I met Jodorowsky, he had started working on the family tree.

Giancarlo: Sorry, Marianne to interrupt –

Marianne: Yeah.

Giancarlo: -because Jodorowsky is the founder of Psychomagic and most of the people know him or maybe not everybody, so maybe tell us a little bit about him. 

Marianne: I started really studying tarot in depth when I met Jodorowsky, who was Chilean-French but based in Paris, who was born in 1929, if I’m not mistaken and who has been a very well-known filmmaker, figure of the 70s. He was always fascinated by both traditional mysticism and more like Northern American psychology. He wasn’t into Freud at all and he made very well-known movies like The Holy Mountain and El Topo. He’s always had quite a prolific career between being a writer, a poet, a filmmaker. He’s also a comic book writer, but he got very interested in this particular kind of psychology that can be derived from reading the tarot. 

And also, he had started working on transgenerational psychology together with other, not together but at the same time as other psychologists in France.

Marianne: One was a psychoanalyst, who ended up working with shamanism like drumming shamanism, and who started working about the phantoms in the family tree, and what is the absence of the father doing going from a strictly Freudian approach to really a transgenerational approach. In my own psychoanalysis, before I met Jodorowsky, I’ve realized that I was haunted by the fact that my favorite grandmother had lost her first husband in a car accident that she witnessed. I had a phobia of driving. My name is Marianne, but Marianne is like Marijhan and he was John. I was born three days apart from his birthdate. 

I started trying to make sense of all of that. When I met Jodorowsky, who was my first really, my root tarot teacher, even though I was already reading the cards a bit whimsically at the time, he had a whole system prepared. I went on with my psychoanalysis and brought all this material to my shrink, who was a really basic Freudian psychiatrist, very French. We started developing together the theory for the family tree that ended up in a book called Metagenealogy that is available also in English with Inner Traditions, where we exposed a proposal for looking at the family tree and understanding the knots that are basically like the automatisms that drive us. For instance, the incestuous knot like absence of mother or father creates a fixation of wanting to be one with mother and father, excess of motherly attention or fatherly attention in whichever of our centers, it can also be sexual abuse, creates the same kind of knot. I don’t want to go into a full-on pedagogical proposal, but it becomes so obvious when you look at it in reality.

For instance, narcissistic parents, who will name their children after them. Roberto Rossellini had the first son, he called him, Robertino. There you go, dead. The kid is dead. He can’t live. He has to be the photocopy of his father and we don’t know that we’re doing that. And then you see the father and the son, and they wear the same clothes. It looks cute. But we have to ask a question, how does a human being develop if they are not allowed in an early age to have at least their own name, and at least wear their own colors? What I love about this work is that it goes back to very simple ideas of what is the best thing I want for a child, whether I’m a father or a mother or not, whether it’s my child, or my inner child, or my parents as a child, or my grandparent as a child, or my neighbor as a child, or my enemy as a child? And so, it makes us rethink what growth is, blah, blah. I could go on forever, but you have to stop me at some point. [laughs] 

Giancarlo: Yeah. But how does– healing features?

Marianne: Oh, yeah. When Jodorowsky had developed that people wanted a lot of that. We started teaching a lot in Spain and then he was bored of it because you encounter so much suffering. The family tree is at least 15 people, plus the brothers and sisters. It is the cruelty, and suffering, and failure, and dead hopes of all these people, and their failed survival strategies. He handed it to me like, “Oh, you go do that.” [chuckles] And so, I worked very extensively on that until I realized, “That’s not what I want to do. I’m an artist. I’m not Mother Teresa. This is too much.” At some point, I was almost, after 10 years of this, of this making maybe a quarter of my work. I was physically sick. I started thinking, “How can we turn this into something that’s attractive and actually doable for people?” And I realized that one of the things we do with the family tree is set an individual goal and harness the power of the whole family tree into our own goal like I want to sing or I want to create a producing company. How does my whole family tree want to do that? 

In order to do that, we have to go back to classic shamanism, which is integrate our lives, create alternate endings for stories, use the power of active imagination, so that some of the burden is lifted not through rational work, not through just digging into the problem, but shortcuts or skillful means that is very much akin to… When we talk about psychedelics, and psychology, and poetry, I immediately think of Richard Alpert, Ram Dass because one thing he says is that when he met his teacher, he met a practice and a devotion to an enlightened human being that surpassed the psychedelics aspect. One other thing he said, he said, “If you’re angry, and you start processing the anger, and that’s true for us or for the whole family tree, you make it into a thing.” What is it that allows the anger to stop existing? In his words, it was the practice of the mantra, the chanting, the devotion to the guru, which is basically the opening of the heart towards a space that is wider. So, art and beauty are also wider. 

I don’t demand that people who work with me have a specific spiritual path that they relate to because people are allowed to just worship beauty or the forces of nature. It doesn’t have to be theistic or philosophical like in Buddhism. But I always ask, “What is the wider, what is the beyond, what is the horizon, and how can we use the power of that?” Like I said, the feeling of the Ganges, for instance. I am on an Advaita path. My teacher is Arnoud Desjardins, who had an Advaita teacher in India, Swami Prajnanpad, whom I consider my root guru. When I connected to the feeling of the Ganges, I do connect to my spiritual path. But you can connect with us Yemanja, the Goddess of the of the sea and the waters in the Orishas. You can connect it to it as the strength of nature, you can connect it to it as Mary or Mary Magdalene. So, then we create a specific form that will be our “religion.” In my case, I always say my religion is tango. [laughs] You can make anything into your religion. But how do you connect to something that you know is free of fear, absolute love and kindness, absolute intelligence, absolute benevolence, and that it will support you. That is the principle of healing fictions.

To generate alternate narratives, either in a personal embodied way, which would be more like focusing. We sit, we ask a question, we go into the body, and I help the person guide themselves into their bodies to not go into the places that will be held, but to go into the places that will create solutions, that will be the individual format. We can create it in an interactive way. I have a series of procedures, where people interact either with objects, or with acting, or speaking and it can also become a collective act, in which case it would be more– For me, for instance, in Mexico, in a little village in Mexico during the pandemic and an abuela of 92 years old starting asking the women to knit squares and stars so that they would cover the streets of the city to make shade. Now, the whole village is covered in colors. For me, that is a healing fiction. We are stuck at home and we’re going to knit.

Giancarlo: I see.

Marianne: When we can go into the open air again, what we have knitted in the shade will provide the shade that we need. 

Giancarlo: Yes.

Marianne: For me, it’s not just a technique that I do. It’s something that I study in reality. Some of the documentary films can become healing fictions because they tell the true story that has been hidden at some points. It’s the idea that in life you can create alternate endings and even alternate beginnings and that is based on the neurology that whatever you remember from the strongly impacting fiction has the same status as what you remember from something you lived. In your brain, it’s the same memory. How do we make the fiction real? It has to be embodied, it has to be juicy, it has to be connected with your body of emotions, it has to have a lasting power flavor. That’s what active imagination does.

Giancarlo: Yeah, that’s fascinating. But just to bring it a little bit more into practical application of all this knowledge of yours, I remember when we did this introductory course on tarot. There was a very simple exercise. You asked three questions and then everybody wrote down the answers and then you connected the three answers to our ancestry, it was so obvious.

Marianne: Yeah. One of the tools I’ve developed, the question of what is your vision or your goal in life? That can be seen from three different points of view. One is your big, big compass. You know, this idealistic, how could I die in peace, what I have achieved? So, that would be the great goal.

Giancarlo: Yeah. What would I have wanted to achieve before my deathbed? 

Marianne: Yes.

Giancarlo: Yes.

Marianne: Then you have the desire of the heart, the thing, the unavowed dream. If it’s that you want to have sex with your neighbor, it’s okay. 

Giancarlo: It’s okay. 

Marianne: No one’s going to read your paper. But the thing that really bugs you, the thing that you really want it and it can be so selfish-

Giancarlo: Today.

Marianne: – it can be so shameful. Well, from today into six months into three years max.

Giancarlo: Okay. The next future yeah.

Marianne: Like, “Oh, my God, I really want this and I got -” You forget whether it’s possible or impossible or anything. You just let it out. Then there is a question that is very important. What is your recurring obstacle and is it an inner or an outer obstacle? For me, for a long time my obstacle has been patriarchy, for instance, until I’ve learned to love it and I realized this pig and toxic masculine is actually inside of me.

Giancarlo: Because your father was very authoritative?

Marianne: Because patriarchy sucks, man.

Giancarlo: Yeah.

Marianne: You’re an Italian –

Giancarlo: You know, trust me. I know. 

Marianne: [crosstalk] you have no idea. 

Giancarlo: [laughs] 

Marianne: Really sucks. 

Giancarlo: Yeah.

Marianne: Being like a superiorly intelligent person, which I know I am. I have very high IQ, etc., and having to prove that you might be right to a series of really stupid men who are not even reaching your level at all just because they have the power to publish a book in a publishing company that has 15% of female writers and then they tell you, “Oh, you will have an article in the The Figaro, but the person who deals with female fiction is not available.” What the fuck? I’m not doing chick lit. That’s the story of my life.

Giancarlo: Yeah.

Marianne: I got angry suddenly. I think it’s a healing fiction. I’m lashing it out on you. Yay!

Giancarlo: I promise another full podcast on the problem of patriarchy.

Marianne: [laughs] You don’t have to. I’m good now. 

Giancarlo: No, but I want to. I come from a lineage of sexual predators. Now, I know my father would never listen to this, so, I think I’m fine. 

Marianne: That’s wonderful. Thank you. 

Giancarlo: Just to leave our listener with – [crosstalk]

Marianne: Very important, the obstacle. 

Giancarlo: Imagine you tell our listener to do this exercise. 

Marianne: Okay. Please, dear listener, forget that I’m such a witch and focus. 

Giancarlo: [laughs] 

Marianne: What would you love to have achieved on your deathbed? The thing that really makes sense of your whole life and if you call it unconditional love, it’s fine. If you call it to be the richest person on the planet, it’s fine also, Anything. Then make sure that nobody can see or hear you and ask the depth of your heart and maybe the depth of your sexual center, or creative or pleasure center, “What is it that you really want?” If you had a magic wand, what would you get? Choose one please. Not a hundred things. The most important. Then go back to your vulnerability and think, “What is bugging me, what is always in the way? Is it something that I carry inside of me or something that I carry that is carried outside of me” and find a name and a face for it or definition for it. Then write these three things down, try to turn these three things into one coherent sentence of what you would really want to do or what you really would want your life to be. And now, you can apply this intention of yours to “What is it that the people in my family tree, my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, either could not do, or would not do, or would not allow and actually really deeply needed?” You will see that somehow it clicks.

Giancarlo: It does.

Marianne: And then what you can do is another step of the exercise that you did not do is, okay, now let’s say that this is all granted that I am allowed to have sex with my neighbor, even though I have a monogamous commitment, that I have reached unconditional love, and I’m the richest person on the planet, and that patriarchy is down forever. What does my own personal world turn into? What becomes possible? Out of that, how do I change my immediate surrounding and keep dreaming? How does the change in my immediate surroundings change society at large and what is the change that appears in the world? Thanks to my own realization. And from that changed world that maybe doesn’t have war anymore, that maybe doesn’t have plastic in the oceans anymore or anything. It has to be concrete. Start healing your family tree. What can I take from this new world and offer my great grandparents that they didn’t have? Maybe medicines that they didn’t have, maybe means that they didn’t have, maybe ideas that they didn’t have. And how can I change my grandparents and how can I change my parents? 

You can make it even into a collage or you can make it into a story. This is what Jodorowsky did. He wrote a book, I don’t think that was translated to English, but which is called Donde Mejor Canta Un Pajaro/Where a Bird Sings Bestin the family tree and it’s been translated to Italian and to French. He recreated the story of his family tree so that he had something solid to sit on that will allow him to be the person he wants to be. That’s one example of working with healing fictions in the family tree. But another example is that, for instance, your child has a nightmare or maybe a recurrent nightmare, and you sit with them, and you have them tell the story of the nightmare in a safe environment, and you say, “Okay, now, we will inform the part of you who dreams and sleeps” that the story can end otherwise. Let’s find an alternate ending to this nightmare. I started like that with my niece. We start inventing so many ways that the nightmare can end and then we start giving the child resources inside the dream. Like the work you do with lucid dreaming. I’ve practiced it a lot. So, maybe you know it. In my case, when I have a lucid nightmare, where I can’t turn the light on, for instance, and I can’t get up from bed, now, I have prayers that I use to scare the demons away and I wake up immediately.

Giancarlo: This is fascinating. Maybe let’s just take one second to explain what is lucid dreaming.

Marianne: Lucid dreaming, it’s a technique that is used in Tibetan yoga of dreaming, but it’s been explored a lot in the 60s and 70s. Sometimes, we are in a dream and something in us tells us that this is a dream. From the spiritual point of view, it is a very important technique to realize that this awakened life is a dream and the same witnessed consciousness can be awakened, so that we don’t go astray and identify with our problems, desires, et cetera, et cetera. In the 60s and 70s, lucid dreaming was more used inside this whole new culture of psychedelics, and shamanism, for instance, trying to fly, trying to direct the dream. It happens or it doesn’t, but one way is to intentionally lucid dream, bringing into your nighttime intention, having specific objects, it can be anything, factor of remembering like a gemstone or glass of water on your night table to ask your subconscious to be able to do this. 

Then so, you’re dreaming, whatever, I’m in my bedroom or whatever and you wake up in the dream and you’re like, “Oh, my God, I’m dreaming.” Initially, you fall off the bike, generally, but then you can educate yourself to have a set intention like, “Okay, I will open the window, and try to fly, and then you reach the limits.” Jodorowsky told me, “What’s interesting is to maybe suggest yourself to go through a wall?” Do things you can’t do in real life. But then you realize that sometimes, you’re stuck in a nightmare, which is basically the same thing as bad tripping with substances. It’s very good because you can create also – For me, when I have a stuck nightmare, I’m oftentimes or I can’t get up of bed, or I wake up and I realize I’m dreaming, I wake up again and then realize I’m dreaming again, and it feels sticky and stuck. 

In many traditions, it means that you’re stuck in a dimension, where there are phantoms. I’m not going to go into details into that, but that’s part of the story. You can also have a set of tools for that and you shouldn’t be joking with that because there are powerful forces in those stuck places. Having an ally is important, but your ally can be even your dog or cat if you love them a lot. Having something solid that you connect with because the price to pay for lucid dreaming is also the lucid nightmare. There is a price to pay for everything. We have to be responsible.

Giancarlo: Yes, fascinating. Thank you very much. With the last 10 minutes or so, I would like to explore a new concept which I heard for the first time from a community based in Austin, America. Aubrey Marcus and this other couple wrote a book called Becoming. Basically, what has happened in the last few years is that people that were not interested in spirituality, people like social entrepreneurs, and people from the fitness world, and people from the meditation world, they would start doing psychedelisc, they will have mystical experience, they would experience transcendence, and they would then want to continue the search. But without the traditional, mystical, or religious base of what we consider the traditional mystics, which were mostly separated from society in a cave or in a mountain practicing renunciation and asceticism. And so, I feel there’s a new cultural movement or maybe I’m projecting because I want it to be creative, that is integrating this desire for transcendence that understands the limit of the mind. That with enlightenment and Descartes. I understand the cogito, ergo sum. I understand that we needed to rationalize to get out of the superstition and misery of the middle age, but I felt that this glorification of reason went a little bit too far now.

Marianne: Absolutely.

Giancarlo: I feel that the neoliberal capitalism system is rewarding left brain problem solving, alert, not being in touch with your emotions. I read somewhere in the first 100 CEO of the 500 companies, there are mostly people not in touch with their feelings. The traditionalists say, of mind, body, spirit, which has been around for a long time and some people raise the eyebrow, but I still think is the right formula to live a more integrated and connected life without the nonsense of excessive individualism, polarization, and tribalism. Anyway, this long premise to say, do you agree that there is a future for modern mysticism and what does it look like?

Marianne: The best and most authentic very discreet spiritual teachers of the end of the 20th century, all prophesized that there will be a spiritual awakening. Because it’s so – [crosstalk]  

Giancarlo: In this moment in time- [crosstalk] 

Marianne: Yeah, because in physics, there is a very simple law, which is the law of action and reaction. The pendulum has gone very far in one direction that has brought us cars, and planes, and surgery, amazing things.

Giancarlo: The Metaverse.

Marianne: Yeah. It’s the law of physics, the law of life. That is a first. But what those spiritual teachers also said, I’m thinking of a few names, is that there would be a lot of fakeness in that. I would like to remind us of something very important. Spirituality is not about the spiritual experience. The spiritual experience is a bonus. Most of the great saints, they come back from the siddhis, from the powers, from the spiritual experience into the most basic daily life, humble, loving, patient kind of life.

Giancarlo: Helping others. 

Marianne: But the mystical experiences is there, you’re right, to shift the focus. Becoming attached to the mystical experience can create what Chögyam Trungpa called The Spiritual Materialism and the crazy idea that it can be bought that it is a thing and we see that happening a lot.

Giancarlo: With retreats and stuff like that.

Marianne: Yeah, with even the millionaires now, they’re trying to buy their immortality. Why are people like whoever, Elon Musk or whoever is trying to buy their immortality or to buy their trip to other planets when this one is done? Because it is about deathlessness. Spirituality is about losing the fear of death. So, it is about learning to die. Learning to die is about becoming nobody, becoming unimportant, opening ourselves to others. of course, it reeks of Christian masochism. We hate those words, we don’t want them. For me, we’re in a very important moment where we have those two dangerous lurking. One is pop spirituality, the beauticians of the soul. The more expensive the retreat is, the bigger are the boobs of the instructor… The richer her husband is, the best. And then you can eat an unedible vegan food, and be taught by someone who is incredibly stupid, and you’re so happy about it. [laughs] 

Giancarlo: And the right people go there.

Marianne: Yeah.

Giancarlo: What you consider the right people.

Marianne: Exactly. The other danger is, to be stuck in, yes, but it has to be done this way and not another way, which we already know brought to massacres, religious fundamentalism, etc. I have a vocabulary in that sense, which can also be tainted, but I think in terms not of the feminine and the masculine, but please not the divine feminine. Let’s not use this word, let’s just keep it out of – even though it really is something, but it’s been overused. It’s turned into something that’s for mopping the floor with. Let’s just talk about concave and convex, right brain and left brain, humility and capacity of action, faith and surrender. So, how can we become more wholly human? That’s the reason why I connect with the Renaissance because the Renaissance had this idea of humanism of the whole human being that was in whole connection with the planet. 

You’re here in Ibiza, everything is wonderful, you swim, and you encounter a piece of plastic at best, because it can be something else in the sea. How do you feel at that moment? The first reaction is, I don’t care. The second reaction is, I’m so angry at the person who threw this plastic in the sea. But this person is me. At some point, I have collaborated on that. The third reaction is the “do gooder”, goody two shoes, I bring the plastic back to the beach, and I put it in the trash can, which is great. For me, the spirituality is to acknowledge the heartbreak of meeting this piece of plastic in the sea. To be what Alice Miller calls the enlightened witness, which doesn’t exonerate you from bringing it back into the trash, but to bear the heartbreak. That’s what spiritual teachers do. They bear the heartbreak of the world. 

Whatever our attitude is, whether we’re in the more traditional, more religious sense, or whether we’re in the more exploring sense, putting the heartbreak, the compassion, the self-observation, the sense of humor for God’s sake, [chuckles] the sense of having our feet on the floor, for me it’s what is going to integrate all these movements that is happening right now, which I think is the only thing that can save the planet. I’m really very certain of that. If you have a minute, I would like to tell you a dream I had.

Giancarlo: Absolutely.

Marianne: I was invited by friends to Formentera that was my only holiday, basically in the last year. And I remember, we used to go to Formentera with Jodorowsky when we were in a relationship. It’s a place that supports intense dreaming. I don’t use substances. I mostly don’t use substances. Sometimes I drink a glass of wine. [laughs] I keep being very impacted by the energy of places. I had this strong dream that said to me. Unless the masculine acknowledges the importance of the concave, this world is going to be destroyed and that cannot be done in the city. As ridiculous as you might consider all these initiatives that are being done in the hippy ways and stuff, because I’m very critical of all that. This is the right way to do it, even if it’s imperfect. I was like, “Okay.” 

Then I was walking to the beach, and there was this man sitting on the beach, and there were very low waves, but he was sitting through the waves and they would splash in his face, and he returned to me and said, “Wow, that’s wild, isn’t it?” I said, “Well, it could get really worse,” and he didn’t believe me. Then, it was night and there was a sky with dark blue clouds. In each cloud, there was a couple and they were interacting in all the ways that couples can interact like resolving things. I saw the beach at night, and there were men seated, and there was a tsunami coming. I woke up in a state of high alertness and I said, “This is a dream for me. This man on the beach, he’s inside of me. The man who’s waiting for the catastrophe to come seated on the beach, it’s me.” I have to remove myself from my city, not necessarily physically, I have to be based in Paris for many reasons, family and stuff. But I have to uproot something about me in the city from myself.

Giancarlo: When was this episode in Formentera?

Marianne: That was the day before you arrived. [laughs] 

Giancarlo: Okay. Recently.

Marianne: Very recently. 

Giancarlo: Yeah.

Marianne: It’s so easy to say, “Oh, yes, the masculine blah, blah, blah.” No, I took it as an individual warning of, even if it’s not perfect, try to be where the vibration of even trying is, where people actually try to grow organic food, even if it’s overpriced. Okay, but stop being critical about these things. Criticism is the city. For me, that’s the way it embodies. So, it can look very blah what I just said to you, but for me, that’s completely connected with what you are saying.

Giancarlo: Yeas, absolutely. 

Marianne: Yeah.

Giancarlo: It is an awareness, right?

Marianne: Yeah.

Giancarlo: I just want to repeat one thing you mentioned about becoming nobody, because Jimmy Catto, a filmmaker just did a documentary on Ram Dass.

Marianne: Yeah, it’s a phrase by Ram Dass. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. People don’t realize to what extent this is the key to go through life, not through the prism of your ego, and you can tell. Some people are stuck 100% in that. Anything they say or they think is through the prism of their ego.

Marianne: Yes, and it is a very evolved request to become nobody. My teacher, Arnoud Desjardins said, “The destiny of the worm is to become a butterfly.” The butterfly is a nobody to the worm or the caterpillar. But a sick caterpillar, a wounded caterpillar cannot become a butterfly. So, it has to become a caterpillar first. First step is becoming somebody. 

Giancarlo: I see.

Marianne: And from it’s that clear, because Ram Dass, he was a complete, dominant male, Harvard, good family, he wasn’t exactly good looking, but he was kind of a catch.

Giancarlo: Charismatic, yeah.

Marianne: He was going to be married. Then he used so many psychedelics and it went really well for him. Anyone else would have been destroyed, so, he probably had a very good bodily structure and when he was ripe, when somebodiness like he calls it was completely ripe, then he encountered  this desire of being completely surrendered to love and to the forces of life. Part of our job is to help people who still need, who are still wounded, still traumatized, and sometimes hide behind the facade of very strong somebodiness, but are actually extremely crippled to touch their somebodiness so that the metamorphosis is possible. 

Giancarlo: I see.

Marianne: It takes a lot of tenderness, compassion, and true mothering. Then the fathering is into, “Okay, now you’re going to the chrysalis.” But the mothering aspect is to learn to know if the caterpillar is ready or not to be handed to the father that will say, “Okay, dude, now retreat three years, three weeks and three days like the Tibetan retreat and now, we’re going to go the hard way.

Giancarlo: And so, what would you advise to the young generation? There’s a new book by David Brooks, who’s a New York writer, it’s called The Second Mountain. It says, “The first mountain is the mountain of money, success and people climb the first mountain, and then some people keep on climbing forever, and they become a little psychopath. And others get bored about the view of the first mountain, so they come down, they linger in the valley looking for a second mountain, which is the mountain of purpose. 

Marianne: Yes.

Giancarlo: And so, when my wife, we were joking that we don’t really have any more patience for first mountain people, we will really like people in the valley, looking for purpose or people that are building the second mountain to find the purpose. And now, you just said that, yes, the purpose of becoming nobody in service of others might need to go through a phase of becoming somebody. You might need to have the first mountain first.

Marianne: Definitely. 

Giancarlo: To the people out of university today, the young adults, 20 to 25 that are looking to find what to do with their life, what advice do you have?

Marianne: I think it’s a generation that has been plagued with excess of screens, excessive virtuality, and even with pornography. We don’t talk about it, but it’s extremely destructive especially to the young people.

Giancarlo: For no man and woman, you think also woman have a pornography problem?

Marianne: No. Look at Instagram, look at what young women are turning into. What do you think the model is? I remember being 15, we felt beautiful. That was not the standardization of what our bodies were supposed to be, what our attitude was supposed to be. This whole virtualization of reality, whether it’s by gaming, or by porn, or by excess of the – 

Giancarlo: Metaverse.

Marianne: Yeah, whatever. What I see in young people is the need to have a proper way of going back into the sensing body, for me because that is where sovereignty comes from. The sensing body has a wisdom of its own. It sounds very simple, but it’s so important. We know in the body if something or someone is good for us, what confuses us is that mind that can fly into the Metaverse. I think that’s the reason why the Metaverse is such a huge economical and financial terrain, because the people who want to make a lot of money, they know they can manipulate us, not me. But anyone in the Metaverse much more than they can manipulate a body that has a sound connection to the world and reality. So, that would be my first response.

Giancarlo: So, don’t focus on the first mountain, the second mountain. Just focus on embodiment practice.

Marianne: First and foremost, and not even practice, start loving each and every one of your organs and parts of body. I have this beautiful –  I was studying Medusa at some point for a fiction I wanted to write that I never wrote. But I’ve realized that there is one giant Medusa that is composed of a lot of different Medusas. One Medusa acts as the stomach, one Medusa acts as the eyes, etc. I love this idea, because I start to see myself as a community, so I could have a relationship with my stomach, a relationship with my little finger, a relationship with my left eye which is different from my right eye. Shamanism is that. Everything is alive, so I can have a relationship with my car, and start to practice love in the most basic ways to love this glass, to love the water that was in it. It’s basic tantra also in a way- It’s practicing loving desire towards what’s already here. For me, that’s the ground. 

Then it’s an individual question. Some people will need to have professional realization, some people will need to focus more on relationships and family, some people will need to heal a trauma that they don’t even know they have. A lot of the trauma of abuse is forgotten and hidden. Some people, we have direct access to some spirituality because we’re all different. There’s Giancarlo yoga, Marianne yoga. It’s not there is one yoga for everything. Reliance on what is essential to us has to be handmade and tailored. But for me, the base is the knowledge of the living body, so important.

Giancarlo: Beautiful. Marianne, thank you very much. We’re past the hour. I promised my listeners not to go too long. How can people find you and what would you advise them to start with a certain book or a certain course, if some people want to explore the Marianne Costa world? How would you go about it?

Marianne: I don’t have a community manager and I’m a very lazy communicator. I do have an Instagram, which is @maryannecostarot in a world like Costa and tarot stuck together. I do have a Facebook that is basically the same. If you google me, you’ll find me quite easily. When I was a student in literature, I went to libraries and I loved losing myself in libraries and being found by a book. So, that’s the way I use those search motors now. I trust that there is a way of interacting with the internet that is extremely playful and where it’s a bit like Alice in Wonderland. So, that’s what I would advise people to do. [laughs] 

Giancarlo: So, tell them five words they should put on a Google search.

Marianne: Marianne Costa tarot, and that’s it, because there’s only one other famous Marianne Costa and she’s a Brazilian makeup artist. So, I think they won’t be confused. I’m pretty present on that. There’s a lot of stuff in Spanish because I have had a lot of attention from the Spanish community.

Giancarlo: But outside of your own galaxy, what are the five words, which you think people would need to lose themselves? 

Marianne: In English, it’s complicated in English.

Giancarlo: Oh, oh, oh, in another language. On the show note, we can make the translation. 

Marianne: Okay. I would advise anything around focusing in the Feldenkrais Method, anything around surrealism, anything around –

Giancarlo: What was the method? Sorry.

Marianne: Feldenkrais Method.

Giancarlo: Feldenkrais.

Marianne: That’s really where I got my education in a feeling sense. 

Giancarlo: Nice. 

Marianne: I had an amazing teacher named Luis Ansab, but here is nothing in English about him. But he was an– All my great teachers are hidden. So, it’s really hard. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, that’s why it’s valuable. 

Marianne: Arnoud Desjardins and Luis Ansab were really my two root teachers, but you almost can’t find anything about them. I would investigate Tarot of Marseilles rather than just tarot, because it brings you to a very interesting universe of images and yeah.

Giancarlo: Amazing, I think I think there is enough to chew here. So, thank you very much. We’d love to have you back to talk about modern feminism, and patriarchy, and why you don’t like the term divine feminine.

Marianne: I love it. I just don’t want to use it right now. 

Giancarlo: I see. I’m very debutant on classic tantra and David Deida, and this idea of integration of masculine and feminine as an important aspect of living a balanced life. I’m very interested in that and you seem very charged around this topic. So, we look at that again. And then also, we’d love to know at some point, who was the neighbor you liked so much? [laughs] 

Marianne: No, it’s actually not. 

Giancarlo: It was a real example. 

Marianne: I think it’s by watching people on the beach.

Giancarlo: [laughs] 

Marianne: [crosstalk] from watching people on the beach.

Giancarlo: Thank you for your time, Marianne. That was great. Thank you so much for coming.Marianne: Thank you.