Profile Spotlight: Jennifer Sodini, Author and Oracle Deck Creator
Five oracle decks, 30,000 copies of Amenti, and a novel about Kirby, AI and Los Angeles. The skeptically optimistic author on feather hearts, The Dark Crystal and her favorite place in LA.
Photo: Liv Jonsé
Jennifer Sodini is an internationally published author and culture writer who has worked in conscious media since 2013, long before wellness was everywhere. She has written five oracle decks, four of them published by Running Press (Hachette Book Group), including her debut Amenti Oracle, which has sold more than 30,000 copies, and her two latest releases, Feline Mystique and Be Not Afraid. Her approach is what she calls skeptically optimistic: grounded, funny, and allergic to the buzzwords of the spiritual space. She lives in Los Feliz, loves Los Angeles like a living thing, and is now branching into horror and speculative fiction.
8 QUESTIONS
WITH JENNIFER SODINI
1. You have worked in conscious media since 2013. Take us back to the beginning. What pulled a grounded, skeptical East Coast writer toward mysticism, and when did you know it was your lane?
Well, it really began at the beginning! My whole life, I've been a really sensitive person, a lucid dreamer, a kid who felt things deeply and had an inherent understanding of things I had no business knowing. My grandmother was a mystic of sorts, and she taught me to read oracle cards when I was eight. I still have her copy of Aleister Crowley's Magick with her highlights and notes.
She died when I was twelve, and in the 90s I dove deeper into mysticism, first through Wicca (of course I loved The Craft), then into metaphysics, Buddhism, remote viewing, anything to do with aliens and realms beyond this world. I was ostracized a bit in elementary school because it wasn't really cool then, especially in a very WASP-y community, to be weird or witchy. So in high school, I buried it all to "fit in," and while I still did oracle readings as a bit of a party trick, I hid that side of myself because I wanted to be accepted.
It wasn't until 2012, when I was working in pop culture, writing a blog for The Situation of Jersey Shore fame, that I discovered all of this writing about the Mayan Long Count Calendar. That discovery led me down a rabbit hole of remembering the person I have always been. So it really was the time of going back, reconnecting, and creating a future integrated with my truth from that moment on.
2. Your first deck, Amenti Oracle, has sold more than 30,000 copies. You have said it is about living with a "feather heart." What does that mean, and how did the deck get from an idea to Running Press?
The ideals of Ma'at, from which the feather heart ideology comes, are beautiful tenets of living in alignment with love as a superlative human state. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, they weigh your heart against Ma'at's feather; if your heart is as light as her feather, you can pass into the next life. I find beauty and value in many great wisdom traditions, but I am averse to putting these ideas into a single box of belief, or naming it (or myself) as one thing.
To me, living with a feather heart means staying aligned with the infinite gradients of wisdom and staying connected to loving awareness, even when things get challenging. Of course, we are all human and shit happens, and I have my own relationship to anger and toxic patterns, but I always try to grow and reflect and remember my heart even when I fail, even if said failures are pretty epic at times. Love is one of the greatest gifts of getting to be alive, and I never want to become bitter or sour or spend too much time being angry about the things I can't control. Remembering the feather keeps me balanced.
And Amenti being picked up by Running Press was a true testament to following your heart. Originally I thought about self-publishing, and reached out to the artist, Natalee Miller, on Instagram to see if she wanted to collaborate on it. Truthfully, I didn't have a big plan; I just had the idea, and then when Natalee and I connected, it was like meeting one of my soulmates (to this day she is not only a muse but one of my best friends). It all felt very flowy, from the idea to connecting with Natalee, to securing a literary agent, and then having the deck picked up. I am grateful for everything that made it come to be, and I feel so lucky to have a home for our work at Running Press, because their entire team has been so supportive and wonderful to work with since day one.
3. You call yourself "skeptically optimistic" and have never connected with labels like witch or empath. How do you hold real belief in magic next to real skepticism? Has your skeptical side ever lost the argument?
I recently heard a quote by the late Robert Anton Wilson that said, "I don't believe in anything, but I have a great many suspicions" (I am paraphrasing). To me, that sums up how I navigate life, and I don't think it's contradictory to the magical path; in some ways, it's much more honest. I feel many things, and when I feel them deeply and in alignment with my heart, I tend to manifest faster, with less resistance. When I cling too heavily to an attachment or a "belief," I get disappointed, and things don't come to fruition as easily as I hope.
It's challenging, and very Taoist, to approach magic this way, but willpower tends to get more jet fuel (metaphorically) when the idea at hand feels like less of a mountain to climb. My skeptical side has lost the argument many times, and I have seen and experienced the mystical in ways that defy logic and reason and are probably borderline miraculous, but I'm still always one foot in and one foot out about it. That's the healthiest place to be, in my humble opinion, even if it feels like a bit of a walking contradiction.
4. Your article on decoding esoteric symbolism in film is taught in a film appreciation course at Broward College. Name one film everyone should rewatch through your eyes. What are most people missing the first time?
The Dark Crystal. Jim Henson was a genius, and this film is riddled with esoteric symbolism and beautiful philosophical concepts around non-duality. The twisted, greedy, horrible Skeksis, in contrast to the gentle, wise, loving Mystics, are the yin and yang to the light and shadow of all the wonder and horror we are capable of as conscious human beings. But in the film, if a Skeksis is harmed, so is a Mystic, and as one dies, so does the other. It is a poetic, gorgeous way to show how interconnected we all are, even those in gross opposition to loving awareness.
Beyond its spiritual richness, in this world of AI overwhelm, seeing how this film was made without CGI, using puppets and incredible detail, is a testament to the beauty of our imagination, and I hope rewatching it encourages more creatives to dream beyond the machine.
5. Your two latest decks could not be more different: Feline Mystique is cats, folklore and pop culture, and Be Not Afraid is the angels of the Bible. What drew you to each, and what did writing them back to back teach you?
Be Not Afraid is the culmination of a powerful part of my journey and a testament to the part of my path that crushed my skepticism and pushed me to trust the ineffable even more. Exploring angels helped bring closure and open a new chapter on experiences in that realm that I am still reconciling. In 2014, I saw the map of a lot of what we are experiencing today, and kept quiet about it for a while. Putting that wisdom into an angel deck, now, felt like the perfect time to release the breadcrumbs, as it were, and to encourage others who find it to BE NOT AFRAID, quite literally.
However, working on that was a really intense experience. Natalee and I have a very deep and soulful connection, and doing this deck together was quite an emotional experience for us both because of what was mirroring in our lives through the creative process. But after it was complete, I wanted to create something that was light, whimsical and easily accessible. No deep esoterica at all, really, just pop culture and cats and everything warm, fuzzy, sweet and lovely. I feel grateful for the artist who collaborated with me on it, because she captured the feeling in a way that I will forever be grateful for, and she is incredibly talented, too. Feline Mystique was a great counterbalance to the heaviness, and shows the softer side of myself all around.
6. Lately you have been branching into horror and speculative fiction. What are you writing now?
I finished a novel last year inspired by being a Millennial in the age of technological acceleration, and by the yokai of Japanese folklore. It all started when I began thinking about Kirby, the Nintendo character, as an apt metaphor for what AI does. He's a seemingly harmless little shell who inhales the talents of whoever he encounters and then spits them back out. The more I sat with that, the more it reminded me of narcissistic relationships too, the way you can pour yourself into another person until they've absorbed so much of you that you can't remember who you were before them.
The book carries a grief around yearning, love, existential dread, and wanting to feel whole in an uncertain world, along with that deeper confusion of not knowing whether to rage against the machine or surrender to it. In a lot of ways it's also a love letter to Los Angeles, because this city mirrors so many of those themes. It's a place built on hopes and dreams, constantly speeding up, and always at risk of swallowing the people who come here to become someone.
I am currently querying agents for the novel. Meanwhile, I am working on a screenplay that's loosely based on a very strange tale about a one-armed UFO prophet with a cult in Switzerland, and finalizing my pitch for my next nonfiction book.
7. You have called LA "a living, sentient being" and "so very Lynchian," a city where a premiere and someone sleeping in a doorway share a block. What has living here taught you about holding both sides, and how does giving back show up in your work?
It's been very humbling. Living here, you can't pretend the suffering isn't real, and I think acknowledging our shared humanity is one of the most important things we can do. I try not to turn a blind eye, and to help ease someone's hardship whenever I can, whether that means giving my time, resources, a blanket, or a meal. When I have cash on me, I give it, and I make a point of looking people in the eye and talking to them, because everyone deserves to be seen as a person, and so many people on these streets deserve far more than they've been given.
I also donate to nonprofits doing the harder, longer work, and I hope to give back even more as my career grows. That same spirit shapes my writing too. I want my work to leave people feeling a little less alone.
8. Thank you, Jennifer. One last thing, since we are LA Today: what is your absolute favorite place in Los Angeles right now?
The Philosophical Research Society is my absolute favorite place in Los Angeles, and honestly, pretty much the world. PRS has done a stellar job of curating a space where you can take a workshop on yokai or Jim Henson, catch an avant-garde film screening, sink into a sound bath, get a tarot reading, study in a gorgeous esoteric library, be on a panel about UFOs and psychedelics, and feel like you're in the coolest place ever while being welcome to show up exactly as you are (I have done all of the aforementioned things, literally).
It's the place my weirdo childhood self dreamed of fitting into, and I still pinch myself that it's not only up the road from me, but they also carry my decks! I'm forever grateful to Manly P. Hall, Kelly Carmena, and the gorgeous, talented, wonderful team of custodians who keep the light of his work burning and continue building that space into the most epic community.
Connect with Jennifer Sodini
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