Clearing the Record: Setting the Facts Straight About Spirit Marriage and My Research

It has recently come to my attention that some claims being made about me, my research, and my book, Spirit Marriage, are inaccurate, misleading, and in some cases simply untrue.

Ordinarily, I would not devote much attention to criticism of my work. Scholarly inquiry depends upon disagreement, debate, and thoughtful critique, and I welcome all three. However, when statements based on a cursory reading of my book—or, in some cases, on material that does not appear in my book at all—begin circulating as though they are established facts, I believe it is important to set the record straight.

Some of the claims appear to originate with a single reviewer who has acknowledged skipping portions of the book and whose conclusions seem to rely, at least in part, on superficial online searches. Those claims have subsequently been repeated by others who appear not to have consulted the original material.

So rather than respond to every individual post or comment, I want to address the substantive issues directly. My hope is that this page will provide readers with accurate information about my background, my methodology, and what I actually say in Spirit Marriage.

1. Clarifying the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

One claim that has circulated is that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD) is a “known anti-Semitic group.”

This is incorrect.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is an esoteric magical tradition and should not be confused with Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi), the Greek far-right political organization. These are entirely different organizations with different histories, purposes, and identities.

The HOGD has publicly disavowed the Greek political organization and its ideology. Conflating the two is therefore a fundamental factual error.

This distinction matters, particularly when discussing occult and esoteric traditions, because organizations can share names while having entirely unrelated histories and purposes. Careful research requires distinguishing between them rather than treating a shared name as evidence of affiliation.

2. Understanding What My Book Actually Argues

Another criticism suggests that my discussion of individuation, spirits, and human evolution somehow constitutes an argument for eugenics.

It does not.

In Spirit Marriage, I explore the process of individuation—the development of a more conscious, integrated self—and investigate how people's relationships with spirits, deities, and other-than-human entities may participate in that process.

I am interested in the possibility that experiences people understand as spirit relationships can contribute to psychological development, meaning-making, spiritual transformation, and expanded states of consciousness.

I also explore whether spirit marriage might have implications beyond the individual: whether such experiences can contribute to becoming more conscious, more relational, and more awake to our place in the larger human and ecological story.

These are psycho-spiritual and sociological questions.

Nowhere in Spirit Marriage do I advocate eugenics, racial purification, selective breeding, or any comparable ideology.

To characterize my work in those terms is not an interpretation of an argument I actually make. It is a misrepresentation of the subject matter.

3. Clarifying My Doctoral Education

There has also been misinformation concerning my doctoral education at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).

CIIS has held institutional accreditation since 1981 and has remained in good standing as an accredited institution throughout that period.

The accreditation issue sometimes cited in discussions of CIIS concerns the Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) program in Clinical Psychology, which is not the program from which I graduated. That program lost its APA accreditation in 2011.

My doctorate is in East-West Psychology, not Clinical Psychology.

Conflating the accreditation history of a particular professional program with the accreditation status of the institution—and then applying that information to a completely different doctoral program—is misleading.

My academic credentials should be evaluated based on the program I actually completed, not on the history of another program at the same institution.

4. Clarifying My Master's Thesis

Another claim states or implies that my master's thesis focused on Mary Magdalene.

It did not.

My master's thesis at the Graduate Theological Union, in the field of Ethics, Religion and Society, focused on Pentecostal women and feminism.

This is a straightforward factual matter, and it is easily verifiable.

5. My Study of Hermetic Kabbalah

I have also seen criticism suggesting that my engagement with Hermetic Kabbalah somehow demonstrates an inappropriate appropriation of Jewish tradition.

My study of Hermetic Kabbalah occurred in the context of my academic and personal exploration of Western esotericism. I also studied Hermetic Kabbalah alongside my then-husband, who was Jewish.

As with any subject I research, I believe it is important to distinguish between studying a tradition, making claims about a tradition, participating in a tradition, and claiming authority within that tradition.

Those are not interchangeable things.

6. The Perspective From Which I Conduct My Research

Perhaps one of the most important things to understand about my work is that I do not pretend to approach these subjects from a position of complete neutrality.

My framework is post-Christian.

I explicitly state at the beginning of my work that I am approaching these questions from the perspective of someone who left Christianity and converted to Paganism.

This is not something I conceal. It is part of the methodological transparency of my work.

Every researcher brings a history, worldview, set of assumptions, and interpretive framework to their work. A responsible scholar identifies those lenses rather than pretending they do not exist.

In fact, acknowledging one's positionality is an important part of qualitative research.

My perspective influences the questions I ask and the ways in which I interpret the material. That does not mean that every conclusion I reach is objectively true, nor do I claim that it is. It means that I am transparent about the perspective from which I am working.

For a deeper discussion of this methodology, I recommend my interview with Brandy Williams on the Spirit Marriage Research Process and Methodology, where I discuss how I approached the research and the experiences of my co-researchers.

7. Am I Writing About Traditions That Aren't “My Own”?

Another criticism is that discussing experiences arising within religious or spiritual traditions other than my own constitutes cultural appropriation.

That criticism misunderstands the nature of the research.

Spirit Marriage is not a claim to represent every tradition discussed in the book from the inside. It is a work of sociological, psychological, and religious-studies inquiry examining experiences that occur across different cultural and religious contexts.

My research includes interviews with people describing their own experiences.

These interviews were conducted within a phenomenological qualitative research framework. My co-researchers gave written permission to participate, and they were invited to review and edit their stories before publication.

The research was conducted under the supervision of a Human Research Review Committee.

This distinction matters.

I am not claiming to speak for the people whose experiences I document. I am studying and presenting their accounts as research participants, with their consent and participation. It also bears mentioning that I have endeavored to support the communities I engaged with, to varying degrees and to the best of my ability, beyond publication of the book.

Again, my interview with Brandy Williams provides a more detailed discussion of this methodology.

8. Addressing Claims About Extraterrestrials

Another particularly curious criticism concerns extraterrestrials.

There is a simple answer:

I do not discuss extraterrestrials in Spirit Marriage.

I am not opposed to entertaining the possibility that intelligence may exist beyond Earth. It is a fascinating question, and one that deserves thoughtful consideration.

But it is not the subject of this book.

The inclusion of ideas that are not actually present in the text creates a rather serious problem for any critique of a book: the reviewer is no longer responding to the author's argument, but to something the reviewer has constructed independently.

9. ESP and Psychic Development

Similarly, psychic or extrasensory perception (ESP) is sometimes characterized as a “conspiracy theory” in discussions of my work.

That characterization is inaccurate.

ESP and related questions concerning anomalous cognition have been the subject of decades of experimental research and scholarly debate.

Reasonable people can—and do—disagree about the evidence, its interpretation, and the conclusions that should be drawn from it.

But disagreement about a controversial research field is not the same thing as demonstrating that the subject is a conspiracy theory.

For readers interested in exploring the empirical research rather than simply dismissing the subject, I recommend the work of researcher Dr. Dean Radin, among others.

10. The Burning Times and Ceremonial Magick

Some criticisms suggest that Spirit Marriage fails to address subjects that are, in fact, addressed in the book.

For example, the Burning Times are discussed in a footnote on page 275.

Likewise, ceremonial magick is defined in the glossary.

These may not be lengthy discussions, but that is different from saying that the subjects were omitted entirely.

A critique of the depth or treatment of a subject is perfectly legitimate. Claiming that the subject does not appear in the book when it does is another matter.

11. Clarifying the Role of Lilith—and My Primary Deity Focus

I have also encountered claims concerning Lilith that substantially overstate her role in my book. My only mention of Lilith in Spirit Marriage is a poem on page 307 that celebrates her as a Dark Goddess.

In contrast, I explicitly state on page 254 that Isis was my focal deity at the time, and that a triumvirate of Isis–Sophia–Magdalen became my primary deity focus for this work.

My personal spiritual practice is not presented as a universal prescription.

My perspective is that gods and goddesses call whom they will, and part of spiritual practice is learning how to discern and respond to those relationships.

That is a description of my spiritual framework—not a claim that every practitioner must share it.

12. What I Actually Say About Healing and Transformation

Some criticism appears to interpret accounts from my co-researchers as though I am asserting that spirits objectively heal people physically or psychologically.

That is not the same as what the book presents.

My research documents people's reported experiences.

Some participants describe profound psychological, emotional, spiritual, or even physical changes that they associate with their relationships with spirits.

As a researcher, I am interested in documenting and analyzing those experiences.

There is an important distinction between saying:

“A participant reported that their relationship with a spirit helped them heal.”

and saying:

“Spirits are scientifically proven to heal people.”

The first is a report of lived experience. The second is a scientific claim.

Spirit Marriage is primarily concerned with the former.

The book takes people's experiences seriously without requiring the reader to adopt the metaphysical interpretation of those experiences.

13. When Spirit Relationships Rearrange a Person's Life

Another criticism is that because some co-researchers described their lives being significantly rearranged by their spirit marriages, these relationships must therefore represent toxic relationship dynamics.

Again, the reality is considerably more nuanced.

Relationships with spirits have taken many forms throughout history and across cultures. Some reported experiences are relatively easeful. Others are challenging. Some involve profound transformation, disruption, surrender, or reorientation.

Just as human relationships vary enormously depending on the people involved, the nature of the relationship, and the circumstances surrounding it, experiences described as spirit marriages vary as well.

This is precisely why I believe support, discernment, and appropriate guidance are important when navigating spirit contact.

Not every intense spiritual experience is automatically beneficial. Not every difficult experience is automatically harmful. And not every transformative relationship can be adequately understood through the framework of conventional human relationship dynamics.

The point of the research is to explore these complexities—not to prescribe a single interpretation.

14. Is Spirit Marriage Really About “Spirit Marriage”?

Finally, some critics have suggested that I am not actually writing about spirit marriage at all, but rather about an alchemical concept of marriage.

This criticism points toward an interesting scholarly question—but it does not invalidate the book.

Marriage has meant different things in different historical and cultural contexts. When the relationships being examined involve primarily disincarnate beings, it should not be surprising that the concept of marriage may look very different from contemporary human marriage.

Throughout the book, I examine the ways people have understood and experienced these relationships.

At the conclusion of the book, I explicitly acknowledge that the sacred or alchemical understanding of spirit marriage is my interpretation of the material I collected.

I do not claim to have discovered the final, definitive meaning of spirit marriage.

Quite the opposite.

I am inviting readers into an area of inquiry that deserves further investigation.

A Request for Good-Faith Scholarship

I am entirely comfortable with people disagreeing with my conclusions.

I welcome scholars, practitioners, psychologists, religious studies scholars, skeptics, and readers to question my assumptions, challenge my interpretations, identify weaknesses in my methodology, and offer alternative explanations for the phenomena I discuss.

That is how scholarship works.

What I object to is something different: attributing claims to me that I do not make, criticizing material that does not appear in the book, confusing unrelated institutions or organizations, or presenting interpretations as though they were established facts without engaging the primary source.

If you're going to critique Spirit Marriage, I ask only that you read the book carefully and critique what is actually there.

You don't have to agree with me.

You don't have to believe in spirits.

You don't have to accept my interpretation of the experiences documented in the book.

You don't even have to find the subject particularly compelling.

But intellectual honesty requires that we engage with the work that actually exists rather than constructing an argument around claims that the author never made.

Moving Forward

I wrote Spirit Marriage because I believe there are important questions at the intersection of psychology, spirituality, religious studies, consciousness, and human transformation that deserve serious investigation.

I recognize that these subjects can be provocative. I also recognize that my conclusions will not resonate with everyone. That's okay.

My hope is that we can have conversations about these subjects that are curious rather than dismissive, rigorous rather than sensationalistic, and critical without being careless.

If you have read Spirit Marriage and found value in it, I would be deeply grateful if you would consider leaving an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews from readers who have actually engaged with the book help ensure that prospective readers encounter a range of perspectives rather than relying on a single interpretation.

And if you encounter claims about me or my work that are inconsistent with what is actually written in Spirit Marriage, please feel free to share this page as a resource.

Ultimately, the best response to misinformation is not more misinformation, nor is it personal attack.

It is the record.

So here is the record.

Read the book. Examine the research. Question the conclusions. Disagree with me if you wish.

But let's have the conversation based on what I actually wrote.