Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer, psychologist and mythologist whose work sits at the junction of depth psychology, mythology and ecology. Coming from a background in behavioural psychology and neuroscience, she has spent over two decades reinstating imagination and intuition as ways of knowing. She is the author of seven books, including the internationally bestselling If Women Rose Rooted and Hagitude, which reframed midlife and elderhood as alchemical rather than diminishing. Her latest, Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, was published in May 2026.
She writes the global-bestselling Substack The Art of Enchantment (60,000+ readers), is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Member of the Association of Jungian Analysts, and recently founded the Nostos Institute, which aims to build a living Western spiritual path out of ancient philosophy and depth psychology.
In this conversation, I sit down with Sharon to explore what it might mean to re-enchant a disenchanted world. We begin with her winding path: from a fiercely behaviourist psychology department, to a PhD in the neuroscience of anxiety, and finally to the imaginal, mythic heart of depth psychology. Sharon gives a crash course in Neoplatonism (the One, the Nous and the World Soul) and traces how James Hillman and Henri Corbin drew on it to describe the imaginal world: a real, intermediary realm where images, dreams and synchronicities live. We dig into the difference between enchantment and magical thinking, why so much Jungian thought stops short of the metaphysics, and how big dreams and synchronicities tend to convert people rather than arguments. We talk about Plato’s Myth of Er and the guardian daimon, why Sharon has focused on reclaiming women’s stories and the archetypes of the older woman (the Hagitude project), and what her new Nostos Institute is trying to build. Along the way: fairy tales as the antidote to alienation, why young people are turning to Christianity, and whether a screen-bound, precarious, increasingly mechanised world can find its way back to community and the more-than-human world. This is a conversation for anyone who feels the pull of meaning and belonging but can’t quite find the door.
🔗 Links
- Website: https://sharonblackie.net/
- Substack (The Art of Enchantment): https://sharonblackie.substack.com/
⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - Reinstating imagination as a way of knowing
01:01 From behaviourist neuroscience to the imaginal: Sharon’s winding path
05:59 A crash course in Neoplatonism: the One, the Nous and the World Soul
08:55 “Platonism for the masses”: Christianity and the problem of institutionalisation
12:52 Iamblichus, theurgy and the imaginal world
15:51 Soul vs. spirit: the missing piece
19:20 Enchantment vs. alienation: Studebaker, Don Quixote and “to sing into”
25:41 Magical thinking vs. enchantment: fantasy or participation?
29:20 The metaphysics Hillman and Jung left out
31:47 What actually converts you: big dreams and the angel cards
33:36 Plato’s Myth of Er and the guardian daimon
36:06 Are women more porous to the imaginal?
38:55 Reclaiming women’s stories: from Native American writers to Celtic myth
43:32 Beyond the hero’s journey: Hagitude and the archetypes of the older woman
48:41 Inside the Nostos Institute: a Western spiritual path
57:47 What “feeling fully alive” actually looks like
1:01:11 Why young people are turning to Christianity: precarity and meaning
1:11:19 Sharon’s guest recommendation: David Abram
1:13:16 Where to find Sharon’s work
