Thoroughly Bewitching: An Interview with Sex Magician and Goddess Expert, Gabriela Herstik
Gabriela Herstik is one of those luminous, numinous beings that makes you believe in the power of magic.
Gabriela Herstik could easily be the main character from a best-selling spicy witchcore fantasy book. You can't help but ask, "Who is this witch?" when you meet her and then follow her into oblivion, only to continuously be enchanted by her. I should know – I've done so for over a decade.
When I first met Gaby, it was in Twitter's innocent and halcyon days; she was an earnest intern for a burgeoning platform at the time that I wrote for. There was an inherent sweetness to her that was not hiding behind her fashionable edge. Still, instead of being diminished, all this sweetness was uplifted by the punkiness of her Vivienne Westwood-style outfits and the dramatic swoop of her hair – pure charm and light while not shying away from the shadow.
A well-researched writer with a poetic flair for words, a sexual ceremonialist who has learned from and collaborated with some of the most remarkable teachers, and a glamour magician of the highest order, Gaby has written for platforms like Cosmo, Nylon, Vice, Flaunt and more before she blessed us with five books.
I recently sat down with her on the launch date of her latest offering – a tarot deck and book, Goddess of Love Tarot, dedicated to embodying the erotic divine feminine.
NB: How are you feeling? It's the birth of your Goddess of Love tarot deck today!
GH: I'm so blown away by people's reception of it and also… I'm kind of over it! It's still my baby, but now that it's out in the world, I can surrender and trust in the deck to take care of itself, live its own life, and do its own thing.
NB: Yeah, I get it! You create a lot. I mean, you put out a lot of content! You've published four books, written many articles, and constantly posted on Instagram. You're creating so much that I can understand how you're ready to move on to the next thing.
GH: Yes! It is the fifth release, and I have another book out in March. I'm also getting really excited about my upcoming podcast. I'm happy to have something free for people, and that's a different medium. I'm an air sign. I love talking! Having something a little different than just writing has been nice.
NB: I remember when I first met you (on the internet) in 2011 on Twitter. I looked at your account and was in love because you were like a tiny fairy with this badass goth Lookbook page.
GH: Oh my God! Yes. My fashion blogger past. Yeah. Lookbook was the shit. Miss her, miss her every day. I still think about making a profile and uploading my outfits there because I love a good outfit photo!
NB: You said that you’re ready to move forward and into your new things, but I still would love to know more about the Goddess of Love tarot deck. What inspired it?
GH: Oh my god, of course, I love talking about this shit. The Goddess of love and sexuality are my favorite things to talk about, which says a lot for an air sign who can talk about anything! I've worked with Tarcher Perigee for all my books. They approached me about making a tarot deck. I've been a student of the tarot since I was 13, right around the time I started witchcraft, but during the pandemic, I got really, really deep into my studies of the tarot and of the Kabbalah Tree of Life, which started me working with the tarot through that lens. As a devotee of the Goddess of love, this was the idea that I couldn't stop thinking about. All of my books, all the classes I teach, my exploration of my sacred sexuality through sex work – all of that for me is devotion to the Goddess of love.
NB: I would love to hear more about how you brought all of the different goddesses of love into your deck.
GH: The last book I published, Sacred Sex, was part of the inspiration. I'm very passionate and obsessed with sacred sexuality and eroticism and with the ways that those tie into the goddesses of love. From Inanna to Ishtar, Venus, Vesta, Hathor, and Babalon, I knew I wanted to create a tarot deck that I could use – that people could use for readings around romance, sacred sexuality, and lust, if they were having relationship problems, wanted insight, or wanted to read about a hookup or crush, especially as a tool to connect to the Goddess. I wanted people to return to something more than just the tarot deck – something more than just divination – but a tool that became a spiritual practice in honor of the Goddess of love. I wanted it to not just be from one pantheon or one tradition, but to connect all these different archetypes, all of these goddesses, all of these cultures, and all of these energies while also respecting where these goddesses come from – from the cultures and the peoples they originate from. I also wanted the suits to reflect sex magic, embodiment, shadow, and goddess worship. Each suit has its own theme. The wands are sex magic, the cups are love magic, the swords are shadow magic and patterns around love, and the pentacles are how we embody that through the earth, through embodiment practices. I also wanted this deck to reflect the Goddess's journey of entering the Underworld and coming out transformed with a new experience and embodied wisdom. It was really important for me for the booklet that accompanied the deck to be more of a book with rituals and affirmations rather than a booklet.
NB: This sounds so you – I can't wait to get mine!
GH: Yes, thank you! I'm so grateful. I was really inspired by my devotion to my own practice. And I also feel that we need the Goddess so severely. Not because we're trying to flip the patriarchy and make it like Barbie – patriarchy with women on top and just patriarchy and pink – but to bring the pendulum back to a state of balance between the masculine and feminine. I'm passionate about bringing the Goddess to everybody – to every kind of expression of gender and sexuality out there! Because it is, to me, a frequency that we all have a connection to. It also helps that the deck is beautiful because I know I like having tangible tools that evoke beauty and are pretty to look at. It's a tool to help people connect to the Goddess within and outside of themselves.
NB: Yes, the deck is gorgeous (the art was done by Snakes 4 Hair). It perfectly aligns with what I've witnessed of you in the last ten years. This softening and this yielding to this primordial essence of energy, but without losing your edge and eroticism. You're bridging this gap between the "divine feminine" and something more transcendent. Although I think the words "divine feminine" have been co-opted strangely these days, with your work, you're still embracing the shadow and the underworld. Allowing people to soften into that and not be afraid of it is the most authentic essence of the Goddess of love: the whole spectrum of the Goddess, the whole picture of them, other than just the love aspect. I'm hearing that it embodies the Goddess's natures, including war, hate, and shadow. How did you start working with Goddess?
GH: Thank you for that reflection and for seeing that. If there's one thing I aim to not do in my work, it's spiritually bypass. As a Libra Rising, I love love. But, simultaneously, the Goddess of love is the Goddess of death. That's the Goddess's journey – she has to go to the Underworld. Traditional goddesses of love were goddesses of war and sexuality. It diminishes her power for her to be a goddess of love; her expression is so much more vast than just that one thing, right? So I appreciate you saying that, and it means a lot. As for working with Goddess, every experience is unique. I found witchcraft when I was 12; I found the Goddess months later. I grew up Jewish, and I grew up reform Jewish. My dad was a rabbi. I grew up going to the temple and loved praying and being spiritual. I thought I was gonna be a rabbi! I remember I was reading Silver Ravenwolf's books, and I remember her writing about the Goddess Bast. I remember pouring over this book and recognizing that I saw myself in the divine for the first time. Even though God isn't female or male in Judaism, God is too expansive to have a gender. But because Hebrew words are like Spanish, they have gendered endings. A lot of the words that you use to describe God are masc. So, I just grew up with this kind of experience of God being this masculine figure. By the time I had my Bat Mitzvah at 13, I already knew that I was neo-pagan, or I already knew that I was a witch. It happened young – I am a goddess devotee, and my path is through the feminine. It was really natural for me to find that.
NB: That's incredible. I didn't know you grew up in a spiritual household or that you started so young with the Goddess. If somebody else wants to work with Goddess for the first time, what suggestions would you give them?
GH: I would suggest to somebody looking to connect to the Goddess to sit with yourself, maybe with some tea or a tarot deck or a journal, and ask how you would define the Goddess – what does that energy mean to you? List how the Goddess and goddess energy are already present in your life. Are you connecting to your heart? Do you feel immense love? Are you listening to your intuition? Do you feel very passionately and powerfully about the things you care about? Do you honor the earth? Do you recognize that something bigger than yourself connects you to everybody else in the world? I think the biggest thing is that your practice has to resonate with you. There is no one structure or one way to do this work. The strongest connection you're gonna have is when you listen to your own heart and to your own intuition. And if you're looking for a more concrete way to connect to this energy, I suggest creating an altar. An altar is an energetic focal point where you practice your magic or where you connect to an archetype energy and intention.
NB: I learned from witnessing your journey that the ultimate altar to the Goddess is the Self. You embody that across all your platforms.
GH: I think the Goddess needs to be worshiped, and wants to be worshiped, and worships us as much as we worship her. There's this infinite connection between you and the divine. The more you show your divinity and openness within you, the more strongly she will respond. You're gonna be able to embody and feel her energy.
NB: There's been a lot of talk recently on social media about embodying the "dark feminine.” I'd love to hear your take on that.
GH: The dark Goddess is the Goddess of the shadow. She is the Goddess of the hunt, of the wild, of the fable, of the feral, and the socially unacceptable parts of the Self that are holy and divine because everything is sacred. I relate to the dark Goddess through the lens of Hindu Tantra. Everything is holy, and that includes trash and "evil." That consists of the darkness. The Goddess Kali is a beautiful example of that energy of non-duality and accepting everything as endings and transformation. That's what the dark Goddess represents. It's not being a bitch for the sake of it and doing all of this shit and being like an edgelord – it's about being the shadow and seeing every part of yourself as sacred, divine, and worthy of exploration. I think of the dark Goddess as a conduit, a path, and an archetype of the "unacceptable" for me. That really means connecting to things like anger, grief, sadness, pain, and sexuality precisely through this lens of the sacredness of honoring, of embodying. Instead of rejecting things like anger, we move into it. So many traditions have dualistic goddesses who represent wholeness in my eyes. The dark feminine energy is about owning all parts of yourself. And it doesn't mean rejecting our own moral compass. It's more about recognizing that everything is divine, especially the things that women are advised not to feel or not to express on our path to liberation. I definitely find liberation through my sexuality, sexuality through my passion, and also through my rage, because these are things that I can transmute, own, and find the Goddess in. My next book is called Goddess Energy and it talks about how goddesses are beings that aren't perfect; every Goddess has its shadow, which, in my opinion, means that every Goddess has the potential to be a dark goddess because there is that kind of shadow aspect.
“The dark feminine energy is about owning all parts of yourself. And it doesn't mean rejecting our own moral compass. It's more about recognizing that everything is divine, especially the things that women are advised not to feel or not to express on our path to liberation.”
NB: Ugh, I love talking about this. As an astrologer, I love discussing how Venus is a total diva in mythology. She's spiteful; she's petty.
GH: Literally, she's a brat. I love it.
NB: She's jealous. This is a part of ourselves that we should embrace. I think it connects really well to your writing in Sacred Sex. I wanted to share one of your rituals from that book with our audience. If you had to point them to a ritual in the book for Scorpio season, which ritual would you encourage them to do?
GH: If you have some shame that you would like to get rid of and also to let go of hang-ups, I think one of the first rituals in the book is an amulet and talisman spell. But, if I really had a say for Scorpio season, in the chapter about the Goddess – which is all about using BDSM and kink as a part of your sex magic practice – there's a ritual with the Devil tarot card as kind of like an emancipator of bondage. That Scorpio season with liberation and sovereign energy is like a kinky BDSM element.
NB: What's your favorite tarot card? Mine is actually the Devil. Whenever I read tarot for people and get that card, they say, "Oh no." And I'm like, "Oh, yes."
GH: What… don't you want to live deliciously? Come on, babes.
NB: I'm just like, "Here! This is your permission to be a hedonist!"
GH: That's so funny. You're like, let me enlighten you for a second, babe.
NB: I know it's a total switch in topics, but what sort of women inspire you most?
GH: I'm really inspired by women who carve their own path, who own their sexuality alongside their intelligence and their spirituality, and who move through the world honoring those different parts of themselves. I think sex workers are a huge inspiration to me, like Cleopatra. At the end of the day, my most prominent teacher is the Goddess, the Goddess of love. She's my forever muse. And I'm constantly learning about her through the many people who write about her, worship her, and honor her.
NB: Do you have any closing sentiments you'd like to share with the Noir readers?
GH: You don't have to know why you're being guided to do something or why you're inspired to do something, but having the trust within yourself to follow that intuition and that calling will help things fall into place in the future. If anybody says they know you more than you do, run. Because they don't. You are the authority of yourself. You can always ask Goddess if you need guidance because she is a part of you, and you are a part of her as much as she is outside of you.
You can learn more about Gaby through her Instagram, website, tarot deck, and five published releases: Craft, Inner Witch, Bewitching the Elements, Embody Your Magick, and Sacred Sex.
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Photography by Alexandra Herstik
