WHO IS THAT ISLAND FOREST WITCH
(and why does she have a methodology)
Hi, I’m Natasha.
Artistic researcher, sound ecologist, cultural worker, ritualist, island woman, Lili’s mother. High witch with a grant application and a geophone.
All true. Simultaneously.
I work at the intersection of embodied research, landscape ecology, and cultural forensics. My base is my off-grid forest home on a small small island in the middle of the Adriatics. My real calendar runs on wind, tides, and ferry schedules.
For the past twenty years I’ve been building what I now call survival infrastructure: festivals, residencies, curatorial schools, advocacy platforms, sound archives, community laboratories. From noise performances in concrete basements to decade-long negotiations with city councils. From botanical field protocols to a novel about a woman who walks into Velebit and doesn’t come back the same person.
The thread running through all of it: precision in the service of the invisible.
That’s what Magia Botanica is: a living system with four (for now) channels.
What lives here
Autonomous Archipelago — The methodological core. This is where GRIMOIRE: Archive of Living Landscapes lives in public — a notation system for archiving places through sound, botany, photochemical processes, and embodied perception. Also where the School of the Future lives: pedagogy, ecological frameworks, survival tools for communities that think in archipelagos, not continents. Free.
Silva Archives — Field dispatches from terrain. Photographs and short records from Silba, Velebit, the Dalmatian underwater. And fragments from a novel in progress — The Last Windmill — which tracks the same landscape through fiction. The research and the story use different instruments to document the same thing. Sent when I’m there. No schedule. Free.
Lunar Letters — One letter per lunation, new and full moon, 24 per year. Each carries a tarot archetype as its engine. The ritual side of the practice: astrology as methodology, herbs as field partners, the body as the first instrument. Including the making of Liminal Tarot, my first deck. Nervous-system signals, not explanations. Paid.
SPLIT Protocols — Forensic field notes on Split’s cultural infrastructure: Dom mladih, MKC, the independent scene that keeps being treated like unpaid scaffolding. Governance, money, energy leaks — with receipts. These texts are the living archive feeding into a monograph in development: 36 njezinih čuda — Mikropolitike skrbi i otpora, a twenty-year study co-edited with my lifetime menthor and professor Miško Šuvaković. In Croatian when precision matters. Coming. Paid.
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What free subscribers receive
Full access to Autonomous Archipelago and Silva Archives. Selected public Lunar Letters.
What paid subscribers receive
Complete Lunar Letters — all 24 per year, including Liminal Tarot process notes. Full SPLIT Protocols access as they publish. Working documents, field protocols, and PDFs as they are released.
Where I am right now
GRIMOIRE is in active development — applying for funding, preparing fieldwork on Silba, Velebit, and the Dalmatian underwater. The School of the Future launches in 2026. The novel is moving. The monograph is being built from the ground up. Some sections here are just beginning.
You’re arriving early. That’s not a disadvantage.
The rule of the work
I’m not interested in making things nice. I’m interested in making them usable.
Start with Friction Between Precision and Madness if you want the methodology.
Start with The loop is broken if you want my story. Or start at the begining and help me grow and understand, you can always contact me via e-mail mavena@mavena.hr
If any of this lands — don’t just bookmark it and disappear into the scroll.
Send it to one person. The researcher who is quietly losing faith in neutral methods. The cultural worker who is holding everything together and calling it fine. The woman who keeps pulling Two of Swords and doesn’t yet know that’s a diagnosis, not a personality.
They don’t need to be ready. They just need to arrive.
Thank you,
— Natasha
& if you want to know more…
The girl who kept pulling Two of Swords
When I was learning Tarot, I kept pulling Two of Swords. Over and over and over again.
The card of permanent crossroads.
The one who sits blindfolded, holding tension for everyone, afraid that if she puts the swords down, the whole timeline will fall apart.
That was me.
The mediator. The cultural glue. The woman holding paradox for groups, institutions, families, scenes. The one who kept the structure at the expense of her own peace. I was the one who “could handle it”, so everyone beleived.
But, the cards, the Forest and the Sea were dragging me somewhere liminal, long before we invented the language for it.
My natal chart is not subtle
Astrology was my only friend growing up, a rude friend who loves you enough not to lie. My natal chart is not subtle. It reads like a grimoire.
I have the Sun and Mars in the eighth house — the domain of shadow work, crisis, death, other people’s resources, taboo, initiation. This is classic “underworld priestess” territory: working with trauma, financial and ancestral magic, transformation through death and underworld: all the things everyone else avoids.
My Moon lives in the twelfth house, linked to dreams, the unseen, karmic entanglements and the places we go when we disappear from the world. My Moon is wired for psychic perception, sleep downloads and conversations with what other people call “imaginary”. It won’t shut up, and I’ve stopped asking it to.
Pluto stands in my fifth house of creativity, love and play — which is a poetic way of saying that for me, art is not decoration. It is ritual, spell and alchemical fire. Relationships are never casual; they are initiations. The studio, the stage and the altar are the same place to me.
Uranus and Neptune pulse through my sixth house of everyday life, work and the body. So magic for me is not just on the Full Moon; it’s in how I make tea, write an email, walk through a forest trail, or decide who gets access to my timeline. Herbs, sound, talismans, little daily rituals — that’s my laboratory.
Black Moon Lilith burns through Leo in my third house: the wild feminine in the voice, the throat, the written word. I am not built for neutral, polite communication. My magic moves through speech, essays, whisper, suddenly-too-honest conversations at the edge of an event when everyone is tired of pretending.
Chiron in Taurus stands in my eleventh house of community, showing me again and again that groups can wound — and heal — through the body, the land, shared resources. My path is to hold spaces where people can put their nervous systems down for a moment and feel what’s really there.
Layered over all that is a rare harmonic pattern linking Mercury, Jupiter and Pluto — the so-called Finger of Fate. It highlights words, teaching, deep truth-telling and transformation as non-negotiable themes in this lifetime. I’m not here to make things “nice”. I’m here to name what’s rotting and what’s ready to be reborn, and to find the language that makes that bearable enough to embrace within.
My karmic nodes run along the Virgo–Pisces axis: bringing mysticism down into the sink, the spreadsheet, the fermentation jar, the grant report; giving the soul somewhere real to live instead of floating above the mess.
And underneath it all, in my Vedic chart, Saturn — the keeper of time, bones, karma — holds the role of Atmakaraka, the significator of the soul. The soul of a teacher, witch and architect of new structures, with Aquarius themes of sound, technology and collective magic running through it.
All of this kept circling the same message:
I was not meant to stay at the crossroads, holding everyone else’s tension. I was meant to walk through, into the forest, and come back with sacred maps.
The Great Attractor of Magia Botanica
Then there is the Great Attractor — a gravitational anomaly in Sagittarius that pulls entire clusters of galaxies toward itself.
My chart is plugged straight into it.
In practice, this means people don’t just casually “find” Magia Botanica. They arrive when something in their orbit has already been pulled out of place: a job that has become a coffin, a relationship that’s quietly rotting, a nervous system that has started refusing to cooperate.
For the last two decades I’ve moved through independent culture, experimental sound, activist scenes and institutional politics — all places where burnout, precarity and complex trauma wear nice shoes and clever T-shirts. The projects were real. The bodies carrying them were not okay.
Mine included.
Eventually my nervous system did what nervous systems do when they’ve been in survival mode for too long: it mutinied.
What looked like “tiredness” from the outside was, in reality, a full-scale somatic revolt. My body stopped agreeing to be the infrastructure for everybody else’s chaos. The old role — the reliable one, the backbone, the one who “can handle anything” — started to die.
In the middle of burnout, pain, grief and ancestral debris, the plants got louder.
They asked me to listen.
So I did. Read here:
I went back to the old ways I half-remembered from my grandmother’s courtyard and the wild paths of my island: harvesting by seasons, watching the moon, paying attention to wind, birds, sudden silences. I began blending oils and balms the same way I used to shape performances and programs: with breath, by hand, in rhythm.
Each blend felt less like a “product” and more like a small ceremony.
A return.
A recalibration.
A way back into my own body.
Herb allies gave me the wisdom of life in a language I could finally hear.
And now, I offer that to you.
THE MAGIA BOTANICA WAY
At Magia Botanica, we move differently. Not by schedules or algorithms, but by ancient rhythms. We attune ourselves to what the Earth whispers: that real growth is spiral, not linear. That healing takes root in stillness. That beauty ripens in its own time.
We move with the tides, the wind, the Moon, to listen, not chase. We honour what blooms slowly, what ripens in silence, what rests in the dark before it glows.
RITUAL OVER RUSH We follow the rhythm of the Earth and the Moon, not the noise of the moment. What we offer is shared in alignment with the seasons, with reverence and intention.
REST AS REVOLUTION
We honour The Rhythm of Rest. Sabbath, solitude, sleep, stillness—all sacred. In a world addicted to output, we choose pause as power.CIRCLE OVER CROWD
This is a living circle. A quiet gathering of kindred spirits who remember: belonging is not built on numbers, but on presence.So… who is that Island Forest Witch?
She’s the one whose chart is wired for deep transformation, whose tarot kept her at the crossroads until she finally chose herself.
She’s the woman who walked barefoot into her own breakdown and came back with herbs, stars and a map.
She’s the one who made this space for you — and marked the path back to yourself with salt, soil, story and slow magic.
The ritual is already in motion.
Your sacred return is already in creation.
Welcome to Magia Botanica.
Welcome to the Wildness.
Welcome Home.
Natasha
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