What You’ll Learn

Enrollment opens on October 10

How to Read the Year

  • The big historical truth: the Wheel is modern

  • What existed before the wheel

  • The wheel as a lineage

  • The landscape as part of the archive

  • Seasonal practice

Decolonial Lens

  • What ‘decolonial’ means here

  • Familiar stories examined carefully

  • How modern people reconstructed the ancestors, the truth about romantic nationalism and the politics of European ancestry

  • The ancestral landscape

  • How to recognize the ancestral in the land beneath our feet.

  • Learn to ask who recorded something, when, for whom, and why, and what may have been misunderstood, omitted, or transformed

  • A look at conversion as a messy process involving suppression, adaptation, incorporation, reinterpretation, and survival rather than a clean break between “pagan” and “Christian”

  • Animism as relationship

  • Hearths, food, childbirth, death, animal husbandry, agricultural work, weather, household customs, local festivals, and seasonal labor - seeing the ordinary as important as the mythological

  • The ancestral landscape

  • Ancestry without possession

  • To deliberately move beyond gods, warriors, and male ritual specialists and ask about women, households, children, farmers, fahrende Frauen, healers, animal keepers, and the dead

Myth + Animism

We're teaching from primary sources like Tacitus' Germania, Bede's De temporum ratione, the Poetic + Prose Eddas, medieval Irish literature + the Indiculus superstitionum, as well as modern interpretations from  Ivy Mulligan, Nicole & Thomas Hö + more.

Meet Your Guide

Natalie Stoemmer

Natalie is weird (wyrd), likes the water, and works with natural cycles and spirals all day long. Here’s what she says about herself:

I am a teacher and a student. And the lesson.
I am a healer and a patient. And the medicine.
I am an herbalist and a creature. And an ecosystem.
I am a weaver and the woven. And the web.
I am a witch and the spell. And the magic.
I am a writer and a reader. And the material.
I am an auntie and a daughter. And life herself.

Mostly, I am a human being.
My name is Natalie, Nat, Nana to some.

I’m the daughter of Helen and Peter, granddaughter of Justine, Heinz, Maria, and Peter, descendant of the tree-people Ask and Embla. I come from Central European lands—Celtic-Germanic and Slavic-Bohemian lineages—and I’m writing to you from Franconia, Germany.

I know from my own family history that my lineage holds complexity: people who were farmers and workers, dissenters and survivors, and also people who participated in oppressive systems, including European & US-imperialist settler movements in North Africa and West Asia.

I don’t carry guilt for what my ancestors did, but I do carry responsibility for what continues in my name. That responsibility shapes how I approach my work: with consent, accountability, and a commitment to not repeating harm—especially in spiritual or healing spaces.

My background is interdisciplinary and embodied. I’m trained in cycle and menstrual health, herbalism, trauma-aware ritual, and symbolic inner work.

I teach embodied menstrual wisdom, blending biology, myth, and nature to help people live in rhythm with their cycle and navigate important energetic portals. I created the Baba Yaga period app to support ovulation awareness and personal health insight.

Alongside that, I lead modern mystery school spaces where we explore archetypes, pre- & non-christian mythology, shadow work, and collective healing through myth and Indigenous science.

My teachers include both human mentors and the more-than-human world of land, plants, and fungi. Find my full Lineage of Thought HERE.

I am shaped by the foothills of the German Alps, the river Isar, the Black Forest, the Sonora Desert, and the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui tribes, the Bay of Beijing in China, and El Borinquen, Puerto Rico.

Find her work here: Natalie’s Library on Substack, her homepage, and her teaching inside Wild Soul and the Inner Territory Guide Training.

  • "I've spent a lot of time combing through the internet and through books looking for people who are teaching on European traditions, rituals, histories, and mysticism without the insidious influence of white supremacy. This course does exactly that. "

  • “I’ve learned from Black and Indigenous women that, as a white woman, one of the ways I’ll learn to truly divest from whiteness is to learn who, where, and what I come from. This course offers me a mapline back to my own ancestral rituals, traditions, stories, and tools.”

  • "Natalie's Green Guides module in the Inner Territory Guide Training was paradigm-shifting. Hearing so many strands of plant medicine research woven seamlessly and respectfully together was a truly satisfying learning experience. As a result, I have sought additional learning and work with herbal aid. I have come to appreciate the relationship between plant guides and my physical body and mental world so much more deeply, and continue to build an alliance of trust with the green universe."

The Wheel of the Year feels ancient. But the Wheel we know today is a modern synthesis, assembled from fragments of much older and very different seasonal traditions.

FAQS

  • Much of modern European paganism is riddled with white supremacy . Not only do we reject that grotesque insertion into ancestral rhythms, rituals, and wisdoms, but we also counter it through decolonial education.

    This isn't about finding the one “authentic” pagan tradition…

    It's about learning to recognize what is inherited, what is reconstructed, what can be re-membered, what has been lost, and what we might responsibly co-create for a liberated future.

    Natalie teaches and guides from her positioning in the ancestral web, as a woman, healer, herbalist, and alchemist born to and living within Germania’s story.

  • Each season will host a 2-hour class that we highly encourage you to engage with in real time on Zoom. All gatherings will be recorded and available for members of the cohort for 3 years, making them easy to revisit at any time.

  • Because of the digital nature of our courses, we do not offer refunds.

  • We strongly encourage our Inner Territory Guides to take Natalie’s course. If you have completed the ITGT or are a member of Wild Soul you will have access to a 20% discount on all The Midline School’s courses.

What Natalie Wants You to Know….

As white folks with European ancestry, we often feel alone, lost, or disconnected from our shared stories and myths, from collective histories, and ancient storytelling. I am not here to tell you we should feel ashamed of that or that we aren’t allowed to grieve it. In fact, since that disconnection was an orchestrated act of violence against our most ancient ancestors long ago, it is imperative that we grieve this (ongoing) process.

 And, because there is always an ‘and,’ we are sitting at this unique intersection of loss and grief and harm, which makes it equally as necessary, if not more so, to go digging. To excavate our histories, shovel in hand, ready for whatever truths we may find, and staying honest with what we’re uncovering. Because, beloved, the harm done in the name of this intentional disconnection must be stopped, and we are uniquely primed to stop it.

 You are here because you do not want to appropriate other cultures’ Indigeneity (any longer). You have learned from Indigenous elders and wise ones about what is and isn’t ours to take; you have read the books by Robin Wall Kimmerer and started orienting differently to your own backyard. You may have even stopped buying White Sage and Palo Santo and instead now use your own herbs. And maybe you even canceled that trip to the jungle to take a mushroom trip because you realize that it is likely an exploitative operation… and now here you are. You are not content with succumbing to collective guilt or shame over our white ancestry’s actions, and you are also not content with perpetuating the harm done in neo-colonial white spiritual spaces. 

 Where do you go?

 Right here. This space in which we will re-member and re-construct what has been buried by or potentially lost to centuries of colonization (both to and by our own ancestry). In order to co-create new collective futures.

 Not unlike Merlin Stone, who went looking for evidence for a hunch she’d had about pre-christian matriarchies and goddess worship, we have to go digging through dirt and rubble, dismantling supremacist stories of how our white institutions determine what is true, excavating animist, land- and season-based ways of life before patriarchal religion took over.

 Not unlike the archetypal witch Baba Yaga teaches us, we have to be initiated into our power by sorting this from that—false stories of national identity from truer, more earth-based ways of finding ourselves/parts of self in our more-than-human kin.

 Not unlike Clarissa Pinkola Estés teaches us about rewilding, we have to re-creature ourselves on this path of re-indigenizing as white Europeans.

These five threads will accompany us throughout the Old Year. They give us a way to stay oriented as we move between historical evidence, ancestral memory, folklore, reconstruction, and contemporary practice. The past doesn't arrive in one clean piece.
 

✓ INHERITED

some things have been handed down

✓ RECONSTRUCTED

some things have been pieced together from fragments

✓ REMEMBERED

some things have survived in odd stories and practices

✓ LOST

some things are simply beyond our reach

✓ CO-CREATED

and then there is the work we do in the present: what we choose to carry forward, transform, and create together

 If you're interested in joining us for The Old Year with Natalie, join the waitlist, and we'll send you our free guide on the origins of the Wheel of the Year!

Natalie teaches and guides from her positioning in the ancestral web, as a woman, healer, herbalist, and alchemist born to and living within Germania’s story.

Enrollment opens October 10