A Print Magazine for the Goddess: Inside Thunder Perfect Mind

A new print magazine devoted to the Goddess cost $80,000 to produce and ships 3,000 copies of its first issue. Thunder Perfect Mind, founded by former Rolling Stone contributor Cassady Rosenblum, 35, bills itself as a "magazine-shaped altar" to what its manifesto calls "the intelligent, pulsing power of life itself."

The origin story is unprintable in most magazines. In 2022, Rosenblum reported in Utah for Rolling Stone on former Mormons using psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in "magic mushrooms") as a sacrament. She joined an all-women's mushroom ceremony. The Goddess appeared, she says, "gorgeous, and terrifying, like a multiheaded dragon who could birth a planet or destroy a galaxy, simply by licking her numerous lips." Before that night, Rosenblum called herself an atheist. "I thought spirituality was really for weak-minded people," she admits. "It was all a Santa Claus bedtime story." Afterward, her life "swerved."

What did she see?

The Mother of All Creation showed her three visions: "babies being born," then sprouting seeds and plants, then rivers and waterfalls. "I was made to understand that she is the dynamic energy that animates the universe," Rosenblum says. Her takeaway was blunt: "This is who the patriarchy has been afraid of this whole time." She now calls herself "a small part of a several-millennia batton pass" — a baton pass, that is.

A week after the ceremony, the Church of Latter-Day Saints issued a proclamation banning prayers to the Heavenly Mother, redacting a Book of Mormon line LDS women had "clung to for centuries." Rosenblum calls the timing "outrageous synchronicity."

Is she alone in this?

Not quite. After studying international relations at Wellesley College and journalism at UC Berkeley, Rosenblum collected "dozens and dozens" of accounts from people who met the divine as a woman after psychedelic experiences. One is Massachusetts police lieutenant Sarko Gergerian, who told a Santa Fe psychedelic conference that mushrooms, taken for PTSD, showed him Gaia in chains. A Johns Hopkins study found religious leaders who took mushrooms often reported the divine as feminine. "This isn't my personal little observation," Rosenblum says. "I'm just the one that's planting a flag of significance."

The inaugural issue covers that Hopkins study and includes "Trip Report," an interview with Muslim chaplain Sughra Ahmed about seeing the womb as God. Science journalist C.A. Blackledge chronicles anasyrma, the ancient Greek practice of women repelling rapists and invading armies with vulvar displays — "like a golden umbilical cord stretching back through time." An interview with Peruvian Indigenous scientist Rosa Vásquez Espinoza covers her work winning legal rights for Amazonian stingless bees.

Who is buying it?

Readers skew roughly 60/40 women to men through publisher Ayin Press, and the biggest launch donors were men. The design comes from creative director Ekin Balcıoğlu and designer Cem Eskinazi. Funding came via Kickstarter and private donations. Rosenblum knows the optics of launching print in 2026. "A lot of people have thought that I'm delusional," she laughs. "Everywhere I've gotten in life is zigging to the zag."

The title comes from "The Thunder, Perfect Mind," a Gnostic poem found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, voiced by a feminine divine: "I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one." That "perfect mind," she says, is "not our ego mind" — it's the intelligence artists channel when small enough to be a "hollow bone."