About Jenn Campus

I’m Jenn Campus—an anthropologist, writer, mythologist, language enthusist,practicing animist, and devoted student of the Old Ways.

My work lives at the meeting place of scholarship and spirit.

As a scribe of the Old Ones, I listen for the stories carried by land, food, ritual, memory, and the unseen world. I translate those threads into writing that awakens the imagination and invites us into deeper relationship—with our ancestors, our communities, the more-than-human world, and ourselves.

As an anthropologist, I bring those experiences into conversation with folklore, history, traditional foodways, cultural memory, and the ways people have created meaning across time. From there, I shape practical frameworks, seasonal practices, rituals, and traditions that can be lived now.

I’m not interested in recreating the past or pretending our ancestors lived in a perfect world.

I AM interested in what they understood about relationship.

How food can become reciprocity.

How land can become kin.

How traditions can hold communities together.

How myth can help us remember who we are.

My work is rooted in the belief that the Old Ways are not the destination. They are the map back to relationship—and a way of remembering how much we already belong.

I now live with my husband and our two neurodivergent children on the ancient island of Sardinia. Life here, in my husband’s homeland, continues to deepen my understanding of language, village life, seasonal rhythm, cultural inheritance, and the slow work of becoming rooted in place.

Motherhood shapes everything I create. Raising two children with distinct ways of experiencing the world has taught me to look beyond conformity and toward inheritance, temperament, ancestral gifts, and the many forms human intelligence can take. It has also made the work of creating meaningful family traditions feel especially urgent.

Everything I make—books, essays, seasonal guides, sacred food booklets, rituals, classes, podcasts, and community gatherings—is intended to help bring the Old Ways back into ordinary life.

 

BACKGROUND & EXPERIENCE

I’m a two-time bestselling author with a degree in Anthropology and Indigenous/Native American Studies from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

For more than three decades, I have studied folklore, mythology, ancestral traditions, traditional foodways, cultural memory, ritual, and the ways communities preserve knowledge across generations.

My spiritual training and practice include ongoing study of Seiðr, ancestral lineage healing and repair, the esoteric arts, and initiation in the Third Road tradition. These paths have shaped my understanding of life as a relationship between the seen and unseen worlds, and taught me to approach ancestral and spiritual work with reverence, discernment, and responsibility.

I also studied Culinary Arts at Sterling College in Craftsbury, Vermont. I have taught cooking to both children and adults, developed a program helping Vermont WIC participants make fuller use of their food benefits, and worked within Farm to Food initiatives.

For more than a decade, I participated in food sovereignty, farm-to-table, and GMO-labeling activism. That work taught me that food is never simply fuel. It is culture, memory, politics, nourishment, hospitality, and relationship made visible.

My husband and I spent nearly ten years renovating and tending a homestead in Vermont, where we grew food and herbs, raised animals, and developed practical skills rooted in self-reliance and seasonal life. I have worked with herbs and created home remedies since the early 1990s.

I have lived in Italy, Norway, Belgium, Vermont, and on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. Each place has shaped the way I understand land, identity, migration, cultural continuity, and belonging.

Together, these experiences form the foundation of Old Ways for Modern Days.

Through the Four Ancestral Keys—Food, Land, Tradition, and Myth—I help people reinterpret ordinary life through an ancestral lens, repair the relationships modern life has fractured, and remember how much they already belong.

Click here to read about the Four Ancestral Keys & Old Ways for Modern Days>>