Occult Confessions

In the second part of our discussion, we turn from myth to historical documents and consider what the druids may have been like as a caste. What jobs did they perform in Celtic culture? How did their role inform what it meant to be a Celt? We also discuss modern neo-Druids and how their practices relate to the history.

In an episode recovered from the dustbin of our archive, we invite you to explore with us the strange lore of the Infertile Order and the Myth of the Cheese. Did Hiram Miraalaarn encounter planetary nymphs on his way to Venus? Are the birds to blame for our inability to pair music and lyrics in the Song of Lurm? Find out in today's very special episode.

Druids were a part of ancient celtic culture—a series of kingdoms or empires that stretched through Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Britain, and Gaul—the region of modern France as well as parts of Belgium and Italy. The Celts were distinct in each region but also shared important cultural structures and practices as well as language. Part of the challenge of recovering the druids from the fog of history is that much of their knowledge was kept strictly within an oral tradition. The Celts were by no means illiterate and had a longstanding relationship with written language but they believed, and the druids in particular believed, in memorization. Eventually Celtic tales, history, and practices were recorded by Celts but this was largely after Christianization. Historians then have to rely on the word of outsiders—mostly Romans—to make sense of who the Celts and Druids were in ancient times. But these writers often had a highly skewed view of the Celts since they were their enemies and they sought to conquer and subdue the Celts just as the Celt sought to conquer and subdue them. The Celts, after all, pillaged Rome in 387 BCE and directly threatened the Senate. All that having been said, we can get a pretty interesting if not detailed picture of the Druids by looking at these outsider accounts and the later accounts of Celtic writers. Julius Caesar has been one such source, having written on the Celtic people he encountered during his military exploits. Those accounts reveal a class of people responsible for the intellectual life of one of the most interesting cultures in the history of the Western world. They were poets, historians, judges, and magicians.

We sit down with Ed Crimi, owner of the Vampa Vampire Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and talk about his collection of vampire kits collected from around the world. Crimi also tells us about the room in museum devoted to the Archangel Michael. For more about the museum, visit: https://www.vampamuseum.com.

The Aghoris are a sect who worships Shiva by way of Shakti or the goddess, often in the form of Kali or Tara. They spend their time at the crematorium in the sacred city of Banares or bathing in the cold waters of the Ganges in winter. They strive to overcome aversion by confronting what humans are most averse to beginning with death itself.

How has ancient Gnosticism resurfaced as a new religion in the modern and postmodern world? Rob introduces the path of gnosticism into modern occultism and Rob and Luke interview Paul Joseph Rovelli, founding director of the Gnostic Church of L. V. X., and the church's social media director Joseph DeOliveira.

In modern occultism, Isis is often regarded as a bearer of mysteries and a symbol of feminine power. When Helena Blavatsky invoked her name in the title of her first major work, Isis Unveiled, she sought to reveal the hidden spirituality of the East through an Egyptian lens; a religion that she claimed sat at the heart of all worship and was more true than the bastardized Judeo-Christian practices passed down in the West. Isis has played the role of purveying the secrets of a culture apart to Westerners going all the way back to the Roman empire. The Greeks and Romans were quick to adopt her cult and celebrate her at public festivals and secret initiations. But what was hidden behind the veil of Isis? How much do we know about her cult today?

The Gnostics believed they had access to the truth; the real truth, not the truth that everyone else thinks is the truth. Everyone who's not a Gnostic that is. While there are certain themes that tend to unite Gnostic groups, they were actually quite distinct and widespread across the Christian world in the time of the Church Fathers. Christian Gnostics—who will be our focus although Hermeticists are also sometimes classified as Pagan Gnostics—tended to believe that the Old Testament God or Yahweh was actually a demigod and that the true God was unknowable, existing in an unimaginable realm somewhere in the cosmological beyond. They tended to believe that humans possessed some grain or seed of the godhead within them and they often underwent elaborate astrologically-themed initiations to join their orders. While their particular theology was ultimately defeated and buried by the Catholic Christians, their beliefs informed Christian doctrine. Arguably, the canonical gospel of John was, in fact, a Gnostic text and a Gnostic bishop very nearly became the Pope in Rome. But Gnostics were considered heretics and the men who defined early Christian doctrine wrote bitter attacks against them. Ironically, these attacks became a significant source for contemporary scholars' knowledge of the ancient Gnostics beliefs and practices. Be careful how detailed you are in arguing against your enemies. You may just be preserving their ideas across the ages.

In 2015, a jury found John Jonchuck guilty of murdering his own daughter by throwing her off of a bridge over Tampa Bay. In this special episode, Bri considers the religious ideation and delusions of Jonchuck, including his obsession with a Swedish Bible, and why they did not justify an insanity plea.

Eleusis is a town outside of Athens where the Greeks conducted a secret rite of initiation in honor of the goddess of the earth, Demeter, and her daughter and queen of the underworld, Persephone. The rite may have dated before the Greek Dark Ages, more than a thousand years BCE, and could have had its roots in a still more ancient agrarian cult. Eleusis was known for its special relationship with the spirits of the dead who aided in the prosperity of the grains that grew in the fields outside of the town. Anyone could become an initiate who could speak and understand Greek and pay roughly a month's wages for the cost of a sacrificial pig and the services of priests and guides. In February, the time of the flowers, initiates experienced the lesser mystery in Agrai based on the events surrounding Persephone's death. In September, the time of the sowing of winter crops, masses of pilgrims paraded over a narrow bridge into the sacred town where they experienced the secret vision of the Greater Mystery, an encounter these initiates could never describe to anyone under any circumstances for the rest of their lives.

If you've heard of Dioynsus, you're likely aware of his associations with grapes, wine, and theatre. The famous Theatre Dionysia was the site where some of the ancient world's greatest scripted performances were staged in honor of the god. But what is the connection between wine and theatre? The power of wine to remove inhibitions parallels the power of art to strip away the socialized self to reveal—through the donning of the theatrical mask—the true inner self. Wine and art are a path to unfiltered truth. This, in its purest and most idealistic form is the ideology of the Dionysian mysteries; a cult of drunk, naked, conspiratorial revelers tearing a fully grown bull limb from limb deep in the forests outside the Greek city state.

In this special listener panel, we discuss representations of occultism in television and film and on the internet.

We're going back to the archive for an episode that first posted to patreon in our first year podcasting. This is the first part of three on how rock came to be regarded as the devil's music (to listen to the other two, you'll need to sign up as a patron).

Lilith was the first woman created alongside Adam as his equal before she quarreled with him and flew away, leaving Adam to ask God for a second wife, Eve. Belief in Lilith is based, in part, on midrash or commentary on the gaps and seeming contradictions in the Bible. Genesis says that the first man and woman are created together as equals and then in the story of Eden, it says that God created Eve after Adam by forming her from his rib. Midrash resolves this contradiction by arguing that these are two different women and the first was Lilith. Her legend also stems from stories of ancient demons, shaping contradictions in and around Lilith herself. In our episode on the djinn, we discussed the possibility that Lilith was the mother of that race of non-corporeal beings and in our episode on sex demons, we wondered whether Lilith might be the original succubus. Jewish tradition has long held that Lilith was responsible for childhood illnesses like diptheria but the Zohar also associated her with nocturnal emissions and nightmares. In the twentieth century, she has come to be regarded as a feminist icon and even a goddess in neo-pagan circles.

It is not enough for the 80s child to reflect wistfully on a simpler time. Rather, we often want to revive the mass cultural products of our youth in a way that maintains their appeal despite or perhaps because of the cognitive and hormonal shifts that come with adulthood. 80s children have done a decent job of keeping our favorite popular cultural icons alive through the last forty years—whether as creators or as hungry audience members rewarding corporations for gazing backward. In movies like Barbie, the adult is invited back to childhood in a way that allows them to maintain all the rights, privileges, and preferences of adulthood. This trick was first invented for the 80s kid, for whom popular culture self-consciously eroded the boundary between content for children and adults.

This is part two of our discussion of the ancient serpent seed theory, the idea that Eve had sex with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and conceived one or several children. In this episode we consider more modern ways of reading the serpent seed idea that steer clear of racism. We revisit some old friends including P. B. Randolph and the creators of the Urantia Book and discover new ideas about how the serpent seed might connect with the theory of evolution and extraterrestrials.

What if the serpent didn’t offer Eve an apple when they met in the Garden of Eden? What if, instead, Eve had sex with the serpent, betraying her partner and engendering a race of half-serpent, half-human people? The suggestion may seem bizarre but as a theological theory it’s had a long life and continues to surface in a variety of interpretations of Genesis up to the modern age. It’s difficult for many readers to just let the serpent be. He’s an unusual character in his own right as the only animal who starts a recorded conversation with the humans in the garden and he’s made even stranger for his rebellious nature. The animals in the garden, after all, had not been endowed with the capabilities nor the responsibilities of Adam and yet here comes a reptile acting almost human and inserting himself into the uniquely human problem of the Tree of Knowledge. When the student of mythology adds the many uses of the serpent in the caduceus, the ouroboros, and legends stretching across civilizations and times, it’s difficult not to wonder if Genesis is trying to say more than what’s on the surface with its snake. The fact that the serpent is the most phallic of animals raises the distinct possibility that maybe this secret is somehow sexual.

Perhaps more than any other text, the apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve, also known as The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan or the First and Second Books of Adam and Eve sought to put Christ in the pre-Christian Garden. But its story was too imaginative or perhaps too surreal to qualify for the Christian canon. Satan plagues the first couple following their expulsion from the Garden and God must send his angels over and over again to revive Adam and Eve who have an odd habit of dying from sorrow, water, and darkness.

We tend to think that the story of Adam and Eve only became a problem from the standpoint of believability after Darwin in the mid-nineteenth-century, but, in fact, the strangeness of the story has dogged Christians throughout history. God creates two people and puts them in a garden to eat and have sex and name some animals. He puts two trees in the garden and says they can't eat the fruit off of one of the trees. Then a snake comes by and tells the woman to eat from the tree anyway so she does and the man feels bad and eats the fruit too and God throws them both out of the garden. The story addresses some of the most significant questions in theology but through a mysterious, mythological lens that does not afford the reader any straight answers. Do humans have free will if God is all-knowing? Why do people do evil things to each other? Under what circumstances is sex a moral act? Why do living beings suffer and die? Each of these questions live inside the narrative without a straight response, leaving readers across the millennia to draw their own conclusions.

We received no requests for L. Ron Hubbard, but Rob became fascinated by his role in Jack Parsons' story and decided to do a deep dive on dianetics-inventing, sci-fi-writing religion founder. Resources for this episode include John Atak's "A Piece of Blue Sky" and Bent Corydon's "L. Ron Hubbard: Mystic or Messiah."

Lynn Short was a member of a gnostic group she now describes as a cult. In our interview, Short tells us about how she developed internal sexual and psychological controls that became damaging to live with and how scandals within the organization led her to become an apostate. What are the limits of religious anti-materialism and how does a narrow conception of religion lead to deep spiritual dissatisfaction?

Shea Bile talks about his experience creating occult groups in San Francisco and Belgium and discusses his new book about the intersection between Neitzsche and occultism. How has the German existentialist been misunderstood and how does he illuminate a path for left hand and satanist occultism?

Please allow us to introduce to you the newest podcast from the Alchemical Actors. This is our first full episode and one of two parts about Walt Disney's vision for a city of the future. For more deep dives into the weirder side of popular culture, follow us wherever you're listening to Occult Confessions. Don't see Strange Ride? Let us know.

A few years before the middle of the nineteenth century in Poughkeepsie, New York, a seventeen-year-old boy sat down, closed his eyes, and dictated a book that detailed the formation of the cosmos more than a century before NASA would send out its rovers, laid out a theory of the transmutation of species several years before Darwin would publish his theory of evolution, and advanced a strong and sometimes dismissive criticism of Christianity at a time when Protestantism was a dominant cultural force in America. The book was The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice for Mankind and the young man was Andrew Jackson Davis. Today on Occult Confessions, the mesmeric subject who inspired Edgar Allan Poe and predicted the advent of modern spirit communication, the Poughkeepsie Seer Andrew Jackson Davis.

Eliphas Levi, who left the priesthood to pursue a life in magic, is a seminal figure in the development of nineteenth-century occultism. He carried forward largely forgotten ideas from the Renaissance and brought together the worlds of Kabbalah and Tarot. Many students sought him out and contemporary occultism would not have been the same without his influence.

Ida Craddock was an occult sex reformer who wrote about how married couples could spiritualize their unions, giving them control over pregnancy and the right to choose when they had their children. She claimed that she herself had married a spirit or angel from the non-physical realm and that such unions were common in the history of mysticism and religion. Craddock would be persecuted by notorious moralizer, Anthony Comstock, who would try and fail to purge Craddock’s work from the occult record.

In the second half of our conversation about Rasputin, the infamous magician meets his end. How did Rasputin become such a controversial figure in Russian politics. And how many tries did it take to bring down the notorious starets?

The biography of Grigori Rasputin is hotly contested and frequently disputed. Did he perform supernatural feats? How much influence did he have over the tsar? Was he responsible for the downfall of the Russian monarchy? Drawing on scholars and first hand witnesses to Rasputin’s life, we attempt to cobble together a picture that is as true to the man as possible.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a Luciferian order of German occultists formed to cross the threshold, practice sex magic, and achieve a form of self-deification. Like many occult groups of the same time period, they claimed to have an ancient origin stretching back to ancient Rome by way of a secret quasi-Rosicrucian group who worshiped Wotan during the period of the Renaissance. This was the Brotherhood of Saturn, created by the occult bookshop owner and writer Gregor Gregorius.

Parsons’ occult experimentation became an enormous financial and emotional liability when L. Ron Hubbard ran off with Parsons’ paramour, Betty, and all of Parsons’ savings. In this episode, Parsons attempts to recover his losses, writes a series of sometimes good and sometimes bad magical treatises, and meets his untimely end while mixing chemicals for a Hollywood movie.

Are the Alchemical Actors a “cult that couldn’t cut it” or was Rob’s May 2023 retreat merely a creative exercise in occult hijinks? Judge for yourself on this special episode.

Jack Parsons was one of the world’s first rocket scientists, inventing an early version of the same fuel that was used to carry humans to the moon without ever having earned a formal degree. Parsons was almost entirely self-taught. Obsessive about rockets, he often took great risks in his experimentation with the explosives that would eventually take his life. Parsons was similarly voracious and impetuous in his study of occultism. He fancied himself a black magician, earned Aleister Crowley’s approval and then censure as head of the Ordo Templi Orientis in southern California, and believed he had conjured his second wife through his invocations to the goddess Babalon. He bridged the worlds of science and magick and died suddenly and tragically, leaving the strange spectacle of his life for his admirers and detractors to puzzle through.

Luke is joined by a panel of occult confessions listeners to discuss their experiences at the intersection of sexuality and Christianity. Together, they address whether it's possible to be gay and Christian today.

In this special episode, Rob sits down with Jacob Wheatley, one of our founding alchemical actors, to discuss their experience with conversion therapy as a gay teenager growing up in a Christian household. Jacob's story reveals the pain caused by these methods and Jacob tells us how they convinced their conversion therapist that conversion therapy doesn't work.

Charles Leadbetter was one of the Blavatsky-trained second generation of theosophists and a frequent collaborator with Annie Besant. Leadbetter believed in reincarnation and his ability to recall past lives including an experience meeting Pythagoras in 504 BCE. Leadbetter claimed to have spent the next two-thousand-three-hundred years since meeting Pythagoras in the “heaven world” before being incarnated back on earth. While born without any memory of the heaven world, the lessons he learned there slowly returned to him, including recollecting a house where he'd resided in a previous life, revealed to him by one of the Masters. These lessons led him to the Anglican priesthood, and, ultimately to a leading role in developing a theosophical and allegorical occult interpretation of Christianity.

Heaven or Havona exists at the center of a collection of super universes within one of which our universe and our planet are found. So says the Urantia Book, channeled by an anonymous source and compiled by a committee calling itself the Forum. At its heart, the book is a reinterpretation of Christianity through a space age lens with creator gods incarnating on various planets throughout the universes they construct. According to Urantian doctrine, Jesus of Nazareth was the seventh bestowal or incarnation of our creator, Christ Michael. He offered humanity the fourth of five revelations with the Urantia Book being the final epochal revelation. Resources for today’s episode include Martin Gardner’s Urantia: the Great Cult Mystery.

In 1876, Anna Kingsford began to have visions and psychic impressions of her past lives which became the basis for the spiritual and theosophical books that were to follow. Edward Maitland, who would be her confederate in these endeavors, was practicing a form of meditation that involved tracing his ideas back to their origin at the core of his consciousness.In summer 1881, Kingsford gave a series of lectures in London on religion and occultism which came to be called her “Perfect Way” lectures and formed the basis for a powerful articulation of Christian-themed occultism.

Anna Bonus Kingsford was at the center of one of the biggest controversies in the Theosophical Society during Helena Blavatsky's lifetime. Arguing that Christian occultism was more accessible to a Western audience than the Hindu and Buddhist version Blavatsky had come to prefer, she threatened to split the London Lodge in half. To hold things together literally and figuratively, Blavatsky and Olcott had to make an emergency visit back from Adyar, India to London to quell the conflict brewing among London's theosophists—some of the most influential theosophists of the nineteenth century. Advocate for vegetarianism, enemy of scientists who performed experiments on live animals, and one of the most visionary Christian occultists of the occult revival; Anna Kingsford is a woman you may not have known about but she very much deserves the opportunity to share her occult confession with you.

John Paul II was the second-longest reigning Pope in Catholic history and spent a lot of time writing and thinking about sex and marriage for a Pope. We consider the prohibition of contraceptives, the meaning of masturbation, and the Catholic Church's preoccupation with adult entertainment.

Christian Sex Writers are an eclectic bunch from conservatives to liberals to doctors who fill you in on the birds and the bees while you wait for your blood test results. What are the Biblical sources for Christian sexual ethics, and are they consistent? Are Christian attitudes toward sex necessarily in opposition to the dominant views of Western culture? How can Christians reconcile God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” while trying to do what the celibate Jesus would do?

Brett Warren brings a forensic approach to the bodies of historical vampires. Brett brings a historian’s curiosity to the project–translating eighteenth-century texts and tracing the origins of the word “vampire.” How can modern medical science help us to better understand the cadavers excavated and eviscerated after their previous owners were accused of being vampires? To support Brett’s work visit: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcanearchive/the-historic-vampire-debate

Paschal Beverly Randolph was a pioneer of American occultism. He began his career as a medium before branching out with his own occult philosophy involving Rosicrucianism and sex magic. The African American Randolph studied medicine and was also involved in efforts to educate recently liberated slaves in the southern United States. Randolph expressed his technique and ideology in fictional novels as well as non-fiction manuals. A tragic figure, he died young, shot in the head in an apparent suicide.

From the New Thought Movement of the 1880s to Charles Fillmore’s Depression-Era preaching to Joel Osteen’s megachurch, the notion that spiritual effort can yield material rewards has been a popular one for both New Age and Christian believers. The Prosperity Gospel asks that believers trust God and credit God for their own successes, but remind believers to work at the things they want. It preaches that money and material wealth aren’t evil and conveniently overlooks Jesus’s own poverty and teachings against the rich who have only the narrowest chance of getting into the kingdom of heaven. It is a doctrine that is full of paradoxes and omissions but it remains one of the most popular elements of megachurch Christianity on the market.

Anna Milon joins us to discuss her ethnographic research into the way religions are imported, created, and developed within Live Action Roleplaying. Do players bring their own religious convictions into the characters they play? What are the places where belief and fantasy overlap? Are there taboos players observe even though they’re acting our a fictional scenario? As both a player and a researcher, Milon gives us insight into the strange and fascinating intricacies of religious LARPing.

Theonomy, Dominionism, and Calvinist Reconstructionism are all different names for the same idea: that the world would be better off it it operated according to a Christian Theocracy. In this episode Rob tackles the ideas of one of the more sober and influential theorists of this perspective, Gregory Bahnsen. Are ethics based on reason rather than belief in God’s law necessarily arbitrary? Did Jesus call on Christians to follow the whole of the Law or only some of the laws? And should Christians make non-Christian follow their laws?

A mad scientist plots, fanatics roam and rant, monsters loom. This Halloween, the Alchemical Actors joined Rob’s college students to create a unique storytelling experience in a couple of acres of corn. In this special episode, Rob gives you a glimpse behind the scenes and Savannah takes you into the field to explore our harvest horror.

Recent United States Supreme Court decisions on the questions of abortion rights and prayer in public school have suggested to many observers that the Court is following a theocratic Christian paradigm in passing its verdicts. The Christian Right’s involvement in politics has been a staple of twentieth-century American society and has been championed by Billy Graham in his magazine Christianity Today, Jerry Falwell with his Moral Majority, and Pat Robertson in his presidential campaigns. At its worst, the Christian Right helped to prop up a genocidal dictator in Guatemala and at its most effective it has made significant changes to American law. How have evangelicals shaped conservatism and what can that tell us about their impact on contemporary politics?

America’s white supremacist Christian Identity churches preach the abhorrent doctrine that non-white races are the descendants of Cain, birthed through a satanic tryst between Eve and the devil. Christian Identity unites the strange principles of British Israelism in the United Kingdom–which held that the British people were a lost tribe of Isreal–with American Klan and Neo-Nazi ideology. We trace the pernicious origins and results of these ideas and consider why these ideas have been so destructive to western culture.

Savitri Devi, a French-born Greek citizen, took on an Indian name and envisioned the second coming of Adolf Hitler. The Chilean occultist Miguel Serrano sought to create “esoteric Hitlerism” as an archetype of the unconscious and believed that Hitler had survived the Second World War and lived in a secret bunker in Antarctica. Inspired by Devi and Serrano, Wotansvolk established a racist, communal Norse occultism that they brought to prisons across the United States to win converts. The Neo-Nazi occult is offensive and terrifying, but we dare not turn away lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.

Malcolm X was tracked by the FBI since before he converted to Islam. Even after he died his viewing and funeral were both visited with bomb threats. He was widely regarded by people both inside and outside of his community of believers as a dangerous man. But Malcolm X did not carry weapons, he directed no army, and on the day he was assassinated he asked his bodyguards to leave their guns at home. What made Malcolm X dangerous was the revolutionary nature of his speech, the power of his thought, his evolving religious conviction, and his deep commitment to the liberation of black people the world over.

Rob and Luke are joined by Judas and Magnolia, husband and wife magicians with a research interest in Harry Houdini. Following the death of his mother, Houdini became interested in making contact with the spirits of the dead but was disillusioned by the stage illusions he witnessed popular mediums perform for their audiences. Even Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife couldn’t change his mind about the truth of spirit communication. But he remained obsessed with the topic and performed his own seances right up to the end of his life. For more information on Judas and Magnolia, visit their website: www.judasandmagnolia.com.

On April 25, 1999 between ten and sixteen thousand Falun Gong believers, clutching the little blue book of Li Hongzing, gathered outside the Chinese Communist Party's headquarters in Beijing. They stayed from dawn until well after sunset for what was the largest public protest in China since the 1989 democracy movement that resulted in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. For Chinese authorities, Falun Gong or Law Wheel Cultivation was a dangerous “devil cult” worthy of persecution decreed from the very top of the government and party structure. But what was it about this seemingly harmless belief system that the CCP found so threatening?

Panic struck the Tokyo subway on 20 March 1995. Men boarded subway cars with plastic bags and umbrellas, removed the newspaper covering the bags, and punctured them with the sharp tips of the umbrellas releasing sarin gas, a biogological weapon first developed by the Nazis during World War Two, into the underground. Eight of eleven bags were broken open and leaked 159 ounces of liquid sarin onto the cars as they hurtled through the subway system. Twelve people were killed, 1,039 were injured, and 4,460 went the hospital reporting symptoms of exposure. The men were members of Aum Shinkrikyo, a religious organization founded by Shoko Asahara in 1987, and were hoping to spark an armageddon—namely war between Japan and the United States—according to their guru's designs.

Brainwashing has long been used to account for why otherwise reasonable people join religious groups deemed strange or aberrant from the standpoint of mainstream society. In the nineteenth century, Mormons were accused of mesmerizing people into joining them. In the 1970s, parents in the anti-cult movement abducted their own adult children and subjected them to forced “de-programming.” Today, the narrative of an individual or group being “brainwashed” by a charismatic leader persists. But is it possible to fundamentally alter a person’s beliefs despite their own better judgment?

For centuries, there was one primary saint Mexicans turned to for protection: the Virgin of Guadalupe. Then, beginning in the 1990s, the popularity of a new saint began to take hold: the skeletal Santa Muerte or Saint Death. The Catholic Virgin of Guadalupe overlapped with an ancient Aztec goddess in ways that blurred the boundary between Christianity and paganism. Similarly, Santa Muerte emerged as a liminal and uncertain figure on the edges of Mexican spirituality.

In January 1692, Village minister Samuel Parris's Indian slave, Tituba, reported seeing his nine-year-old daughter, Betty, and eleven-year-old niece, Abigail, acting strangely. Parris was fully invested in the notion of a satanic conspiracy and beat Tituba to get her to confess to witchcraft. It's likely that much of what the magistrates drew out of Tituba in court can be traced back to Parris. Although Salem hung many for witches in the witch trials, Tituba managed to save herself by cleverly talking around her judges’ expectations.

The celebration of Columbus day had started among Italian Americans in San Francisco and became a national holiday in 1937. Recently, indigenous people and their allies have requested changing the celebration of Columbus Day to the celebration of Indigenous Peoples' Day. While this is, in part, an effort to recognize the place of Native people in America's history and culture, it is also a reaction against Columbus who, detractors say, does not deserve his own holiday. For them, Columbus is a villain. Certainly, Columbus played a central role in the Christianization of the Americas, specifically the Caribbean. His example inspired countless European explorers to cross the Atlantic and initiate ambitious programs of colonization which ultimately decimated native populations. But is the villainization of Columbus based on the fact that he set an example for explorers to follow or crimes committed by the man himself against the Caribbean's indigenous people?

The legend of the witch that spread during the three centuries of witch hunting and lasted through the Renaissance began with the devil. A woman or man (but usually a woman) who was down on their luck would suddenly find themselves in the company of the Prince of Darkness. Great gatherings of witches would take place on a sabbat and witches had to travel great distances to reach it, flying on a ram, goat, pig, ox, black horse, stick, shovel, spit, or the iconic broomstick. Witches who missed the service or didn't do enough mean magical stuff in the time between sabbats were whipped for their transgression, suggesting the degree to which the witch was simply an inverted mirror image of the strictly controlled religious life of Renaissance Christianity.

When we think of crusades, images of the Knights Templar riding into battle against their Islamic foes in the Holy Land spring to mind. But there was another medieval crusade against non-believers, in this case pagans, held in Scandinavia in the same time period. How did the Church arrive at the conclusion that it had no choice but to forcibly convert these Baltic heathens? Some monarchs were anxious to convert for the political advantage it gave them, but others like the Swedish Queen Sigrid the Haughty preferred a slap in the face to Christianity.

In the first millennium, Pope Gregory the Great understood humanity to be blind, cold, and lost since the fall of Adam, drawn to materialism and false gods and religions. With humility, humans who subjected themselves to God's divine will and grace could learn to live righteously and channel God's higher purposes to their fellow human beings. Gregory's vision of history was one of the species' gradual movement closer to god. The three stages of our collective spiritual development were paganism then Judaism and finally Christianity. Some of the tribes he endeavored to convert came easily. Others not so easily.

Constantine was the first Christian emperor of Rome and established Christianity as a state religion for the first time. Constantine certainly knew about Christianity and was already well on his way to a conversion for personal and political reasons before ascending to the throne. He was a fan of the Christians and saw value in aligning his reign with their God. But his concept of the Christian God may have been based, at least in part, on the Syrain worship of a rock that fell out of the sky.

Was Paul McCartney replaced by a doppelganger in 1968? Was Britney Spears replaced by a clone in 1998 or Eminem in 2006? Conspiracy theorists suggest the existence of underground military laboratories where governments and corporations produce clones for various uses, including, apparently, pop music. Have some celebrities been replaced by secret clones? Could you be replaced by your own clone? Find out in this episode.

Nikolai Gogol, considered one of the greatest writers in Russian literature, was born in Ukraine and wrote his first set of stories based on Ukrainian folklore. In this episode, we explore Gogol's witches and demons and discover a treasure trove of Ukrainian folk beliefs along the way. Please donate to https://www.pah.org.pl/en/

The cosmic and quantum worlds are full of mysteries. It's possible that our universe is, in fact, part of a vast multiverse stretching into unknown spaces and times. It's also possible that our universe is one of uncountable universes occupying the exact same space. In this episode, we dip our toes back into the weird overlapping worlds of the quantum and the cosmic in search of parallel universes.

Is it possible to take a photograph of the soul? While modern observers often laugh at the so-called spirit photographs taken by William Mumler or the Crewe Circle of William Hope, it is harder to scoff in the face of kerlian photographs of human auras, first discovered by Baron Karl von Reichenbach. Still more challenging are the claims made by French doctor Hippolyte Baraduc who photographed his wife’s spirit as she died.

In 1886, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore collected and edited over a thousand pages of cases of encounters with these phantoms. As a person was dying or about to get into a carriage accident, suddenly they would appear to a friend the next house over or maybe a thousand miles away. Stories of these phantasmic encounters were carefully researched and verified as far as the authors were able, and when verification was incomplete or impossible they noted it before sharing the narrative. To rule out the problem of misremembering or suggested memory, they sought out witnesses to these experiences; people who heard the tale when it first happened. They consulted calendars and retrieved death records and newspaper reports of accidents to verify details. Taken together, the hundreds of reports they received assumed a substantial weight as evidence for a phenomenon that science has chosen to ignore ever since.

The tulpa has become a staple of Western popular culture and has even taken a role in New Age occultism through the practice of tulpamancers. Tulpas play a prominent role in David Lynch's Twin Peaks series, appear in the X-Files, and bronies—adult male fans of My Little Pony—have even conjured their own little pony tulpas. The Western tulpa is a kind of imaginary friend brought to life. If it gathers enough of its creator's energy, the creature can, like a golem, take on a life of its own. Much of this tulpa mysticism is a recent invention, borrowing from theosophy, chaos magic, and esoteric buddhism. Traditionally, the tulpa has been attributed to Tibetan Buddhists. It's true that Tibetans, drawing on earlier Indian texts, have a concept for a mind-made body or emanation but their practice and theology do not come anywhere near what the bronies and their fellow tulpamancers have been up to. In this episode, we try and make sense of the tangled history of the tulpa.

Rob is joined by our resident pandemic expert Dr. Matt Hatkoff to discuss recent developments surrounding CoVID and the Omicron variant.

Percy Byshe Shelley was a haunted man. He saw a man who looked just like him walking on the terrace and the man asked how much longer Shelley meant to be content. Days later, he stood screaming over Mary in the middle of the night about a vision of the sea rising into the house. He saw his doppelganger again standing beside Mary and strangling her. Interestingly, Jane Williams—who was staying with the Shelleys along with her husband, Edward—also reported seeing Shelley's double walking past her window and disappearing around a dead end. Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffman, and the psychologist Otto Rank all shared Shelley’s curiosity with the doppelganger. Do we all have doubles, and, if so, what does it mean for us to come across them?

Rob and Luke are joined by two Independent Catholic priests, Siobhan Houston and John Mabry. They discuss what it means to be a Catholic outside the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and how independent Catholicism has incorporated Gnosticism, Theosophy, and Eastern traditions into its rituals and practices.

Wilhelm Reich was a student of Sigmund Freud's who went on to develop views on human sexuality—views that questioned prohibitions against contraception and sex education and wondered over the longterm sustainability of monogamous relationships—that scandalized society. He escaped the Nazis and fled to America only to be imprisoned by the FBI, hounded by Immigration services, and ultimately persecuted by the Food and Drug Administration for his vitalist theories on the existence of an ether-like substance called orgone which penetrated the universe and, according to Reich, could be accumulated to heal even the most deadly of diseases. In this episode, we elicit that occult or rather fringe scientific confession of Dr. Wilhelm Reich.

Is the root of all religions the worship of penises and vaginas? Nineteenth-century writer and Rosicrucian-enthusiast Hargrave Jennings thought so. He said that the worship of the reproductive powers is prehistoric and at the secret origin of all of the world's religions. Eggs and palm fronds at Easter, the Hindu lingam, pagan and Judaic pillars, the Ark of the Covenant, and the cross itself are all signs of the cult of the yoni and phallus.

On 25 July 1755, Giacomo Casanova—arguably the most famous libertine in Western history—was arrested for possession of illicit literature. Among the books authorities confiscated from his house were the Key of Solomon, the Zohar, and the devil-conjuring Picatrix. Early in his life, Casanova had attempted to enter the priesthood and he knew enough of Kabbalah to convince a senator and three of his occult-inclined friends that he possessed a secret numerological formula. And yet, in his autobiography, Casanova professed disdain for magical thinkers of all kinds, iterating at every opportunity the Enlightenment credo that one must only trust reason in answering life's many questions and quandaries. How can a man be both a magician and a disbeliever in magic?

The exciting conclusion of Church Secrets conflict with the Girl with the Crab Shell Tattoo featuring segments from Borderline Crime, Woah Drama, Sunrise Wellness, Get it Girl, and Church Secrets.

Some scholars who think about the history of Christendom link the notion that sex is sinful or dangerous for the soul to the fact that almost all Christian religious leaders in Europe from about the fifth century until the Reformation were celibate or at least paid lip service to practicing celibacy. If sex is good, why wouldn't priests allow themselves to marry and procreate? There must be something uniquely holy about depriving onself of sex which then implies that there must be something sinful or degrading about sex. The question of how and why we got the idea that priests should be celibate is not a minor one. It echoes across the culture and informs the way we think about sex across the Western world straight up to the present day.

We pick up our discussion of tantra by following it across the ocean from India to America. American tantra came to focus specifically on sex. It inspired the founders of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which would go on to become a home for Aleister Crowley, Pierre Bernard’s various tantric yoga and healing orders and schools, and the Wiccan pioneers Gavin and Yvonne Frost. Tantra also became a direct import with Tibetan and Indian gurus fleeing oppression or prosecution to start over in America.

Geoffrey Samuel loosely defines tantra as the ritual practices and tradition, within both Buddhist and Hindu Saiva sources, “that present themselves as sophisticated and elevated means for the attainment of exalted spiritual goals, yet contain constant reference to practices that seem deliberately transgressive and bizarre.” These include orgies at crematoriums, cannibalism, creating instruments out of human body parts, and having sex on top of corpses. Historically, tantric practices were associated most closely with the cults of the Goddess, a singular and powerful divine feminine force who emanates many faces and forms. We try to get a birds-eye view of the long history of Tantra from ancient India to twenty-first century America.

Rob is joined by prison psychologists Dr. David Morelos and Dr. Jessica Micono of the Psychology After Dark podcast. They talk about what psychologists consider fringe today, when a belief becomes pathological, the place of parapsychology in modern psychology, and how new approaches to consciousness might revolutionize the field.

Rob and the gang are back with the second season of their semi-fictional occult exploration: The Dark Pool. This season, an esoteric grimoire provides the blueprint for a journey into another dimension. Listen wherever you get Occult Confessions.

In this episode, Rob is joined by Daniel Walker and Simone Lasher of San Francisco's Satanic Bay Area and the Black Mass Appeal Podcast. They talk about the meaning of satan through history and why conspiracy theorists have chosen satan as the mascot for their so-called liberal elite. Why is satan associated with liberal ideals? Is satan necessarily anti-conservative?

On the night of tuesday, January 3rd of 1804, 29 year old excise officer Francis Smith came face to face with the ghost and in an act of justice, shot down the white figure in the dead of night, determined to free Hammersmith from the ghost’s reign of terror once and for all. What Smith didn’t realize was that he didn’t kill the ghost at all, but instead killed 32 year old bricklayer Thomas Millwood. This resulted in a murder trial that would set a legal precedent in the UK involving self-defense that remained unsettled for almost two hundred years.

In the 1990s, former footballer (or soccer baller for us Americans) and sportscaster David Icke made waves with his wild conspiracy theory that the planet was under the control of a nefarious group of reptilian shapeshifters. Olivia was a longtime fan of Icke's theory but current events public and personal have prompted a change of heart. Find out why in our reptilian redux.

Robert E. Howard's “The Shadow Kingdom” sits at the nexus of two realms of occult lore: the canon revolving around an Atlantean Root Race established by Helena Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine in the late 1880s and the reptilian conspiracy theory most closely identified with former sportscaster David Icke. The Shadow Kingdom tells the story of an Atlantean warrior, Kull, who becomes a Valusian king. The ambassador Ka-nu reveals a secret plot of shape-shifting serpent men hiding in Kull's own palace and the blunt warrior king swings into action in opposition to the conspiracy which reaches a terrible climax in the cursed chamber of a king murdered a thousand years before. Although “The Shadow Kingdom” is a work of fiction—in fact, it is arguably the earliest example of the “Sword and Sorcery” fantasy genre most popularly associated with Tolkein's Lord of the Rings—it both drew on and introduced elements into occult and conspiracy lore that have been accepted by believers as absolute truth.

For fifty years, most people believed the Necronomicon, an ancient grimoire written by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazrad in the year 700, was imaginary. That is, until a writer using only the name Simon published what he claimed to be a translation of the text in 1977. How could a book of spells meant to invoke interdimensional space deities or raise otherworldly destructors from the depths of the sea, based on a complex mythos that seemed to have been the invention of a small circle of weird fiction writers led by H. P. Lovecraft, have any basis in reality. If there really was a Necronomicon written in 700, how did Lovecraft know about it? And if there wasn't, why would Simon claim that the book was an authentic translation of a real ancient grimoire?

For hundreds of years, Americans have speculated about the origins of ancient burial mounds scattered across North America. Rob is joined by Miranda Yancey of the Illinois State Museum to consider who created these mounds. Speculations have run wild and come to include a lost tribe of Israel, Vikings, Freemasons, and a mythic race of giants. How did European Americans use these false legends to justify the colonization of the Americas, and what is the truth behind America’s ancient burial mounds?

Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats believed that Ireland’s freedom depended in part on overthrowing Christianity, the religion of the oppressor, in favor of a pagan mindset. A longtime member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats incorporated occult themes into much of his work. In 1925, he published A Vision, inspired by his wife’s automatic writing in which he articulated his own supernatural theory.

In 1857, a full-throated defense of hermetic philosophy and medieval and renaissance alchemy came from an unexpected source: major general Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a veteran of two wars who served as chairman of the war board during the American Civil War. Writing almost a century before Jung's psychological interpretation of alchemy, Hitchock argued that the mistake alchemy's nineteenth-century critics made was to read the alchemists' detailed treatises literally. In fact, legitimate alchemical literature was meant to be read as an allegory for the elevation of the soul. What did Hitchcock know of the hermetic mystery that his contemporaries failed to grasp?

The house where Lizzie Borden's father and step-mother were brutally murdered with an ax (or hatchet) is under new ownership. Rob discusses ghost tourism, paranormal phenomena, and the strange history of the house with Azure Hall of US Ghost Adventures.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is one of the most important figures in Victorian occultism who you've probably never heard of, in part because Lord Lytton was a man before his time. He was likely a practicing occultist who invented the occult novel with his book, Zanoni. The concepts of the “dweller on the threshold” as well as the magical power of “vril,” an occult energy like astral fluid or akasa can both be attributed to Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. He also predicted the cataclysmic impact of nuclear power and eugenics on civilization.

The pizzagate and Qanon conspiracies are the offspring of legends of ritual abuse propagated during the 1980s and 1990s as part of what's come to be called the Satanic Panic. The myth of a secret group of powerful people abusing children goes back millennia but recent themes of elite manipulation and mind control date to the 1970s. In this episode, we complete our history of the false legends of ritual abuse by bringing them up to 2021.

Almost immediately after the second world war, the American military initiated a program to collect the Nazis' most promising scientists and bring them to the US in a form of intellectual and technological reparations. Anxious to best the USSR, which was also recruiting among Nazi scientists, the Americans often turned a blind eye to some of the darker atrocities some of these researchers had been implicated in. The Americans and the British adopted rocket scientists, chemists, and, perhaps most controversially bio-medical researchers. The severe ethical compromises required to claim these so-called reparations from the Germans bred a host of conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most bizarre theory, which gained traction among therapists who believed in a pandemic of Satanic Ritual Abuse, was the legend of Dr. Green. According to believers, Green worked for the CIA in developing the prototype for their mind control program.

In the 1940s, Candy Jones was a successful model and performed in the South Pacific with the USO in a show that had been written for her. In the 1970s, she married New York midnight radio host Long John Nebel. When she had trouble sleeping, he volunteered to help her by trying out hypnosis. While hypnotized, Jones began to tell an incredible story of being mind controlled by a doctor in Oakland, California and performing covert operations, possibly for the CIA.

The Lakota chiefs gathered at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and each spoke their piece about whether or not to send a delegation West to Nevada to meet the messiah. They decided a delegation would go out in late summer or fall 1889 under the leadership of Good Thunder. In 1890, the official delegation return with the opinion that the messiah had, in fact, arrived. Short Bull, who had fought with Sitting Bull in the War of 1876, and Kicking Bear were among this delegation and would go on to lead the Ghost Dance Religion among the Lakota. They both opposed the reforms visited on the Lakota by the US government after Sitting Bull's defeat.

In 1980, Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder, published a book that would shape the culture of the decade to come, lasting into the 1990s. Billed as “the true story of a year-long contest between innocence and Evil,” the book recounted lurid memories of abuse that Michelle had recovered in therapy with Dr. Pazder. Going into a trance-like state, Smith discovered that she had been the victim of systematic abuse at the hands of a satanic group in Victoria, Canada. After bringing her to an orgy, her mother gave her away to the cult. The cult tortured her in an open grave, forced her to live in a cage, slaughtered kittens and mutilated dead infants in her presence. If all of this seems to be too much to accept that’s because there’s a very strong argument to be made that, while Smith and Pazder may have believed every word of Smith’s tale, most if not all of it had been imagined.

Who is the girl at the pizza emporium and what's the deal with the tattoo on the back of her neck? James visits "Church Secrets" and Olivia and Bri visit "Get It, Gurlll" on this very special episode.

In 1972, Ed Sanders published one of the earliest investigative accounts of the Manson family in his book "The Family." Sanders argued that the Manson family's murders were part of a pattern of ritual evil that Manson learned from the Process Church of the Final Judgement as well as the Solar Temple of the O. T. O. Both groups successfully sued to have their names removed from subsequent printings of the book. In this episode, we explore the myth that Charles Manson was a New Age Satanist.

The second part of our story of the black mass begins with Renaissance and Victorian tales of the witches' sabbath complete with human sacrifice and sex in the woods. We bring our narrative full circle by ending with the anti-Catholic false confession of Maria Monk, who claimed to experience ritual abuse at a nunnery in Montreal.

In the ancient and medieval world, early Christians, Gnostics, medieval Waldensians and Fraticelli, and European Jews were accused of participating in acts of ritual evil including child murder and illicit sex. The first of our two-part series on the black mass tackles early instances of the false legend of satanic abuse.

Rob is joined by microbiologist Dr. Matt Hatkoff and PhD candidate Bryan Delius, whose research focuses on the intersection of disease and environmental change. Together, they discuss CoVID vaccination, the spread of disease from animals to humans, the global impact of human population growth, and the likelihood of another pandemic in our lifetimes.