Magus in the Media

What does nearly fifty years of practicing magick reveal about spirits, the Great Work, and what it means to live a magical life?

In this episode of Magus in the Media, I'm joined by David Rankine, ceremonial magician, researcher, and author of The Grimoire Encyclopaedia, for a conversation that goes beyond the grimoires. 

We explore his lifelong journey through ceremonial magic, spirit conjuration, the magical worldview, imagination, and embodiment. We also discuss the importance of ethics and service, our relationship with the living world, and the challenges of AI and modern technology.

At the heart of it all is a simple question: How do we bring magick out of the ritual chamber and into everyday life?

Explore David's work: https://www.davidrankine.com/

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This is Magus in the Media.

Welcome to Magus in the Media.

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Can music become a modern mystery school? In this conversation, I'm joined by Frater R∴C∴ of the Hermetic Podcast to explore the life, music, and esoteric influences of Reverend Maynard James Keenan, the voice behind Tool, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer.

We dive into the relationship between music and magic, the role of the bard, sacred geometry, Drunvalo Melchizedek, the Merkaba, Hermeticism, and the Golden Dawn. Along the way, we explore initiation, psychedelic experiences, spiritual transformation, and how art can change the way we understand ourselves and the world.

It's a wide-ranging conversation filled with personal stories, humor, mythology, and the possibility that music itself can become a path toward greater self-knowledge. 

Explore Frater R∴C∴'s work:
Hermetic Podcast: https://hermeticpodcast.com 
Arcane Research Society: https://arcaneresearchsociety.com 

If you enjoy conversations exploring mythology, philosophy, magic, and the stories that shape our lives, subscribe to Magus in the Media and join the conversation.

Welcome to Magus in the Media.

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In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. Ian C. Edwards to explore the meeting point between occult philosophy, continental thought, depth psychology, and lived magical experience.

We move through Crowley, Heidegger, Austin Osman Spare, Andrew Chumbley, being and non-being, the abyss, True Will, embodiment, sovereignty, and what it might mean to understand magick not simply as ritual, but as a way of perceiving and becoming in the world.

A deep conversation on philosophy, psychology, occultism, and the hidden structures that shape how we experience reality.

Welcome to Magus in the Media.

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What happens when the things we’re told to trust no longer match what’s actually underneath?

Kaiva and I start with the recent UC Davis avocado oil study and what researchers found in products from brands like Siete, Primal Kitchen, and Chosen Foods. From there, the conversation opens into something much bigger: Flock cameras, surveillance, the loss of privacy, corporate power, AI, deepfakes, and the increasingly difficult question of knowing what is actually real.

At times it feels like we’re living inside the kind of world Philip K. Dick was writing about decades ago, where the image and the reality beneath it become harder and harder to separate. From the food we eat to the cameras watching our streets, how much of what is being sold to us is actually what it claims to be?

This is a conversation about deception, discernment, privacy, technology, and learning how to see through the representations of reality we’re surrounded by every day. 

The map is not the territory.

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Lon Milo DuQuette is a scholar, author, magician, and one of the most authoritative voices on the work of Aleister Crowley, Thelema, and the Thoth Tarot. His books include Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, My Life with the Spirits, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, and his newest work: Young Aleister Crowley and the Magician's Revolt, a novel.

In this conversation we get into what Crowley was actually after, why his lust for self-realization is not the same thing as rebellion, and what it means to walk into the Golden Dawn revolt as a young initiate with no idea what you have stepped into. We talk about Yeats, MacGregor Mathers, and the real historical figures Lon has fictionalized into a cinematic story that has been 25 years in the making. We also get into what Thelema actually asks of a solo practitioner, why initiatory oaths are made to yourself and no one else, and the one line from the Book of the Law that Lon says contains an entire religion on its own. 

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Amazon is buying physical books, cutting off their bindings, scanning them for AI training, and destroying the originals. Court documents have also revealed Anthropic’s Project Panama, an effort internally described as wanting to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”

But what happens when the physical book disappears and its digital representation becomes what future generations encounter? 

Tonight we go from Amazon and Anthropic into the Library of Alexandria, Fahrenheit 451, Orwell’s 1984, General Semantics and “the map is not the territory,” hermeneutics, historical memory, and the growing distance between actually reading a text and asking AI what that text means. 

Are we building the greatest library humanity has ever created, or something that may eventually replace our need to enter the library at all?

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Angel Millar joins Magus in the Media for a deep discussion on initiation, modern masculinity, Freemasonry, the sacred feminine, Jung's anima, the Warrior Mystic path, and his new book Supernatural Woman and the Male Initiate: Bonded Through Dreams.

What role does the supernatural feminine play in a man's journey? Why has initiation disappeared from modern life? And what can ancient traditions teach us about meaning, embodiment, and transformation in an age of chaos? 

🔔 Subscribe to Magus in the Media for weekly deep dives into myth, magic, and meaning: the esoteric lens mainstream commentary refuses to pick up.

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Why does the world feel fake, and why does it feel like everything is speeding up?

In this conversation with Kaiva Rose, we get into Philip K. Dick, AI, accelerationism, Kali Yuga, the cult of celebrity, media, robots, religion, and the strange feeling that we may be living through the end of one age and the beginning of another. We also talk about how reality gets filtered through screens, institutions, algorithms, and narratives, and what it means to stay grounded, human, and discerning while all of it keeps accelerating.

A conversation about myth, magic, meaning, technology, and how to keep your head when the world feels increasingly unreal.

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What if philosophy was always an initiation, a living practice, a rebellion against the assumption that you already know what you are?

Dr. Danielle Layne is a professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University, director of the graduate philosophy program, and founder of Palinode Productions and Khora, a philosophical search engine and social platform designed to connect ideas and challenge perspectives.

We move from Orphism through the pre-Socratics into Plato and the Platonic mysteries, and into what it means to live philosophy as a rebellious, embodied practice.

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We have access to more information than any generation in history, so why does it feel like we understand less?

In this Monday Night Live, Kaiva Rose and I ask what happened to the Renaissance mind and whether we are confusing access to information with actual knowledge and wisdom. We explore AI and cognitive offloading, pre-digested knowledge, social media and algorithms, the loss of deep reading, apprenticeship and embodied practice, and why returning to source material still matters. 

From Plato, Jung and Ludwig Klages to the Pandaemonic, cosmogonic Eros, magic, mythology and the living world, the conversation becomes a larger question about how we recover a direct relationship with reality. We also follow that same thread into food, agriculture, marketing and the ways we increasingly outsource the basic things that once connected us to our communities and the world around us.

Maybe the Renaissance mind isn't dead. Maybe we're being asked to build it again.

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