We sit down with Dr. Justin Sledge of the Esoterica Youtube channel to talk about his work with medieval and ancient esoteric texts and alchemical practices.

Krishnamurti's philosophy was about getting free from thought and time, releasing memory and belief, and becoming fully present. He taught that there was no method or ritual or plan that could achieve this state of perfect presence and no guru who could guide you. Each person had to be their own guru and discover the truth of what is.

In this final installment of our biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the teacher disbands the Order of the Star and is banished from Theosophical Society Headquarters. He becomes an advisor to Indira Ghandi and questions whether his strange path to knowledge can ever be replicated.

The second part of our series on the teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti begins with his spiritual awakening beneath a pepper tree in Ojai, California. Krishnamurti was plagued by terrible episodes of physical suffering accompanied by great spiritual insight. We continue through to George Arundale's bizarre plot to insert himself into the highest ranks of Krishnamurti's organization and theosophy writ large.

As a child, Jiddu Krishnamurti was named the vessel for the World Teacher by leading figures in the Theosophical Society, namely Charles Leadbetter and Annie Besant. He came to regard Besant as a second mother but his relationship with Leadbetter was more complicated. Leadbetter wrote a serialized account of Krishnamurti's previous lives, calling him Alcyone, and helped Krishnamurti make contact with the ascended masters of theosophy. But Krishnamurti and his family were conflicted by the way he had been set up to become the religious leader of thousands and thousands of people worldwide.

In the second part of our conversation about Annie Besant, she leaves the secularists and joins the Theosophical Society. We consider how the Mahatmas continued to produce letters after Blavatsky's death and how closely Besant's theosophy resembled the first generation.

We open our story on the child messiah, Jiddu Krishnamurti, with a two-part episode on Annie Besant, a woman he came to regard as his adopted mother. Having been an atheist, social reformer, and advocate for birth control, Besant became the president of the Theosophical Society and one of the most influential occultists of the early twentieth century.

For parents like me who chose to share 2010’s revival of My Little Pony with my children, the animated series’ emphasis on social-emotional learning is the primary draw; however, these lessons are framed in distinctly occult terms. The series is subtitled “friendship is magic” and while this may suggest that friendship is awesome, in the context of the show it often means that it is literally a matter of spells, potions, and esoteric books. The show’s association with real-world occultism in the form of pony-inspired tulpas shows the degree to which it has successfully tapped into a New Age spirituality that also appeals to adult fans. The protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, descends according to the theosophical paradigm from the palace of Princess Celestia to Ponyville in order to learn, grow, and ultimately metamorphose into the show’s version of the divine feminine—a princess with both secular and spiritual power. At the end of the third season, she achieves an incomplete apotheosis and the audience learns the degree to which her friendships are, like Aleister Crowley’s goetian demons, actually external manifestations of her own consciousness in need of harmonizing. In Crowleyite fashion, the show celebrates the ponies’ individuality, but, after Twlight Sparkle’s initiation, it troubles personal identity by requiring the ponies to surrender a significant aspect of their ego-based power. In this paper, I analyze the show’s psycho-spiritual occultism in order to explore what it means to embody the divine feminine in postmodern popular culture.

We're joined by Alyce Spencer of the Witch Way Youtube channel, an expert on all things witchy in popular media. We talk about how the witch is represented in Western culture across time from Betwitched to Sabrina with plenty of stops along the way.

Visit Alyce at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5gfF-v77EiVQqcUZHKx4pA

Americans are largely responsible for discovering how to make exercising a cult. The link between exercise and the spiritual life of the exerciser wasn't invented after Y2K nor were intense fitness, demanding fitness routines. But bringing these things together into a practice designed to cultivate commitment to the corporatized and franchised exercise routine as the best possible path to overall well being is a twenty-first century innovation, and one that is probably at this point a thing of the past. At least for now. Today on Occult Confessions: this history of fitness cults.