Occult Confessions

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?