Occult Confessions

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.

In this episode, Rob is joined by Luxa Strata from the Lux Occult podcast and Nia Ain, a longtime chaos magician and member of the Illuminates of Thanateros. Together they discuss the influences of Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley on Chaos Magic(k), the various intersections between Chaos Magic(k) and popular culture, how to get started in Chaos Magic(k), and My Little Pony.

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth is perhaps one of the most influential groups in the practice of chaos magic(k). In this episode, we explore the career of its founder, musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, trace the basic rites of the Temple, and tackle P-Orridge's theory of occult splinters and samples.

Ray Sherwin and Peter Carroll are the founders of the Illuminates of Thanateros and the international occult practice of chaos magic(k). In this episode, we explore their theory and practice as they laid it out in their initial texts, Carrolll's Liber Null and Sherwin's the Book of Results.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley founded a religion around the principle of chaos in which everyone was the Pope and anyone could be a Fenderson. In the 1980s, the Church of the SubGenius with their cult of Bob Dobbs followed up on the Discordians' tradition by inventing their own millenarian movement anticipating the arrival of the extraterrestrial Xists. In the second part of our chaos magic series, we follow the history of these two practices.

Austin Osman Spare is widely regarded as the spiritual progenitor of chaos magic. He was a modernist artist from the first decades of the twentieth century and a man ahead of his time in many ways. His art, drawing on automatic writing and drawing, predated surrealism by more than a decade and his occult practice--involving sigils and masturbation--inspired a movement that wouldn't coalesce until the 1970s.

A visit from the mare is, by all accounts, terrifying. Shortly after falling asleep, you're suddenly stirred awake again except that your body is paralyzed. You can't move. You feel an evil presence approaching your bedside, crawling up beside you, and sitting down on your chest, crushing the breath out of your lungs. Encounters with the mare cross continents and time periods making them a fairly uniform intercultural experience. In this episode, we trace beliefs across cultures and uncover true stories of people who believe they've encountered a demon in the night.

The wendigo is a creature of Canadian First Nation Algonquian folklore; a resident of the forests of Nova Scotia. Like vampires or werewolves, the wendigo had been a human being before it was transformed into a grotesque monster possessed of fantastic spiritual and physical power. In the nineteenth century and possibly before, stories emerged from among the Algonquian tribes of people who became obsessed with consuming human flesh that ultimately transformed them.

In the West, our most common association for the djinn is Aladdin and his wonderful lamp. But this famous djinn is but one of a whole race of fire spirits inhabiting a non-material world that overlaps out own. According to tradition, there good djinn and evil djinn, depending on which have converted to Islam. In this episode we explore Interactions between the djinn and humanity which stretch beyond Arabia and Persia's ancient pagan past into the present day.