Occult Confessions

In our first Halloween special, Rob explores Edgar Allan Poe's ideas about the unconscious and the Alchemical Actors perform two Poe classics: "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" and "M.S in a Bottle." We learn how Poe's original audience felt about mesmerism and what it meant to journey into the unfathomable ocean of the mind.

Human sacrifice has been practiced across cultures among the ancient pagans, tribal Africans, Aztecs, and in the Old Testament. What are the magical implications of human sacrifice? Why do humans sacrifice themselves and each other? And are these sacrifices evil or benign?

We open our series on black magic by asking how curses like the evil eye can cause the medically-proven phenomenon of hex death. How can our beliefs lead to life-threatening and even fatal physical ailments?

We use quantum physics to describe how a secret conscious observer outside of our physical brains is the best way to explain our free will. Along the way, we happen across proof that the mind may be capable of seeing the future.

Apparitions of the living, mystical encounters with God, and genius accounting prodigies all have something in common. According to nineteenth-century psychologist F. W. H. Myers they were all signs of a subliminal soul capable of supernatural feats beyond the limits of how science has defined the brain.

We uncover history's earliest cases of multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder: the medieval nun Jeanne Fery, Mary Reynolds, and Louis Vivet, the real-life inspiration for Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Along the way, we consider how this phenomenon might provide evidence for the existence of a consciousness beyond our physical brains.

We explode the materialist theory of consciousness to prove that we are not zombies and argue for minds that exist somewhere, somehow beyond our bodies and possibly in traffic lights and strawberries.

Charles Darwin was not the only naturalist to arrive at the theory of evolution in the 1850s, Alfred Russel Wallace came to the same conclusions completely independently of Darwin except that Wallace believed that God and the soul maintained an essential role in nature.

Our brief history of the soul includes African ancestor worship, the Mayan creation story, Aristotle and Plato's ancient philosophical visions, Jewish mythology, the Islamic rational soul, the spiritualist Summer Land, Blavatsky's tripartite soul, and the conscious elevation of the New Age.

In this episode we explore five poltergeists at Enfield, Sauchie, Jaboticabal, in the Smurl Family, and at Andover. What makes poltergeist phenomena persuasive as evidence of paranormal influence? How do poltergeists fit into the larger story of teenage girl's millennia-long connection with supernatural power?