Occult Confessions

The Gnostics believed they had access to the truth; the real truth, not the truth that everyone else thinks is the truth. Everyone who's not a Gnostic that is. While there are certain themes that tend to unite Gnostic groups, they were actually quite distinct and widespread across the Christian world in the time of the Church Fathers. Christian Gnostics—who will be our focus although Hermeticists are also sometimes classified as Pagan Gnostics—tended to believe that the Old Testament God or Yahweh was actually a demigod and that the true God was unknowable, existing in an unimaginable realm somewhere in the cosmological beyond. They tended to believe that humans possessed some grain or seed of the godhead within them and they often underwent elaborate astrologically-themed initiations to join their orders. While their particular theology was ultimately defeated and buried by the Catholic Christians, their beliefs informed Christian doctrine. Arguably, the canonical gospel of John was, in fact, a Gnostic text and a Gnostic bishop very nearly became the Pope in Rome. But Gnostics were considered heretics and the men who defined early Christian doctrine wrote bitter attacks against them. Ironically, these attacks became a significant source for contemporary scholars' knowledge of the ancient Gnostics beliefs and practices. Be careful how detailed you are in arguing against your enemies. You may just be preserving their ideas across the ages.

In 2015, a jury found John Jonchuck guilty of murdering his own daughter by throwing her off of a bridge over Tampa Bay. In this special episode, Bri considers the religious ideation and delusions of Jonchuck, including his obsession with a Swedish Bible, and why they did not justify an insanity plea.

Eleusis is a town outside of Athens where the Greeks conducted a secret rite of initiation in honor of the goddess of the earth, Demeter, and her daughter and queen of the underworld, Persephone. The rite may have dated before the Greek Dark Ages, more than a thousand years BCE, and could have had its roots in a still more ancient agrarian cult. Eleusis was known for its special relationship with the spirits of the dead who aided in the prosperity of the grains that grew in the fields outside of the town. Anyone could become an initiate who could speak and understand Greek and pay roughly a month's wages for the cost of a sacrificial pig and the services of priests and guides. In February, the time of the flowers, initiates experienced the lesser mystery in Agrai based on the events surrounding Persephone's death. In September, the time of the sowing of winter crops, masses of pilgrims paraded over a narrow bridge into the sacred town where they experienced the secret vision of the Greater Mystery, an encounter these initiates could never describe to anyone under any circumstances for the rest of their lives.

If you've heard of Dioynsus, you're likely aware of his associations with grapes, wine, and theatre. The famous Theatre Dionysia was the site where some of the ancient world's greatest scripted performances were staged in honor of the god. But what is the connection between wine and theatre? The power of wine to remove inhibitions parallels the power of art to strip away the socialized self to reveal—through the donning of the theatrical mask—the true inner self. Wine and art are a path to unfiltered truth. This, in its purest and most idealistic form is the ideology of the Dionysian mysteries; a cult of drunk, naked, conspiratorial revelers tearing a fully grown bull limb from limb deep in the forests outside the Greek city state.

In this special listener panel, we discuss representations of occultism in television and film and on the internet.

We're going back to the archive for an episode that first posted to patreon in our first year podcasting. This is the first part of three on how rock came to be regarded as the devil's music (to listen to the other two, you'll need to sign up as a patron).

Lilith was the first woman created alongside Adam as his equal before she quarreled with him and flew away, leaving Adam to ask God for a second wife, Eve. Belief in Lilith is based, in part, on midrash or commentary on the gaps and seeming contradictions in the Bible. Genesis says that the first man and woman are created together as equals and then in the story of Eden, it says that God created Eve after Adam by forming her from his rib. Midrash resolves this contradiction by arguing that these are two different women and the first was Lilith. Her legend also stems from stories of ancient demons, shaping contradictions in and around Lilith herself. In our episode on the djinn, we discussed the possibility that Lilith was the mother of that race of non-corporeal beings and in our episode on sex demons, we wondered whether Lilith might be the original succubus. Jewish tradition has long held that Lilith was responsible for childhood illnesses like diptheria but the Zohar also associated her with nocturnal emissions and nightmares. In the twentieth century, she has come to be regarded as a feminist icon and even a goddess in neo-pagan circles.

It is not enough for the 80s child to reflect wistfully on a simpler time. Rather, we often want to revive the mass cultural products of our youth in a way that maintains their appeal despite or perhaps because of the cognitive and hormonal shifts that come with adulthood. 80s children have done a decent job of keeping our favorite popular cultural icons alive through the last forty years—whether as creators or as hungry audience members rewarding corporations for gazing backward. In movies like Barbie, the adult is invited back to childhood in a way that allows them to maintain all the rights, privileges, and preferences of adulthood. This trick was first invented for the 80s kid, for whom popular culture self-consciously eroded the boundary between content for children and adults.

This is part two of our discussion of the ancient serpent seed theory, the idea that Eve had sex with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and conceived one or several children. In this episode we consider more modern ways of reading the serpent seed idea that steer clear of racism. We revisit some old friends including P. B. Randolph and the creators of the Urantia Book and discover new ideas about how the serpent seed might connect with the theory of evolution and extraterrestrials.

What if the serpent didn’t offer Eve an apple when they met in the Garden of Eden? What if, instead, Eve had sex with the serpent, betraying her partner and engendering a race of half-serpent, half-human people? The suggestion may seem bizarre but as a theological theory it’s had a long life and continues to surface in a variety of interpretations of Genesis up to the modern age. It’s difficult for many readers to just let the serpent be. He’s an unusual character in his own right as the only animal who starts a recorded conversation with the humans in the garden and he’s made even stranger for his rebellious nature. The animals in the garden, after all, had not been endowed with the capabilities nor the responsibilities of Adam and yet here comes a reptile acting almost human and inserting himself into the uniquely human problem of the Tree of Knowledge. When the student of mythology adds the many uses of the serpent in the caduceus, the ouroboros, and legends stretching across civilizations and times, it’s difficult not to wonder if Genesis is trying to say more than what’s on the surface with its snake. The fact that the serpent is the most phallic of animals raises the distinct possibility that maybe this secret is somehow sexual.