Solomon & Smith

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In this episode we talk to Professor Sue Niebrzydowski (Bangor) about Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe—two women who claimed to experience intense visions of the divine, but whose lives could not have been more different. Julian's visions drove her into intense isolation as an anchorite—and Margery Kempe's threw her out into the world, to travel, preached, and openly shar her experiences.

The hidden world of anchorites and medieval solitude

Public vs private expressions of faith

Mysticism, madness, and medieval psychology

How society judged female visionaries

The origins of some of the earliest writing by women in English

How people distinguished God visions from Devil visions from mental illness

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Modern civilisation: is it best explained by philosophy—or by myth?

In this conversation we talk about Goethe’s Faust, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the everlasting crisis of Western civilization, and the philosophy doomscape of modern academia. Faust captures the restless drive that defines the modern world: the desire to know everything, experience everything, and reshape reality itself. Nietzsche interrogates the same drive at greater length, in greater depth.

We discuss:

• Faust and modernity

• Goethe, Nietzsche, and nihilism

• Why everyone thinks Nietzsche’s Übermensch is about them

• Whether universities are still the right place for philosophy

• The permanent, everlasting crisis of meaning in the Evening Lands

• Technology and power

• Is Nietzsche optimistic?

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Here is a link to Johannes's in depth course on Faust Part II: https://halkyonacademy.teachable.com/p/goethe-faust-part-ii

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A discussion with composer Samuel Andreyev about one of the central questions in creativity: Should artists refine one definitive style… or constantly try to reinvent themselves?

The conversation introduces the idea of the mono-artist vs the poly-artist. A mono-artist finds a form and spends a lifetime refining it. A poly-artist evolves across styles, mediums, and artistic languages.

We discuss composers like Stravinsky, Webern, Bach, Carter, and Messaien, as well as a host of examples from other forms, from film, painting, and literature.

The discussion explores:

• Why some artists need constant change to stay creative

• Why others need to deepen a single artistic language

• The pressures artists face from institutions, audiences, and markets

• How commercial and institutional systems shape artistic production

• Why many artists struggle with expectations and “branding”

00:00:00 Preview

00:01:47 Introduction

00:14:58 Bicycle

00:16:34 Samuel arrives

00:20:00 Outline of Mono vs. Poly

00:33:31 Messiaen

00:39:50 Outsider Artists

00:45:50 The Art Music Funding Problem

00:51:10 Should Artists be Subsidised

00:55:32 The Bureaucratic hellscape of funding

01:06:49 You must produce slop

01:10:30 AI and composition

01:16:40 Cultural alienation

01:24:16 Pachelbel, and the tragedy of being a one hit wonder

01:29:00 Love is the soul of art-making - J.S. Bach - Late Style

01:38:29 Being careful, vs. being pedantic - Webern

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Napoleon (1927), the monumental silent film directed by Abel Gance is frequently (and correctly) described as one of the most astonishing, awe-inspiring achievements in the history of cinema.

Joined by small-handed essayist and fiction writer (and the sole inventor of Google Maps) Cecily Carver, Milo and Jack discuss why this five-and-a-half-hour epic about Napoleon Bonaparte (a Corsican man) remains insanely electrifying a century later. What makes Napoleon feel less like a historical drama and more like an operatic explosion of cinematic ecstasy? Is it fascist propaganda? Is it a prototype of the modern blockbuster? Is it the final, triumphant eruption of silent cinema before the apocalypse of sound, which murdered the medium forever?

Topics include:

Napoleon as “Great Man” and metaphysical force

The French Revolution (what was all that about?)

Abel Gance’s radical visual experimentation (polyvision, superimposition, handheld camerawork)

Silent film acting and the magic of the human face

The Coppola vs. Carl Davis scores and how music transforms silent cinema

The Josephine interlude and romantic melodrama

Unfinished art, and the beauty/tragedy of abandoned masterpieces

Whether Napoleon belongs to the stolid 19th century, or the avant-garde 1920s, and how it anticipates directors like James Cameron

We also plonk Napoleon within the broader arc of late silent film, alongside the theatrical inheritance of opera and vaudeville.

For viewers interested in film history, aesthetics, political myth, and the philosophy of art, this discussion treats Napoleon (the film) as a heavenly spectacle, and as a majestic historical object.

If you care about silent cinema, epic filmmaking, the French Revolution, or the enduring allure of charismatic power on screen, this conversation is for you.

orbs and gems wedge here - https://www.patreon.com/cw/SolomonSmith/membership

In this episode, we talk with Sean McCleod about the theological, cultural, and political logic behind contemporary belief in demon possession, spiritual warfare, and deliverance ministries within Third Wave Evangelicalism.

How did demons return to the center of American religious life? What distinguishes Third Wave charismatic Demonology from earlier Pentecostal or Catholic demon-hunting? And how does the language of spiritual warfare intersect with neoliberal ideas about free will, agency, responsibility, and selfhood?

Drawing from the sociology of religion, political theology, and cultural history, this conversation explores:

The rise of Third Wave Evangelicalism and charismatic Christianity

Deliverance ministry and modern exorcism practices

Generational curses and the psychology of spiritual warfare

The legacy of the 1980s Satanic Panic

Prosperity gospel theology and market-oriented spirituality

Neoliberalism and the construction of the “responsible” Christian self

Conspiracy culture, apocalypticism, and American politics

We also look at these developments in the context of a broader media history that includes films like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, which helped reintroduce demonology into mainstream American imagination. From there, we trace how spiritual warfare theology became normalised within evangelical institutions and how it continues to shape contemporary political and religious discourse.

Rather than dismissing belief in demons as irrational or fringe, this episode asks a deeper question: What social, economic, and theological conditions make demonology feel plausible—and even necessary—within late modern America?

For scholars of religion, clergy, graduate students, and anyone interested in evangelical theology, charismatic Christianity, political theology, or the intersection of capitalism and spirituality, this episode offers a sustained, two-hour analysis of one of the most misunderstood features of modern American religion.

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In this long-form conversation, we look at how Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence applies to cinema — and what it might reveal about modern filmmakers.

Bloom argued that strong artists are “born in debt,” and must struggle against the overwhelming presence of their creative fathers. What happens when we apply this idea to movies?

From Alfred Hitchcock to David Lynch, from Paul Thomas Anderson to Quentin Tarantino, we trace how directors wrestle with their influences — escaping them, misreading them, and sometimes swallowing them whole.

We discuss:

Bloom’s concept of “creative misprision”

The idea of artistic “fathers” in film history

Whether originality is still possible

The 90s video store generation of directors

The psychological burden of influence

Cinema as an ongoing act of reinterpretation

Is every filmmaker haunted?

Is influence something to escape — or something to transform?

If you’re interested in film theory, auteur studies, literary criticism, or the philosophy of art, this conversation dives deep into the anxiety at the heart of modern cinema.

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Welcome back to Solomon and Smith — keep it juicy, large boys.

In this second part of our deep dive into William Blake, we’re joined by Jodie Marley for a rich, wide-ranging conversation on prophecy, vision, mysticism, and the strange, electric Blakeopantheon.

Building on our earlier discussion with Mark Vernon, we explore Blake through the lens of innocence and experience, satire and sincerity, heaven and hell. What does it mean for Blake to “see” something? Did he believe his visions were literal? Or are they poetic frameworks for imagination and revelation?

We dig into:

Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and its critique of Emanuel Swedenborg

Biblical prophecy, including Isaiah’s vision in Book of Isaiah

Millenarian movements of the 18th century

Visionary experience vs prophetic authority

The occult revival and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

W. B. Yeats, Theosophy, and esoteric symbolism

Tarot, symbolism, and the language of spiritual correspondences

We also touch on visionary figures like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and the wider mystical tradition that influenced (and reacted to) Blake’s work.

Is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell satire? Revelation? Both?

Can everyone become a visionary — or does prophecy require terror, descent, and transformation?

And what happens when imagination becomes indistinguishable from revelation?

If you’re interested in Romanticism, mysticism, biblical symbolism, esotericism, the occult revival, or the philosophy of imagination — this episode is for you.

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William Blake still awes and unsettles us. In this long-form discussion, Mark Vernon — psychotherapist, author, and former Anglican priest — joins Milo and Jack for a deep exploration of Blake’s religious imagination, visionary cosmology, and misunderstood relationship to Christianity.

Together we explore Blake’s prophetic works Milton and Jerusalem. We ask whether Blake changed his mind after the French Revolution, or whether a single spiritual vision runs through his entire oeuvre. We examine Blake’s critique of deism, mechanistic science, and moralism, his engagement with numbers and eternity, and his insistence that imagination is not fantasy but a mode of truth.

This conversation moves through Blake’s theology, his rejection of the theological currents of his day, his fascination with prophecy (including failed prophecy), and his enduring relevance in a disenchanted modern world. Along the way, we touch on Newton, Milton, Jesus, revolutionary politics, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, Tolkien, and the strange power of beauty as a marker of truth.

This is the first of two conversations on William Blake on the channel, with a contradictory companion discussion 'Was William Blake an Unorthodox Christian?' following soon.

If you’re interested in Blake studies, Christian mysticism, Romantic poetry, prophecy, imagination, or the spiritual crisis of modernity, this conversation is for you.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:05:31 Conversation Begins

00:09:10 Blake and Christianity

00:29:33 Did Blake change over time?

00:40:00 Blake and Mormonism

00:52:26 True vs. False visions

01:01:25 Problem of Evil

01:11:35 Blake and Mathematics

01:22:19 Blake and the Enlightenment

01:29:02 Blake and the Body

01:37:49 Blake and Painting

01:47:59 Mark Vernon taken up in a whirlwind

01:50:04 Mark Vernon brought back down in a whirlwind

01:58:45 1,000,000,000 monkeys

02:00:44 Blake and Tolkein

02:07:30 Is sensation meaningless?

02:12:53 Conclusions

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In this long-form literary conversation, Emma Smith—Shakespeare scholar at Oxford (Hertford College)—joins us for a broad discussion of Shakespeare, with a special focus on Othello and Timon of Athens.

The conversation explores why Iago has been imbued with such psychological complexity, how Othello is often denied the same interpretive generosity, and what race, rhetoric, and language do inside Shakespeare’s plays. We look at magic, words as world-making, jealousy, authorship, and power, and ask whether Othello might be read as a magician?

We also turn to Timon of Athens: its survival through the First Folio, its collaborative authorship, its absence of women and family structures, and why the play has been neglected in England but embraced by Marx, Brecht, and German Romantic thinkers. Is Timon unfinished—or just radically experimental? What does it mean to imagine Shakespeare not as a solitary genius, but as a collaborative playwright working inside a theatrical system?

Along the way, we discuss:

Iago’s language, silence, and the meaning of “I am not what I am”

The handkerchief, contradictory histories, and narrative instability in Othello

Words as magic, rhetoric as spell-casting, and Shakespearean speech acts

Race, identity, and the limits of character psychology

Dual authorship, collaboration, and the myth of Shakespearean genius

Why Timon of Athens still feels strange, unfinished, and modern

How political, structural readings differ from psychological ones

Shakespeare, biography, and why we want authors to “believe in something”

Intro: 00:00

Opening general Shakespeare discussion: 18:29

Timon of Athens: 31:54

Othello: 1:06:30

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What is satire for — laughter, outrage, moral attack?

In this conversation, we explore the evolution of English satire from the 17th and 18th centuries, examining how writers like Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, and the Earl of Rochester used anger, wit, and self-induced misanthropy to critique politics, religion, art, and human nature itself.

Opening with a powerful reading from Pope’s The Dunciad, the discussion moves into questions of righteous vs unrighteous anger (Aristotle’s ethics), the role of masks and persona in satire, and how satire shifted from vicious moral attack to modern comedy. We compare the biting invective of Restoration satire with the refined irony of Pope and Swift, and trace how censorship, politics, and religion shaped the genre.

Topics covered include:

📜 The meaning of satire in the Renaissance and Restoration period

⚡ Righteous anger vs unrighteous anger in literature and philosophy

✒️ Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, Essay on Man, and The Rape of the Lock

🌍 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and political irony

👑 John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and political allegory

🍷 Rochester’s libertinism, misanthropy, and shocking satire

🧠 Hobbes, Epicureanism, moral philosophy, and pessimism

🎭 Masks, persona, irony, and cruelty in satirical writing

🔥 Why satire became associated with comedy in the modern era

📚 Connections to modern writers like Thomas Bernhard

If you’re interested in classic literature, philosophy, literary criticism, political satire, or the history of ideas, this episode offers a thoughtful and sometimes hilarious exploration of how writers use anger and humor to tell uncomfortable truths.

👍 If you enjoyed this discussion, like the video, subscribe for more literary conversations, and share your thoughts in the comments.