Black Hoodie Alchemy

For the final episode of 2022, I am pleased to announce that both Joe Rupe and Tippy Patson are back! If you missed Tippy's last appearance on Episode #14 of Black Hoodie Alchemy , he's a strange yet affable redneck from Defuniak Springs, Florida that is absolutely and totally a real person.  He and his cohorts (a group of rednecks that call themselves "a 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' of sor...

Fellow researcher and field-investigator, Chaz of the Dead joins me to talk about some of his strange expeditions across the world, investigation the unexplainable, the psychedelic, and the horrific -- oftentimes all at once. Firstly we discuss Chaz's ground-rules of paranormal investigation, with considerations of Carl Jung, chaos magick, and classical paranormal ghost hunting but without the cro...

Author, illustrator, and experimental esotericist Eric Millar -- The Garbage Wizard himself --returns to the show to talk about his latest work, An Assemblage of Disparate Parts . Following up our last conversation about OG comic book culture, philosophy, and mysticism, Eric's latest work is a decidedly critical strike at the concepts of the "scholar", the "professional", the "accredited", and the...

Welcome back, folks! This week on the show, my friend Martin Ferretti joins me to analyze psychoanalyst, Carl Jung's legendary self-therapy journals: The Red and Black Books. Both released after his death, The Red Book represents a sizable portion of the Black Books' contents. Large, leather-bound, and full of beautifully haunting paintings and calligraphy of his innermost spiritual turmoil, Jung'...

As a follow-up to last week, I will be reading the chapter after the excerpt I read last! Both from my book Hunt Manual: 21st Century Demonology & Forteana . Last week was mostly about serial killers and some cult leaders, and this week will mostly be about cult leaders and then some serial killers -- and of course, this will all focus on their occult obsessions, and we'll attempt to analyze t...

For our discussion this week, I am reading an excerpt from my book Hunt Manual: 21st Century Demonology & Forteana. While the book covers a wide variety of subjects, all under the umbrella-topic of the "unexplainable and horrifying", this excerpt will focus mainly on serial killers with some cult leaders peppered in. And mainly from the perspective of analytic psychology as espoused by CG Jung...

This week Miguel Conner and his cohort ol' Moondog join me from Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio! These guys are veterans of the game -- life, esoteric study and practice, even broadcast -- and I am always eager to have a conversation with them. And while this episode is being released on Halloween, and the holiday will be mentioned here and there, don't be discouraged to listen to this any time of year! T...

This time around, Keats Ross of the PragMagick podcast is here to get our fingers deep in the dark recesses of our unconscious minds, doing some kinds of ghost-busting that you've probably never considered before! Yes, we'll be celebrating the Halloween season a little bit -- and for most you that are listening to this outside of October, don't be discouraged! The content is applicable to any seas...

After a two-week break, this next episode picks up right where the last left off: discussing and investigating the outer limits of strangeness! Joined by my friend, Fortean investigator Bob Antone, we discuss some of the stranger and creepier stories he's encountered throughout his life in North Bend, Washington with his wife Laura.  Laura is a native of the First Nations Dene people, and having b...

This time around, the show gets pretty X-Files-ish with my colleague, AP Strange -- a writer, researcher, investigator, and collector of Forteana. Strange gives us a brief history of Charles Fort and the ideas of "Fortean" investigation and phenomena, which essentially encompasses anything unexplainable with some shades of specificity that we'll get into.  Armed with an impressive Fortean library,...

For one of the most esoteric episodes I've done so far, Joe Rupe joins me again and we talk about magick, alchemy, Hermeticism, and the Order of the Golden Dawn. We go through many different areas of discussion here, like: why Hermeticism isn't a religion, where it came from historically, why alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold, what the most recommended reading is, and what exactly the...

This week's episode will be more personal than usual, as I talk about why the culture of the conspiracy theory has been on the strong rise over the last several years. For 3 years, around 2014 to 2017, I was one of the three main writers behind the non-partisan news website The Last American Vagabond, where I immersed myself in so many conspiracy theories in an attempt to find what was real and wh...

Interested in the psychology, symbolism, and existential potential of the UFO, but tired of the insane new age space gurus, government insiders, and half-baked philosophies? Then this will be an episode for you.  UFOs won't be a main focus on this podcast series, and this will likely be one of the few episodes I ever do on the subject. They will surely be mentioned from time to time with varying d...

This week's episode is all about the "Ancient Mysteries of Antiquity" as scholars have put it, and what they psychologically represent for us today. Part historical fact and part philosophical supposition, the Mysteries are the loose name for the overarching metaphysical studies found within the cultures of the Egyptian, the Hebrew, the Greeks, Romans, Mesopotamians, Sumerians, Persians, Chinese,...

This week, I'm not saying that 'evil' as a concept is completely nonexistent, but I'll be taking the time to demonstrate how the arch-devil of Christianity is entirely a "straw-man argument" that not even the source texts backed up until a certain point in history. Like it is with so many other things, this multi-thousand year telephone game brought us all a mix of many different characters like S...

Welcome back, folks! This week I start the discussion off with some odds and ends, elaborating on a couple points from prior episodes to segue into this one, the philosophy and psychology of God. I also briefly mention the latest Alexisonfire album-- the first one since 2009. It's fantastic and if heavy stoner rock that bleeds slightly into hardcore and blues sounds up your alley, then I highly re...

This episode is a bit of a Heavy Metal Special! And that also makes it an opportunity to play some brutal solos and breakdowns courtesy of the metal band, Silent on Fifth Street, of which my friend Adam Koch is the bassist. You can find their music on Youtube, Spotify, and iTunes the easiest and we'll be playing a few samples of tracks here on this show instead of the usual bumps of black hoodie r...

This episode of Black Hoodie Alchemy is going to be a little bit different! Suffice it to say that I was contacted by a very curious Florida man that only seems to communicate through old fashioned snail mail, despite still having a website. His name is 'Tippy Patson', and he's a totally real person that has some very fascinating ideas about American trucker culture existing throughout time and sp...

Here comes the first appearance (of many to come on this show) of my friend Joe Rupe, host of Lighting the Void and the main brain behind the Fringe FM Radio. He is also a former member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and has a great deal of insight into mysticism, transcendental magick and Jungian psychology.  In this episode, we warm up with some talk about the destruction of the Georgi...

Get ready to get down to the brass tacks of mysticism, magick, and the religious experience. Firstly, what is the difference between these three, and how do things like dreams, psychedelic drugs, and hypnosis fit into it all? Another way to describe this is as an episode about altered states of consciousness and adaptation. With dreams, we use symbols to quantify emotional values with contexts and...

This week is a Part 2 of sorts to last week! This is actually an episode that I recorded as a guest on Alex's show, Natural Born Alchemist, but I'm going ahead and releasing it here as well. Extending out of our last conversation about the Abrahamic religions, Gnosticism, and alchemy, we go deeper into alchemical symbolism and discuss the detailed ins and outs of what plants, gardening, and hortic...

This week's episode is released a bit late on account of me being bedridden with a stomach virus -- it was goddamn terrible. This chat was recorded before it hit me, but not before I had prepared it for release at all, so here it is a couple days late!  It's a chat with my good friend Alex that started open-ended with some cannabis smoke and led us into a conversation analyzing Christianity, the G...

Greetings everyone and thank you for joining me after a longer hiatus than I expected -- almost 2 months! It was a move to a new city, commuting a lot while the move finished up on top of a job-transfer and everything else. Nothing really eventful outside of the norm, but now here I am back in the weekly swing of things! This was a rare extended break for several reasons, and even when any more br...

For this edition of Black Hoodie Alchemy, my good friend Martin joins me as my second official guest. We follow up my last conversation with Eric Millar about his book 'The Four Color Grimoire', the history of comic books, the mythologies and philosophies that inspired them, as well as unpacking some of the details of Eric's favorite authors and heroes. This time, Martin takes what Eric helped us...

This week of Black Hoodie Alchemy brings us our first guest: my friend and colleague, Eric Millar! While he's done the cover of my book Hunt Manual and we've talked back and forth for nearly a couple years, this actually marks our first real-time conversation, and we had a helluva time. Eric comes around to have a serious but informal discussion about old school comic books, their culture and cont...