Occult Confessions

Heaven or Havona exists at the center of a collection of super universes within one of which our universe and our planet are found. So says the Urantia Book, channeled by an anonymous source and compiled by a committee calling itself the Forum. At its heart, the book is a reinterpretation of Christianity through a space age lens with creator gods incarnating on various planets throughout the unive...

In 1876, Anna Kingsford began to have visions and psychic impressions of her past lives which became the basis for the spiritual and theosophical books that were to follow. Edward Maitland, who would be her confederate in these endeavors, was practicing a form of meditation that involved tracing his ideas back to their origin at the core of his consciousness. In summer 1881, Kingsford gave a serie...

Anna Bonus Kingsford was at the center of one of the biggest controversies in the Theosophical Society during Helena Blavatsky's lifetime. Arguing that Christian occultism was more accessible to a Western audience than the Hindu and Buddhist version Blavatsky had come to prefer, she threatened to split the London Lodge in half. To hold things together literally and figuratively, Blavatsky and Olco...

John Paul II was the second-longest reigning Pope in Catholic history and spent a lot of time writing and thinking about sex and marriage for a Pope. We consider the prohibition of contraceptives, the meaning of masturbation, and the Catholic Church's preoccupation with adult entertainment.

Christian Sex Writers are an eclectic bunch from conservatives to liberals to doctors who fill you in on the birds and the bees while you wait for your blood test results. What are the Biblical sources for Christian sexual ethics, and are they consistent? Are Christian attitudes toward sex necessarily in opposition to the dominant views of Western culture? How can Christians reconcile God’s comman...

Brett Warren brings a forensic approach to the bodies of historical vampires. Brett brings a historian’s curiosity to the project–translating eighteenth-century texts and tracing the origins of the word “vampire.” How can modern medical science help us to better understand the cadavers excavated and eviscerated after their previous owners were accused of being vampires? To support Brett’s work vis...

From the New Thought Movement of the 1880s to Charles Fillmore’s Depression-Era preaching to Joel Osteen’s megachurch, the notion that spiritual effort can yield material rewards has been a popular one for both New Age and Christian believers. The Prosperity Gospel asks that believers trust God and credit God for their own successes, but remind believers to work at the things they want. It preache...

Anna Milon joins us to discuss her ethnographic research into the way religions are imported, created, and developed within Live Action Roleplaying. Do players bring their own religious convictions into the characters they play? What are the places where belief and fantasy overlap? Are there taboos players observe even though they’re acting our a fictional scenario? As both a player and a research...

Theonomy, Dominionism, and Calvinist Reconstructionism are all different names for the same idea: that the world would be better off it it operated according to a Christian Theocracy. In this episode Rob tackles the ideas of one of the more sober and influential theorists of this perspective, Gregory Bahnsen. Are ethics based on reason rather than belief in God’s law necessarily arbitrary? Did Jes...

A mad scientist plots, fanatics roam and rant, monsters loom. This Halloween, the Alchemical Actors joined Rob’s college students to create a unique storytelling experience in a couple of acres of corn. In this special episode, Rob gives you a glimpse behind the scenes and Savannah takes you into the field to explore our harvest horror.

Recent United States Supreme Court decisions on the questions of abortion rights and prayer in public school have suggested to many observers that the Court is following a theocratic Christian paradigm in passing its verdicts. The Christian Right’s involvement in politics has been a staple of twentieth-century American society and has been championed by Billy Graham in his magazine Christianity To...

America’s white supremacist Christian Identity churches preach the abhorrent doctrine that non-white races are the descendants of Cain, birthed through a satanic tryst between Eve and the devil. Christian Identity unites the strange principles of British Israelism in the United Kingdom–which held that the British people were a lost tribe of Isreal–with American Klan and Neo-Nazi ideology. We trace...

Savitri Devi, a French-born Greek citizen, took on an Indian name and envisioned the second coming of Adolf Hitler. The Chilean occultist Miguel Serrano sought to create “esoteric Hitlerism” as an archetype of the unconscious and believed that Hitler had survived the Second World War and lived in a secret bunker in Antarctica. Inspired by Devi and Serrano, Wotansvolk established a racist, communal...

Malcolm X was tracked by the FBI since before he converted to Islam. Even after he died his viewing and funeral were both visited with bomb threats. He was widely regarded by people both inside and outside of his community of believers as a dangerous man. But Malcolm X did not carry weapons, he directed no army, and on the day he was assassinated he asked his bodyguards to leave their guns at home...

Rob and Luke are joined by Judas and Magnolia, husband and wife magicians with a research interest in Harry Houdini. Following the death of his mother, Houdini became interested in making contact with the spirits of the dead but was disillusioned by the stage illusions he witnessed popular mediums perform for their audiences. Even Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife couldn’t change his mind about the truth...

On April 25, 1999 between ten and sixteen thousand Falun Gong believers, clutching the little blue book of Li Hongzing, gathered outside the Chinese Communist Party's headquarters in Beijing. They stayed from dawn until well after sunset for what was the largest public protest in China since the 1989 democracy movement that resulted in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. For Chinese authorities, Falun...

Panic struck the Tokyo subway on 20 March 1995. Men boarded subway cars with plastic bags and umbrellas, removed the newspaper covering the bags, and punctured them with the sharp tips of the umbrellas releasing sarin gas, a biogological weapon first developed by the Nazis during World War Two, into the underground. Eight of eleven bags were broken open and leaked 159 ounces of liquid sarin onto t...

Brainwashing has long been used to account for why otherwise reasonable people join religious groups deemed strange or aberrant from the standpoint of mainstream society. In the nineteenth century, Mormons were accused of mesmerizing people into joining them. In the 1970s, parents in the anti-cult movement abducted their own adult children and subjected them to forced “de-programming.” Today, the...

For centuries, there was one primary saint Mexicans turned to for protection: the Virgin of Guadalupe. Then, beginning in the 1990s, the popularity of a new saint began to take hold: the skeletal Santa Muerte or Saint Death. The Catholic Virgin of Guadalupe overlapped with an ancient Aztec goddess in ways that blurred the boundary between Christianity and paganism. Similarly, Santa Muerte emerged...

In January 1692, Village minister Samuel Parris's Indian slave, Tituba, reported seeing his nine-year-old daughter, Betty, and eleven-year-old niece, Abigail, acting strangely. Parris was fully invested in the notion of a satanic conspiracy and beat Tituba to get her to confess to witchcraft. It's likely that much of what the magistrates drew out of Tituba in court can be traced back to Parris. Al...

The celebration of Columbus day had started among Italian Americans in San Francisco and became a national holiday in 1937. Recently, indigenous people and their allies have requested changing the celebration of Columbus Day to the celebration of Indigenous Peoples' Day. While this is, in part, an effort to recognize the place of Native people in America's history and culture, it is also a reactio...

The legend of the witch that spread during the three centuries of witch hunting and lasted through the Renaissance began with the devil. A woman or man (but usually a woman) who was down on their luck would suddenly find themselves in the company of the Prince of Darkness. Great gatherings of witches would take place on a sabbat and witches had to travel great distances to reach it, flying on a ra...

When we think of crusades, images of the Knights Templar riding into battle against their Islamic foes in the Holy Land spring to mind. But there was another medieval crusade against non-believers, in this case pagans, held in Scandinavia in the same time period. How did the Church arrive at the conclusion that it had no choice but to forcibly convert these Baltic heathens? Some monarchs were anxi...

In the first millennium, Pope Gregory the Great understood humanity to be blind, cold, and lost since the fall of Adam, drawn to materialism and false gods and religions. With humility, humans who subjected themselves to God's divine will and grace could learn to live righteously and channel God's higher purposes to their fellow human beings. Gregory's vision of history was one of the species' gra...

Constantine was the first Christian emperor of Rome and established Christianity as a state religion for the first time. Constantine certainly knew about Christianity and was already well on his way to a conversion for personal and political reasons before ascending to the throne. He was a fan of the Christians and saw value in aligning his reign with their God. But his concept of the Christian Go...