Radical Elphame

There's a common phrase in Occult circles that often precedes a cautionary tale: "blowing your life up with magic." The story goes something like this: a burgeoning magician, fresh off the armchair, skips a few steps or bites off more than they can chew. Sometimes this neophyte is drawn to a dark current that they aren't prepared for, or catfished by a parasitic entity. What tends to unfold is the...

Excited to bring you a new Patreon exclusive series I'll be doing with, friend of the pod, Chaise Levy of the Hagstone Podcast. For those who haven't fed the tip jar, the first one is free! We wanted to find a way to expand on some of the conversations we've been having behind the scenes and share them with the kind folks who support our respective Patreon and Substack pages. I think this spin-off...

Three years ago, Douglas Batchelor of the What Magic is This? podcast released a series that caught my attention. I had been a fan of his show for years and had come to expect his episodes to revolve around magical history, often with an emphasis on the ceremonial and evocatory variety. He called this series A Fistful o' Fairies, and over six episodes, he brought on an assortment of amazing guests...

Before I was a Witch, I was a cinephile. When I was younger, I subscribed to the "Auteur Theory" of film appreciation, which posits that the best movies are essentially a masterful reflection of a god's eye view, and that in the case of cinema, the director is god. The Auteur Theory of the director doesn't describe a dreamer or a collaborator, but a visionary master of their medium, who, prior to...

The inner experience of magic – the knowledge and gnosis gleaned from somatic responses and inner-eye eruptions – is a feature, not a bug, of engaging with these practices. When magic can be experienced fully, without doubt, it tends to draw us in and lead us to seek even deeper. The mystical applications of magic are a large part of what drew me to it in the first place. The utility of practical...

If you had to guess the political persuasion in the land of Faery, what's the first thought that comes to mind? I think for most, it would be hard to separate our preconceived notion of faeries from their titular tales, replete with Queens, Kings, and courts. Although there is no lack of allusions to a Faery adherence to some form of Otherworldly monarchy (or monarchies), there are just as many in...

If I go to my rural grocery store today, amongst the tabloids, gossip rags, and boomer nostalgia slop in the magazine section, a strange artifact awaits. There, as it likely has been since the place was built in the fifties, is a row of Old Farmer's Almanacs. Ostensibly a relic of homespun wisdom and a tangible reminder of an agrarian lifestyle that a few generations ago would have been intrinsic...

Despite being an eccentric enough person to have a podcast about magic, I find the topic of UFOs and UAPs difficult to talk about. Unlike animism, folk magic, and faeries, the UAP subject is no longer a fringe pursuit. It's making headlines in legacy media outlets and being earnestly discussed by the figureheads at both ends of the US political spectrum. Unlike most of what we cover on this show,...

There can be a deep sense of displacement in the experience of the diaspora. Often raised unrooted to ancestral lands and traditions, or even fully rudderless in the vacuum of cultural assimilation. To engage in ancestral lifeways from this position can sometimes give off a palpable sense of imposter syndrome, seeming like a choice between appropriation and a LARP. How can we explore ancestral spi...

When we consider "nature spirits" in an occult or magical context, they can appear to be a clearly defined category of beings. In most books on Witchcraft or spirit work, they might be reduced to a chapter or even a paragraph. So what are we talking about when we refer to "nature spirits"? Are we talking about "elementals" a la Paracelsus or Madame Blavatsky? Or the pixies and sprites of Victorian...

A strange thing happened in 2019. A five-part paranormal documentary series named after a small town in Kentucky was released for free on the internet. The promo art for the series featured a bizarre humanoid figure with a conical head and amphibious features and felt like clear counterprogramming to the run-of-the-mill ghost-harassing fodder dominating mainstream TV at the time. The project was h...

UPG is a term I find to be often misunderstood. Short for "unverified person gnosis," this phrase is sometimes wielded as a criticism in the world of spirituality – pagan, polytheist, or otherwise. It's the word "unverified" that stands out in this instance, that seems to be contextualizing someone's "personal gnosis" – about a spiritual path, or being, or myth – as dubious, or heterodox. When use...

What can change a goddess into a nature spirit? What can change a nature spirit into a witch? A hasty answer might simply be "colonization." This was the evolution of Fröja in Sweden. I don't think we can have an intellectually honest discourse about folklore without confronting the forces of colonization head-on. What has this ongoing process done to the gods, the spirits, and the myths of a peop...

There may be no clearer gateway drug to magic in 2026 than astrology. You don't need psychic abilities, or a spirit court, or a wider mystical philosophy to dabble in astrology. Just a birthday. I've always been a proponent of practical magic – the kind that helps you get stuff – not as an end goal, but as a necessary step, for many, in re-enchanting their minds. Astrology can do something similar...

I sometimes wonder why, of all the occult and magical currents we have on offer, Witchcraft manages to still have such a powerful pull on our contemporary culture. We find ourselves on the other side of a century of occult revivals and magical trends, and yet Witchcraft somehow stil retains a timeless appeal. More recent spiritual trends, such as the "New Age" movement, which you would expect to b...

When you look at the oldest and most intact spiritualities around the world, you will find that, at the center of their practice, is ancestral veneration. For many of us who were raised in less intact spiritualities and in cultures with a tendency to mold prevailing religions to the will of Empire, venerating our ancestors can feel complicated, to say the least. The same cultures that tend to mold...

Folk magic has a powerful pull. It can express complex metaphysical ideas that, for most of us practicing today, had once felt like the purview of the "New Age." Magical ideas that once seemed fantastical, through the lens of folk magic, can suddenly feel earthy and vital. Techniques that once felt silly can begin to feel ancestral. The source texts go from channeled writings, to myths and folktal...

They're on bumper stickers, they're on bags of jerky, they're on bars of soap, and if you're not seeing an ancient alien on the History Channel, you're almost certainly seeing someone searching for them in the woods. Big Foot, Sasquatch, Oh Mah, Sunk Ape – they go by many names, and are spotted throughout North America, and beyond. For some, they are a myth; for some, a monster; and for the rest,...

What is it that draws occultists to horror films, when by in large, the history of horror cinema is essentially anti-occult propaganda? Despite what can seem like a counterintuitive interest on the part of practitioners, the fact remains that the horror genre is the last bastion of regular engagement with the spirit world left in contemporary media, and therefore a natural draw for people who see...

I had to reschedule an interview for the first half of this month, but I didn't want to leave you hanging this week, so I recorded an essay I put out on our  Foliate Head Substack recently for your listening pleasure. Nora Fornario has always been a deep fascination of mine, whom I find to be misunderstood and often explored in ways that ignore her most interesting aspects in favor of a more lurid...

When we think about the Otherworld, we tend to do so from the perspective of this world. What is this hidden world that seems to operate so differently from our own? Who are the beings who dwell there, and what do they want with us? In J. M. Hamade's fascinating book, Procession of the Night Theater,  they explore the "night side" of astrology, offering a poetic vision of the Lunar Stations, not t...

After years of thinking that the only path for building a community around the fringe pursuits of witchcraft, folk magic, or the occult were relegated to the grace of internet, two friends in vastly different parts of the country have boldly presented a proof of concept for big tent approaches to "in real life" magical communities that are fostering a inspirational alternative to more dogmatic and...

When it comes to exploring animism and the magic of and with place, I like to borrow a term from the world of wine: terroir. Terroir is generally understood in the wine world as the sense of place – soil, geography, seasonality, and even culture – that can be expressed in a glass of wine. When it comes to "magical terroir," we are referring to how all of those same factors develop into unique and...

One of my key takeaways from the conversation I had with Joanna Tarnawska, was the way she articulated her own definition of what makes a practice fundamentally "witchcraft" as opposed to other strains of magic, mysticism, and pagan spirituality. The key to witchcraft, she suggests, is heresy.  I've heard similar distinctions elsewhere regarding witchcraft, but Joanna's definition of heresy went f...

Why start a podcast about magic? Prior to the internet, in real life, these topics were typically at best niche and eccentric, and at worst, dangerous. As a millennial, for most of my adult life, magic was the subject of fiction, and anyone who couldn't understand that seemed mostly harmless, but not exactly the company you keep. When the imaginary boundaries between philosophy, spirituality, and...