Occult Confessions

Druids were a part of ancient celtic culture—a series of kingdoms or empires that stretched through Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Britain, and Gaul—the region of modern France as well as parts of Belgium and Italy. The Celts were distinct in each region but also shared important cultural structures and practices as well as language. Part of the challenge of recovering the druids from the fog of histor...

We sit down with Ed Crimi, owner of the Vampa Vampire Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and talk about his collection of vampire kits collected from around the world. Crimi also tells us about the room in museum devoted to the Archangel Michael. For more about the museum, visit: https://www.vampamuseum.com.

The Aghoris are a sect who worships Shiva by way of Shakti or the goddess, often in the form of Kali or Tara. They spend their time at the crematorium in the sacred city of Banares or bathing in the cold waters of the Ganges in winter. They strive to overcome aversion by confronting what humans are most averse to beginning with death itself.

How has ancient Gnosticism resurfaced as a new religion in the modern and postmodern world? Rob introduces the path of gnosticism into modern occultism and Rob and Luke interview Paul Joseph Rovelli, founding director of the Gnostic Church of L. V. X., and the church's social media director Joseph DeOliveira.

In modern occultism, Isis is often regarded as a bearer of mysteries and a symbol of feminine power. When Helena Blavatsky invoked her name in the title of her first major work, Isis Unveiled, she sought to reveal the hidden spirituality of the East through an Egyptian lens; a religion that she claimed sat at the heart of all worship and was more true than the bastardized Judeo-Christian practices...

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...

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...

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 rev...

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 E...

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...

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...

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 fo...

Perhaps more than any other text, the apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve, also known as The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan or the First and Second Books of Adam and Eve sought to put Christ in the pre-Christian Garden. But its story was too imaginative or perhaps too surreal to qualify for the Christian canon. Satan plagues the first couple following their expulsion from the Garden and God must...

We tend to think that the story of Adam and Eve only became a problem from the standpoint of believability after Darwin in the mid-nineteenth-century, but, in fact, the strangeness of the story has dogged Christians throughout history. God creates two people and puts them in a garden to eat and have sex and name some animals. He puts two trees in the garden and says they can't eat the fruit off of...

We received no requests for L. Ron Hubbard, but Rob became fascinated by his role in Jack Parsons' story and decided to do a deep dive on dianetics-inventing, sci-fi-writing religion founder. Resources for this episode include John Atak's "A Piece of Blue Sky" and Bent Corydon's "L. Ron Hubbard: Mystic or Messiah."

Lynn Short was a member of a gnostic group she now describes as a cult. In our interview, Short tells us about how she developed internal sexual and psychological controls that became damaging to live with and how scandals within the organization led her to become an apostate. What are the limits of religious anti-materialism and how does a narrow conception of religion lead to deep spiritual diss...

Shea Bile talks about his experience creating occult groups in San Francisco and Belgium and discusses his new book about the intersection between Neitzsche and occultism. How has the German existentialist been misunderstood and how does he illuminate a path for left hand and satanist occultism?

Please allow us to introduce to you the newest podcast from the Alchemical Actors. This is our first full episode and one of two parts about Walt Disney's vision for a city of the future. For more deep dives into the weirder side of popular culture, follow us wherever you're listening to Occult Confessions. Don't see Strange Ride? Let us know.

A few years before the middle of the nineteenth century in Poughkeepsie, New York, a seventeen-year-old boy sat down, closed his eyes, and dictated a book that detailed the formation of the cosmos more than a century before NASA would send out its rovers, laid out a theory of the transmutation of species several years before Darwin would publish his theory of evolution, and advanced a strong and s...

Eliphas Levi, who left the priesthood to pursue a life in magic, is a seminal figure in the development of nineteenth-century occultism. He carried forward largely forgotten ideas from the Renaissance and brought together the worlds of Kabbalah and Tarot. Many students sought him out and contemporary occultism would not have been the same without his influence.

Ida Craddock was an occult sex reformer who wrote about how married couples could spiritualize their unions, giving them control over pregnancy and the right to choose when they had their children. She claimed that she herself had married a spirit or angel from the non-physical realm and that such unions were common in the history of mysticism and religion. Craddock would be persecuted by notoriou...

In the second half of our conversation about Rasputin, the infamous magician meets his end. How did Rasputin become such a controversial figure in Russian politics. And how many tries did it take to bring down the notorious starets?

The biography of Grigori Rasputin is hotly contested and frequently disputed. Did he perform supernatural feats? How much influence did he have over the tsar? Was he responsible for the downfall of the Russian monarchy? Drawing on scholars and first hand witnesses to Rasputin’s life, we attempt to cobble together a picture that is as true to the man as possible.