Occult Confessions

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...

Was Paul McCartney replaced by a doppelganger in 1968? Was Britney Spears replaced by a clone in 1998 or Eminem in 2006? Conspiracy theorists suggest the existence of underground military laboratories where governments and corporations produce clones for various uses, including, apparently, pop music. Have some celebrities been replaced by secret clones? Could you be replaced by your own clone? Fi...

Nikolai Gogol, considered one of the greatest writers in Russian literature, was born in Ukraine and wrote his first set of stories based on Ukrainian folklore. In this episode, we explore Gogol's witches and demons and discover a treasure trove of Ukrainian folk beliefs along the way. Please donate to https://www.pah.org.pl/en/

The cosmic and quantum worlds are full of mysteries. It's possible that our universe is, in fact, part of a vast multiverse stretching into unknown spaces and times. It's also possible that our universe is one of uncountable universes occupying the exact same space. In this episode, we dip our toes back into the weird overlapping worlds of the quantum and the cosmic in search of parallel universes...

Is it possible to take a photograph of the soul? While modern observers often laugh at the so-called spirit photographs taken by William Mumler or the Crewe Circle of William Hope, it is harder to scoff in the face of kerlian photographs of human auras, first discovered by Baron Karl von Reichenbach. Still more challenging are the claims made by French doctor Hippolyte Baraduc who photographed his...

In 1886, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore collected and edited over a thousand pages of cases of encounters with these phantoms. As a person was dying or about to get into a carriage accident, suddenly they would appear to a friend the next house over or maybe a thousand miles away. Stories of these phantasmic encounters were carefully researched and verified as far as the authors...

The tulpa has become a staple of Western popular culture and has even taken a role in New Age occultism through the practice of tulpamancers. Tulpas play a prominent role in David Lynch's Twin Peaks series, appear in the X-Files, and bronies—adult male fans of My Little Pony—have even conjured their own little pony tulpas. The Western tulpa is a kind of imaginary friend brought to life. If it gath...

Rob is joined by our resident pandemic expert Dr. Matt Hatkoff to discuss recent developments surrounding CoVID and the Omicron variant.

Percy Byshe Shelley was a haunted man. He saw a man who looked just like him walking on the terrace and the man asked how much longer Shelley meant to be content. Days later, he stood screaming over Mary in the middle of the night about a vision of the sea rising into the house. He saw his doppelganger again standing beside Mary and strangling her. Interestingly, Jane Williams—who was staying with...

Rob and Luke are joined by two Independent Catholic priests, Siobhan Houston and John Mabry. They discuss what it means to be a Catholic outside the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and how independent Catholicism has incorporated Gnosticism, Theosophy, and Eastern traditions into its rituals and practices.

Wilhelm Reich was a student of Sigmund Freud's who went on to develop views on human sexuality—views that questioned prohibitions against contraception and sex education and wondered over the longterm sustainability of monogamous relationships—that scandalized society. He escaped the Nazis and fled to America only to be imprisoned by the FBI, hounded by Immigration services, and ultimately persecu...

Is the root of all religions the worship of penises and vaginas? Nineteenth-century writer and Rosicrucian-enthusiast Hargrave Jennings thought so. He said that the worship of the reproductive powers is prehistoric and at the secret origin of all of the world's religions. Eggs and palm fronds at Easter, the Hindu lingam, pagan and Judaic pillars, the Ark of the Covenant, and the cross itself are a...

On 25 July 1755, Giacomo Casanova—arguably the most famous libertine in Western history—was arrested for possession of illicit literature. Among the books authorities confiscated from his house were the Key of Solomon, the Zohar, and the devil-conjuring Picatrix. Early in his life, Casanova had attempted to enter the priesthood and he knew enough of Kabbalah to convince a senator and three of his...

The exciting conclusion of Church Secrets conflict with the Girl with the Crab Shell Tattoo featuring segments from Borderline Crime, Woah Drama, Sunrise Wellness, Get it Girl, and Church Secrets.

Some scholars who think about the history of Christendom link the notion that sex is sinful or dangerous for the soul to the fact that almost all Christian religious leaders in Europe from about the fifth century until the Reformation were celibate or at least paid lip service to practicing celibacy. If sex is good, why wouldn't priests allow themselves to marry and procreate? There must be someth...

We pick up our discussion of tantra by following it across the ocean from India to America. American tantra came to focus specifically on sex. It inspired the founders of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which would go on to become a home for Aleister Crowley, Pierre Bernard’s various tantric yoga and healing orders and schools, and the Wiccan pioneers Gavin and Yvonne Frost. Tantra also became a direct...

Geoffrey Samuel loosely defines tantra as the ritual practices and tradition, within both Buddhist and Hindu Saiva sources, “that present themselves as sophisticated and elevated means for the attainment of exalted spiritual goals, yet contain constant reference to practices that seem deliberately transgressive and bizarre.” These include orgies at crematoriums, cannibalism, creating instruments o...

Rob is joined by prison psychologists Dr. David Morelos and Dr. Jessica Micono of the Psychology After Dark podcast. They talk about what psychologists consider fringe today, when a belief becomes pathological, the place of parapsychology in modern psychology, and how new approaches to consciousness might revolutionize the field.

Rob and the gang are back with the second season of their semi-fictional occult exploration: The Dark Pool. This season, an esoteric grimoire provides the blueprint for a journey into another dimension. Listen wherever you get Occult Confessions.