Episodes
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In this final installment of our biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the teacher disbands the Order of the Star and is banished from Theosophical Society Headquarters. He becomes an advisor to Indira Ghandi and questions whether his strange path to knowledge can ever be replicated.
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The second part of our series on the teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti begins with his spiritual awakening beneath a pepper tree in Ojai, California. Krishnamurti was plagued by terrible episodes of physical suffering accompanied by great spiritual insight. We continue through to George Arundale's bizarre plot to insert himself into the highest ranks of Krishnamurti's organization and theosophy writ large.
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As a child, Jiddu Krishnamurti was named the vessel for the World Teacher by leading figures in the Theosophical Society, namely Charles Leadbetter and Annie Besant. He came to regard Besant as a second mother but his relationship with Leadbetter was more complicated. Leadbetter wrote a serialized account of Krishnamurti's previous lives, calling him Alcyone, and helped Krishnamurti make contact with the ascended masters of theosophy. But Krishnamurti and his family were conflicted by the way he had been set up to become the religious leader of thousands and thousands of people worldwide.
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In the second part of our conversation about Annie Besant, she leaves the secularists and joins the Theosophical Society. We consider how the Mahatmas continued to produce letters after Blavatsky's death and how closely Besant's theosophy resembled the first generation.
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We open our story on the child messiah, Jiddu Krishnamurti, with a two-part episode on Annie Besant, a woman he came to regard as his adopted mother. Having been an atheist, social reformer, and advocate for birth control, Besant became the president of the Theosophical Society and one of the most influential occultists of the early twentieth century.
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For parents like me who chose to share 2010’s revival of My Little Pony with my children, the animated series’ emphasis on social-emotional learning is the primary draw; however, these lessons are framed in distinctly occult terms. The series is subtitled “friendship is magic” and while this may suggest that friendship is awesome, in the context of the show it often means that it is literally a matter of spells, potions, and esoteric books. The show’s association with real-world occultism in the form of pony-inspired tulpas shows the degree to which it has successfully tapped into a New Age spirituality that also appeals to adult fans. The protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, descends according to the theosophical paradigm from the palace of Princess Celestia to Ponyville in order to learn, grow, and ultimately metamorphose into the show’s version of the divine feminine—a princess with both secular and spiritual power. At the end of the third season, she achieves an incomplete apotheosis and the audience learns the degree to which her friendships are, like Aleister Crowley’s goetian demons, actually external manifestations of her own consciousness in need of harmonizing. In Crowleyite fashion, the show celebrates the ponies’ individuality, but, after Twlight Sparkle’s initiation, it troubles personal identity by requiring the ponies to surrender a significant aspect of their ego-based power. In this paper, I analyze the show’s psycho-spiritual occultism in order to explore what it means to embody the divine feminine in postmodern popular culture.
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We're joined by Alyce Spencer of the Witch Way Youtube channel, an expert on all things witchy in popular media. We talk about how the witch is represented in Western culture across time from Betwitched to Sabrina with plenty of stops along the way.
Visit Alyce at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5gfF-v77EiVQqcUZHKx4pA -
Americans are largely responsible for discovering how to make exercising a cult. The link between exercise and the spiritual life of the exerciser wasn't invented after Y2K nor were intense fitness, demanding fitness routines. But bringing these things together into a practice designed to cultivate commitment to the corporatized and franchised exercise routine as the best possible path to overall well being is a twenty-first century innovation, and one that is probably at this point a thing of the past. At least for now. Today on Occult Confessions: this history of fitness cults.
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Norwegian black metal in the 1990s served as the soundtrack for murder, suicide, and the burning of churches dating to the medieval period across the country with the musicians themselves at the center of these crimes. Andrew Mimms takes over the microphone to tell the story of the militant Satanist Black Circle who gathered a record store called Hell to create music but also mayhem.
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Synanon is really two different organizations separated by time with the same origin and some of the same personnel sort of like 1960’s Jefferson Airplane and 1980’s Starship. One has very little do with the other close-up but from a far enough distance they look kind of similar. The psychologist Steven Simon calls these two groups Synanon I and Synanon II. Synanon I called itself a charitable organization and focused its energies on drug rehabilitation in the inner city. Synanon II called itself a religion and established communes in urban and rural locations where residents followed whatever rules were passed down as part of the Synanon leadership's social experiment. Synanon I saved lives even though it was often protested by NIMBY neighbors who didn't want to run into recovering drug addicts at the grocery store. Synanon II accumulated vast resources and sought to intentionally freak out the general public, leading to the group's decline.
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In the 1980s, the game Dungeons and Dragons or, more specifically, its creators and players were accused of operating a Satanic cult. Luke takes the lead microphone to explore the strange events that led to this profound confusion between the fantasy world of the game and the real world of 1980s America. Warning: this episode contains references to suicide.
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Multilevel marketing groups or MLMs engage in legal pyramid-style schemes that escape laws against such schemes because of the involvement of products including everything from make-up and detergent to diet pills, shampoos, and nutritional supplements. Nikki Hiller Henderson takes the microphone to lead the second of our actor-hosted episodes in our cults that aren't cults series.
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(Part 2 is now available on the Strange Ride channel). In this Strange Ride/Occult Confessions crossover episode Savannah kicks off OC’s newest season “cults that aren’t cults” by looking at the Secret Space Program conspiracy theory. The human race is under attack, and the earth needs all of our help if we’re going to survive to the end of this war. You’ve already started your journey by listening to this podcast, but stick with us. It’ll be difficult to understand. They don’t want you to understand, but you have to try. An evil Alien race known as the reptilians are keeping us trapped here on earth. To be used as food to fuel their galactic conquest. They’ve even taken up abducting us to turn us into Super Soldiers to fight in their never ending war for control over the universe. Some of us may have been those kidnapped soldiers. Once they have no more use for us they wipe our memories and throw us back to Earth. We are nothing to them. They are faster, stronger, smarter, BUT, not all hope is lost. Us humans of earth… We’re special. We have souls that have the power to defeat the reptilians once and for all, but only if we’re able to unlock that power.
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Rob and Luke talk with author and witch Gabriela Herstik about her new project, "Goddess Energy: Awakening the Divine Feminine through Myth and Magick." Gabriela talks about the intersections of Judaism and neo-paganism in her own practice, the many faces and incarnations of the goddess, and sex magic. For more about Gabriela's work visit linktr.ee/gabyherstik.
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This graduation season, Rob was asked to be a commencement speaker for Chesapeake College's ceremony. In this special episode, Rob shares his speech with the confessors and talks intimately about what the opportunity means to him and what he hopes for the future of the species. .
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The Georgia Guidestones arrived mysteriously and disappeared violently, shrouded in secrecy as a monument intended to direct future generations of human beings. Rob sits down with Bryan Delius to discuss his research on the Guidestones and discover the full story of what became of the monument.
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The Morrigan is a perplexing figure to make clear sense of for the reasons that all Celtic mythology is similarly perplexing: it was part of an oral tradition that was only recorded in the medieval period after the believers in the Morrigan had long since disappeared. Unlike the fairly extensive record of the Greco-Roman deities, the references to the Morrigan and her fellow Celtic gods are far more scant. The fact that Celtic deities were often triple-natured and that their aspects could take on or subsume different names further complicates the project of pinning down exactly who the Morrigan was to the members of her cult. But we're going to see how far we can go in identifying the lore association with the Morrigan and what we can properly say about the goddess.
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The legends of Rhiannon come primarily from the Mabinogion, a cycle of fourth Welsh myths that tell, in part, the story of Pwyll Pen Annwn who married Rhiannon. The stories date to the twelfth century although their origins likely go much further back in Celtic history. Rhiannon is a Welsh witch or druid who uses her power to escape an unwanted courtship and marry the man she chooses. But a lie finds her subject to a terrible penance that has linked her with Epona, goddess of horses, ever since. We tell the story of Rhiannon and Pwyll and also her marriage to Manawydan, brother of Branwen, after Pwyll’s disappearance.
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In the second part of our discussion, we turn from myth to historical documents and consider what the druids may have been like as a caste. What jobs did they perform in Celtic culture? How did their role inform what it meant to be a Celt? We also discuss modern neo-Druids and how their practices relate to the history.
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In an episode recovered from the dustbin of our archive, we invite you to explore with us the strange lore of the Infertile Order and the Myth of the Cheese. Did Hiram Miraalaarn encounter planetary nymphs on his way to Venus? Are the birds to blame for our inability to pair music and lyrics in the Song of Lurm? Find out in today's very special episode.
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