Occult Confessions

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 wife’s spirit as she died.

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 were able, and when verification was incomplete or impossible they noted it before sharing the narrative. To rule out the problem of misremembering or suggested memory, they sought out witnesses to these experiences; people who heard the tale when it first happened. They consulted calendars and retrieved death records and newspaper reports of accidents to verify details. Taken together, the hundreds of reports they received assumed a substantial weight as evidence for a phenomenon that science has chosen to ignore ever since.

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 gathers enough of its creator's energy, the creature can, like a golem, take on a life of its own. Much of this tulpa mysticism is a recent invention, borrowing from theosophy, chaos magic, and esoteric buddhism. Traditionally, the tulpa has been attributed to Tibetan Buddhists. It's true that Tibetans, drawing on earlier Indian texts, have a concept for a mind-made body or emanation but their practice and theology do not come anywhere near what the bronies and their fellow tulpamancers have been up to. In this episode, we try and make sense of the tangled history of the tulpa.

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 the Shelleys along with her husband, Edward—also reported seeing Shelley's double walking past her window and disappearing around a dead end. Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffman, and the psychologist Otto Rank all shared Shelley’s curiosity with the doppelganger. Do we all have doubles, and, if so, what does it mean for us to come across them?

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 persecuted by the Food and Drug Administration for his vitalist theories on the existence of an ether-like substance called orgone which penetrated the universe and, according to Reich, could be accumulated to heal even the most deadly of diseases. In this episode, we elicit that occult or rather fringe scientific confession of Dr. Wilhelm Reich.

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 all signs of the cult of the yoni and phallus.

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 occult-inclined friends that he possessed a secret numerological formula. And yet, in his autobiography, Casanova professed disdain for magical thinkers of all kinds, iterating at every opportunity the Enlightenment credo that one must only trust reason in answering life's many questions and quandaries. How can a man be both a magician and a disbeliever in magic?