Occult Confessions

On the night of tuesday, January 3rd of 1804, 29 year old excise officer Francis Smith came face to face with the ghost and in an act of justice, shot down the white figure in the dead of night, determined to free Hammersmith from the ghost’s reign of terror once and for all. What Smith didn’t realize was that he didn’t kill the ghost at all, but instead killed 32 year old bricklayer Thomas Millwood. This resulted in a murder trial that would set a legal precedent in the UK involving self-defense that remained unsettled for almost two hundred years.

In the 1990s, former footballer (or soccer baller for us Americans) and sportscaster David Icke made waves with his wild conspiracy theory that the planet was under the control of a nefarious group of reptilian shapeshifters. Olivia was a longtime fan of Icke's theory but current events public and personal have prompted a change of heart. Find out why in our reptilian redux.

Robert E. Howard's “The Shadow Kingdom” sits at the nexus of two realms of occult lore: the canon revolving around an Atlantean Root Race established by Helena Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine in the late 1880s and the reptilian conspiracy theory most closely identified with former sportscaster David Icke. The Shadow Kingdom tells the story of an Atlantean warrior, Kull, who becomes a Valusian king. The ambassador Ka-nu reveals a secret plot of shape-shifting serpent men hiding in Kull's own palace and the blunt warrior king swings into action in opposition to the conspiracy which reaches a terrible climax in the cursed chamber of a king murdered a thousand years before. Although “The Shadow Kingdom” is a work of fiction—in fact, it is arguably the earliest example of the “Sword and Sorcery” fantasy genre most popularly associated with Tolkein's Lord of the Rings—it both drew on and introduced elements into occult and conspiracy lore that have been accepted by believers as absolute truth.

For fifty years, most people believed the Necronomicon, an ancient grimoire written by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazrad in the year 700, was imaginary. That is, until a writer using only the name Simon published what he claimed to be a translation of the text in 1977. How could a book of spells meant to invoke interdimensional space deities or raise otherworldly destructors from the depths of the sea, based on a complex mythos that seemed to have been the invention of a small circle of weird fiction writers led by H. P. Lovecraft, have any basis in reality. If there really was a Necronomicon written in 700, how did Lovecraft know about it? And if there wasn't, why would Simon claim that the book was an authentic translation of a real ancient grimoire?

For hundreds of years, Americans have speculated about the origins of ancient burial mounds scattered across North America. Rob is joined by Miranda Yancey of the Illinois State Museum to consider who created these mounds. Speculations have run wild and come to include a lost tribe of Israel, Vikings, Freemasons, and a mythic race of giants. How did European Americans use these false legends to justify the colonization of the Americas, and what is the truth behind America’s ancient burial mounds?

Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats believed that Ireland’s freedom depended in part on overthrowing Christianity, the religion of the oppressor, in favor of a pagan mindset. A longtime member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats incorporated occult themes into much of his work. In 1925, he published A Vision, inspired by his wife’s automatic writing in which he articulated his own supernatural theory.

In 1857, a full-throated defense of hermetic philosophy and medieval and renaissance alchemy came from an unexpected source: major general Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a veteran of two wars who served as chairman of the war board during the American Civil War. Writing almost a century before Jung's psychological interpretation of alchemy, Hitchock argued that the mistake alchemy's nineteenth-century critics made was to read the alchemists' detailed treatises literally. In fact, legitimate alchemical literature was meant to be read as an allegory for the elevation of the soul. What did Hitchcock know of the hermetic mystery that his contemporaries failed to grasp?

The house where Lizzie Borden's father and step-mother were brutally murdered with an ax (or hatchet) is under new ownership. Rob discusses ghost tourism, paranormal phenomena, and the strange history of the house with Azure Hall of US Ghost Adventures.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is one of the most important figures in Victorian occultism who you've probably never heard of, in part because Lord Lytton was a man before his time. He was likely a practicing occultist who invented the occult novel with his book, Zanoni. The concepts of the “dweller on the threshold” as well as the magical power of “vril,” an occult energy like astral fluid or akasa can both be attributed to Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. He also predicted the cataclysmic impact of nuclear power and eugenics on civilization.

The pizzagate and Qanon conspiracies are the offspring of legends of ritual abuse propagated during the 1980s and 1990s as part of what's come to be called the Satanic Panic. The myth of a secret group of powerful people abusing children goes back millennia but recent themes of elite manipulation and mind control date to the 1970s. In this episode, we complete our history of the false legends of ritual abuse by bringing them up to 2021.