Occult Confessions

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.

Almost immediately after the second world war, the American military initiated a program to collect the Nazis' most promising scientists and bring them to the US in a form of intellectual and technological reparations. Anxious to best the USSR, which was also recruiting among Nazi scientists, the Americans often turned a blind eye to some of the darker atrocities some of these researchers had been implicated in. The Americans and the British adopted rocket scientists, chemists, and, perhaps most controversially bio-medical researchers. The severe ethical compromises required to claim these so-called reparations from the Germans bred a host of conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most bizarre theory, which gained traction among therapists who believed in a pandemic of Satanic Ritual Abuse, was the legend of Dr. Green. According to believers, Green worked for the CIA in developing the prototype for their mind control program.

In the 1940s, Candy Jones was a successful model and performed in the South Pacific with the USO in a show that had been written for her. In the 1970s, she married New York midnight radio host Long John Nebel. When she had trouble sleeping, he volunteered to help her by trying out hypnosis. While hypnotized, Jones began to tell an incredible story of being mind controlled by a doctor in Oakland, California and performing covert operations, possibly for the CIA.

In 1980, Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder, published a book that would shape the culture of the decade to come, lasting into the 1990s. Billed as “the true story of a year-long contest between innocence and Evil,” the book recounted lurid memories of abuse that Michelle had recovered in therapy with Dr. Pazder. Going into a trance-like state, Smith discovered that she had been the victim of systematic abuse at the hands of a satanic group in Victoria, Canada. After bringing her to an orgy, her mother gave her away to the cult. The cult tortured her in an open grave, forced her to live in a cage, slaughtered kittens and mutilated dead infants in her presence. If all of this seems to be too much to accept that’s because there’s a very strong argument to be made that, while Smith and Pazder may have believed every word of Smith’s tale, most if not all of it had been imagined.