Occult Confessions

Who is the girl at the pizza emporium and what's the deal with the tattoo on the back of her neck? James visits "Church Secrets" and Olivia and Bri visit "Get It, Gurlll" on this very special episode.

In 1972, Ed Sanders published one of the earliest investigative accounts of the Manson family in his book "The Family." Sanders argued that the Manson family's murders were part of a pattern of ritual evil that Manson learned from the Process Church of the Final Judgement as well as the Solar Temple of the O. T. O. Both groups successfully sued to have their names removed from subsequent printings of the book. In this episode, we explore the myth that Charles Manson was a New Age Satanist.

The second part of our story of the black mass begins with Renaissance and Victorian tales of the witches' sabbath complete with human sacrifice and sex in the woods. We bring our narrative full circle by ending with the anti-Catholic false confession of Maria Monk, who claimed to experience ritual abuse at a nunnery in Montreal.

In the ancient and medieval world, early Christians, Gnostics, medieval Waldensians and Fraticelli, and European Jews were accused of participating in acts of ritual evil including child murder and illicit sex. The first of our two-part series on the black mass tackles early instances of the false legend of satanic abuse.

Rob is joined by microbiologist Dr. Matt Hatkoff and PhD candidate Bryan Delius, whose research focuses on the intersection of disease and environmental change. Together, they discuss CoVID vaccination, the spread of disease from animals to humans, the global impact of human population growth, and the likelihood of another pandemic in our lifetimes.

In this episode, Rob is joined by Luxa Strata from the Lux Occult podcast and Nia Ain, a longtime chaos magician and member of the Illuminates of Thanateros. Together they discuss the influences of Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley on Chaos Magic(k), the various intersections between Chaos Magic(k) and popular culture, how to get started in Chaos Magic(k), and My Little Pony.

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth is perhaps one of the most influential groups in the practice of chaos magic(k). In this episode, we explore the career of its founder, musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, trace the basic rites of the Temple, and tackle P-Orridge's theory of occult splinters and samples.

Ray Sherwin and Peter Carroll are the founders of the Illuminates of Thanateros and the international occult practice of chaos magic(k). In this episode, we explore their theory and practice as they laid it out in their initial texts, Carrolll's Liber Null and Sherwin's the Book of Results.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley founded a religion around the principle of chaos in which everyone was the Pope and anyone could be a Fenderson. In the 1980s, the Church of the SubGenius with their cult of Bob Dobbs followed up on the Discordians' tradition by inventing their own millenarian movement anticipating the arrival of the extraterrestrial Xists. In the second part of our chaos magic series, we follow the history of these two practices.

Austin Osman Spare is widely regarded as the spiritual progenitor of chaos magic. He was a modernist artist from the first decades of the twentieth century and a man ahead of his time in many ways. His art, drawing on automatic writing and drawing, predated surrealism by more than a decade and his occult practice--involving sigils and masturbation--inspired a movement that wouldn't coalesce until the 1970s.