Occult Confessions

Did Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current and one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth-century, create plans for a death ray or particle beam peacemaker that would put an end to all warfare.

In Western New York's "burned over district" a series of religious movements rose up with apocalyptic visions. In this episode, we discuss two post-apocalyptic groups: the Shakers or Shaking Quakers, led by Mother Ann Lee, and the Perfectionists at the Oneida Community led by John Humphrey Noyes. Both believed that Christ's Second Coming had already happened and both argued for a complete overhaul of the way human beings had or didn't have sex.

The concept of a rapture is a relatively recent idea although a time of evil, destruction, and tribulation is as old as John's Revelation. In this episode, we trace theories of rapture, tribulation, the anti-Christ, and the judgment from John the Revelator to the present day.

Kali is one of the most notorious of the Hindu pantheon. As the unamiable consort of Siva, she needs to be calmed by her husband to keep from destroying the world. Christian missionaries accused her of encouraging human sacrifice, but her real mission was the destruction of the demons that hold humanity back from enlightenment. For this reason, Kali has become a key figure in Tantric worship. What makes Kali so fascinating and what does she have to teach us about staving off apocalypse?

Did the Mayan calendar end on December 21, 2012? And if it did, so what? Conspiracy theorists predicted a NASA-inspired plot or grand revelation produced by crystal skulls. New Agers believed that the ancient Mayans were actually extra terrestrials with a plan for a re-harmonization of the earth. But actual Mayans weighed in with their own theories, revealing a deeper message behind the 2012 phenomenon.

How is Chinese Traditional Medicine a form of spiritual healing? We work our way through the yin and yang theory, organs, disorders, and the divine penetrating illumination as we try and make sense of how and why this ancient practice works for modern patients.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was one of the first American healers to come up with the idea that disease was a mental phenomenon that could be cured using the mind. Mary Baker Eddy incorporated scripture into the process with her own spiritualized version of this theory. And Therapeutic Touch brought these ideas back into a secular context. In this episode, we discuss the American Mind Cure and Rob gives a demonstration of Spiritualist laying-on-of-hands healing.

If the demon is the disease then exorcism is the cure. The rite was most popular in the Roman Empire and again during the rise of Protestantism and it persists into the twenty-first century. How did exorcism change from the reign of Constantine to medieval Europe to Anna Ecklund in Iowa in 1928?

From ancient Bablyon to the Occult Revival, occultists have categorized demons and created formulae for their invocation and control. We follow the long thread of this tradition through the Book of Tobit, The Book of Enoch, the Testament of Solomon, and the Lesser Key of Solomon.

At the time the gospels were written, enemies of the early Christians circulated anti-gospels arguing that Jesus was a black magician. In fact, Jesus fell into the category of a divine or holy man who healed through an innate ability. Jesus was one of a host of healers circulating around the Roman Empire during this time period. What made him stand out from the crowd and why did he become the founder of the world's largest mainstream religious tradition?