Occult Confessions

Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception was a book ahead of its time and related the famous British novelist and intellectual's experimental engagement with mescaline. Huxley became a proponent of mescaline and sometime user of LSD ever afterward and a major influence on the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s.

There is so much Star Wars content out in the wide world. Some of it is loved, some of it hated, but there is one piece of Star Wars media that is so hated by its creator that it was almost lost media. If it wasn’t for fans making bootleg VCR copies during its one and only broadcast it would be lost to time. I’m talking about of course the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. A variety show set in the Star Wars universe that was also meant to sort of celebrate Thanksgiving/Christmas. George Lucas was so mortified by how this special turned out that he has tried to remove any trace of its existence from the earth, and because of that resistance it has since become a cult classic amongst Star Wars fans. But how did the Star Wars Holiday special end up so bad? Today, Savannah will be going over how the special was made and its content, so you can be spared from having to watch it yourself.

We sit down with Dr. Justin Sledge of the Esoterica Youtube channel to talk about his work with medieval and ancient esoteric texts and alchemical practices.

Krishnamurti's philosophy was about getting free from thought and time, releasing memory and belief, and becoming fully present. He taught that there was no method or ritual or plan that could achieve this state of perfect presence and no guru who could guide you. Each person had to be their own guru and discover the truth of what is.

In this final installment of our biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the teacher disbands the Order of the Star and is banished from Theosophical Society Headquarters. He becomes an advisor to Indira Ghandi and questions whether his strange path to knowledge can ever be replicated.

The second part of our series on the teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti begins with his spiritual awakening beneath a pepper tree in Ojai, California. Krishnamurti was plagued by terrible episodes of physical suffering accompanied by great spiritual insight. We continue through to George Arundale's bizarre plot to insert himself into the highest ranks of Krishnamurti's organization and theosophy writ large.

As a child, Jiddu Krishnamurti was named the vessel for the World Teacher by leading figures in the Theosophical Society, namely Charles Leadbetter and Annie Besant. He came to regard Besant as a second mother but his relationship with Leadbetter was more complicated. Leadbetter wrote a serialized account of Krishnamurti's previous lives, calling him Alcyone, and helped Krishnamurti make contact with the ascended masters of theosophy. But Krishnamurti and his family were conflicted by the way he had been set up to become the religious leader of thousands and thousands of people worldwide.

In the second part of our conversation about Annie Besant, she leaves the secularists and joins the Theosophical Society. We consider how the Mahatmas continued to produce letters after Blavatsky's death and how closely Besant's theosophy resembled the first generation.

We open our story on the child messiah, Jiddu Krishnamurti, with a two-part episode on Annie Besant, a woman he came to regard as his adopted mother. Having been an atheist, social reformer, and advocate for birth control, Besant became the president of the Theosophical Society and one of the most influential occultists of the early twentieth century.

For parents like me who chose to share 2010’s revival of My Little Pony with my children, the animated series’ emphasis on social-emotional learning is the primary draw; however, these lessons are framed in distinctly occult terms. The series is subtitled “friendship is magic” and while this may suggest that friendship is awesome, in the context of the show it often means that it is literally a matter of spells, potions, and esoteric books. The show’s association with real-world occultism in the form of pony-inspired tulpas shows the degree to which it has successfully tapped into a New Age spirituality that also appeals to adult fans. The protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, descends according to the theosophical paradigm from the palace of Princess Celestia to Ponyville in order to learn, grow, and ultimately metamorphose into the show’s version of the divine feminine—a princess with both secular and spiritual power. At the end of the third season, she achieves an incomplete apotheosis and the audience learns the degree to which her friendships are, like Aleister Crowley’s goetian demons, actually external manifestations of her own consciousness in need of harmonizing. In Crowleyite fashion, the show celebrates the ponies’ individuality, but, after Twlight Sparkle’s initiation, it troubles personal identity by requiring the ponies to surrender a significant aspect of their ego-based power. In this paper, I analyze the show’s psycho-spiritual occultism in order to explore what it means to embody the divine feminine in postmodern popular culture.