Occult Confessions

Jack Parsons was one of the world’s first rocket scientists, inventing an early version of the same fuel that was used to carry humans to the moon without ever having earned a formal degree. Parsons was almost entirely self-taught. Obsessive about rockets, he often took great risks in his experimentation with the explosives that would eventually take his life. Parsons was similarly voracious and impetuous in his study of occultism. He fancied himself a black magician, earned Aleister Crowley’s approval and then censure as head of the Ordo Templi Orientis in southern California, and believed he had conjured his second wife through his invocations to the goddess Babalon. He bridged the worlds of science and magick and died suddenly and tragically, leaving the strange spectacle of his life for his admirers and detractors to puzzle through.

Luke is joined by a panel of occult confessions listeners to discuss their experiences at the intersection of sexuality and Christianity. Together, they address whether it's possible to be gay and Christian today.

In this special episode, Rob sits down with Jacob Wheatley, one of our founding alchemical actors, to discuss their experience with conversion therapy as a gay teenager growing up in a Christian household. Jacob's story reveals the pain caused by these methods and Jacob tells us how they convinced their conversion therapist that conversion therapy doesn't work.

Charles Leadbetter was one of the Blavatsky-trained second generation of theosophists and a frequent collaborator with Annie Besant. Leadbetter believed in reincarnation and his ability to recall past lives including an experience meeting Pythagoras in 504 BCE. Leadbetter claimed to have spent the next two-thousand-three-hundred years since meeting Pythagoras in the “heaven world” before being incarnated back on earth. While born without any memory of the heaven world, the lessons he learned there slowly returned to him, including recollecting a house where he'd resided in a previous life, revealed to him by one of the Masters. These lessons led him to the Anglican priesthood, and, ultimately to a leading role in developing a theosophical and allegorical occult interpretation of Christianity.

Heaven or Havona exists at the center of a collection of super universes within one of which our universe and our planet are found. So says the Urantia Book, channeled by an anonymous source and compiled by a committee calling itself the Forum. At its heart, the book is a reinterpretation of Christianity through a space age lens with creator gods incarnating on various planets throughout the universes they construct. According to Urantian doctrine, Jesus of Nazareth was the seventh bestowal or incarnation of our creator, Christ Michael. He offered humanity the fourth of five revelations with the Urantia Book being the final epochal revelation. Resources for today’s episode include Martin Gardner’s Urantia: the Great Cult Mystery.

In 1876, Anna Kingsford began to have visions and psychic impressions of her past lives which became the basis for the spiritual and theosophical books that were to follow. Edward Maitland, who would be her confederate in these endeavors, was practicing a form of meditation that involved tracing his ideas back to their origin at the core of his consciousness.In summer 1881, Kingsford gave a series of lectures in London on religion and occultism which came to be called her “Perfect Way” lectures and formed the basis for a powerful articulation of Christian-themed occultism.

Anna Bonus Kingsford was at the center of one of the biggest controversies in the Theosophical Society during Helena Blavatsky's lifetime. Arguing that Christian occultism was more accessible to a Western audience than the Hindu and Buddhist version Blavatsky had come to prefer, she threatened to split the London Lodge in half. To hold things together literally and figuratively, Blavatsky and Olcott had to make an emergency visit back from Adyar, India to London to quell the conflict brewing among London's theosophists—some of the most influential theosophists of the nineteenth century. Advocate for vegetarianism, enemy of scientists who performed experiments on live animals, and one of the most visionary Christian occultists of the occult revival; Anna Kingsford is a woman you may not have known about but she very much deserves the opportunity to share her occult confession with you.

John Paul II was the second-longest reigning Pope in Catholic history and spent a lot of time writing and thinking about sex and marriage for a Pope. We consider the prohibition of contraceptives, the meaning of masturbation, and the Catholic Church's preoccupation with adult entertainment.

Christian Sex Writers are an eclectic bunch from conservatives to liberals to doctors who fill you in on the birds and the bees while you wait for your blood test results. What are the Biblical sources for Christian sexual ethics, and are they consistent? Are Christian attitudes toward sex necessarily in opposition to the dominant views of Western culture? How can Christians reconcile God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” while trying to do what the celibate Jesus would do?

Brett Warren brings a forensic approach to the bodies of historical vampires. Brett brings a historian’s curiosity to the project–translating eighteenth-century texts and tracing the origins of the word “vampire.” How can modern medical science help us to better understand the cadavers excavated and eviscerated after their previous owners were accused of being vampires? To support Brett’s work visit: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcanearchive/the-historic-vampire-debate