Oddcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP)

Having laid out fairy-magic as a genre, and discussing some of its characteristics, we are delighted to speak with Daniel Harms about the people and social circumstances behind the texts and practices of fairy-magic.

Did you know that there is a whole practical and occult-philosophic corpus dealing with the summoning and controlling of faeries? Samuel Gillis Hogan tells us about his research in the archives of early-modern British faerie-magic.

Say no more.

Having reviewed the roots of reincarnationism in the west, we move forward in time, looking at the Hellenistic and especially the imperial man eras. We then focus in on the inheritors of the Pythagorean/Platonic legacy, the Platonists.

In Part II we discuss the reincarnational mythoi and logoi found in Plato's dialogues. These are, in many important ways, the foundational documents of western reincarnationism.

In Part I of a thematic series, we begin to explore the long secret history of reincarnation in the west. In this episode we consider our earliest evidence, which clusters around two resonant names: Pythagoras and Orpheus.

We penetrate further into the dream-labyrinth of the Hypnerotomachia with James Russell, exploring the book's many early readers. These include a pope, a playwright, and an alchemist. Codes, rebuses, polyvalent images, esoteric architecture, and more meet in the melting-pot of Humanism.

We introduce one of the strangest and most nigglingly-intriguing esoteric books of the Italian Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. James O'Neill is our guide through nested dream-landscapes, erotic initiations, and weirdly-specific garden design.

What if the scientific study of religions, a.k.a. Comparative Religions, History of Religions, and so forth – the academic discipline wherein the academic study of western esotericism largely finds its home – was founded by, well, western esotericists? In this interview we examine the history of the history of religions with two historians of religions and find the Theosophical Society right there at the beginning.

Music was seen as a crucial tool for the elevation and transformation of the human soul in ancient esoteric philosophy from Pythagoras to Olympiodorus, and beyond into the western esoteric traditions of later eras. We discuss the theory and practice of anagogic music in the ancient Pythagorean/Platonist tradition with Sebastián Moro Tornese.