Rune Soup

Parapsychologist Dr Brian Laythe joins the show for a discussion on ghosts and haunted places. We explore definitions: what IS a ghost? That's a slippery question right there. We look at what makes a place 'haunted'. Are they haunted because they have ghosts or do they have ghosts because they are haunted? And we investigate how ghost encounters fit into the wider ecosystem of High Strangeness. Can anyone really be 'just' a witness or are we at least co-creating these contact events? A great chat. Enjoy! Show Notes Get Brian's book, Ghosted!: Exploring the Haunting Reality of Paranormal Encounters. Visit the Institute For The Study of Religious And Anomalous Experience.

After last year's Astro-Gnostic conference and some extended jungle experience, I want to revisit some comparisons between 'gnosticism' and 'animism' -whatever they happen to be. And in particular I want to make the case for how the assertion that the cosmos is a prison built by an evil God and the cosmos is a community of beings can share co-presence in the same overall framework. So this is a gathering of thoughts in that general direction. Show Notes There is a Higher Soup meetup in Wellington NZ on Saturday Feb 11th. It's open to all but please RSVP so we have an idea of numbers. And once again for no reason other than it's a good way for me to organise my talking points so I don't forget them, I used Tome again. If you want to try it out, here's the invite link.

This week we welcome to the show hunter, leather maker, tracker, artist and educator Harmony Cronin. Over the course of her career, Harmony has been a big game skinner, she has convened and continues to convene women's hunting groups, she provides support for Indigenous buffalo hunts and has lived in a tent she built herself beside Yellowstone, where her neighbours were a wolf pack she fed with road kill. Harmony joins the show for a powerful conversation about the roles and obligations of being a human in a living cosmos. Obviously this one has some pictures to go with it. So you can watch the video version on YouTube, or you can check out all the images we discuss in the show notes at runesoup.com. Enjoy! Show Notes Find out about Harmony's classes and everything else she has going on at Gathering Ways. Find out about the Buffalo Bridge project here.

Join me for the first solo show of the year! In this episode, we walk through a presentation that can help best situate you to achieve and transform in 2023. Extreme ownership. Correctly setting priorities. How to build a map of both official reality and reality. Stepping into an attitude that thrives in chaos. Using time magic to shift from 'goals' to 'sites of magical transformation'. Oh, and if you want to have a play around with the fun little AI presentation creator I used, here's an invite link. You can also watch this episode on YouTube, if you'd prefer.

Tis the season once more for our annual chat with the one and only Conner Habib. We started by discussing Christmas and then ended up having quite a detailed exploration of ceremony, place and context that set the theme for the rest of the chat. So this one is a little different from our usual new year chats. Enjoy! Show Notes Conner on Patreon. Conner's debut novel, Hawk Mountain.

Continuing our End-of-Year run, the legendary Lynne McTaggart returns to the show to talk about working with The Field and the Power of Intention for healing, manifestation and transformation. We catch Lynne up on some of the work of the Rune Soup Premium Member intention groups, compare notes and experiences and speculate as to how all this stuff might 'work'. Always a good time. Enjoy! Show Notes Lynne's website. Get on the waiting list for the 2023 Power of Eight masterclass here.

Welcome to the 300th episode of Rune Soup! They grow up so fast, eh? To celebrate the occasion, I had two options: The first was to hold a big party and then slip on a magic ring mid-speech, vanishing before your very eyes. The second was to invite onto the show perhaps the most-requested guest, John Michael Greer. And really this timed very well because John has a new book out called The Occult Philosophy Workbook: A One Year Course In The Secret Wisdom. Plus we're looking at a whole new year a few days away. Plus we're doing a very special six month premium member course at the beginning of next year called The Foundations which -as the name suggests- is a comprehensive course on all the foundational magical practices from setting up altars to casting circles to scrying and all of that. I'll be taking you through exactly how I do All The Things. So with all this going on, John and I have a conversation at the Venn overlap of all these territories: What are the essential skills of a (broadly speaking 'Western') magician and have they changed over time? Show Notes Get The Occult Philosophy Workbook here. AND ALSO... the good people at Aeon Books have offered Rune Soup listeners a discount of 20% off any book purchased from their website until December 31, 2022. Use the code OP20 at checkout. John's blog and website, Ecosophia.

A Christmas tradition to rival eggnog and embarrassing yourself at the office party, this week we once again have the astrological forecast for the first half of 2023 with the incomparable Austin Coppock. Enjoy!

Greg Carlwood from The Higherside Chats joins the show for a countdown of the 10 best conspiracy books of all time. UFOs, technocracy, CIA coups, predatory capitalism, ancient aliens, Big Pharma, elite networks… here's the list! Some you might expect. Others you most definitely will not. And half the fun is hearing the justification for why one book made it into the list and another didn't. I had a blast with this one. Enjoy!

The one and only Julio Cesar Ody returns to the show for our annual Halloween special! Julio joins us from his native Brazil for a fascinating romp through his country's magical landscape: Spiritism, Umbanda, Quimbanda, Candomblé. The impact of Diaspora African frameworks, Amazonian plant spirits, ayahuasca. The impact of Catholicism and the role of the saints. The disastrous impact of modern, evangelical Christianity. It's all here! Spooky season's greetings to you all. Thank you so much for listening. Show Notes Julio's book, Magister Officiorum. Julio's website, Figueria Mágica. Figueria Mágica on YouTube. The thesis/article Julio mentions: Umbanda, Uma Religião Sincréta e Brasileira.