Rune Soup

Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio's Miguel Conner returns to the show this week for an in-depth unpacking of claims made by Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay and others in the online Right that Marxism is actually Gnosticism.

We look at

• The origins of these claims.
• Exactly WHERE and HOW they are wrong.
• The origins of Gnosticism.
• The 'true' origins of 'woke' thought.

We also explore some possible points of consent with the analysis Jordan Peterson presents regarding Lucifer and the archetypal significance of clowns, jesters and evil.

Many thanks to Miguel for coming back on the show again. I have actually tried several different ways of doing this topic as a solo show since catching the discussion between Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay back in June of 2023. But imagine trying to have a discussion on the history of Gnosticism without Miguel?

Turns out that was the very obvious unlock I needed all along. Enjoy!

• Catch Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio here.
• This is the video examining Jordan Peterson's shadow projection that I mention during the show.

This week's episode is an installment in the long-running World Without Sin series, examining how we respond to monolithic media and how not every outsider is a plucky freedom fighter.

We also look at how and why it might be that all forms of expression are collapsing into a meme singularity and what this might have to do with the jester archetype.

After that there is a life update and a travel magic story. And then -on the video version only- we have a Q&A where we speculate on the whereabouts of Kate Middleton, what's really going on with Boeing, healing from trauma patterns and G. K. Chesterton.

Also, I promised I'd share some of the memes that were hard to convey in audio format, but instead, I am just sharing a link to the presentation from the livestream. It's all here if you're interested.

The show notes are just some other things that are coming up or going on, because why not?

• Peter Grey's talk at Occulture Berlin 2023: Atomic Gods: Magick beyond the nuclear horizon.
• J. F. Martel of Weird Studies has a new course coming up this months on the films of Stanley Kubrick.
• This Missing Witches fundraiser that Rune Soup listeners contributed so generously is coming back around again. I probably mentioned this one a few weeks too early as I have no detail on prizes and such yet, lol. But the link is here!
• Hadean Press have just released the final Jake Stratton-Kent book we'll ever get, Cyprian's Offices of Spirits.
• My own fancy, pre-ordered copy is winging its way to the farm where it is useless to me for the Q2 member course will be Grimoires 2: Your Greek Inheritance (The Jake Edit) as I am currently back in South America. Lol. Anyway, more details on that closer to the date.

Hello from the road!

Just wanted to get out a little solo show of what I have been up to, which also morphed into how to deal with foreseen rather than unforeseen dramas.

We also cover some updates on the Sigil A Day project, and speculate on the development of media and podcasts in our post-Putin-interview World Without Sin.

Enjoy! Chat soon!

You may recall that Angie from Angie Speaks guested on the podcast last year. Well, she graciously invited me on a show she co-hosts, Mystic and the Machine, where we have a good ol' chat about UFOs, Jung, the looming apocalypse and how all of these things are interrelated.

It was such a good chat, I'm releasing it as a main podcast episode this week.

Should you wish to watch it instead, catch the interview at the Mystic and the Machine YouTube channel.

Here we are in 2024, eh?

And it’s off to a bang for people starting on the #SigilADay2024 Project and, to a lesser extent, Japan Airlines.

In this solo show, we cover:

• Locating your intentions and goals for 2024.
• Turning them into enchantment topic areas.
• How to create sigils from scratch.
• The initial sigil activation I am offering for those embarking on this project and why. (Hint: It needs to be quick but not as quick as some of you ejaculate. That’s right, I made a sigil joke.)

 NOTE: the audio version does not contain the Q&A which starts at the one hour mark of the livestream, should you wish to check that out.

As far as show notes go, I would recommend you also check out a video I shot over the Christmas break about setting and achieving powerful goals in 2024. It teams with the practical enchantment theme.

Enjoy! Let's do this!

You know the festive season has begun when Austinmas rolls around! Join Gordon White and Austin Coppock for a look into the first half of 2024 and how to navigate it.

We look at

• Risk of war.
• What we can and can't learn from 2024.
• The best time of year to GTD.
• The Year of the Dragon.
• Mars, Mars and also some Mars to go with your Mars.

Plus there's this whole subplot about fish.

Enjoy!

After tabling the possibility in the last live stream and thrashing out some of the details with the Rune Soup Premium Member brain trust, we'll be moving forward with the goal of launching one sigil a day for every day of next year.

The audio version of the announcement -ie this one- is a bit more involved than the video one. That's because 58% of YouTube watchers aren't subscribed, so I had to pitch it a bit more as 'beginner'. But if you're subscribed to the podcast I wanted to speak more at your level.

But if you want the video one, you can watch me wandering around on the first beach day of Tasmanian Summer. (It poured with rain almost immediately after I finished filming). Or you can consume both. It's the festive season. Treat yourself.

The only relevant show note is a link to the Rune Soup telegram group, where the ongoing sigil project will be discussed. It's free and available to members and non-members.

Enjoy!

We come at last to the final in the AI For Magicians series of solo shows.

This time we explore how we co-create with non-human beings and what that AI co-creation looks like for magicians.

As is traditional, there is a video slide presentation that goes along with this episode, which you absolutely do not need to watch if you're vibing more with the audio.

Show Notes

• Ursula K. LeGuin and Donna Haraway discuss technology.
• James Bridle discussing Ecological Technology on the Emergence Magazine podcast.
• Previous episodes in the AI series:
  • Tools of the Magician
  • Transhumanism, Technocracy and AI: The Complete Story
  • Can We Trust AI To Censor Reality?

This weekend was the livestream of my year in review, as well as a suggested shape for

• How to conduct your own.
• Why you should do it now as a separate act to your new year intention setting.

As is now traditional, we did a Q&A on YouTube at the end which is only available on the video version, starting around 1:40. Two things came up that have already sparked some discussions regarding next year's plans. We're spinning up teams for:

• Launching one sigil a day for a whole year.
• A new year's detox.

More on both of these if and as they happen.

Enjoy!

Who says you can’t teach an old (27) dog new tricks?

For something a bit different, I’m sharing the audio version of, not my podcast, but I podcast I was on. Specifically The Coffee and Divination Podcast with JoAnna Farrer.

One of my goals for next year is to push the boat a bit more with the format of the podcast. This year we brought in more regular solo shows, more livestreams, and so on. I want to start throwing in some shorter episodes in addition to the main ones, and I want to start sharing other shows I was on that I think are really good discussions. It won’t happen every time, of course. But JoAnna is a very experienced practitioner herself so we have a really chat. And not enough of you click through when I just point to them. So I made it easy for you! You don’t have to do anything!

But actually what you should do is subscribe to Coffee and Divination if you like this episode. Do that here.

And if you’d like the video version, you can watch that here.

Enjoy!

This week's episode is the audio version of a live stream discussion with Samuel Urban of the Illegitimate Scholar podcast. We talk about

• The educational industrial complex.
• So-called 'alternative' history.
• Find the good in the total failure of academia over the past few years.
• Invisible colleges.
• What comes next and what to do.

A really fun chat -and one that only had a few technical issues for once, some of which weren't even on my side! Thanks, Elon! (We got Starlink while I was in Paraguay.)

Show Notes

• The Illegitimate Scholar podcast.
• Illegitimate Scholar on YouTube.

Legendary co-originator of permaculture, David Holmgren, returns to the show this week on the ery special occasion of the launch of the feature-length documentary, Reading Landscape.

In the show notes below, you will find the link and the password to watch the full documentary for free.

Please share it widely with anyone who may be interested, with the blessing of the producers.

David and I discuss

• The development of the film
• What is meant by 'landscape'
• What is meant by 'reading'
• What has changed in permaculture over the decades
• Learning from Indigenous teachers in Australia and New Zealand

And a whole lot more. It was a personal pleasure to be involved in the financing of this film as an individual and during my tenure at Permaculture Tasmania.

• Watch the full documentary here.

Use the Password: Melliodora

• Holmgren Design.

Astrologer and YouTuber Cam White joins the show this week to bring some helpful reframings to the space weather we'll all be enduring over the next few years.

We discuss

• How astrology works
• The role of a fortune teller in troubled times
• What sort of conflicts and wars are likely to appear when
• Whether the so-called Barbault Basket configuration ushers in a new golden age or not.

Super fun and spicy times. Enjoy the White Pill! 

• Cam's website.
• Cam's YouTube channel.
• Context on the Barbault Basket from S.J. Anderson.

Author, activist and educator, Dougald Hine returns to the show this week for a discussion that is simultaneously timely and timeless.

If you've been following along on the blog, you'll know that I have been wrestling with how to say things, with whom and to what end, given how the world is going.

One of the topics I had been meaning to record on for months now was the resurgence of Christianity: whether it is surprising or not, whether it is automatically reactionary, whether it is a sign of things improving or devolving. And I tried coming at that from several angles -including recording a whole solo show before leaving Paraguay on the topic that I didn't release- but found none of them were satisfactory.

Then I messaged Dougald about it, and it turns out it's an area he is also exploring, both personally and 'culturally' (whatever that means) right now. Plus, he's something of an aficionado of the works of Ivan Illich -whose insight is especially useful in these times. So he graciously agreed to come back on the show to prove that two heads are definitely better than one.

We explore the possible why of Christianity's resurgence, who 'owns' it and what happens if we don't engage, plus its different forms and mutations. Then we turn to Ivan Illich himself, beginning with a biography and an overview of his thought, before finishing with what he might have to say about these very strange times we are living through. (And depending on when you catch this episode, there is still time to get in on some Illich discussions with Dougald. Details in the show notes.

An excellent discussion. Enjoy!

• Dougald's Substack. Subscribe for access details for the Illich discussions.
• Here's a series from Dougald's substack called Into The Deep exploring Christianity's return:
  • The Ruined Church.
  • Stranger Friends.
  • What Happened in the Cathedral.
• Regrowing A Living Culture: A School Called Home.
• Dougald's first appearance on the show, discussing At Work In The Ruins.

Rhyd Wildermuth returns to the show on the occasion of his latest book launch, Here Be Monsters.

So we have a freewheeling chat about the mutation and fall of leftism, the what and where of activism accordingly, whether things are getting 'worse' or 'better', updated definitions of capitalism and fascism, Russell Brand, all kinds of incendiary stuff.

Oh, and gay werewolves.

• Get Here Be Monsters.
• Rhyd on Substack.
• Rhyd on X.

This week I had been meaning to do a World Without Sin solo show on the censorship laws rolling out around the world and their implications.

Then, as we all know by now, whatever is going on with Russel Brand started happening, so we begin our story there. (It's worth noting I recorded this about 24 hours ago, before YouTube demonetised his channel.)

Today's episode is a bit of a read-along so you may wish to watch the video version. Of course, all accommodation is made for the audio folks as well. No child left behind. We explore some of our looming technological dystopia and then finish off with some tactics on what to do about it.

Show Notes

• Rune Soup on Odysee.
• Rune Soup on Rumble.
• A live event on the censorship industrial complex hosted by none other than Russel Brand himself.

Greg Carlwood returns to the show for another instalment of the book club nobody asked for! We explore the best alternative medicine -perhaps 'true healing' or 'actually effective' is better- books that we know of.

Nutrition, breathwork, light therapy, terrain theory, energy healing. It's all here, baby. Greg has spent years interviewing some of the leading lights in what allopathy absurdly calls 'alternative' healing on The Higherside Chats. So this is a really comprehensive exploration.

Your wish list will have grown by the time this episode is done, that's for sure!

• The Higherside Chats.

It's been one of the highlights of my year to start getting messages and images of the Fortune's Fools Lenormand oracle out in the world. And, as you might expect, it's got me thinking about fortune-telling.

One of my personal creative goals for the project was the queer (lol) the Little White Book concept, and so the companion book IS my fortune-telling book, in the sense that it is a book-length exploration of the techniques and metaphysics of telling fortunes. I've been reading fortunes for two decades, teaching tarot for almost one decade and have interviewed some of the best modern minds on the subject.

And so I have some takes. Several of them spicy.

This week, the audio version is an off-the-cuff exploration of those takes, recorded immediately after my deck artist, Colin Alexander, and I completed a full unboxing of the deck. An unboxing obviously makes for a terrible audio-version of a podcast so this week they're completely separate.

• The audio version is Thoughts on Fortune Telling.
• The video version is Coling and my gay little unboxing and reminiscing about the deck creation journey.

And there are still some decks available if you want to buy them here. (It still says pre-order, but they totally exist, I swear.)

Note: James and I are travelling for the next few days. For the 36 who purchased the top-tier package, we'll be in touch next week with the dates for the training and initiation.

One of my favourite guests returns to the show this week for a scintillating and freewheeling dive into the perennial question of whether there are aliens in the Bible. Author, researcher, psychonaut and hypnotist Danny Nemu.

The impetus for this discussion is a book and a thesis that’s been translated out of Italian and into English relatively recently: Mauro Biglino’s Gods of The Bible. Speaking of translation, for years, Mauro was a translator of Biblical texts for the Vatican’s official publisher. Over the course of that work, he began to have questions about this term, ‘Elohim’, and all the other strange stuff that’s in there. So he decided to translate the Old Testament literally and what emerges is alien beings and flying saucers and all that classic Ancient Aliens fare.

A few people started asking me about the Biglino hypothesis, and then Mauro himself was on Graham Hancock’s podcast. And then, Graham’s son Luke quoted from one of Danny’s books in the same podcast. Danny was the person whose take on the hypothesis I most wanted to hear because of his work on the presence of entheogens and drugs in the Bible. So that was enough of a sign for me to repeatedly peer-pressure him into buying and reading the book so we could talk about it.

Anyway, he graciously obliged. So here is a Star.Ships meets ‘are there drugs in the Bible’ take on aliens, the power of language, the use of metaphor, literalism as spells and a whole lot more.

Super excited for this one.

Enjoy!

• Danny Nemu’s website.
• Mauro Biglino’s YouTube channel, which gives a really good overview of his thesis.
• My AI-generated presentation on the life and work of Zechariah Sitchin.
• My AI-generated presentation on Owen Barfield’s thesis on the origin of language.

This week's solo show is a necessary side quest in our AI series up into space and out into the future.

It's also a standalone exploration of:

• Understanding 'big' or archetypal stories, such as zodiac signs and planets, as containing all stories.
• Using longer cycles to formulate timing and meaning. 
• What is yours to do in a looming world of social credit scores, digital control grids and the tyranny of niceness.

And if you'd like to also listen to the Q&A, it starts around the one-hour mark of the video version over on YouTube.

Enjoy!

Show Note(s)

• A bit of a rarity for a solo show, but we have a show note. Here's a link to Dan Waites's and S. J. Anderson's discussion of the Barbault Basket.

This is one of the most fascinating discussions I have had this year. For centuries, people have speculated as to the formulation of the legendary substance of the Gods known as soma. It's something I have kept my eye on for a couple of decades now.

And, as far as I can tell, Dr Etminan's research is the best pointer in the direction of what that might have been. Even better than that? His research has developed into a completely legal product you can try for yourself today.

In this show, we explore exactly who the Zoroastrian Magi were, what customs and beliefs fed into their practices and what haoma might have been and how it was used.

Then we'll explore Shauheen's journey toward the development and release of the Ancestral Magi products and how they can be used today. I am particularly excited to see these in the hands of visionary astrologers. Have at it!

Brilliant stuff. Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Get the Ancestral Magi supplements here.
• Watch Shauheen's presentation on Zoroastrian shamanism here.
• Shauheen on Twitter.

The one, the only Christopher Knowles returns to the show this week for a breezy romp through our near-term future. No, seriously. The end of the west offers perhaps the best time in centuries to be a weird kid.

Chris and I talk about the latest UFO nonsense, modern parallels to the fall of Rome, just how long collapses actually take and what they look like for those of us who came to earth to live through one.

Combined with last week's astro forecast, this is a really great discussion to have and a collection of worthy points to table in the lead-up to the final AI solo show. There's just one more piece to play coming up and then we can release those particular robot hounds.

But until then, settle in and enjoy the Gospel according to Knowles!

Show Notes

• The Secret Sun.
• The Secret Sun on Patreon.
• Chris on Twitter.

Can you believe it’s been six months since Austinmas??? Anyway, it has. A very big thank you to those who joined us on the live stream this weekend -and for all the birthday wishes.

During the show, Austin and I

• Looked back over what hit and what didn’t these past six months.
• Explored some of the wider contexts of Pluto in Aquarius and what it has to do with Uranus.
• Tabled some scenarios for current events in Eastern Europe.
• Looked at the forecast for the rest of this year.
• Unpacked, in particular, the upcoming Venus Retrograde and how we can be with that on an individual and collective level.
• Answered some fun questions from the live chat at the end.
• Named several peacocks.

You can, of course, listen to this audio version or you can watch along on YouTube below. Because it is a live show I put some slides together but, as always, they are not in the least bit necessary. (This is my long-running performance piece about how that is true of all slides in every professional setting anywhere.)

Either way, enjoy!

Vlogger, podcaster and cultural commentator Angie Speaks joins the show this week.

We dive deep into:

• The medicine in Diaspora cultural experiences.
• Being abandoned by the Left and abandoning the Left.
• Political shortcomings of materialist thinking.
• Why the Left hates C. G. Jung.
• Reality tunnels.

A really rich, powerful conversation. Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Angie on YouTube.
• Angie on Twitter.
• Angie's podcast, Mystic and the Machine.

The penultimate instalment in our AI series! This time we talk about the impact of algorithms and the mental frames of the builders of Artificial Intelligence and what that means for access to a living cosmos.

What happens when AI gets to decide what is real?

If you have already used Chat GPT, you may have found that it refuses to answer some questions -about biopolitics or geopolitics or even exopolitics. Or if it does, it simply enforces the party line. Either that or it gives you a Lisa Simpson-style caveat about how 'important it is' to respect diversity or something at the end. We have seen what happens when political information is dropped from Google results. AI will multiply that effect a thousandfold.

(As is traditional now, there is a Q&A at the end for those who choose to watch the video version.)

Either way, here is the link to the Marc Andressen piece that is referenced.

Enjoy!

The one and only Camelia Elias returns to the show this week to talk about demons and crosses.

Specifically, we explore what demons actually are and their relation to human desire. We examine the curious case of Andromalius, the final spirit of the Goetia. We discuss occult style.

Then we turn to the role and function of crosses in cartomancy: Why and how is the cross so potent in the tarot? And why does the Celtic Cross suck so much??

Really great stuff. Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Camelia's Website.
• Eyecorner Press.
• Aradia Academy.

What is transhumanism? Is it different from technocracy? What about posthumanism?

Where do these ideas originate, and how have they become so prominent today?

In this week's solo show, we look at the history of some mostly-insane ideas and explore their significance for today's magical folk. Join Gordon as we continue our series looking at the arrival and impact of AI from the perspective of a living cosmos.

Enjoy!

Writer, speaker, filmmaker, podcaster and cultural theorist J. F. Martel joins the show this week to explore art, creativity, UFOs and the Imaginal.

• We discuss C. G. Jung, David Lynch, Ramsay Dukes, Bergson, and Corbin.
• We look at what insights might come from having a better definition of 'image' when it comes to UFO phenomena.
• We talk about creativity as and with magic.

And generally try to wrestle down to earth something approaching a Grand Unified Weird Theory.

Super fun, super deep discussion.

Enjoy!

🔼🔼SHOW NOTES🔼🔼

• Weird Studies Podcast
• The Twin Peaks Mythos - a watch-along experience with J. F. Martel and Phil Ford.
• Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice.

This week, we welcome to the show artists, musicians, authors and fellow podcasters Risa Dickens and Amy Torok.

Amy and Risa from the Missing Witches project join us for a deep dive into the archetype of the witch.

• What is it?
• What changes does it portend?
• What does it mean when it is so close to the surface?
• What are our obligations to it?

We also talk ancestors, reclaiming history, art-as-magic and a whole lot more.

Super great chat! Enjoy!

• Missing Witches: Podcast and Website.
• Missing Witches: The Book
• Missing Witches Fundraiser for the Montreal Native Women's Shelter.

Continuing our multi-part exploration of AI and its implication for These Capitalised Times we are living through and with, we look at the metaphysics of technology this week.

What are the implications of Artificial Intelligence for

• The performing of magic?
• Living in a magical universe?

What is an animist understanding not just of 'intelligence' but 'artifice'? What -if any- is the difference between a tool and a magical tool?

This week we explore:

• The work of Ivan Illich.
• A metaphysics of tools.
• What it means to operate in the ruins.
• Steiner's description of Ahriman and what it means for our moment.

Show Notes

• Donate to the Missing Witches fundraiser for the Native Women's Shelter.
• Towards a Definition of Magic.
• At Work in The Ruins.
• Unlocking the Secrets of Prophecy - For Sorcerers, Astrologers and Magicians.
• Are Humans The AI Of The Mineral Realm? w/ Matías De Stefano.

Author and (post)activist Dougald Hine joins us this week for a powerful discussion about our moment and what -if anything- we should 'do' with and about it.

The springboard for our chat is Dougald's recently-released book, At Work in the Ruins. We unpack the title -what do we mean by 'work'- as well as what we mean by 'ruins'. Physical? Cultural? Social?

We talk about what it means to hospice modernity and we unpack why one of the founders of the Dark Mountain project is no longer talking about climate change.

Really good stuff. Good, timely stuff.

Enjoy!

• At Work in the Ruins.
• Dougald's Website.
• A School Called Home.

Legendary ethnobotanist, Mark J. Plotkin, joins the show this week for a fascinating chat about traditional medicine, Indigenous knowledge, plant healing and modern medicine.

Dr Plotkin studied under the great Richard Evans Schultes himself and has been exploring the Amazon as a friend and researcher for five decades. He is the co-founder of the Amazon Conservation Team -a nonprofit that partners with Indigenous communities to conserve biodiversity, protect traditional lifeways and support sustainable Amazonian livelihoods.

During the lockdown era, Mark started an excellent and highly recommended podcast, Plants of the Gods. We discuss

• The origination of the podcast project
• The role of psychedelics in contemporary medicine
• The safeguarding of Indigenous intellectual property in the 'modern' world
• 'Active molecules' versus whole plants in contemporary medicine
• The changes -good and bad- in the field of ethnobotany over the course of his career

A fantastic discussion with a personal hero. Dive in. And if this is the first time you've heard about Plants of the Gods, well, I'm pleased to be able to share it with you!

• Mark's website
• Plants of the Gods podcast
• Amazon Conservation Team

In this solo show, we dive deep into the origin of our understanding of prophecy, how it is different from prediction and where this understanding is useful for sorcerers, astrologers and magicians.

We explore the Old Testament prophets and how their roles changed over the centuries, how they positioned themselves toward power and what kind of 'Prophetic moment' we might find ourselves in.

Enjoy!

Alkistis Dimech and Peter Grey of Scarlet Imprint return to the show for an exploration and celebration of Jake Stratton-Kent: In particular his thought, his research and his impact on the western magical world.

We discuss:

• His generosity as a thought leader. 
• His attitude to academia and academics.
• His role in the return of spirit-centric approaches to the grimoires. 
• His revitalisation of blue grimoires. 
• His understanding and love of the Ancient and Archaic Greek world. 
• "I don't do angels."
• His championing of practice over theorising.
• His role as a key participant in the return of the Dead to contemporary western magical practice. 

I'm very grateful to Peter and Alkistis for sharing their thoughts about their friend and colleague, Jake.

In the middle of the Philippines archipelago is the mysterious Siquijor -known variously as the Island of the Witches, the Island of Sorcerers or the Island of Healers. This remarkable place is home to several thriving magical and healing lineages.

Here is my story of visiting and encountering these traditions during the time of year where the healers travel up sacred Mount Bandilaan in order to collect the healing herbs their work requires for the whole year. These visits only happen on the seven Fridays between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. I was fortunate enough to come along on one of these harvests.

It's a fascinating place that is illuminating in comparison with cunning traditions, curanderismo and other cosmovisions around the world: Saints, sacred timing, herb lore, energy work. And if you are looking to visit Siquijor, check out the show notes.

If you'd prefer some visuals, head over to YouTube.

- Note - Episode has been updated due to audio not playing properly.

I have added the following places to Google Maps on Siquijor, so go to the island and search for these:

• Annie Ponce (Nearest town is San Antonio).
• Batong Hakut (the name of Noel Torremocha's healing practice. Nearest town is Cantabon).
• Loreto Quimno (bolo-bolo healer in the town of San Juan).

If you are visiting, I recommend the guide I used, Chelsey, whom you can contact via Facebook or Instagram. He came with me to each of the healers and accompanied me gathering herbs so he knows everyone and all the places. He's also a great guide just if you are visiting Siquijor:

• Chelsey on Facebook.
• Chelsey on Instagram.

In the middle of the Philippines archipelago is the mysterious Siquijor -known variously as the Island of the Witches, the Island of Sorcerers or the Island of Healers. This remarkable place is home to several thriving magical and healing lineages.

Here is my story of visiting and encountering these traditions during the time of year where the healers travel up sacred Mount Bandilaan in order to collect the healing herbs their work requires for the whole year. These visits only happen on the seven Fridays between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. I was fortunate enough to come along on one of these harvests.

It's a fascinating place that is illuminating in comparison with cunning traditions, curanderismo and other cosmovisions around the world: Saints, sacred timing, herb lore, energy work. And if you are looking to visit Siquijor, check out the show notes.

If you'd prefer some visuals, head over to YouTube.

- Note - Episode has been updated due to audio not playing properly.

I have added the following places to Google Maps on Siquijor, so go to the island and search for these:

• Annie Ponce (Nearest town is San Antonio).
• Batong Hakut (the name of Noel Torremocha's healing practice. Nearest town is Cantabon).
• Loreto Quimno (bolo-bolo healer in the town of San Juan).

If you are visiting, I recommend the guide I used, Chelsey, whom you can contact via Facebook or Instagram. He came with me to each of the healers and accompanied me gathering herbs so he knows everyone and all the places. He's also a great guide just if you are visiting Siquijor:

• Chelsey on Facebook.
• Chelsey on Instagram.

Legendary storyteller and mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw joins the show this week. On the occasion of the release of his remarkable and uncharacterisable (although I try) new book, Bardskull.

We talk about the weakness of the word archetype, we talk about place and story and transformation, we talk about myth and landscape, we talk about Tolkien, Gandalf and Merlin, we talk about defending indefensible books, and… in the end and ultimately, we talk about spiritual transformation. 

A fantastic chat. One of the best of the year, for sure. Enjoy!

Show Notes

Get Bardksull:

• https://unbound.com/books/bardskull/ School of Myth
• https://schoolofmyth.com/

This week we welcome to the show the legendary Rosita Arvigo. Rosita is the author of ten books, she is a naprapathic physician, a herbalist and a specialist in traditional Mayan healing. For decades she has lived in western Belize, operating a healing practice and maintaining an organic farm. During this time she studied under Don Elijio Panti -a powerful and famous shaman then in his nineties. (He lived to 103.) This story is described in her book, Sastún.

Rosita joins us today to discuss Mayan healing and shamanism, what it entails, the state it is in today and what we can learn from it. This is a fascinating discussion that we managed to record from regional Belize all the way to Wellington New Zealand -during a cyclone.

Enjoy!

• Rosita's website and books.
• Rosita on Facebook.
• The Abdominal Therapy Collective.
• Rosita presenting at the New York Botanical Garden.

Peter Mark Adams joins us today on the occasion of the imminent release of his new book, Hagia Sophia: Sanctuary of Kronos. Like The Game of Saturn before it, this is an exploration of curious survivals of pagan cosmologies hidden in seemingly plain sight -in this case Hagia Sophia in his home of Istanbul.

Check out the show notes at runesoup.com for some companion images.

Along the way, we also discuss what happened to the Mysteries when Eleusis was closed, the School of Athens and whether any such thing as Neoplatonism even existed.

Enjoy!

• Get Hagia Sophia: Sanctuary of Kronos.
• Peter Mark Adams's website.

This week, we discuss morality, where to intervene in the world, in your life and why.

Enjoy!

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.

• 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!

• 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!

• 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!

• 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?

• 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.

• 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.

The good Doctor Knowles makes a welcome return to the show this week.

We talk about the presence of nineteenth century occultism in the pulps, how those pulps influenced the superheroes of the twentieth century, Watcher cults, imperial worldviews and the synchromysticism of the apocalypse.

A freewheeling romp for all!

• The Secret Sun.
• The Secret Sun on Patreon.

This week we have the first triple-header of the energy healing dialogues. Brian Wilkins returns to the show with first-time guest, Jess Waters.

Jess and Brian are principally responsible for creating and maintaining a weekly intention group based on the principles outlined in Lynne McTaggart's Power of Eight.

So we discuss their respective paths through various healing modalities, how they came to intention-based work, what it's good for, how it might work and what its efficacy implies for the cosmos at large.

Really scintillating chat. Excellent stuff with some excellent people.

Enjoy!

• Jess and Brian's substack, Banhe.
• Brian's website.

This week, returning guest Brandt Stickley joins us for another instalment of our energy healing dialogues series.

We discuss how Chinese medicine sees the human energy body/ies, the antiquity of the system, how it works, what it works best with and the attitude or ways of thinking that characterise TCM. In particular, we look at what even am meridians, how TCM understands human organs, polarity and all that good stuff.

Enjoy!

• Brandt's website.
• Brandt's Patreon.

One of my favourite books of the year is Jerry Kantor's Sane Asylums. He joins us this week for an equally-scintillating episode.

We explore how homeopathy works, the 19th century heyday of homeopathic psychiatry -including the successful treatment of Abraham Lincoln's widow's 'incurable madness' with three months of homeopathy. And we find out just how it was homeopathy was erased from history and why. (Spoiler: Money.)

Really great stuff. 

• Get Sane Asylums.
• Jerry's website, Vital Force Health Care.
• Jerry's publishing website, Right Whale Press.

The legendary Eileen McKusick joins us this week for the next Rune Soup Energy Healing Dialogue.

We discuss the origins of biofield tuning, how it and other forms of sound healing work, what it's best for and what other modalities it best supports. A fantastic discussion with a true healing pioneer.

Enjoy!

• Biofield Tuning Store.
• Biofield Tuning Website.

Jenx returns to the show with his latest and best book, The Thai Occult 2.

We catch up with what’s been going on with Jenx’s ongoing cultural survey and research on and with various Ajarns, we talk about global candle magic, Thai astrology, talisman, doll magic and why you might want to live in a graveyard for a month.

He also explains that this latest book is a 'living' book. Get the PDF once and you will automatically receive all ongoing updates, additional material and interviews.

Great stuff.

Show Notes

• Get The Thai Occult 2.

Continuing the energy healing dialogues this week, we welcome to the show Kenzie Q. Adams. Kenzie is a Reiki master and teacher, professional healer, industrial engineer and the creator of Mind Connection Healing. She also happens to be the better half of Scarlet Imprint author, Peter Mark Adams.

MCH is a healing and trauma release system incorporating meridian therapy, Reiki and several other modalities into an holistic synthesis. Kenzie and I discuss her own journey as a healer, the road to developing MCH and what it can be used for.

Note: Kenzie is giving a training webinar this weekend (Sunday Sept 4th) as part of the Rune Soup Premium Member energy healing course. So if you like what you hear, there's still time to join us!

• Mind Connection Healing.

This is one of my favourite shows of the year so far!

Continuing our dialogues with energy healers as part of the Rune Soup Premium Member course on energy healing, this week we welcome to the show Stella Osorojos.

Stella is a mother, a writer, an acupuncturist and multi-disciplinary healer, and the creator of a powerful healing modality called Resonant Attention.

We discuss the origins of Resonant Attention in her own miraculous health journey, working with and learning from 'non-western' systems, the importance of understanding trauma, how healing systems 'work' and what health even 'is'.

Splendid stuff!

• Stella's Substack, Resonant Attention.
• Part 1 of Stella's serialised healing memoir, The Universe Is Generous.
• Stella's website.
• A guided resonant attention exercise.

Continuing our dialogues with and about different energy healing frameworks, this week we welcome to the show Pranic Healer, Trisha White -who also happens to be my mother.

We chat about the origins of Pranic Healer, Trisha’s career as a professional healer, how the system works and what it works best for.

And if you would like to participate in the energy healing course, join the Rune Soup Premium Membership here.

Enjoy!

Poet, author, taiji instructor and intentionist (this will make sense shortly), Brian Wilkins joins the show this week, on the occasion of the publication of his book, A Wheel of Small Gods.

We discuss how poetry can be a container or place for spirits, different methods of experiencing and understanding energy, healing magic, magic-as-time-travel as well as the how's and why's of coming into relation with star spirits.

Super fun discussion. Enjoy!

• Get A Wheel of Small Gods.
• Brian's website.

The Q3 premium member course beginning shortly is on energy healing and -to go alongside it- we'll be doing a series of dialogues with practitioners from various energy modalities.

First cab off the rank is fellow Newcastle boy, Lance Baker, to talk about certainly the most well-known (and perhaps the least understood?) modality, Reiki. Lance is a Reiki Master, hypnotherapist, author and teacher.

Definitely the right person to talk me through it!

• Lance's website and business, Branches of Healing.
• Lance's YouTube channel.

The one and only Matawhero Lloyd returns to the show this week. More specifically, while I am in New Zealand, I returned to Whetu Ariki to spend some time with Matawhero and to see what’s been happening with his pā project over the past couple of years. This is a project many of you will be familiar with from Ani.Mystic, where it gets a whole chapter of its own.

I’m releasing this one as an audio version as well as the video tour because -while I definitely think you should actually watch it so you can put images to the words- Matawhero goes really deep on Maori metaphysics, indigenous philosophy and all kinds of powerful topics. So there’s still a lot to pick up just in the conversation.

But if you do want to watch it, jump over to YouTube and watch it there.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Get Ani.Mystic.

It's that time of half-year again! Forecastapalooza. With returning champ, Austin Coppock.

You know you want it. Get in.

Note: This was a video show so you can watch along on YouTube if you prefer.

Enjoy!

An Amazonian solo show this week, exploring the one-year anniversary of providing shamanic energy healings.

One of the things I mention during the episode is how I consider some of the seemingly bolder claims of shamanic healing from a different perspective having been in the jungle a number of times now. There’s certainly a shared underlying metaphysics there.

Note: As mentioned at the top of the episode, this is a video one. So you may want to jump over to YouTube instead.

Show Notes

• Register to be notified for the next availabilities for healing sessions here.

Something different -and personally very exciting- this week. In the few days in between my Ecuadorian ayahuasca retreat and a return to my Peruvian jungle dieta, I got to visit the art school founded by my favourite artist, Pablo Amargino. Even better… I got given the tour by Pablo’s son, Juan!

Juan is himself an artist, so I also got to see some of his work, and some of the work of Pablo’s students. Plus I got the opportunity to ask some questions about Peruvian shamanism and curanderismo, and have some of the amazing concepts depicted in the painting spelled out.

This is very much a video episode, rather than an audio on, so be sure to head over to YouTube and check it out. 

Enjoy!

The one and only Jenx returns to the show to discuss his latest book, Supernatural Thailand. And so of course we discuss graveyards, Naga caves, boy spirits, dying for one’s city and a whole bunch more.

Then we end the show looking at some of Adjarn Apichai’s forecasts for the next few years and where they precisely align with our own.

Great stuff, as always! Please note I’m still in the Andes so there are a few audio dropouts. Also this was recorded as a live video discussion if you would prefer to watch rather than listen.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• The Thai Occult.
• Get Supernatural Thailand.

A solo show this week, in which I explore Ani.Mystic now that it's about two months out from launch, and how it has been immensely helpful in coming to terms with Mexican and explicitly Mayan sense making.

As I have basically been travelling since the thing came out, I've been remiss in sharing some of the shows that have kindly had me on to discuss the book.

So let that be your show notes for this week. Each episode is remarkably, remarkably different in a way that shows I've done for Star.Ships or The Chaos Protocols or Pieces of Eight weren't. And I genuinely think that's down to the material in the book.

Which means, if you are so inclined, you have hours of material to enjoy! (And hopefully that makes up for the travel-based radio silence.)

This week's solo show is the audio of my presentation and discussion with the guys from Watkins -the most recent discussion of the book- for reasons spelled out in the opening of the episode.

Show Notes

• Gordon talking Ani.Mystic on The Higherside Chats.
• Gordon talking Ani.Mystic on Coffee and Divination.
• Gordon talking Ani.Mystic on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.

I joke at the beginning of the episode that James wrote the best book I read this year that I didn’t write. But actually, it’s true.

Ways of Being is an excellent book that toils in many of the same vineyards as Ani.Mystic. So James and I discuss our notions of technology, artificial intelligence, publishing, language and how these all interrelate and are interdependent.

We also have an excellent discussion on the true significance of randomness as well as speculating on political and technological futures.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Get Ways of Being.
• Get Ways of Being on audiobook.
• James's website.

The one and only Gary Lachman returns to the show this week.

And the topics of the hour are dreams and time: precognition, sacred time, time slips, machine time and what even am dreams in the first place? Definite food for thought here.

Always a pleasure!

• Gary's latest book, Dreaming Ahead of Time.
• Gary's website.

Wait a minute. Gordon of all people is giving advice about what now?

Relax. I truly would never dream of it. Think of it more like Advice To A Young Wife From An Old Mistress. It's a dramatic frame that allows us to explore ways of being with this moment that -oh, just a thought- don't contribute to a field of war that brings everyone closer to nuclear annihilation while somehow assuming doing so gives you the moral high ground.

So it's not actually (just?) for professional astrologers and other fortune tellers. It's for any of you looking around at the entire planet losing its mind and working out what role -in your profession, in your family, in your friendship group, in your communities- you are being called to step into. It's my offering to you, delivered in the form of a presentation given to a strictly hypothetical group of professional astrologers.

Yeah, it's long. I mention at the beginning that the personal reason for sharing this is a healing one, around finding transformative ways of being with anger and defence. It may be challenging to watch or listen to for some of you. Healthy anger is a useful warning that situations or people are approaching important boundaries (physical or otherwise). And it is not that it means these boundaries must never be crossed or must always be defended. Anger simply calls you to an urgent awareness that boundary business is afoot.

For instance, being wrong about something or some position you have taken in which you have invested a lot of emotional energy. When someone points this out or when you begin to realise it yourself, the anger signal is there. But this is probably one instance where you allow that signal to draw your attention to the boundary and, rather than defending it, allow that pent up energy to dissipate across it.

I sincerely hope you come to your own understanding of the sentiment in which this presentation is offered, why it is offered at this time, as well as my intention that you find whatever medicine is meant for you in it.

Note: This is a video presentation with slides and such. It is only available on Rumble. Though it will still work fine as an audio offering if that is what you prefer.

• War and the Hyperreal. Rhyd Wildermuth.
• Tears for Ukraine, Sanctions for Russia, Yawns for Yemen, Arms for Saudis: The West’s Grotesque Double Standard.
• The Overton Window Is Being Shoved Toward Warmongering Extremism. Caitlin Johnstone.
• Defending Freedom And Democracy Sure Requires An Awful Lot of Censorship. Caitlin Johnstone.
• The Field of Peace. Charles Eisenstein.
• Bunny Rabbits and the Big Bad Wolf: Ukraine and Russia through the lens of Western reporting. Gilbert Doctorow.
• The Tom Woods Show episode I truly hope you watch.
• Ukraine Neo-Nazis Infiltrate EVERY LEVEL Of Military & Government. Jimmy Dore.
• Ukraine War Driving Rampant Censorship At Home. Jimmy Dore.
• There's More To This. Russell Brand.

Everyone's favourite expat druid and substacker, Rhyd Wildermuth, returns to the show this week.

His latest book, Being Pagan: A Guide To Re-Enchant Your Life, forms the through-line of a wide ranging discussion on beingness, paganism, embodiment and the general state of the world.

Electrifying stuff, as ever. Enjoy!

• Rhyd's latest book.
• Rhyd's substack.
• Rhyd's website.

Everyone's favourite Swedish polymath returns to the show for a discussion about the Black Pope, Anton LaVey, himself.

This is on the occasion of the release of Carl's latest book, Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan. It's the biography LaVey boths needs and deserves. So we talk a little bit about his life but mostly we examine his legacy, what he might think of today's cancel culture and whether or not the ol' devil has got his dues yet.

It's a great chat and had both Carl and I reminiscing about our own wayward youths.

Enjoy!

• Get the book here. (It's also available as an audiobook.)
• Follow Carl's work here.
• Trapart Publishing.

Here is the next of the free or publicly available modules of the latest premium member course, Protection and Malefica. It is a discussion on morality frameworks and how, when and we we might magically intervene.

The one and only Peter Grey of Scarlet Imprint joins us for a deep dive on one of Jack Parsons's most important texts, We Are The Witchcraft.

This is a video discussion with slides and such, but if you would prefer to listen to it like a normal podcast, this audio version is eminently followable.

• Download a PDF of We Are The Witchcraft.
• Peter Grey reading We Are The Witchcraft.

The one(s) and only(s) Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio and Chris Knowles of The Secret Sun join the show this week for a discussion of all things astro-gnostic.

We discuss the true antiquity and use of star lore, stars in the Bible, gnostics in history as well as a gnostic study of history as well as which components of gnosticism may or may not be universal.

This chat was arranged in honour of a conference that Miguel is arranging that Chris and I will both be speaking at next month (March 20 - 22) in Playa del Carmen called the Astro Gnostic Conference. We discuss the event during the show and you can find out more, including details on tickets, accommodation and excursions in the show notes.

• The Astro Gnosis Conference website.
• The Secret Sun.
• Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.

This week, we welcome to the show astrologer, philosopher and shamanic practitioner, Michael Ofek.

Michael and I have a great chat about topics very near and dear to our hearts: star lore, star magic, and the true antiquity of what we can broadly call astrology, or perhaps coming into relation with Sky Country.

Along the way, we also talk about the metaphysics of light, the shamanic origins of Greek and European civilisation, hag attacks and spontaneous OBEs.

Good times!

(Note: This is a repost as there was an error with the file. This is another live video episode so if you would prefer to watch it rather than listen, jump over to YouTube or Odysee.)

• Michael's website and upcoming course.
• Book a reading with Michael.
• Michael's Facebook page.

This week we complete our revisitation of classic blog post series from back in the day. And we have saved my favourite for last: Apocalypse Pharmaka.

It’s my favourite for a bunch of reasons that I explain in the episode. But, basically, the contested landscape of medicine and power and the body is where the witch and the cunning person has always lived. (Not that you’d know it from looking around in the past couple of years, although the shrillness is mercifully receding.) So if you want to say you are a participant in the ‘western’ understanding of magic or witchcraft in any capacity and have the people around you keep a straight face, one way or the other you need to ‘come to terms’ -in the animist sense- with this contested landscape that is our homeland. It really is as simple as that.

Of course -and this is pretty much the whole point- we have all been pushed off these homelands over the past two years and into both literal and metaphoric quarantine camps. Which is to say these discussions are even more fraught than at the time I wrote the series. So you won’t find this episode on YouTube. You can listen to the audio version as per usual, or you can watch along on Odysee or Rumble.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• The Apocalypse Pharmaka series.

Researcher, energy healer and fellow Scarlet Imprint author, Peter Mark Adams, returns to the show this week. We discuss his book, The Power of the Healing Field.

We also have a fantastic chat about what the field even am, and why it is an idea and framework whose time has come. We explore various energy-based healing modalities and pause to consider that we should not even be using the word 'alternative' for such disciplines, as the majority of the population of the planet incorporates them into standard medical practice. It is us in the west who are the 'alternative'.

Excellent stuff, and a great discussion to for the first month of the year!

(Note: This episode was first livestreamed on YouTube, should you wish to watch it instead.)

• Get The Power of the Healing Field.
• Peter's website.
• Mind Connection Healing.

We begin the new year with the traditional podcast catch-up with Conner Habib.

This time around we explore the full cosmic significance of the heart, the metaphysics of blood and blood sacrifice and then spend a lot of time with the notion of prophecy: What it is, what it isn’t, which medicines it holds, what it says about time and what it can say about our moment.

Then we turn to 2022 and thrash out some frameworks for sin, trauma and forgiveness. A splendid start to the year!

Show Notes

• Conner on Patreon.
• Conner on Twitter.

Austinmas comes but twice a year!

Yes, it’s the traditional half-yearly forecast with the one and only Austin Coppock.

Join us as we explore the space weather for the next six months, as well as a discussion on how to be with said space weather. (And stick around for the amusing tech fails on both sides of the call.)

Enjoy!

This week, we are joined by essayist and filmmaker, Niles Heckman. Among other things, Niles is the co-creator of the Shamans of the Global Village series. So we talk about that, obviously.

And we also talk about creativity, filmmaking, the power of the essay format, as well as how -or if it's possible- to participate in cross-cultural learning in non-extractive ways.

Great chat.  Enjoy!

• Niles's website, podcast and blog.
• Watch Shamans of the Global Village.
• Trailer for Episode 1.
• Trailer for Episode 2.

Continuing our revisitations this week, we turn to the archonology series -a long running exploration of power and conspiracy.

And you know what? A lot of these have held up pretty well. I especially like how so many of the videos shared in the posts are now gone from YouTube, and how many links have died. It’s like burning the edges of a pirate map. Adds character.

Enjoy!

The Archonology Series

• Things That Persist: Archonology (Part 1).
• While We Pray For A Long Summer: Archonology (Part 2).
• Spook Tech: Archonology (Part 3).
• The Money: Archonology (Part 4).
• Collaborators: Archonology (Part 5).
• The Weapon of the Enemy: Archonology (Part 6).
• Knives in the Dark: Archonology (Part 7).
• Fate of Empires: Archonology (Part 8).
• Dispatches From The Front: Archonology (Part 9).
• Force Majeure: Archonology (Part 10).
• Listening to Demons: Archonology Redux.
• Pointing Out Devils: Archonology Redux.
• Section 31: Archonology Redux.
• The Syndicate: Archonology Redux.
• Offers Unrefused: Archonology Redux.

A bumper episode this week and a veritable romp through the Fortune's Fools project as the finish line appears over the horizon.

I was told going into a project like this that it would show up in your life in strange ways: seeing a cardiologist the week of the Heart card, having a friend lose is eyebrow ring at your house the week of the Ring card, taking ayahuasca the week of the Tree card.

None of these things were planned out beforehand but if you read cards, you know these things tend to happen. They just seem a little extra when you're creating a deck.

So artist extraordinaire Colin Alexander returns to the show in order to reminisce and commiserate on this wacky journey so far.

This episode will probably work better as a video, but it still works audio only, especially if you want to download this large image of all the cards we discuss in the episode. Otherwise you can jump over to YouTube and watch it there.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Watch the episode on YouTube.
• Pre-order the cards and the book.
• Join the Fortune's Fools Telegram group.
• The Fortune's Fools playlist on Spotify.
• Colin on TikTok.
• Colin on Instagram.

Continuing our whistle-stop tour of classic blog series, this time we revisit a term I lifted from the (pre-cancelled) Joss Whedon film, Serenity.

It’s the term I use to better frame the totality of digital systems and social media in the context of how they see the world and what it is they seek to do to ours. For people who may be unaware, I had a career in digital media and publisher strategy before doing whatever it is you call what I’m doing now. And I’ve long been interested in that overlap between communication and magic.

These posts weave all of that together. And it’s necessary to continue the revisitations with this series next, because it gives us the context for why probably the rest of the revisitations won’t be found on YouTube.

• "I'm Going To Show You A World Without Sin."
• The First World Without Sin.
• Worlds Jurassic and Without Sin.
• World Without Sin: Farming Spies.
• Blowing Filter Bubbles: World Without Sin.

NOTE: Last week's revisitation didn't push out an MP3 file, so this week you are getting two. Add them together and it's almost a podcast!

Based on some suggestions that came out of the recent solo show on the story of Rune Soup, I'm going to be revisiting the classic blog post series from back in the old timey bloggy days of yore.

The first such series is The Whisky Rant: where the name came from, the benefits and shortcomings of alternate history, which UFOs are actual aliens and which of the various rants stood the test of time.

For new people, this was a series that covered off all the exciting hits like ruins on Mars and the Moon, the location of Atlantis and my own version of the stoned ape hypothesis.

It's that time of year again!

And for the traditional Halloween special, we are joined by astrologer, witch and counsellor, Sasha Ravitch. Sasha joins us to talk about star spirits, astrology and the dead, and what sort of ancestral curses and blessings can show up in your natal chart.

Awesome stuff. 

• Sasha's website.
• Sasha's Linktree.
• Sasha's Instagram.
• Sasha's Twitter.
• Sasha's Patreon.
• AstroMagia conference website.

This week, we welcome to the show author, teacher and herbalist, Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue.

Seán joins us today to talk about his journey to animist herbalism, how he defines it, and what constitutes health in a living framework.

Really good, timely stuff. Enjoy!

• Seán's website, Otherworld Well.
• Seán's course, Holistic Pharmacology for Herbalists.

A long-overdue solo show this week, telling the story of Rune Soup from its beginnings as a blog in Bristol, through the books, through the development of the podcast, and the membership and the events and so on.

At the end, there is also some discussion of where to next.

• Subscribe to Rune Soup on Rumble.
• Subscribe to Rune Soup on Odysee.
• Check out Fortune's Fools.

Author, magician, returning guest and friend, Ivy Bromius, joins us again this week on the occasion of the publication of her completely free book, The Cancer Grimoire.

We talk about her experiences treating and overcoming cancer, blending allopathic and holistic methods, and finding meaning in our own health crises. An important discussion at the best of times. Probably more so now.

Download the episode directly here or watch along on YouTube below.

• Find everything Ivy has going on at Circle Thrice.

This week, we are joined by the hosts of one of my very favourite podcasts, Fucking Cancelled.

Clementine and Jay talk to us about their own journey to activism, through what they call the nexus -that toxic combination of social media bullying and neoliberal group thing- and out the other side to a genuine left they call 'socialism with freaky options'.

Along the way we discuss what cancellation is, how old it is, why it works and whether or not its efficacy is fading.

Super fun show with some super fun people!

• Fucking Cancelled on Patreon.
• Fucking Cancelled on Libsyn.
• Fucking Cancelled on Instagram.
• Clementine's website.
• Clementine on Instagram.
• Jay on Instagram.

This week, we welcome back to the show Dr Matthew Segall. Matt joins us to talk about his recently released book, Physics of the World Soul: Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology.

So we chat about the shortcomings of materialism, what science could be like and how it could be done. We also discuss the concept of the Anima Mundi -or World Soul- and what the point of the universe might be.

• Get Matt's book, Physics of the World Soul.
• Matt's blog.
• Matt's YouTube channel.

This week we welcome to the show Karen Johnson.

Karen is a shaman, healer, and former judge. She was catapulted into the life of a healer when her son died suddenly of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty seven. Leaving her old life behind, Karen embarked on a multi-year spiritual quest around the world, ultimately discovering -among many modalities and sources of spiritual nourishment- shamanic energy medicine. (Karen is actually my teacher at the Four Winds Academy, which comes up a couple of times in the show.)

She joins us today to talk about her brand new book, Living Grieving: Using Energy Medicine to Alchemize Grief and Loss.

A really great chat about a really powerful topic. Enjoy.

Show Notes

• Living Grieving: Using Energy Medicine to Alchemize Grief and Loss.
• Karen’s energy medicine website and blog.
• Karen's Instagram.

Christmas only comes but once a year, which makes the half-yearly astrological forecasts twice as good as it!

Big thanks to the one and only Austin Coppock -as well as the premium members and patrons who join the call. As is now tradition, we look at the previous six months, the upcoming six months and situate our discussion in the context of longer cycles.

I always look forward to these chats!

Something a bit different and exciting this week in lieu of a normal show. One of the things the premium members will be doing over the coming month is participating in calls and Q&As with thinkers who have something to share or contribute to this notion of operating at the level of the living field.

First cab off the rank is none other than Rhyd Wildermuth. Finding The Ekumen gets its name from Ursula K. Le Guin's space utopia, effectively an anarchist version of Star Trek's far more militant United Federation of Planets. So if we are going to have a series of discussions beyond traditional politics, we should begin with a discussion of what politics is, what it isn't and where it might be that you come in. I can think of no one better than Rhyd for that chat, so here it is!

Big thanks to Rhyd and the members for participating! This is obviously a video discussion if you would prefer to watch on YouTube or Odysee.

• Rhyd's Substack.
• Rhyd's essay, Here Be Monsters.
• Saul Newman's Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment.
• The works of Silvia Federici.
• Human Scale.
• Postmodern Anarchism in the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.
• Against Identity Politics.

Comedian, author, ceremonialist and healer, Nick Sun, joins us this week.

Back in January, Nick wrote a piece on Medium called Watch Your Dreams Die And Be Happy Now. It's about how childhood dreams in general and the insistence we all follow them is not always a good thing. In fact, it can even be pathological.

Obviously that sort of piece has Big New Year Energy given the world is awash with resolutions at the time. But it is also good and insistent medicine for now -particularly for younger readers. There is a lot about this in the wealth magic course in the members area, but desire is very poorly understood and even more poorly experienced in the modern world.

Given the dramatic changes to how society functions we have all been through these past sixteen months have barely begun to be felt, the work of sitting with, parsing and simply showing up to your dreams, desires, goals -as well as how they all differ- takes on a different form of urgency.

So that's what Nick came on to discuss ostensibly. We also talk about a bunch of other stuff too, I hasten to add. Encountering different plant spirits, prophecy, healing from trauma, all very good times.

Show Notes

• Nick on Medium.
• Nick's Patreon.

This week, we welcome to the show the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World -genuinely one of my favourite books ever- Tyson Yunkaporta. In addition to being an author, Tyson is a poet, an artist, a wood carver, a linguist and and is senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University.

I had a fantastic time with this chat. We talk about ceremony, metaphor, the pitfalls of the new age, right relation and all that good stuff. We also talk about communicating via body odour, getting fat and 80s movies.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Get Sand Talk.

Author, speaker and Scarlet Imprint co-founder, Peter Grey, returns to the show this week to talk about his latest book, The Two Antichrists.

This means we explore the Babalon Working(s), the influence of Jack Parsons on science fiction and science fiction's influence on Jack Parsons, the sophistication in Parsons's later work, L. Ron Hubbard's fascination with Aleister Crowley -as well as some of the ways he managed to out-Crowley the Beast himself.

We also talk about what witchcraft could and should do now, as well as the urgent necessity of coming into relation with the stars.

Enjoy!

• Get The Two Antichrists.
• Scarlet Imprint on Instagram.

This week, we are speaking with Danish historian and animist, Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen.

Animism is the main topic of our discussion, inevitably. We talk about what it looks like in the doing, and what academic work does and still might come from operating within an animist framework rather than a materialist-naturalist one.

We also examine both some of the opportunities and risks inherent in learning from and with indigenous ways of thinking and being.

Absolutely killer chat. Enjoy!

• Rune's website, Nordic Animism.
• Nordic Animism on YouTube.
• Nordic Animism on Patreon.

Microbiologist, teacher and ritualist, Dr Siobhan Watkins joins the show this week.

We have a really great chat about the how and why of coming into right relation with the microbial world, what all forms of biology look like from an animist perspective and the ancestral implications of being a composite being.

Awesome discussion. Enjoy!

• Microanimism website.
• Thinking Like A Plague course.
• Siv on instagram.

Ethnobotanist, ecologist, author and teacher Jonathon Miller Weisberger joins us this week.

We talk about growing up in Ecuador, living among various Amazonian nations, ecology, eco-spirituality, environmental activism and the difference between ayahuasca and yagé -among many, many other topics (including being dispatched by Terence McKenna to buy a paddleboat).

This is an amazing and lengthy chat which I have wanted to have since reading Jonathon's book, Rainforest Medicine, a few years ago. And we are having the conversation now because Jonathon is convening three upcoming series of yagé ceremonies at his amazing facility in Costa Rice known as Ocean Forest Ecolodge in April, May and June 2021. I mention it at the opening of the audio-only version of the show and then we discuss it again toward the end of the episode in both the audio and video versions.

Details and dates in the show notes!

Show Notes

• Details on Rainforest Medicine the book, as well as the yagé ceremonies.
  • April 24 – May 1 (option to add 3 days til May 4)
  • May 29 – June 5
  • June 6 – June 12
• Learn more and book your ceremony.
• Don Pablo's copal ceremony.
• Ocean Forest Ecolodge video tour.

One of our most popular returning guests joins us again this week.

Denmark's very own Queen of Swords is back to talk about the latest book in her Read Like The Devil series, which is about something near and dear to my own heart (and diamonds), fortune telling with playing cards!

So we discuss the in's and out's of the various suits, how significators work in playing card readings, which questions might be better 'suited' to playing cards and which ones to tarot, which spreads play to their various strengths and weaknesses and what can happen when, you know, you just read the damned cards.

A great chat with a great person about a great book. Enjoy!

• Get Read Like The Devil: Playing Cards.
• Camelia's website.
• Camelia's cartomancy blog.

This week, my Fortune's Fools cohost and Lenormand deck artist, Colin Alexander joins the show. Inevitably, we discuss fortune telling, and Madame Lenormand herself, as well as creativity, growing up weird in the 90s, comics and that other magical comic creator from the Glasgow area you may or may not have heard of.

And, naturally, because we are launching a live video show in a couple of days, this one is best consumed on YouTube, but you can certainly download it here instead.

One thing I keep forgetting to mention is that the Telegram group for Fortune's Fools is already up and kicking and you should definitely join us there. (Also in the Rune Soup one for main blog banter.)

• Fortune's Fools Telegram group.
• Fortune's Fools Episode 0. Hit the bell icon so you know when we're live!
• Fortune's Fools main site.
• Colin's main site.
• Colin on Instagram.

Life coach, author, teacher, athlete and host of the Inspire Nation show, Michael Sandler is our guest this week. Michael joins us to discuss his latest book, AWE: The Automatic Writing Experience.

Along the way, we also explore different forms of spirit contact, what it's like to have had two Near Death Experiences, the importance of ceremony, sweat lodges and -topic du jour for the premium members- angels and how to contact them.

Quick note if you’re listening to the audio version, this was in fact recorded as a video discussion. So if you like looking at people while they talk, this is one to watch on YouTube. 

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Get AWE: The Automatic Writing Experience, along with bonus material.
• Michael's podcast, Inspire Nation.
• Inspire Nation on YouTube.
• Michael's training programmes; Inspire Nation University.

Author, teacher, and Vedic Astrologer Freedom Cole joins us this week for a deep dive into the astrology of India and the Indian experience of what we call magic. Along the way we discuss yoga, Ayurveda, the chakras and how to save a farm from bushfires by summoning a dragon.

Super fun chat.

Show Notes

• Science of Light vol 1 and vol 2.
• Freedom's teaching site, Science of Light.
• Freedom's consultation site.
• Freedom's YouTube channel.

Artist, researcher and author Veda Austin joins us this week. She talks us through her healing journey with water, as well as some of the amazing artwork she creates from and with water.

Along the way, we discuss what water actually is, that it is far stranger than we typically realise and the implications of living in a world which responds to our thoughts and emotions.

Please note: This is a very visual episode, as Veda takes us through some of the art that informs her upcoming book, The Secret Intelligence of Water. You can certainly follow the discussion on the audio version but it is highly recommended you watch the show on YouTube.

• Get The Secret Intelligence of Water.
• Veda's website.
• Veda on Instagram.

Artist, performer, musician, magician and teacher Bint Al-Shalabiya joins us this week. We talk about growing up Muslim in America in the 9/11 years, the importance of travel as a teacher, art, astrological and image magic, shared ayahuasca jungle encounters and the world of Islamic folk magic.

Really great chat. Enjoy!

• Bint's website.
• Bint's Patreon.
• Bint on Instagram.
• Upcoming Intro to Islamic Magic course.

This week, we welcome to the show Dr Paul Koudounaris, art historian, photographer, explorer and member of the order of good death. Paul is the author of multiple books including Empire of Death, Heavenly Bodies and, most recently, A Cat's Tale: A Journey Through Feline History, which he co-authored with his cat, Baba.

Paul joins us today to talk about catacomb saints, death rites, the impact of cats on the development of civilisation and people who mine jade under the instruction of UFOs.

Great stuff.

• Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs.
• The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses.
• A Cat's Tale: A Journey Through Feline History.
• Live event with Paul and Baba hosted by Glen Eira libraries.
• Smithsonian article on A Cat's Tale.
• Paul on Instagram.

This week, we welcome back to the show good friend and one of our most popular returning guests, Langston Kahn. Langston is a shaman, educator and community leader.

And now he can also add author to that list, because he joins us today on the occasion of the launch of his excellent first book, Deep Liberation: Shamanic Tools For Reclaiming Wholeness In A Culture Of Trauma.

• Deep Liberation: Get the book.
• Langston's website.
• Free online book launch party and on January 19th.
• Langston's Energy Body Mastery Course.

This week, we welcome to the show Tania de Jong. Tania is a soprano, social entrepreneur, business woman, professional speaker and member of the Order of Australia among many other things. She has also founded several highly successful charities that have brought thousands of people together to heal through music and singing. Tania’s most recent charity is Mind Medicine Australia, which is helping to bring psychedelics into the fields of mental health and social well being.

A great chat for the first month of the year, and especially this first month of this specific year. Be sure to check out the show notes for a reminder that good things happen in the world, and good people live in it.

This week's outro music is Angel Song by Tania de Jong AM.

• Tania's website.
• Tania de Jong AM on Soundcloud.
• Tania's article, My Magic Medicine Journey.
• Mind Medicine Australia.
• List of webinars and events coming up from Mind Medicine Australia.
• Creativity Australia's With One Voice programme.
• Tania's TedX talk: How Singing Together Changes The Brain.
• Video highlights of the With One Voice programme.

Cometh the hour, cometh the traditional new year special guest!

Conner Habib joins us once again for a 2020 retrospective and a deep and thoughtful engagement with 2021: Politics, health, agency, meaning, desire. All that great stuff. This was a livestreamed discussion so you can download the audio version here or watch along over on the YouTube channel.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Patreon for Conner's podcast, Against Everyone with Conner Habib.
• Conner on Twitter.

A brief solo show this month to finish up our accidental series on time with a practical technique you can use to move forward into 2021 with greater coherence and optimism.

Have a wonderful Christmas and I will see you on January 2nd at 3pm New York time when we return with a live recording of Conner Habib and my traditional new year's episode. Click through to YouTube and hit the bell icon. (Members and patrons can join the call live.)

Cometh the hour, cometh the astrologer! This week, we welcome back Austin Coppock for a super-sized discussion of the first half of 2021, followed by a spirited Q&A session with the members and patrons who joined us.

We also kick the show off with Rev. Danny Nemu who explains this year's decolonising Christmas fundraiser, which is for a Brazilian reforestation project with at least one twist.

Enjoy!

(Note: This is a video discussion. The replay is available at YouTube or runesoup.com)

• Austin's website.
• Donate to RAIN.
• Buy amazing art from RAIN.

Another swapcast for you this week! With the amazing Kathryn Fink -coach, healer, magical practitioner and host of The Heart is a Cauldron.

We talk about mythic time, breaking time, how time tries to break you, decolonisation and a return to right relation. Great stuff.

Super fun conversation.

• The Heart is a Cauldron podcast page.
• The Heart is a Cauldron on Patreon.
• Kathryn's coaching page.
• Kathryn on Instagram.

This week we welcome to the show Ryan Edward. Ryan is an artist, designer and deck creator. In fact he is responsible for one of my favourite Lenormand decks, the Maybe Lenormand.

He joins us today to talk us through the process of deck creation, how design informs fortune telling function, the story of the Lenormand cards through time, the difference between divination and fortune telling and what it was like growing up in a funeral home.

Super fun chat.

Show Notes

• Get the Maybe Lenormand.
• Ryan's newsletter.
• Ryan on instagram.

This week, we are joined by artist and adventurer, Lucy Delics. Originally from England, Lucy has lived all over the world and currently lives in the Cusco area of the Peruvian Andes where she created The Visionary Path Tarot.

Lucy joins us today to talk about finding one's creative voice, making art with plant medicines, healing personal and ancestral traumas and living in Peru.

Great stuff!

Show Notes

• Get The Visionary Path Tarot.
• Lucy and her husband's website and blog.
• Lucy on Instagram.

This week, adding to our growing number of triple-header interviews, we welcome back to the show Mitch Horowitz and welcome to the show for the first time Richard Smoley.

Mitch, as regular listeners would be aware, is a public intellectual and occult historian with an expertise in New Thought. Richard is a writer, editor and public speaker specialising in esoteric thought. He is the author of numerous books including the classic (and one of my personal favourites) The Dice Game of Shiva.

Mitch and Richard join us in this episode to explore the antecedents to New Thought, differing theories of mind and what is and isn't genuine skepticism. 

(Note that this is a video discussion on YouTube as well.)

• Mitch's article for Boing Boing on James Randi.
• Mitch's website.
• Mitch on Twitter.
• Richard's website.

This week we are joined by philosopher, professor and speaker, Matt Segall.

We discuss Platonism vs Neoplatonism, theories of mind and the natural world, and how it is we can or might know anything at all.

A really rich and thought-provoking conversation.

• Matt's website, Footnotes to Plato.
• Matt's YouTube channel.
• Matt on Twitter.

This week, we welcome to the show Dr Bayo Akomolafe.

Bayo is a psychologist, educator and philosopher working and playing principally in the fields of decoloniality and ecology. He joins us today for a very special episode to celebrate the culmination of the premium member course on Custodianship, to talk about making sanctuary, fugitive spaces and post activism.

"What if the way we respond to crisis is part of the crisis?"

• Bayo Akomolafe's website.
• Bayo's essay, The Allegory of the Pit or The Irony of Victory.
• The Emergence Network.
• Interview with Bayo: Let Us Make Sanctuary.
• Interview with Bayo: Unlearning Mastery.

Another swapcast this week, with the lovely Joanna Farrer of Coffee and Divination.

We talk to each other about our shared love of tarot: where it began, when it began, best approaches, that sort of thing. And we also talk about homesteading and navigating right relation with both land and home spirits. Two of my very favourite things.

Oh, and if you're reading this in your podcatcher, I should tell you we did this as a video recording.

• Coffee and Divination.
• Joanna Farrer's personal and music site.
• Joanna on Twitter.

The one and only Khi Armand returns to the show this week with some medicine for our extremely challenging times. What lessons are we being invited to learn? What sort of healing might be available in this moment and no other? What kinds of Ceremony are best for now?

Really good stuff. Also some travel stories and 30 Rock. Because that totally counts as being with this moment.

• Chiron's blog and website, Impact Shamanism.
• Chiron on Twitter.
• Chiron on Instagram.
• Chiron's Amazon author page.

An unusual solo show this week. We have an introduction from me and then it's a recording of a classic Michael Parenti lecture, Conspiracy and Class Power, which you can also find in the show notes.

Speaking of show notes, they're rather extensive everywhere but YouTube, and best found at the actual post page.

Firstly, the rest of the 'series' in which this show would reside, were it a post.

1. How you play is what you win.
2. Hypostasis of the farmers.
3. The nightingale of eternal meaning.
4. Alien invasion as self care.
5. Medicine songs.
6. Talking The Invisibles.

Secondly, the Parenti lecture, its inspiring TMBS clip, and a bit from Ben Burgis on populism and liberal scolds:

Jupiter is still in Capricorn. One way of being with this is to see him as a teacher of hard truths. The other side of that is that you are or should be learning just what it takes to run the world. To administer the physical plane. To see how the sausages are made and what they are made of. The great teacher has shined a light and I worry that some of you shut your eyes. Open them, please. This is very serious now.

1. If you would like to understand who is 'behind' this in large part. Call them the Anglo-Americans, the Atlanticists, the dollar syndicate, Mr Global. Who cares? It is the interlocked shelob's web of supranational organisations and think tanks that evolved out of the Round Table model. Call them the Davos class.
2. Then you need to understand both how and why they run the world the way they do. And that's here with Miles Copeland.
3. And finally -doing triple duty as a Rune Soup recommendation by also being a limited hangout, and written by a shaman- you need to see how the syndicate uses economics to have entire countries do what they say. (This is the system Russia and China are doing their best to extricate themselves from for obvious reasons.)

Next is Charles Eisenstein, and an excerpt from his conspiracy essay.

“Conspiracy theory” has become a term of political invective, used to disparage any view that diverges from mainstream beliefs. Basically, any critique of dominant institutions can be smeared as conspiracy theory. There is actually a perverse truth in this smear. For example, if you believe that glyphosate is actually dangerous to human and ecological health, then you also must, if you are logical, believe that Bayer/Monsanto is suppressing or ignoring that information, and you must also believe that the government, media, and scientific establishment are to some extent complicit in that suppression. Otherwise, why are we not seeing NYT headlines like, “Monsanto whistleblower reveals dangers of glyphosate”?

Information suppression can happen without deliberate orchestration. Throughout history, hysterias, intellectual fads, and mass delusions have come and gone spontaneously. This is more mysterious than the easy conspiracy explanation admits. An unconscious coordination of action can look very much like a conspiracy, and the boundary between the two is blurry. Consider the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) fraud that served as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq. Maybe there were people in the Bush administration who knowingly used the phony “yellowcake” document to call for war; maybe they just wanted very much to believe the documents were genuine, or maybe they thought, “Well, this is questionable but Saddam must have WMD, and even if he doesn’t, he wants them, so the document is basically true…” People easily believe what serves their interests or fits their existing worldview.

In a similar vein, the media needed little encouragement to start beating the war drums. They knew what to do already, without having to receive instructions. I don’t think very many journalists actually believed the WMD lie. They pretended to believe, because subconsciously, they knew that was the establishment narrative. That was what would get them recognized as serious journalists. That’s what would give them access to power. That is what would allow them to keep their jobs and advance their careers. But most of all, they pretended to believe because everyone else was pretending to believe. It is hard to go against the zeitgeist.

The British scientist Rupert Sheldrake told me about a talk he gave to a group of scientists who were working on animal behaviour at a prestigious British University. He was talking about his research on dogs that know when their owners are coming home, and other telepathic phenomena in domestic animals. The talk was received with a kind of polite silence. But in the following tea break all six of the senior scientists who were present at the seminar came to him one by one, and when they were sure that no one else was listening told him they had had experiences of this kind with their own animals, or that they were convinced that telepathy is a real phenomenon, but that they could not talk to their colleagues about this because they were all so straight. When Sheldrake realised that all six had told him much the same thing, he said to them, “Why don’t you guys come out? You’d all have so much more fun!” He says that when he gives a talk at a scientific institution there are nearly always scientists who approach him afterwards telling him they’ve had personal experiences that convince them of the reality of psychic or spiritual phenomena but that they can’t discuss them with their colleagues for fear of being thought weird.

This is not a deliberate conspiracy to suppress psychic phenomena. Those six scientists didn’t convene beforehand and decide to suppress information they knew was real. They keep their opinions to themselves because of the norms of their subculture, the basic paradigms that delimit science, and the very real threat of damage to their careers. The persecution and calumny directed at Sheldrake himself demonstrates what happens to a scientist who is outspoken in his dissent from official scientific reality. So, we might still say that a conspiracy is afoot, but its perpetrator is a culture, a system, and a story.

Lastly but the opposite of leastly, is Whitney Webb talking about the next three or four months. (And if you are a premium member, this goes well with yesterday's Q&A with Alison McDowell.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SU7VuX-Ip8

This week, we continue to play with some novel show formats. I am joined by three of the conveners of the upcoming Nura Learning course, Cohering the Radical Present: Integral Consciousness in Daily Life. We have two first time guests:

• Dr Barbara Karlsen, a practising somatic psychotherapist and continuum movement instructor.
• Jeremy Johnson, founder of Nura Learning, author and president of the International Jean Gebser Society.

And one returning guest:

• Brandt Stickley, practitioner and professor of Classical Chinese medicine at multiple academic institutions and senior instructor and board member of Dragon Rises seminars.

The subjects under discussion today fall entirely under staying with the trouble: how to, why to, and who best to show us. Really good, important stuff.

• Cohering the Radical Present: Integral Consciousness in Daily Life.
• Barbara Karlsen.
• Jeremy Johnson
  • Jeremy on Patreon.
  • Jeremy on Twitter.
  • Jeremy's book, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.
• Brandt Stickley
  • Brandt's website and blog.
  • Brandt on Twitter.

Keeping the swapcast train rolling this week, we are joined by author and fellow podcaster (obviously), J. David Osborne. David is the author of multiple novels and is a fellow superfan of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

Who better, then, to talk about the series' heightened value in These Capitalised Times, as well as the role of creativity in responding to and thriving in eras of unrest?

A super enjoyable conversation!

• Listen to The JDO Show and No Country here.
• Follow J. David Osborne on Twitter here.
• J. David Osborne's novels:
  • By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends.
  • Black Gum.
  • A Minor Storm.

Something a little different this week. I am both the guest and the host in today on today's episode. And fellow podcaster, James from Hermitix, is himself both guest and host.

We talk about and through accelerationism, the state of various discourses, what to do when doing anything makes everything worse, where (and how?) to find meaning in These Capitalised Times and whether or not an exit is even possible.

• Hermitix Podcast.
• Hermitix on Patreon.
• James on Twitter.
• James's course, taught in conjunction with Matt Colquhoun, The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism.

Trying something a little different with this month's solo show. We're putting a couple of 20th century American thinkers in dialogue around the topic of stories, meaning and what makes a life significant.

Show Notes

• The Myth of Redemptive Violence. Walter Wink.
• What Makes A Life Significant. William James.

Thought leader, speaker and innovator, Carol Sanford, joins the show this week. We discuss indigenous thinking, metaphor, and her latest book, The Regenerative Life: Transform Any Organization, Our Society, and Your Destiny.

A fascinating and eye-opening discussion.

Show Notes

• The Regenerative Life: Transform Any Organization, Our Society, and Your Destiny.
• Carol's website.
• Carol's articles on Medium.
• Carol's first appearance on Making Permaculture Stronger.
• Carol's second appearance on Making Permaculture Stronger.

One of our most popular guests returns to the show this week. Mitch is an historian, speaker, public intellectual, editor and author. He joins us today to talk about his latest book, The Miracle Habits: The Secret of Turning Your Moments Into Miracles.

We talk about focus, vitality, how best to use money and the destructive power of gossip among many other topics. There’s even a bit about Tucker Carlson.

Enjoy.

• The Miracle Habits: The Secret of Turning Your Moments Into Miracles.
• Mitch's website.
• Mitch on Twitter.
• Mitch on Instagram.

Time Magazine's Hero of the Environment and Green Book Award winner, Michael Shellenberger, joins the show this week.

Michael has been an environmental activist since his teens. He founded an Amnesty International chapter at his high school, he travelled to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas in the 80s, he ran for governor of California, he has published multiple books and founded and runs Environmental Progress.

Michael is one of the world's leading public intellectuals when it comes to clean energy and he joins us today to talk about his latest book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

• Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
• Michael's open letter, On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare.
• Accompanying slides for Apocalypse Never.

Talking about talking is less Seinfeldian than it might initially appear.

Everyone's favourite Canadian scamps join the show to talk about their journey with Grimerica and what's it like to be broadcasting now, versus at the outset. Obviously we get into the speculative weeds of what's going on and what we can do about it on a group but also individual level. We literally discuss discussing.

We also talk about chickens, UFOs, guns and dinosaurs being shot at with lasers from flying saucers. There's a lot going on here, put it that way. Enjoy.

• Grimerica.
• Grimerica on Twitter. (This is Darren, specifically.)

The one and only Dr Joseph P. Farrell joins us this week! Dr Farrell publishes and speaks in a wide variety of topics, from ufology to alternate history to politics to theology.

On the occasion of the publication of his latest book, The Tower of Babel Moment, we have a wide ranging chat on some of the subjects that underpin his many interests: Music, linguistics, magic as harmonics, and what our relationship to culture is and our role within it.

Enjoy!

• The Tower of Babel Moment.
• Dr Farrell's blog and website.
• Dr Farrell's YouTube channel.

It's that time of year again! The one and only Austin Coppock joins us to talk about the astrology of the second half of all *this*.

We discuss the most important configurations to be aware of, and situate them in some of the longer trends and cycles that are playing out, then we have a lively Q&A with members and patrons.

The one and only Alex Tzakiris joins us this week for an extended and challenging discussion on the nature of evil.

Alex is in the process of writing a book on the subject, pulling together the testimony and opinions of multiple guests on his excellent podcast, Skeptiko. What does psi data tell us about the possible existence of evil? What about cross-cultural comparisons? We have a frank and challenging discussion.

This is a firecracker of an episode. Or maybe I just smell brimstone?

• Preorder Alex's book, Why Evil Matters: How Science and Religion Fumbled a Big One.
• Alex's site and podcast, Skeptiko.

This week, we welcome to the show Brandt Stickley. Brandt is, among other things, Assistant Professor in the College of Classical Chinese Medicine, Visiting Professor at Dragon rises College of Oriental Medicine, acupuncturist, herbalist and a Classical Chinese Medical practitioner working in the Portland area.

He joins us today to talk about Classical Chinese medicine, of course, but in the particular context of what insights it might provide for more holistic, spirit-inclusive healing modalities in general.

A fascinating and timely discussion. Enjoy!

• Brandt's website and blog.
• Brandt on Twitter.
• The Medicine Songs discussion mentioned in the episode.

Writer, musician and researcher Joshua Cutchin returns to the show along with first-time guest and host of the excellent Strange Familiars podcast, Timothy Renner.

Joshua and Timothy are co-authors of the recently released Where The Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon volume 1. And so they join us today to talk about the book's elusive and enigmatic subject, Bigfoot.

Enjoy.

• Where The Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon volume 1.
• Joshua's website.
• Strange Familiars, Timothy's podcast and website.

Glastonbury's best bard and psychogeographer, Paul Weston, returns to the show to update us on his synchromystic adventures.

This episode is a bit of a special one as it serves as the isolation-era launch of his latest book, History and Myth: Boris Johnson, Henry VIIIth, Extinction Rebellion, Plague & The Return of the Middle Ages. And even more special than that, the book owes its existence in many respects to his last appearance on the podcast and the feedback it generated among the listenership.

So if people ask you what you did with your lockdown you can tell them you actually did co-author a book. Albeit accidentally.

Enjoy!

• Paul's latest book, History and Myth: Boris Johnson, Henry VIIIth, Extinction Rebellion, Plague & The Return of the Middle Ages.
• Paul's website.
• Paul's blog.
• Paul's YouTube channel.
• Paul on Twitter.

Artist, ritualist and clothing designer, Katie Martin joins us this week for a bumper episode.

Katie accompanied me on an ayahuasca dieta in the jungle last year, so the story weaves in and around spirit-based healing methods; the difference between costume and ritual garments; the function and power of performance, how you can use ritual thinking with your own clothing; as a thorough look at how magically operant people can respond to serious health diagnoses.

Super, super fun.

• Katie's site, Lo Monte.
• Lo Monte on Instagram.
• Lo Monte Vintage on Instagram.
• Lo Monte Vintage on Etsy.
• Information on Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder.

Super fun video chat with the legendary Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.

We discuss what constitutes cyberpunk, it's origins, influences and many gnostic parallels. Then we run through a top 10 cyberpunk films -carefully selected for our current apocalypse- and then we field some questions from the premium members and patrons who followed along live.

This is the audio of a video conversation you can find on YouTube or at Rune Soup, should you wish for some visual.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
• Miguel on Twitter.
• Miguel on Patreon.

Professional photographer and author, Darragh Mason Field, joins us this week to talk about travel, adventure and creativity.

Along the way we discussion Göbekli Tepe, the Djinn, Harran and seeing your own familiar places with new eyes.

Visit runesoup.com for further examples of Darragh's work discussed in this episode.

• Darragh's website.
• Darragh on Twitter.
• Darragh on Instagram.
• Spirit Box Podcast.
• City of Djinn presentation.
• The Aghori presentation.

This week we are speaking to the co-host of one of my very favourite podcasts, Bad Gays. Author, Huw Lemmey, joins us to talk about the importance of history, what it tells us, what it doesn't tell us, and how notions such as homosexuality change over time.

Very cool stuff. Check it out.

• Bad Gays Podcast.
• Bad Gays Podcast Patreon.
• Huw on Substack.
• Huw on Twitter.

In the last of the in-person London recordings, we welcome the one and only Gary Lachman back to the show. This time, we deep dive on Jung as a person and then attempt to parse his most important ideas.

In many respects, today's show turned out to be extra-timely. Now, more than ever, we require an urgent inward turn.

Enjoy!

(You will also find just the video discussion at runesoup.com.)

• Gary's website.
• Gary on Twitter.

The one and only Peter Jenkins returns to the show on the occasion of the release of the third and final book in his Thai occultism saga, The Thai Occult Appendix.

In this episode we talk more about spirit houses and why you should think twice about installing them, angels in Thai occultism, Thai astrology, cave spirits and the Thai animist version of the story of a wacky billionaire and some trapped school boys.

Very good stuff.  Enjoy!

• The Thai Occult website.
• The Thai Occult Books on Facebook.
• Note: There are images from the book available at the post page at runesoup.com

This week, we sit down in-person with medieval historian, author and public speaker, Christina Oakley Harrington. Christina is the proprietor of the world-famous Treadwell's Books in London so, of course, we talk about magic books and the role of the bookstore in the twenty first century.

We also talk about growing up amongst African and Southeast Asian spirit customs, mystic medieval women, Gardnerian witchcraft and a lot more.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Treadwell's Books.
• Treadwell's on Twitter.
• Treadwell's on Instagram.
• Video introduction to Treadwell's.

A very special solo show this week, talking about pattern logic and cycle models.

Not much to share in terms of show notes, but the post page at Rune Soup has some additional images.

This week, we welcome to the show philosopher and public intellectual, Charles Eisenstein.

Charles is the author of a number of important books including Sacred Economics and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. He joins us today to talk about his most recent book, Climate: A New Story.

Along the way we tackle many challenging and thorny topics, such as solutionism, polarisation, despair and how to best think with our ecological crisis so that we may return to flourishing.

Excellent stuff.

• Charles's book, Climate: A New Story.
• Charles's website.
• What If We Survive?

This week we welcome to the show speaker, educator, lawyer, anthropologist, activist and Bardi woman, Munya Andrews.

Munya joins us for an exploration of the concepts in her book, Journey into Dreamtime, as well as related notions in ecology, politics and philosophy.

Excellent stuff!

Show Notes

• Munya's website, Evolve Communities.
• Munya's book, Journey into Dreamtime.
• Munya's webinar on The Dreamtime.

Dr Al Cummins returns to the show to talk about his upcoming publication, An Excellent Booke of the Arte of Magick -a 16th century English grimoire written by colonial explorers and navigators, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and John Davis.

Along the way we talk necromancy, spirits and Empire, and scrying. A superb chat.

• Preorder page for An Excellent Booke.
• Al's website.
• Al's Instagram.

Cognitive science researcher, Vince Polito, joins us this week to speak about microdosing, psychedelics in a clinical setting, and the direction and implications of this sort of work for our understanding of the human mind.

School is in! Except this time I am paying attention.

Show Notes

• Vince's website.
• Vince on Twitter.
• Vince's microdosing study.
• Classic psychedelics: An integrative review of epidemiology, therapeutics, mystical experience, and brain network function.

And finally, Gordon's upcoming London events:

• Avenging Angels, with Peter and Alkistis from Scarlet Imprint. March 15th.
• Tamesis Retrograde: An all-day animism, journeying and decolonisation workshop. March 16th.

The one and only Conner Habib returns for our traditional New Years discussion.

Necromancy, witchcraft and whiteness, manufactured outrage, dialectical materialism and how to free yourself from the clutches of neoliberalism.

Just what the time of year called for!

Show Notes

• Conner on Patreon.
• Conner on Twitter.
• Lynn Margulis episode of Against Everyone.

For our Christmastide special, José Leitão returns to the show. He joins us to talk about the imminent release of his latest book, Opuscula Cypriani, folk magic and witchcraft in Portugal, and all things St Cyprian.

Splendid stuff.

Show Notes

• Preorder Opuscula Cypriani.
• José on Patreon.
• José on Academia.
• José's presentation in Kiev.

This week, we have a very special (emergency?) edition of Storytime with Paul.

Glastonbury psychogeographer extraordinaire, Paul Weston, returns to the show to talk through some of the mythic, archetypal and historic resonances to the recent British election and the looming inevitability of Brexit.

Great stuff, as ever.

• Paul's website and tours.
• Paul's YouTube channel.
• Paul on Twitter.

It's that time of half-year again!

This is the audio-only version of the H1 2020 live video forecast. You can also watch the replay and/or donate to the Christmas fundraiser here.

Enjoy!

The one and only Phil Hine joins us this week for a wide-ranging discussion on tantra, magical experimentation, the history and proper understanding of chakras, the benefits of terrorising yourself and what he has learned over a metaphysical career spanning more than 35 years.

Enjoy!

• Phil's latest book, Hine's Varieties: Chaos and Beyond.
• Phil's website, Enfolding.org.
• Phil on Twitter.
• Phil's recommendations for Tantric poetry books:
  • Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal.
  • A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Premodern South India.
  • Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary.

Return of the Queen!

The one and only Becca Tarnas joins us again as we dive deeper than ever before into Tolkien's notion of Faërie, Middle Earth's Creation story, and how the man himself understood creative acts.

And, because we are almost at the end of the year, we take what we have learned from this journey into Middle Earth and transform it into some guidelines and inspiration for facing 2020 with our minds on hope and mutual flourishing.

Show Notes

• Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader's Guide to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
• Dr Becca Tarnas's website.
• Dr Tarnas's presentation on Hildegard of Bingen and the Ainulindalë with Jacob Sherman.

This week, the one and only Christopher Knowles returns to the show for amazing mega-discussion around the macro subject of writing about magic, how writing is magic and generally 'magic and this thing we call fiction'.

The principal texts we use to frame this chat are Grant Morrison's legendary series, The Invisibles, and Alan Moore's Providence. Both of these you can read in their entirety for free by following the links in the Show Notes.

Super fun stuff. 

• Chris's website, The Secret Sun.
• Chris on Twitter.
• The Invisibles.
• Providence.

Season of the Mitch!

This week, we are very excited to welcome back author, speaker and historian, Mitch Horowitz to the show.

Being Halloween, we explore why this occult revival might be different, we look at the history of Spiritualism, we swap adolescent Ouija board stories and finish off with a little, light Satanism.

Excellent stuff. Happy Halloween, all!

• Mitch's website.
• Mitch on Twitter.
• Mitch's most recent book, The Miracle Club.

The reverend Danny Nemu returns to the show for a fiery and important chat about neocolonialism, plant spirits, modern medicine, ancient medicine, spirit logic and all that very good stuff.

Be sure to check out the show notes for the presentation that inspired our discussion.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Danny's presentation, Prejudice and Neo-colonialism in the Academic study of Ayahuasca.
• Danny's website.
• Danny's book, Neuro-Apocalypse.
• Danny on Twitter.

Author and researcher, Peter Mark Adams, returns to the show this week to discuss his latest book, Mystai.

Along the way we talk orphism, mystery traditions, visuality and the shortcomings of materialist archaeology.

Show Notes

• Get Mystai: Dancing Out The Mysteries of Dionysus.
• Attend the launch of Mystai at Treadwell's in London on October 19th.
• Peter's website.
• Peter on Twitter.

This month's solo show returns to the notion of utopia and our imaginal-relational opportunities.

Stay with that trouble, kids.

Show Notes

• The Donna Haraway documentary, Story Telling For Earthly Survival.
• David Graeber's essay, Hope in Common.

Camelia Elias makes a very welcome return to the show this week, on the occasion of the launch of two new books, What is Not: Marseille Tarot à La Carte and Divination with Cards: A Short History.

We also talk about meaning versus function, meaning in astrology and new ways to approach all the interpretive arts. An absolutely fantastic show. It's good to be back! 

• Get What is Not: Marseille Tarot à La Carte here.
• Get Divination with Cards: A Short History here.
• Join the Lenormand Foundation Class here.
• Camelia's blog, Taroflexions. (Specifically, a classic post describing her method.)
• Camelia's column on Patheos.
• Camelia on Twitter.
• Camelia on Instagram.

This week, novelist, non-ficition author and professor of art and film, Stephe Barber, joins us to talk about about Heliogabalus or The Crowned Anarchist. 

Fully translated into English for the first time, this remarkable little book was written by avant garde theatre visionary, Antonin Artaud, and is ostensibly based on the two year reign of a teenage emperor that history records as little more than an orgy of sex and violence. However it is also Artaud exploring power, and magic, and spectacle, and mythology, and how one tells history and why.

Really good stuff. Really good, indeed.

Show Notes

• Get Heliogabalus or The Crowned Anarchist.
• Video primer on Artaud's impact on theatre.

In the July solo show, we look at the possibly bright future of the novel and what thriving independent expression might look like in an era of endless reboots and comic book films.

The only show notes this week is a short film from the featured musician at the end.

This week we are speaking with Appalachian conjure doctor, Jake Richards. Jake is the author of the recently released Backwoods Witchcraft.

We talk family lineages, magical landscapes, tending family graveyards, witchcraft initiations and all things Appalachian folklore.

Great stuff.

Show Notes

• Backwoods Witchcraft: Conjure and Folk Magic from Appalachia.
• Jake's blog.
• Jake on Twitter.
• Jake on Instagram.
• Jake on Facebook.

This week, we welcome to the show, producer singer songwriter, Nika Danilova, aka Zola Jesus.

Nika has released five albums over the last decade or so and in 2017 moved back onto family land in Wisconsin and built a cabin in the woods. She also played Dark Mofo down here in Tasmania last year so we have some overlaps or similarities that led to a really fruitful discussion about creativity and place in a post-materialist context.

We also talk cities as habitats, structured and unstructured creation, and the role of visual presentation. Excellent stuff!

Show Notes

• Nika's website, zolajesus.com.
• Zola Jesus on Twitter.
• Zola Jesus on Patreon.
• Zola Jesus on Instagram.

The amazing Alkistis Dimech and Peter Grey return to the show on the occasion of their latest Scarlet Imprint release, Brazen Vessel.

This new book is a collection of both of their writings on witchcraft, Lucifer, the grimoires, embodiment and Babalon. 

And those are the subjects of our discussion. Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Buy Brazen Vessel.
• Scarlet Imprint.
• Scarlet Imprint on Twitter.
• Scarlet Imprint on Instagram.
• Alkistis on Twitter.
• Alkistis on Instagram.
• Alkistis's website.
• Video from the book launch at Treadwell's in London.

This week we welcome back to the show the only and only Langston Kahn.

Langston is a shamanic practitioner based out of New York. He joins us to explore the overlapping subjects of desire, embodiment and the shadow.

An excellent chat!

Show Notes

• The Metaphysics of Desire - Langston and my 3-day workshop in New York in September.
• Langston's website and newsletter.

Is it the end of H1 already?

Why, yes. Yes it is.

And that can only mean one thing! Astrologer in residence, Austin Coppock, returns to talk us through what the sky has in store for us for the second half of 2019.

Essential listening.

Show Notes

• Austin's website.
• Austin's Patreon.
• Austin on Twitter.

Slight delay to this week's episode, for reasons that are explained in it.

But this week, we explore the potentially contentious statement that spirit contact is, in fact, easy.

These solo shows are in danger of becoming an accidental series.

Note: I'm travelling for the next month so new episodes and blog posts may be less reliable. Check me out on Twitter or check out the Rune Soup Facebook page for more details or last minute updates.

This week, we are speaking with my good friend, Kaitlin Coppock.

Kaitlin is the owner of Sphere and Sundry, an online-store-meets-ritual-art-project dedicated to expertly elected talismanic materia.

So of course, we talk talismans, as well as how or why they might work, in addition to astrology in general, while sharing a few thoughts on its current moment of cultural prominence.

Great stuff!

Show Notes

• Sphere and Sundry.
• Kaitlin on Twitter.
• Sphere and Sundry on Instagram.
• Sphere and Sundry on Facebook.

This week, we welcome to the show Brian Lord. Brian is a graduate student in psychology, a special collections archivist and Masters student at the University of West Georgia.

He joins us today to talk about the legendary Ingo Swann, as well as the complete, unpublished Ingo Swann manuscript he discovered in the archive and went on to publish.

Great stuff!

Show Notes

• Psychic Literacy and the Coming Psychic Renaissance - Ingo Swann.
• Ingo Swann Collection at the University of West Georgia.

This week, in what is probably one of my favourite ever episodes, we welcome to the show Elizabeth Krohn.

Elizabeth, along with Dr Jeff Kripal, is the author of Changed in a Flash, which is the story of her being struck by lightning, dying and returning from the afterlife very much changed.

A truly fascinating discussion. Enjoy.

Show Notes

• Elizabeth's book, Changed in a Flash.
• Elizabeth on Facebook.

This week we speak to anthropologist, writer, teacher and Maya shaman-priestess, Gabriela Jurosz-Landa.

Gabriela is the author of Transcendent Wisdom of the Maya and she joins us today to talk about Maya cosmology, ceremony and understanding of time.

Show Notes

• Gabriela's website.
• Transcendent Wisdom of the Maya.
• Gabriela's Facebook group.

This week, we welcome back to the show one of my favourite guests from last year, Dr Diana Walsh Pasulka.

Diana is chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and joins us today to discuss her recent book, American Cosmic.

We explore interacting with off-planet intelligences and what such practices might actually do to you; as well as meaning and synchronicity; and how contact events become religious over time.

Fascinating stuff!

Show Notes

• American Cosmic website.
• Buy American Cosmic.
• Diana's previous appearance on the show.

This week, we welcome back to the show Dr Jeffrey Kripal to talk about his latest book, The Flip.

Dr Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and is the associate director of the Center for Theory and Research at Esalen.

The Flip is a fascinating exploration of what happens when hard scientists or medical professionals encounter something anomalous or out of place within their materialist framework and then... flip.

Along the way we talk models of mind, science's impact on mysticism, what the Humanities can do better, and feeling our way toward a much better understanding of the imagination.

Show Notes

• The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge.

This week, we are joined by author, traditional witch and fellow southern Tasmanian, Lee Morgan.

In this free-ranging, in-person discussion, we explore the elusive challenge of definitions, restoring the imaginal to prominence, responding to and with place, self-censorship and UPG, and a whole lot more.

Good times.

Show Notes

• Lee's author page.
• Lee's website.
• Lee on Facebook.

This month's solo show is fairly self-explanatory, to be honest.

This week we welcome to the show Dr Monica Gagliano.

Dr Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist and the author of the fantastic book, Thus Spoke The Plant. We chat about her experiences running experiments on plant communication and cognition, as well as her experiences learning from and with both indigenous plant teachers and plant spirits themselves around the world.

Very much my jam.

Show Notes

• Thus Spoke The Plant.
• Monica's Website.
• Monica on Twitter.
• Monica giving the keynote at Bioneers 2018.

This week we welcome to the show fellow podcaster, Laura London. Laura has a background in neuroscience, astrology, kundalini yoga and Transcendental Meditation.

She is the host of one of my favourite podcasts, Speaking of Jung and joins us today to have a wide-ranging chat about -what else?- but Carl Jung himself.

Enjoy.

Show Notes

• Laura's website and podcast, Speaking of Jung.
• Laura on Twitter.
• Laura on YouTube.
• Laura on Facebook.
• NYT Piece: The Holy Grail of the Unconscious.

Joining us this week for a chat about both one of my very favourite things and very favourite people is filmmaker Lance Mungia. Lance is the director of the recently released feature documentary, Third Eye Spies.

So in this extended discussion, we explore remote viewing, the amazing Russell Targ, the experience of actually making the film and also speculate on the cosmic implications of the efficacy of remote viewing in general.

Splendid stuff.

Show Notes

• Third Eye Spies -both the film and the mailing list.
• Third Eye Spies on Amazon.
• Third Eye Spies on Google Play.
• Third Eye Spies on Vimeo.
• Lance's YouTube Channel, Waking Universe TV.
• Waking Universe Films Facebook Page.

This week we welcome to the show author, teacher and animist, Daniel Foor. In addition to being an initiate in several global traditions, Daniel is also a doctor of psychology and licensed psychotherapist.

He joins us to talk about ancestral healing, the positive and negative impact the dead can have in our lives, the difference between an ancestor and a dead person and what the ongoing opportunities and responsibilities we among the living have to those in the spirit world.

Excellent stuff.

Show Notes

• Daniel's book, Ancestral Medicine.
• Daniel's website and course calendar.
• The upcoming lineage healing workshop in Mullumbimby, NSW.
• Daniel on Facebook.
• Daniel on Twitter.

A little later than usual, and timed to coincide with the Glastonbury Occult Conference launch of Paul Weston's latest book, The Occult Battle of Britain, I am pleased to present another patented episode of Storytime with Paul!

Listen in as we discuss the book, its backstory and how it wove its way into Paul's life, what even was the Occult Battle of Britain, its antecedents, and what significance it might hold for us at this particular point in the timeline.

Show Notes

• The Occult Battle of Britain. (US)
• The Occult Battle of Britain. (UK)
• Paul's Website.
• Paul on Twitter.

In which we unpack the aftermath of the fire, the completely successful group enchantment that ended it, and ponder some ways of talking about and thinking with dragons.

I know I promised a solo show on my experiences so far with this 53,000 hectare fire encircling the farm but, a few hours ago, it occurred to me there might be a way of framing the tale so that it is more useful or at least magically interesting to you.

So with very little notice and coming off another podcast recording, Austin agreed to pull a chart together for Tasmania and we use an analysis of that as a frame for discussing my experiences.

It’s not technical -how could it be, if I’m involved?- but for you astro nerds out there, the Aries and Libra ingress charts for Hobart, as well as the base chart we drew up for Tasmania, are all in the show notes, with Austin’s commentary.

• I See Your Blood Moon and Raise You a Sky Filled with Fire
• The Motor Lodge at the End of the World
• Some Say in Ice

This week, we welcome to the show the legendary Robyn Francis. Robyn is one of permaculture’s leading teachers and proponents.

We talk about the movement's early days, some reasons for optimism today, interconnectivity and building stone circles in the subtropics.

Note: This episode was recorded on location. You can view the video version on YouTube.

Show Notes

• Permaculture College Australia (Djanbung Gardens)
• Permaculture College Australia on Facebook.
• Robyn's Personal and Artist Site.

This week, we are joined by Dean of Religion at Vassar, Dr Christopher White.

Christopher joins us to discuss his recent book, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions. Along the way, we talk Flatland, Narnia, the role of dreams in one's life and the true merit of 'fantasy' fiction.

Really good stuff.

Show Notes

• Christopher's book, Other Worlds
• Christopher's faculty page
• Christopher on Twitter

Continuing our January series of guests here to get your head in the game for 2019, this week we speak to artist, author and art therapist, Angela Kirby.

Angela takes us through her journey as an artist, what it's like living out in the Australian desert, and which techniques you can use at home to utilise artistic or creative capacities for either psychological growth or healing.

Really good, useful stuff.

Show Notes

• Angela's website.
• Angela's book, Creating Wisdom and Magic in Life and Love.
• Angela on Facebook.
• Angela on Twitter.

And we're back!

Kicking off January's run of guests here to get you all setup for 2019, we welcome back to the show Conner Habib. Conner is a writer, teacher, sex worker, anthroposophist and activist.

He joins us today to explore desire and whether we experience it in the most optimised way. We also chat about Wilhelm Reich, the Left's problem with witchcraft, anthropology and Christmas.

Show Notes

• Conner's patreon and podcast.
• God Sex Death - Conner's January 20th online course with Caitlin Doughty and Peter Rollins.
• Conner on Twitter.

For the final episode of the year, please enjoy this bumper edition forecast for the first half of 2019 with Austin Coppock.

After we debrief on 2018 and talk about what's coming up, Austin and I also spend some time exploring some of the topic areas we touched on at 'So Below'. And then we take some questions from people who watched the live recording (which you can find on YouTube).

Mandatory listening!

Show Notes

• Austin Coppock's website
• Austin on Twitter
• Austin on Patreon
• Austin on Facebook

What else would the November solo show be about but So Below -the astrological magic event Austin and I hosted in Melbourne last weekend?

There's also a good deal of talk on the hows and the wheres of magic and astrology's general overlap, as well as why one might want to look at it from a specifically chaos magic perspective.

Show Notes

• Images from So Below.

This week we speak with science writer and cultural anthropologist, Dr Eric Wargo.

Eric is the man behind the nightshirt.com and the author of the recently released book, Time Loops.

We talk retrocausation, precognition, and whether our capacity to ‘feel the future’ extends beyond the human world, what that might say about the structure of the universe and our role in it.

Excellent stuff.   

• Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious.
• The Nightshirt.
• Eric on Twitter.
• The Nightshirt on Facebook.

This week we return to one of our most popular topics of conversation... Tarot!

Joining us to do so is author, professional card reader, podcaster and tarot teacher, T. Susan Chang.

We cover fortune telling, journeying with tarot, using playing cards, how to get to know new decks and bravely attempt to work out quite where it is 'meaning' comes from.

Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers
• Susie's website
• Susie's etsy store
• Susie's tarot podcast: Fortune's Wheelhouse
• Fortune's Wheelhouse Facebook group
• Susie intoning the Orphic Hymn to Hermes Cthonios in Greek

This week, we welcome Mitch Horowitz back to the show to talk about his latest -and frankly fantastic- book, The Miracle Club.

Mitch and I chat about the origins of New Thought, its shortcomings and areas of much-needed improvement, as well as some of the contemporary scientific data that suggests there really is something fundamentally true and important about your attitude and headspace and how it might impact reality.

Really, really good stuff.

Show Notes

• The Miracle Club
• Mitch's website
• Mitch on Twitter
• Mitch on Facebook

In October's solo show, we discuss the eruption of the witch into so-called 'popular culture', with a particular emphasis on the reboot of Charmed, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and American Horror Story: Apocalypse.

And, for once, there aren't spoilers!

Show Notes

• The Witchy Beauty Trend's Ancient, Sexist Roots.

It is once again time for our annual catch up with Alkistis and Peter of Scarlet Imprint! I always look forward to these discussions as -for one- I learn so much and -for two- it gives me those warm, 'find the others' feels.

This week's episode has all of that in spades. We talk angels, landscape, tarot, books and, inevitably, witchcraft and the wider culture.

Enjoy!

• Scarlet Imprint
• Alkistis Dimech
• Scarlet Imprint on Twitter
• Alkistis on Twitter
• Scarlet Imprint on Instagram
• Alkistis on Instagram

This week, we welcome to the show physicist, light therapist, researcher and author of Light Therapies: A Complete Guide to the Healing Power of Light, Anadi Martel.

Now, if you’ve read Pieces of Eight, or if you’ve seen some of the premium member bonus material, you’ll know I’ve long been fascinated by what we stupidly still call ‘alternative medicine’ rather than the more clunky if not much more accurate ‘modes of living and healing that do not emerge from a dysfunctional belief system’.

And I’m especially interested in the ones that, whilst they are used for treatment, are better thought of as unavoidable universals. You don’t have to use acupuncture, right? But you can't avoid having a relationship with light, and sunlight in particular.

It is nowhere more obvious that we have a complete failure in the descriptive powers of the official version of reality than when it comes to accounting for the effects of sunlight, mindfulness meditation, forest bathing, and so on. 

• Light Therapies: A Complete Guide to the Healing Power of Light
• Website for the book, Light Therapies
• Sensora
• Light Noise Detector
• International Light Association

This week we speak with artist, teacher and maker, Daniel Mack. Daniel is also the chairman of the Seligmann Center Committee in upstate New York and joins us to talk about the life and work of the surrealist painter, Kurt Seligmann -in particular his book, The Mirror of Magic, first published in the late forties.

In this wide ranging discussion, we talk art, irrationality, the impact of the Unconscious on the flow of history, early experiments in creative homesteading and the remarkable Seligmann himself. 

• The Mirror of Magic
• Daniel's site, The Casual Alchemist
• The Seligmann Center
• Seligmann Center Giftstore (for the zines)
• Weinstein Gallery exhibition catalogue
• Martica Sawin discussing the life and work of Kurt Seligmann
• Daniel introducing the life of Seligmann

This week we welcome back to the show one of the most popular returning guests, Jenx.

As you might expect, he’s back in your ears talking us through Thai Occultism, to coincide with his recently released tour de force, The Thai Occult.

Along the way, we cover land spirits, uses for specific ghosts, the universality of candle magic and the many nuances of love charms.

Show Notes

• The Thai Occult.
• The Thai Occult Books on Facebook.

This week, we welcome back to the show author and researcher, Joshua Cutchin.

Josh's last three books -including his most recent, Thieves in the Night, explore under-examined categories of evidence for the range of phenomena uneasily labelled 'paranormal'.

Who better, then, to pick over Skinwalkers, abductions and the thorny issue of what constitutes evidence in the first place?

Show Notes

• Josh's website.
• Josh's recent post on evidence and skepticism.
• Thieves In The Night: A Brief History of Supernatural Child Abductions
• Josh on Twitter.

This week, we welcome hereditary witch, tarot creator and new Huon Valley neighbour, Avalon Cameron, onto the actual farm for a face to face chat.

Our wide-ranging discussion explores growing up both weird and Brazilian in regional Australia, the goods and the bads of living off-grid and what to do with over 3,000 tarot decks when downsizing into a tiny house.

Very good times!

Show Notes

• So Below: Melbourne astrological magic event
• Avalon's website and blog
• Avalon on Patreon
• Avalon on Instagram
• Avalon's YouTube Channel
• Avalon on Facebook
• Avalon on Twitter

This week, Dr Becca Tarnas returns to the show to discuss two of my very favourite things: Imaginal Journeying -including some really useful practical advice on Active Imagination- and The Lord of the Rings.

Why it was written, how it was written, and what even am Middle Earth.

Extremely good times. Enjoy!

Show Notes

• Dr Tarnas's new course, Journey to the Imaginal Realm: Reading J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
• Website of Dr Becca Tarnas.
• Becca Tarnas on Twitter.