Multilevel marketing groups or MLMs engage in legal pyramid-style schemes that escape laws against such schemes because of the involvement of products including everything from make-up and detergent to diet pills, shampoos, and nutritional supplements. Nikki Hiller Henderson takes the microphone to lead the second of our actor-hosted episodes in ou…

(Part 2 is now available on the Strange Ride channel). In this Strange Ride/Occult Confessions crossover episode Savannah kicks off OC’s newest season “cults that aren’t cults” by looking at the Secret Space Program conspiracy theory. The human race is under attack, and the earth needs all of our help if we’re going to survive to the end of this wa…

Rob and Luke talk with author and witch Gabriela Herstik about her new project, "Goddess Energy: Awakening the Divine Feminine through Myth and Magick." Gabriela talks about the intersections of Judaism and neo-paganism in her own practice, the many faces and incarnations of the goddess, and sex magic. For more about Gabriela's work visit linktr.ee…

This graduation season, Rob was asked to be a commencement speaker for Chesapeake College's ceremony. In this special episode, Rob shares his speech with the confessors and talks intimately about what the opportunity means to him and what he hopes for the future of the species. .By The Alchemical Actors

The Georgia Guidestones arrived mysteriously and disappeared violently, shrouded in secrecy as a monument intended to direct future generations of human beings. Rob sits down with Bryan Delius to discuss his research on the Guidestones and discover the full story of what became of the monument.By The Alchemical Actors

The Morrigan is a perplexing figure to make clear sense of for the reasons that all Celtic mythology is similarly perplexing: it was part of an oral tradition that was only recorded in the medieval period after the believers in the Morrigan had long since disappeared. Unlike the fairly extensive record of the Greco-Roman deities, the references to …

The legends of Rhiannon come primarily from the Mabinogion, a cycle of fourth Welsh myths that tell, in part, the story of Pwyll Pen Annwn who married Rhiannon. The stories date to the twelfth century although their origins likely go much further back in Celtic history. Rhiannon is a Welsh witch or druid who uses her power to escape an unwanted cou…

In the second part of our discussion, we turn from myth to historical documents and consider what the druids may have been like as a caste. What jobs did they perform in Celtic culture? How did their role inform what it meant to be a Celt? We also discuss modern neo-Druids and how their practices relate to the history.…

In an episode recovered from the dustbin of our archive, we invite you to explore with us the strange lore of the Infertile Order and the Myth of the Cheese. Did Hiram Miraalaarn encounter planetary nymphs on his way to Venus? Are the birds to blame for our inability to pair music and lyrics in the Song of Lurm? Find out in today's very special epi…

Druids were a part of ancient celtic culture—a series of kingdoms or empires that stretched through Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Britain, and Gaul—the region of modern France as well as parts of Belgium and Italy. The Celts were distinct in each region but also shared important cultural structures and practices as well as language. Part of the challen…

We sit down with Ed Crimi, owner of the Vampa Vampire Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and talk about his collection of vampire kits collected from around the world. Crimi also tells us about the room in museum devoted to the Archangel Michael. For more about the museum, visit: https://www.vampamuseum.com.…

The Aghoris are a sect who worships Shiva by way of Shakti or the goddess, often in the form of Kali or Tara. They spend their time at the crematorium in the sacred city of Banares or bathing in the cold waters of the Ganges in winter. They strive to overcome aversion by confronting what humans are most averse to beginning with death itself.…

How has ancient Gnosticism resurfaced as a new religion in the modern and postmodern world? Rob introduces the path of gnosticism into modern occultism and Rob and Luke interview Paul Joseph Rovelli, founding director of the Gnostic Church of L. V. X., and the church's social media director Joseph DeOliveira.…

In modern occultism, Isis is often regarded as a bearer of mysteries and a symbol of feminine power. When Helena Blavatsky invoked her name in the title of her first major work, Isis Unveiled, she sought to reveal the hidden spirituality of the East through an Egyptian lens; a religion that she claimed sat at the heart of all worship and was more t…

The Gnostics believed they had access to the truth; the real truth, not the truth that everyone else thinks is the truth. Everyone who's not a Gnostic that is. While there are certain themes that tend to unite Gnostic groups, they were actually quite distinct and widespread across the Christian world in the time of the Church Fathers. Christian Gno…

In 2015, a jury found John Jonchuck guilty of murdering his own daughter by throwing her off of a bridge over Tampa Bay. In this special episode, Bri considers the religious ideation and delusions of Jonchuck, including his obsession with a Swedish Bible, and why they did not justify an insanity plea.…

Eleusis is a town outside of Athens where the Greeks conducted a secret rite of initiation in honor of the goddess of the earth, Demeter, and her daughter and queen of the underworld, Persephone. The rite may have dated before the Greek Dark Ages, more than a thousand years BCE, and could have had its roots in a still more ancient agrarian cult. El…

If you've heard of Dioynsus, you're likely aware of his associations with grapes, wine, and theatre. The famous Theatre Dionysia was the site where some of the ancient world's greatest scripted performances were staged in honor of the god. But what is the connection between wine and theatre? The power of wine to remove inhibitions parallels the pow…

In this special listener panel, we discuss representations of occultism in television and film and on the internet.By The Alchemical Actors

We're going back to the archive for an episode that first posted to patreon in our first year podcasting. This is the first part of three on how rock came to be regarded as the devil's music (to listen to the other two, you'll need to sign up as a patron).By The Alchemical Actors

Lilith was the first woman created alongside Adam as his equal before she quarreled with him and flew away, leaving Adam to ask God for a second wife, Eve. Belief in Lilith is based, in part, on midrash or commentary on the gaps and seeming contradictions in the Bible. Genesis says that the first man and woman are created together as equals and the…

It is not enough for the 80s child to reflect wistfully on a simpler time. Rather, we often want to revive the mass cultural products of our youth in a way that maintains their appeal despite or perhaps because of the cognitive and hormonal shifts that come with adulthood. 80s children have done a decent job of keeping our favorite popular cultural…

This is part two of our discussion of the ancient serpent seed theory, the idea that Eve had sex with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and conceived one or several children. In this episode we consider more modern ways of reading the serpent seed idea that steer clear of racism. We revisit some old friends including P. B. Randolph and the creators…

What if the serpent didn’t offer Eve an apple when they met in the Garden of Eden? What if, instead, Eve had sex with the serpent, betraying her partner and engendering a race of half-serpent, half-human people? The suggestion may seem bizarre but as a theological theory it’s had a long life and continues to surface in a variety of interpretations …

Perhaps more than any other text, the apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve, also known as The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan or the First and Second Books of Adam and Eve sought to put Christ in the pre-Christian Garden. But its story was too imaginative or perhaps too surreal to qualify for the Christian canon. Satan plagues the first couple follo…

We tend to think that the story of Adam and Eve only became a problem from the standpoint of believability after Darwin in the mid-nineteenth-century, but, in fact, the strangeness of the story has dogged Christians throughout history. God creates two people and puts them in a garden to eat and have sex and name some animals. He puts two trees in t…

We received no requests for L. Ron Hubbard, but Rob became fascinated by his role in Jack Parsons' story and decided to do a deep dive on dianetics-inventing, sci-fi-writing religion founder. Resources for this episode include John Atak's "A Piece of Blue Sky" and Bent Corydon's "L. Ron Hubbard: Mystic or Messiah."…

Lynn Short was a member of a gnostic group she now describes as a cult. In our interview, Short tells us about how she developed internal sexual and psychological controls that became damaging to live with and how scandals within the organization led her to become an apostate. What are the limits of religious anti-materialism and how does a narrow …

Shea Bile talks about his experience creating occult groups in San Francisco and Belgium and discusses his new book about the intersection between Neitzsche and occultism. How has the German existentialist been misunderstood and how does he illuminate a path for left hand and satanist occultism?By The Alchemical Actors

Please allow us to introduce to you the newest podcast from the Alchemical Actors. This is our first full episode and one of two parts about Walt Disney's vision for a city of the future. For more deep dives into the weirder side of popular culture, follow us wherever you're listening to Occult Confessions. Don't see Strange Ride? Let us know.…

A few years before the middle of the nineteenth century in Poughkeepsie, New York, a seventeen-year-old boy sat down, closed his eyes, and dictated a book that detailed the formation of the cosmos more than a century before NASA would send out its rovers, laid out a theory of the transmutation of species several years before Darwin would publish hi…

Eliphas Levi, who left the priesthood to pursue a life in magic, is a seminal figure in the development of nineteenth-century occultism. He carried forward largely forgotten ideas from the Renaissance and brought together the worlds of Kabbalah and Tarot. Many students sought him out and contemporary occultism would not have been the same without h…

Ida Craddock was an occult sex reformer who wrote about how married couples could spiritualize their unions, giving them control over pregnancy and the right to choose when they had their children. She claimed that she herself had married a spirit or angel from the non-physical realm and that such unions were common in the history of mysticism and …

In the second half of our conversation about Rasputin, the infamous magician meets his end. How did Rasputin become such a controversial figure in Russian politics. And how many tries did it take to bring down the notorious starets?By The Alchemical Actors

The biography of Grigori Rasputin is hotly contested and frequently disputed. Did he perform supernatural feats? How much influence did he have over the tsar? Was he responsible for the downfall of the Russian monarchy? Drawing on scholars and first hand witnesses to Rasputin’s life, we attempt to cobble together a picture that is as true to the ma…

In the first half of the twentieth century, a Luciferian order of German occultists formed to cross the threshold, practice sex magic, and achieve a form of self-deification. Like many occult groups of the same time period, they claimed to have an ancient origin stretching back to ancient Rome by way of a secret quasi-Rosicrucian group who worshipe…

Parsons’ occult experimentation became an enormous financial and emotional liability when L. Ron Hubbard ran off with Parsons’ paramour, Betty, and all of Parsons’ savings. In this episode, Parsons attempts to recover his losses, writes a series of sometimes good and sometimes bad magical treatises, and meets his untimely end while mixing chemicals…

Are the Alchemical Actors a “cult that couldn’t cut it” or was Rob’s May 2023 retreat merely a creative exercise in occult hijinks? Judge for yourself on this special episode.By The Alchemical Actors

Jack Parsons was one of the world’s first rocket scientists, inventing an early version of the same fuel that was used to carry humans to the moon without ever having earned a formal degree. Parsons was almost entirely self-taught. Obsessive about rockets, he often took great risks in his experimentation with the explosives that would eventually ta…

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

In this special episode, Rob sits down with Jacob Wheatley, one of our founding alchemical actors, to discuss their experience with conversion therapy as a gay teenager growing up in a Christian household. Jacob's story reveals the pain caused by these methods and Jacob tells us how they convinced their conversion therapist that conversion therapy …

Charles Leadbetter was one of the Blavatsky-trained second generation of theosophists and a frequent collaborator with Annie Besant. Leadbetter believed in reincarnation and his ability to recall past lives including an experience meeting Pythagoras in 504 BCE. Leadbetter claimed to have spent the next two-thousand-three-hundred years since meeting…

Heaven or Havona exists at the center of a collection of super universes within one of which our universe and our planet are found. So says the Urantia Book, channeled by an anonymous source and compiled by a committee calling itself the Forum. At its heart, the book is a reinterpretation of Christianity through a space age lens with creator gods i…

In 1876, Anna Kingsford began to have visions and psychic impressions of her past lives which became the basis for the spiritual and theosophical books that were to follow. Edward Maitland, who would be her confederate in these endeavors, was practicing a form of meditation that involved tracing his ideas back to their origin at the core of his con…

Anna Bonus Kingsford was at the center of one of the biggest controversies in the Theosophical Society during Helena Blavatsky's lifetime. Arguing that Christian occultism was more accessible to a Western audience than the Hindu and Buddhist version Blavatsky had come to prefer, she threatened to split the London Lodge in half. To hold things toget…

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

Christian Sex Writers are an eclectic bunch from conservatives to liberals to doctors who fill you in on the birds and the bees while you wait for your blood test results. What are the Biblical sources for Christian sexual ethics, and are they consistent? Are Christian attitudes toward sex necessarily in opposition to the dominant views of Western …

Brett Warren brings a forensic approach to the bodies of historical vampires. Brett brings a historian’s curiosity to the project–translating eighteenth-century texts and tracing the origins of the word “vampire.” How can modern medical science help us to better understand the cadavers excavated and eviscerated after their previous owners were accu…

From the New Thought Movement of the 1880s to Charles Fillmore’s Depression-Era preaching to Joel Osteen’s megachurch, the notion that spiritual effort can yield material rewards has been a popular one for both New Age and Christian believers. The Prosperity Gospel asks that believers trust God and credit God for their own successes, but remind bel…

Anna Milon joins us to discuss her ethnographic research into the way religions are imported, created, and developed within Live Action Roleplaying. Do players bring their own religious convictions into the characters they play? What are the places where belief and fantasy overlap? Are there taboos players observe even though they’re acting our a f…