x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Occult Confessions

The Alchemical Actors

Discover the secret history of cults, witches, magicians, conspiracies and the supernatural with occultism scholar Rob C. Thompson. His crew of Alchemical Actors explore life’s mysteries with a blend of research, ritual, and old-fashioned radio drama.

history spirituality

All Episodes

00:56:48

14.9: The Ghost of Hammersmith

Occult Confessions ·

2021/09/03

On the night of tuesday, January 3rd of 1804, 29 year old excise officer Francis Smith came face to face with the ghost and in an act of justice, shot down the white figure in the dead of night, determined to free Hammersmith from the ghost’s reign of terror once and for all. What Smith didn’t realize was that he didn’t kill the ghost at all, but instead killed 32 year old bricklayer Thomas Millwood. This resulted in a murder trial that would set a legal precedent in the UK involving self-defense

en-US

01:02:15

14.8: Reptilian Redux

Occult Confessions ·

2021/08/20

In the 1990s, former footballer (or soccer baller for us Americans) and sportscaster David Icke made waves with his wild conspiracy theory that the planet was under the control of a nefarious group of reptilian shapeshifters. Olivia was a longtime fan of Icke's theory but current events public and personal have prompted a change of heart. Find out why in our reptilian redux.

en-US

01:02:54

14.7: Snake Priests of Atlantis

Occult Confessions ·

2021/08/06

Robert E. Howard's “The Shadow Kingdom” sits at the nexus of two realms of occult lore: the canon revolving around an Atlantean Root Race established by Helena Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine in the late 1880s and the reptilian conspiracy theory most closely identified with former sportscaster David Icke. The Shadow Kingdom tells the story of an Atlantean warrior, Kull, who becomes a Valusian king. The ambassador Ka-nu reveals a secret plot of shape-shifting serpent men hiding in Kull's own palace

en-US

01:06:56

14.6: The Necronomicon

Occult Confessions ·

2021/07/23

For fifty years, most people believed the Necronomicon, an ancient grimoire written by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazrad in the year 700, was imaginary. That is, until a writer using only the name Simon published what he claimed to be a translation of the text in 1977. How could a book of spells meant to invoke interdimensional space deities or raise otherworldly destructors from the depths of the sea, based on a complex mythos that seemed to have been the invention of a small circle of weird fiction

en-US

00:54:50

14.5: America's Ancient Burial Mounds (Interview...

Occult Confessions ·

2021/07/16

For hundreds of years, Americans have speculated about the origins of ancient burial mounds scattered across North America. Rob is joined by Miranda Yancey of the Illinois State Museum to consider who created these mounds. Speculations have run wild and come to include a lost tribe of Israel, Vikings, Freemasons, and a mythic race of giants. How did European Americans use these false legends to justify the colonization of the Americas, and what is the truth behind America’s ancient burial

en-US

01:01:20

14.4: Yeats and the Pagan Apocalypse

Occult Confessions ·

2021/07/09

Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats believed that Ireland’s freedom depended in part on overthrowing Christianity, the religion of the oppressor, in favor of a pagan mindset. A longtime member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats incorporated occult themes into much of his work. In 1925, he published A Vision, inspired by his wife’s automatic writing in which he articulated his own supernatural theory.

en-US

00:59:20

14.3: General Hitchcock's Alchemy

Occult Confessions ·

2021/06/25

In 1857, a full-throated defense of hermetic philosophy and medieval and renaissance alchemy came from an unexpected source: major general Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a veteran of two wars who served as chairman of the war board during the American Civil War. Writing almost a century before Jung's psychological interpretation of alchemy, Hitchock argued that the mistake alchemy's nineteenth-century critics made was to read the alchemists' detailed treatises literally. In fact, legitimate alchemical

en-US

00:48:15

14.2: The Lizzie Borden Haunting (Interview Special)

Occult Confessions ·

2021/06/04

The house where Lizzie Borden's father and step-mother were brutally murdered with an ax (or hatchet) is under new ownership. Rob discusses ghost tourism, paranormal phenomena, and the strange history of the house with Azure Hall of US Ghost Adventures.

en-US

01:23:31

14.1: Vril or the Magical Underground Frog People

Occult Confessions ·

2021/05/28

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is one of the most important figures in Victorian occultism who you've probably never heard of, in part because Lord Lytton was a man before his time. He was likely a practicing occultist who invented the occult novel with his book, Zanoni. The concepts of the “dweller on the threshold” as well as the magical power of “vril,” an occult energy like astral fluid or akasa can both be attributed to Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. He also predicted the cataclysmic impact of nuclear power and

en-US

01:06:28

13.8: The Satanic Panic Returns

Occult Confessions ·

2021/05/14

The pizzagate and Qanon conspiracies are the offspring of legends of ritual abuse propagated during the 1980s and 1990s as part of what's come to be called the Satanic Panic. The myth of a secret group of powerful people abusing children goes back millennia but recent themes of elite manipulation and mind control date to the 1970s. In this episode, we complete our history of the false legends of ritual abuse by bringing them up to 2021.

en-US

01:06:27

13.7: Nazi Mind Control

Occult Confessions ·

2021/04/30

Almost immediately after the second world war, the American military initiated a program to collect the Nazis' most promising scientists and bring them to the US in a form of intellectual and technological reparations. Anxious to best the USSR, which was also recruiting among Nazi scientists, the Americans often turned a blind eye to some of the darker atrocities some of these researchers had been implicated in. The Americans and the British adopted rocket scientists, chemists, and, perhaps most

en-US

01:13:52

13.6: The CIA's Original Pin-Up Slave

Occult Confessions ·

2021/04/16

In the 1940s, Candy Jones was a successful model and performed in the South Pacific with the USO in a show that had been written for her. In the 1970s, she married New York midnight radio host Long John Nebel. When she had trouble sleeping, he volunteered to help her by trying out hypnosis. While hypnotized, Jones began to tell an incredible story of being mind controlled by a doctor in Oakland, California and performing covert operations, possibly for the CIA.

en-US

01:19:55

13.5: Michelle Remembers a Satanic Cult

Occult Confessions ·

2021/04/02

In 1980, Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder, published a book that would shape the culture of the decade to come, lasting into the 1990s. Billed as “the true story of a year-long contest between innocence and Evil,” the book recounted lurid memories of abuse that Michelle had recovered in therapy with Dr. Pazder. Going into a trance-like state, Smith discovered that she had been the victim of systematic abuse at the hands of a satanic group in Victoria, Canada. After bringing her

en-US

00:38:13

13.4: Mystery Magic Theatre: The Girl with the Crab...

Occult Confessions ·

2021/04/01

Who is the girl at the pizza emporium and what's the deal with the tattoo on the back of her neck? James visits "Church Secrets" and Olivia and Bri visit "Get It, Gurlll" on this very special episode.

en-US

01:39:08

13.3: The Manson Myth

Occult Confessions ·

2021/03/19

In 1972, Ed Sanders published one of the earliest investigative accounts of the Manson family in his book "The Family." Sanders argued that the Manson family's murders were part of a pattern of ritual evil that Manson learned from the Process Church of the Final Judgement as well as the Solar Temple of the O. T. O. Both groups successfully sued to have their names removed from subsequent printings of the book. In this episode, we explore the myth that Charles Manson was a New Age Satanist.

en-US

00:59:39

13.2: The Black Mass (Part Two)

Occult Confessions ·

2021/03/05

The second part of our story of the black mass begins with Renaissance and Victorian tales of the witches' sabbath complete with human sacrifice and sex in the woods. We bring our narrative full circle by ending with the anti-Catholic false confession of Maria Monk, who claimed to experience ritual abuse at a nunnery in Montreal.

en-US

00:51:44

13.1 The Black Mass (Part One)

Occult Confessions ·

2021/02/26

In the ancient and medieval world, early Christians, Gnostics, medieval Waldensians and Fraticelli, and European Jews were accused of participating in acts of ritual evil including child murder and illicit sex. The first of our two-part series on the black mass tackles early instances of the false legend of satanic abuse.

en-US

00:51:01

12.6: Future Plagues (Pandemic Special)

Occult Confessions ·

2021/02/19

Rob is joined by microbiologist Dr. Matt Hatkoff and PhD candidate Bryan Delius, whose research focuses on the intersection of disease and environmental change. Together, they discuss CoVID vaccination, the spread of disease from animals to humans, the global impact of human population growth, and the likelihood of another pandemic in our lifetimes.

en-US

01:01:16

12.5 Contemporary Chaos (Interview Special)

Occult Confessions ·

2021/02/12

In this episode, Rob is joined by Luxa Strata from the Lux Occult podcast and Nia Ain, a longtime chaos magician and member of the Illuminates of Thanateros. Together they discuss the influences of Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley on Chaos Magic(k), the various intersections between Chaos Magic(k) and popular culture, how to get started in Chaos Magic(k), and My Little Pony.

en-US

00:57:07

12.4: Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth

Occult Confessions ·

2021/01/29

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth is perhaps one of the most influential groups in the practice of chaos magic(k). In this episode, we explore the career of its founder, musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, trace the basic rites of the Temple, and tackle P-Orridge's theory of occult splinters and samples.

en-US

244 results

Similar Podcasts

The Old Front Line

Paul Reed

Today In History with The Retrospectors

The Retrospectors

جنود خلدهم التاريخ

ALSUMOOD PODCAST

Film History - Daily

Inception Point Ai

Madonna - Biography Flash

Inception Point Ai