What if UFOs aren't visitors from another planet, but actually beings that crossed into our reality from another dimension entirely? Well, today occult historian Mitch Horowitz explains why modern alien encounters might be a part of a phenomena that humanity has been experiencing for thousands of years. We get into the grummy evidence for an interdimensional explanation of UFOs, and why Mitch believes that it's actually the most plausible theory. He explains why encounters with aliens may resemble ancient stories of angels or demons or other supernatural beings and the bizarre connection between the occult and the modern UFO phenomenon. We also dive into Alistair Crowley, often dubbed the father of occultism and his mysterious encounter with an entity he called Lamb, a being he claimed to contact decades before the classic image of the gray alien entered into pop culture. So what was he talking to? Was it an alien? Was it a demon? Or are those things even different at all? Are UFOs aliens and flying saucers actually extraterrestrial spacecraft coming from a different galaxy? Are they just a psychological phenomenon that can be explained by something happening in our brains or is there evidence that something else could be crossing into our reality from a completely different dimension? Well, today we're gonna find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. [Music] Mithorowitz, here we are, one more time. I wanted to speak with you about UFOs, and broadly speaking like the phenomenon that I've heard people talk about, it's like high-strangeness, like these things that don't fit neatly into our boxes of material science. And lately there's been so much interest in it. You have Trump and his administration released in these UFO files, you have fighter pilots in the New York Times journalists that are talking about these amazing revelations about these objects that we don't understand, and then of course on this show, I've spoken with experiencers, people that claim to have interacted with these non-human intelligences, and their stories are difficult for me to understand, because I don't think they're lying. They're crying real tears, they're truly affected by these experiences. I don't think they're crazy, and I'm remiss to even use that word, because I think it's a pejorative that's used all the time with people that experience things that we can't really explain, and so that leaves me with really one option, and it's an uncomfortable one, because I don't know what to make of it, and I know you've in your work talked about UFOs in this high-strangeness and aliens and things of that nature. So what does the occultor esoteric tradition have to say about UFOs? It seems to me that we as a culture are edging closer and closer to what might be called metaphysical explanation of UFOs, which is to say the interdimensional explanation. It seems to me like there's four possible explanations for UFOs. One is that they're just in effect lens smudges. That's the one favored by pseudo-rationalists, just mistakes, and it's a clean lens and away goes the UFO, so to speak. Another is that there's some kind of classified super-weapon system maybe used by the United States, maybe used by our adversaries, so that's one point of view. If you've discounted the mundane, if you've discounted the secret weapon system, then you have two chief categories left. One is extraterrestrial, and one is interdimensional. Now dig this. We actually have better conceptual models for interdimensionality than we do for interstellar travel. The distances of interstellar travel are so vast that we cannot conceive of them. Without resorting to something like a cosmic wormhole theory, you introduce some piece of exotic matter into a neighborhood and time bends or a black hole develops in which time has been, and these are very, very speculative conceptions. But we actually do have a well-worked out theoretical model of a multiverse, or what is sometimes called the many worlds theory interpretation of quantum physics. This started with the Schrodinger's cat experiment in which you have to logically conclude that a dead alive cat can exist because of what's observed in particle phenomena, and a law to be a law has to be consistent. So what's observed in particle phenomena has some relationship to our above ground world, and that's sometimes interpreted and understood as evidence in support of a multiverse. So according to this line of thought, ET, so to speak, is a being from another intersection or dimension of time, and may be as alarmed by us as we are by him. This could be an explanation for all kinds of anomalous phenomena that can't be discounted as mundane. So you have a small percentage of UFO cases that really elude all conventional explanation, and the interdimensional thesis, if one wants to delve into the realm of the anomalous, probably holds up better, in other words, there are stronger conceptual models for that than we possess for interstellar travel. Yeah, it's I've spoken with people, like I said, that have these experiences and the way they describe them, it doesn't feel interstellar. Now perhaps they are untrue in what they're saying. Perhaps what they're saying is better explained through like a trauma response or perhaps a stroke or some other type of material thing, but if it's possible that they're communicating with some other deity or some other type of intelligence, the way they describe it is that it always like sort of apperates. That there's always a telepathic component, that there's a feeling of euphoria, that there's a time kind of dilation thing that happens, which would feel more consistent with something that's interdimensional. And this is, I think, been echoed, or perhaps even started by Jack Foley. Yes. Jack is a computer scientist and UFO theorist who was, I suppose, could be counted as the pioneer of the interdimensional thesis. And Jack has worked with Steven Spielberg and told me that Spielberg agreed with him that the interdimensional thesis was the likelier of the two if you were pitting it against the interstellar thesis. Right. And I would say probably since the 1950s and even more so in our time, religious themed language is taking shape around UFOs. People, reporters, experiencers are describing these things with religious overtones and language around the extra physical, it changes generationally, but it may be describing the same kind of anomalies, let's say, that go back to biblical antiquity. In speaking of more recent times, in the early 1890s, President Teddy Roosevelt wrote a book called The Wilderness Hunter. And in that book, he tells a story of the most blood-curdling bigfoot encounter that you've ever read. He was hunting along the Idaho Montana border and he was told a story by a hunting guide. And this was real wilderness at that time of a two-legged, hominid being killing a campmate of his. And Roosevelt recounts the story with the most vivid and blood-curdling detail, but he describes it as a goblin because that was the term from his childhood. Words like bigfoot and Sasquatch had not entered the American vernacular yet. So to Teddy Roosevelt, goblin is the word you reach for when you're describing something like that. Nowadays, people will describe UFO experiences and they'll speak in terms of tall grays or Nordic figures or reptilians and so forth. And they're ceasing upon language that just belongs to our generation. An earlier generation might have called them ghosts or poltergeists or-- - Banshees. - Banshees. - Banshees. - Right. Sprites, fairies. Take your pick. It just depends upon your part of the world you live in. I think we're having the same discussion as our forebearers did, but we're just using different vocabulary. - Right. Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop, religion camp, history camp, and campgagnon. Now let's get back to it. - Yeah, I think-- I mean, I forget the name of the book, Passport to Magnonia. - Magonia, Passport to Magnonia. - So I read the book and it was interesting because he's outlining all these different cultures and their experience with these different things. And they're all calling them different names, but they're describing very similar kind of phenomena. - Right. - Like people being abducted by fairies. - Right. - And there are these small little beings that are kind of mischievous, so they take them places and they look at them and then they drop them back in time is different. And they just call them sprites or whatever. - Exactly. - Exactly. - Exactly. - With that context, because he's harkening back to Scotland in the 1200s or something. Christian Dumb was already sweeping through the nation at that point. So why would they not also use demons or use angels or something that is more biblical or religious in their description of these beings? - Well, ironically, those terms are getting used today in the 21st century. You'll have J.D. Vance hypothesizing that UFOs are demons and I discourage the user.
of that word that way because demon going back to its original Greek and Latin usage was a neutral term for a kind of worker-be-spirit the same way we might refer to a genie or some kind of a messenger or something of that nature. It was only after centuries of cultural conditioning that the term demon became the bad guy term and even the ancient Romans would speak of genius as something that was a gift from a spiritual messenger. They would refer to it as genie-i, which was a play on the term gen or genie in Arab culture. That's how we used to use demon. Now the term is conditioned to be exclusively evil, but ironically all of this is getting revived today and the religious language is almost coming full circle. Now some of the people who occupied early Christian nations, they certainly persisted in beliefs of these mysterious anomalous beings called them fairies or gnomes or brownies or allouches or every culture literally from Polynesia to Siberia has stories of these little men. I heard people speak very ingenuously to me about this in the nation of Belize when I visited a few years ago. Allouches is the term they used, these little men who occupied the hills. There's a through line among all these stories, these reports of anomalous beings that we keep trying to characterize in different terms, whether it's goblin or poltergeist or tall white or what have you, and it demonstrates some undigested aspect of the human experience. These reports are persistent and they're sometimes unified in detail as Jacques Vellet was trying to point out and they differ only in vocabulary, but in our era they're taking on more religious tones and for some people these are messengers, either foreboding or beneficent. It seems like with many of these cases there is a message that goes along with it. For example, the Zimbabwe sighting of maybe a hundred schoolchildren to see this being or this craft land and they communicate with these beings and they draw pictures and things like that where they describe what the beings told them. Almost always it goes along with conserving the planet, like love and harmony amongst humankind, and then oftentimes appearing around like nuclear testing. Yeah, I have to admit the messaging for me is the least persuasive part of the whole paradigm because it feels anodine, it feels repetitive, it feels lukewarm. The notion of environmental degradation is something that no reasonable person could disagree with, but I almost feel as though it's a kind of cultural repeat loop cycle. I find that to be the weakest link in the chain. If there is a message it's something that should upend our conventional view of reality and I don't think there's any reasonable person that would disagree with a message of environmental stewardship that would disagree with a message around nuclear proliferation. The problem is, and this is the problem with all religion and all wisdom literature. None of it penetrates. Everyone around the world agrees there should be no more war. War solves nothing. It's nothing but a horrible tragedy and we keep having them and we keep having them even though down to a person we all agree that it's an outrage. It should never occur. It doesn't penetrate being. We sit in an armchair and we read the Dou De Ching or the Beatitudes or the Bhagavad Gita or the Dhamma Pada and we say, "Yeah, right on. That's how to live." We instantly violate it when we're out in the friction of life. That's the human tragedy. Not that we don't all understand that we're running out of rope environmentally. The tragedy is we know it and we cannot act on it because we are not sufficiently developed to act on it. That's where we need help. Right. When it comes to these beings, these extraterrestrial beings, as people will call them, I've heard people say that you can conjure them and people do like CE5, for example, where they'll kind of go to the woods and they'll go with a group and kind of like a guide and they'll do some type of meditative practice. I've had friends that have personally done it and they say, "I looked up in the sky and I saw these lights that were not stars." They're kind of like orblake and they kind of moved and danced in a sort of pattern and then they went away. What do you make of that? Listen, I take seriously the reports of experiencers. I'm frustrated with them, but in the last episode I talked about Alistair Crowley downloading his three-part book of the law in Cairo in the early 20th century. I do believe that there are extra physical forms of communication, whether that's with a deity or an entity or a non-human intelligence, or just some misunderstood anomalous form of our own intuition. I can't say. But I do think there are poltergeist-like effects. I do think their, I would say, psychokinesis as a phenomenon has been demonstrated and repeated and replicated in bulletproof lab studies. So there is a bridge between the mind and phenomena. What is going on is next to impossible to say. We're on our knees peaking through a keyhole. We don't understand the invisible world. We can track some of its phenomena, but what's really going on is the ultimate mystery. What are some stories about psychokinesis or some of these examples? We spoke a little bit before by you, Geller, but are there others that you point to and you go, this is a legitimate, not a stage trick, not a delusion, a legitimate effect where the mind is manipulating reality. Sure. Some of the finest data we have on it emerges from the Parapsychology Lab at Duke University. It was amassed during the early stages of the Second World War, where experiments were conducted thousands upon thousands of trials, vetted, jureed, bulletproof, meta-analyzed. In fact, it was that lab that minted the concept of meta-analysis, where you're grouping together different experiments, but similar, into one study and trying to analyze the possibility of chance or accident. These experiments, the psychokinesis experiments at the Duke Parapsychology Lab, demonstrated the ability of thought among certain subjects to influence the throw of dice. If you exclude all possibility of pollution in the experiments, there is a statistically small, but significant effect that the human mind can events on throws of dice. Skeptics or pseudo-sceptics will sometimes say, oh yeah, then why don't people go to Vegas and get rich using this? How do we know they're not? The guy who has a winning streak, all it takes is that one marginal, but statistically significant factor, and a loser exits a winner. We don't know that that's not going on. The gambler hammer herself doesn't even know whether that's going on. Now, Alastro Crowley is communicating with an entity that he calls Lamb. Lamb is large-headed with kind of like bulbous eyes and a thin mouth, and looks very similar to what we would call a gray. Do you think that this is evidence of the same phenomenon just being given different labels? Well, it's a centrail. It's a centrail. No one can look at Crowley's drawing of Lamb and not think of what we call "grays" in the 21st century. I can't describe it as anything other than a remarkable parallel, but as a parallel, I would say it's damn near unforgettable. Right? To me, it's just. And people will talk about Egyptian mysteries about the pyramids and ancient aliens and all the sort of thing. Perhaps there is a spiritual technology that goes along with these ancient rituals of Egyptian antiquity that is conjuring some type of spiritual communication. And perhaps when we're talking about ancient aliens, we're not talking about interdimensional aliens. We're talking about metaphysical aliens. And maybe there's some type of knowledge or some type of information that's transferred in these experiences. And that's my challenge to the experiencer community. Who I love, who I love. My challenge is that a message of environmental stewardship, human comedy, nuclear non-proliferation, that's insufficient. We need to grow up in terms of the messaging. If there is something there that can aid humanity, not in its professed principles, because we don't act on our professed principles. But some way to actually penetrate being, that's the message we need right now of the 21st century. Now, what about the raw tapes, the law of one? Are you familiar with this? Oh, yes, but only in a glancing way. I'm so fascinated by it. It's effectively a, it was a professor. I've read exactly what he studied, but a professor in America, a psychic, and another gentleman who joined into this triad. And they started doing these conjurings, these channelings, and they would dictate everything that was written down. And the woman who was channeling all of these days.
things was talking to who she claimed was raw, an ancient Egyptian guy. Yes, it's been made into a book, a very popular book. And it's become the law of one, which is now almost a modern religious movement that people abide by. And it's very detailed, it's very intense, and basically upon the death of, I think it was the main medium. Yes. It kind of just, actually no, I don't even think it was the main medium. I think it was the other professor. Once he died, the main medium wasn't able to do it anymore and it all kind of just stopped. But everything that they channeled is now collected into this, this volume. It's, it's a moving teaching. I've read it, I haven't spent any great deal of time with it. There's some channeled literature, there are clusters and handfuls of channeled literature. The Seth material is among them, of course, miracles is among them. Some of the edgier Casey material that I really honor and that I really venerate, I haven't spent a great deal of time with the raw teachings, but I recognize that it's a very meaningful transmission to people. And I take modern religious messages very seriously. I think religious novelty and I don't use that term in a degraded way. Religious novelty is incredibly important. Religious novelty includes, for example, the beatifying of new saints. These are very meaningful episodes in people's lives that coincide with, in some cases, I would say, justly investigated and claimed miracles, such as spontaneous healings, which do exist. There are in standard medical literature, and I've written about this and people can hold my feet to the fire because if I'm exaggerating or if I'm getting the numbers wrong, call me out. But there are about 15 cases a year in this country of spontaneous remission of cancer and no one knows why. They're anomalies. Now mainstream medical authorities theorize that in some cases it could have been a misdiagnosis. There was no cancer. In some cases, maybe the person's immune system was being suppressed by a virus, the virus lifts and they're able to recover. And they will describe other cases still as psychological in nature. And I accept that language. I accept that language. I'm not going to insist that anybody speak in terms of language of miracles or even, oh, I don't know, cyclical healing or anything of that nature. We can settle on the term psychology, but they occur, they occur. The anomalous is all around us and it occurs. So do you believe based off what you've read about, for example, the raw materials or the Seth materials, do you think that there was a genuine legitimate channeling going on? Yes. I do. I think there's a handful of channel literature that really comes from a source that goes beyond the ordinary. And if that source is the medium, him or herself, then I would say there's an intuitive faculty of thought that may be much deeper and wilder than we've come to understand. What about say ounces or Ouija boards? I know people will scoff and they'll say, oh, this was a game made by Hasbro. This has no legitimate bearing to the spiritual world. But if you ask my mom, she's like, you better not touch a Ouija board. I used to say that when I was a kid, I would say, come on, it's in a shrink wrap box that toys our us. This can't have an occult property. And yet, reported and experienced contradicts my childhood skepticism. The Ouija board is actually a homemade folk item that emerged from spiritualists experimenting with say ounces and table wrapping in Ohio in the late 1870s. And it was only not quite a generation later that it was patented as the Ouija board by a group of novelty manufacturers in the city of Baltimore. Oh, there's an amazing testimony around the Ouija board. And any study that I've ever seen that attempts to explain it through some kind of psychological transference, the researchers get exactly what they're looking for. The extraordinary stories around the Ouija board just keep coming. It's an objective fascination. And again, if it's just the mediums themselves that are causing the communication and the weird phenomena, like blinking lights that sometimes accompany it, how extraordinary the mediums become. Do you have a personal experience with Ouija boards or say ounces? Not much. I don't. I've had some anomalous experiences, but I'm the guy to whom very little happens. I tend to be more of a researcher historian. I am a seeker. And I do have some extraordinary experiences with what people will sometimes refer to as manifestation, which I refer to as selection. And I bring a more interdimensional, multiverse interpretation to it. I also don't believe we live under one mental super law. I think there are many different laws and forces that intersect our lives. I've had some remarkable experiences, no bed levitating, split pea soup, vomiting experiences with the Ouija board. But I've certainly witnessed enough to feel that there's something there, man. What could you say from your personal experiences, not only of like a say ounce or Ouija board, but other types of manifestation experiences that would compel you on a personal level to say like, oh, there's something going on here. I'd say the following thoughts are causative. There is an intimate relationship between what we experience in our emotionalized thoughts. There are also countervailing measures. And it can be very difficult for people to swallow and accept that. There are extreme countervailing measures sometimes that present impossible barriers to people. Physical decline is a fact, mortality is a fact. What said, I do think there is some kind of law of mental causation, correlation that I take very, very seriously. And I think that there is a perceptual reality. And in a way, I would even say that's the end point of all magic, prayer, liturgy. We're seeking the actualization of a wish and uncanny things occur. There are also disruptions to those uncanny things. And it can be a very tight path for the seeker to walk. It would be a way that someone could manifest using their thoughts to affect reality. One of the things I'm really focused on lately, because I'm trying to boil down ritual, liturgy, prayer, ceremony into its simplest kernel. I believe that nothing unlocks the, I'll call them, psychical potentials of the individual, than a focused, impassioned wish. If someone asks me how to do magic, the first thing I issue them is a suggestion that in private, and just within the confines of their own psyche, they really arrive at a very unembarassed, well-focused, and deeply, deeply impassioned wish. Everything in our society conspires to take that from a person because we get so conditioned and peer pressure really gets its cause in us at a very young age. And we find ourselves, even within the exquisitely private confines of our own psyche, which I see as a compact of thought and emotion, we find ourselves using language that doesn't belong to us, using reprocessed language from wisdom literature that we know only in translation of translation of translation, that we cannot read in its original language. We may not even have the originals any longer, and we are conditioned to believe in things that are really custom and habit as being some kind of hollow truth, that we haven't verified for ourselves, verification is really the one lever that the seeker has on the path. So when the individual is communicating to him or herself, even the very language used is often culturally conditioned, and sanitized in a certain way, as though there's only a menu of terms and concepts that we can use, or it starts to get into so-called black magic, or something of that nature, which I can give a dictionary definition of, but I don't abide it. I just don't abide it. How do you know where one thing ends and another begins? And I think these are artificial terms that we internalize. So I say to the seeker, start with a wish, start with a deeply impassioned, focused wish, nothing will do more to unlock the causative agencies of the psyche. In the same way that if a placebo effect occurs at all, and there are extraordinary occurrences, the turnkey seems to be hopeful expectancy, that seems to be the turnkey. I think a wish also functions in the same way within our psyche. I've heard people describe like the going to Barcelona effect, where they'll say, if you want to go to Barcelona, just tell everyone you meet that you really want to go to Barcelona. And throughout time, someone will say, "Oh, my parents love in Barcelona," and we actually have a house that you can go stay at, and, "Oh, that's so funny, I actually work for American Airlines, and I can actually get you a discount on a thing," and then slowly through transmuting this wish, it can manifest just through proximity to people in your immediate circle. And I thought it was like, "Oh, that's an interesting thing, it's not metaphysical, but it does have a very practical way that a wish can then become manifest." practical and it also raises the possibility that maybe we use
used the term positive thinking. That's kind of given way now to law of attraction, manifestation, or secret made this very thing. Yes, yes, or my term is selection. But when I was younger, the term positive thinking was more often heard. It could be that all this positive thinking, if it has any impact at all, and I believe it does, could be a kind of telepathy in which we're seeking people to meet us halfway, lend us a hand, because extraordinary things happen. I've had things that are off the charts of any actuarial table or so-called law of large numbers that have happened to me, and people have these stories, and there's no statistical model or theory that can contain them, because the occurrence is also rarified by its emotional meaning to the seeker, him or herself. Somebody may be able to persuade you that if you meet your old childhood friend wandering along the beach somewhere in Hawaii, and you were just thinking of him, well, that's not so surprising, because the law of large numbers dictates that extraordinary things have to happen to someone. Okay, fair enough. What if in addition to just thinking about him, you were wishing you could revisit an argument that you feel really sorry about. You want to apologize before. And what if, you know, his name is the same name as the hotel that you're staying in and so forth. At a certain point, these things exit the possibility of measurement. It becomes synchronicities. Yeah. They become synchronicities. Interesting. Hey guys, we're going to take a break real quick, because I realized something the other day, right? We all have little pockets of dead time. 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[email protected]. And after you purchase, they're going to ask how you heard about them. Make sure you tell them that Mark increased us from the campsite, sent you. I am curious your perspective on like my practice as a person that is a professed Catholic, right? That is my, the world view that I strive to because it's been good to me. I enjoy it. Like it's the thing that makes me feel comfortable. I was raised in this tradition. So for me to interact spiritually, I have no concerns whether you know going to mass or going to confession or praying to Jesus Christ. These are things that make me feel comfortable. Of course. And I recognize that many people in other religious traditions would think this is heresy or they wouldn't want to do this. And not only occult traditions are perhaps not even occult traditions but like Islam or Judaism. So I'm curious in your opinion. Do you see my practice as equally legitimate to your practice and other practices? Do you see it as just a sliver that potentially precludes me from the totality of the spiritual experience? Or am I completely on the wrong path? A lot of people are surprised to hear me say this and I say it with the deepest sincerity. I love Catholicism. I genuinely love Catholicism. I grew up in a traditional Jewish home. I had an Orthodox bar mitzvah identify as an occultist or believing historian of the occult today. I feel that within Catholicism you find a vestige of the universal religion of the old religion. It's monotheistic of course. But the polytheistic traditions have gone into the tradition of saint veneration which is an extraordinary doorway for many, many people to truth and to salvific help. I have engaged in saint veneration. I went through a terrible crisis in my life about 15 years ago and I prayed to Catholic saints including St. Jude. I will sit here and tell you I believe in my heart. It was absolutely life saving. I won't draw lines of demarcation among the traditions. I will not do it. I have in my possession a miraculous medal that was blessed by Pope Benedict. This is thanks to my good friend Gary Janssen who was a Catholic layperson and writer. I believe very strongly in the tradition of miraculous healings in saint veneration in truths found within the Catholic Church. I think that's part of why the Catholic Church attracts so much attention sometimes from conspiracists and haters because some of the old religion which had its final expression in the polytheistic world in Rome traversed into Catholicism. I think there's absolute truth there and I'll never say a word against Catholicism. I've even noticed like in reading like my secret teachings of all ages from Manley P. Hall. There will be like sigils to Raphael, the archangel. How does this square? I have a Raphael tattoo in my arm. We can't see it because I've got my shirt on but you did a nice lot of jacket. Yeah, I'll thank you. I wouldn't appreciate it. But what's happening there? What is the connection with esoteric magic and archangel? There's no prejudice in symbol. Symbol is a universal language. So if you read in a book of a cult philosophy how to invoke Raphael and if you read about Raphael and Hebrew scripture or within Catholic tradition, I just won't draw these lines of demarcation. That's why I reject terms like white and black magic or even for that matter personality and essence or identification, non-identification, attachment, non-attachment. How would I know where one ends and the other begins? And I can recite along with the best of them all the dictionary definitions. I can pull my book of Bartlett's divine quotations off the wall and recite what I'm supposed to believe but that's habit. That's custom masquerading as tradition. Tradition requires in my view verification, participation, remaking, and every generation. I won't draw lines of demarcation. Chris Numerity said truth is a pathless land. I'll live by those words. But is there any concern about, again, this moral hazard? We've spoke about this a bit before, but to reiterate, if this technology is real, if the spiritual practice is legitimate, is there such a thing as a negative spiritual force that then could infiltrate your life, that then could cause grave injury, that in the way we talk about with Faust, where you make a deal that you eventually have to pay the debt, but you get the initial offering up front. But you know, or even the film obsession, which is very popular right now. That's a heavy one. I like that movie. A guy makes a wish that a girl loves him and then not only does she love him, she's obsessed with him and tries to kill everything around him and chaos and soot. That type of thing, is there any concern that this not dry demarcation could lead you into these paths of spiritual negativity? Well, first of all, it's interesting. I was saying earlier that in the Faust myth, as dramatized by Gerita, Faust actually prevails in Mephistopheles form a kind of bargain where Mephistopheles says, "If you give me your soul, I'll give you eternal happiness." And Faust knows, "Well, you know, how do I know you'll make good on it?" And they work out a weird bargain where Faust gets Mephistopheles to agree that if he experiences a moment that's so sublime and wonderful that he'd want it to go on forever, then he'll know Mephistopheles was telling the truth and he'll get his soul. And Faust in Gerita's drama finds a way out of that and actually outwits Mephistopheles.
So that may be a source of encouragement for those who are skeptical, I would have to agree that there is risk. But I abide that risk. I abide that risk. There's risk in everything. We as a human community can't avoid or avert risk. And look, I have friends in the Catholic church who might say, if you mess around with a Ouija board, you may be inviting in a negative entity and you may be in a lot of trouble. Okay. Okay, fair enough. But I could also respond with the good things that have come from the Ouija board. The largest religion, I'm sorry, third largest religion in Vietnam today, is a faith called cow dhyism. It ranks third after Catholicism and Buddhism. It was channeled in the 1920s by a Vietnamese civil servant over a Ouija board. Cow dhyism maintained its own private militia and sided with the United States until the end of that war in 1975, probably saved some American lives. There are works of poetry and wisdom, legitimate things, Pulitzer winning poetry by the poet James Merrill. That he, with total ingenuousness, said, were channeled over a Ouija board. I'm simply not going to curb experiment. I believe in experiment. And people might view this and say, wow, you are really dancing on the razor's edge. Or you are just a fool. And it's like, well, then I'll dance on the edge or I'll be a fool. But I won't curb experiment. It's part of the search. I can't cordon off the search. Truth is a pathless land. And I think we have to be willing to stray from the path to find it. Interesting. Yeah, I guess I just won't incur the risk. The risk seems too great. I'm too scared. I look at my life and I'm like, I got a pretty awesome life. I'm so grateful for everything that's happened in my life. I have a beautiful child. My wife is awesome. My friends that I work with are amazing. This show is awesome. And in part, I ascribe that to my faith in some way that I'm like, I've lived in accordance with how I believe God wants me to live as best that I can. I did that. I fall to regularly. But I try my best. And for that, I'm like, I don't want to be so greedy as to try to invoke some other type of spiritual entity or nature to try to compound that. Because it feels like I'm being greedy, you know? I agree with that. And yet I have to admit, I have chosen a path where I seek allies. And sometimes I will seek those allies among non-human intelligences, ancient deities. I, as historian, work really hard to peel back layers of conditioned history to try to find fragments and threads of some of our ancient ancestors' earliest religious expressions. And what you find there is extraordinary, because you, you do find something of a convergence of different religions. We even have statuettes that were presumably devotional objects used by our ancient Neanderthal ancestors. They were dubbed Venus figurines in the mid 19th century. They're, they're bulbous, feminine, statuary. And they were believed to be appeals to a fertility goddess. And Neanderthal men and women would use things that we would recognize today as talismans, like eagle claws or bear claws, things that were thought to be a help in the hunt, for example. And when you look at these things, these are from our prehuman ancestors, a lot like us, but not us. And they're actually recognizable to 21st century men and women, which suggests to me that spirituality is not conditioned, it's realized. And as did the ancients, as did the ancients, I do seek allies. And that's probably what makes me an occultist versus a member of one of the monotheistic religions, versus someone who's still part of the religion of my youth, although you never really depart, it gets in your bones. And I will flow into the mainstream religion sometimes, and then I will flow back out. And that's, that's the path I've chosen. And of course, I accept wherever risk is on that path. And if anyone shoulders it, I hope it's just me alone. Right. I have two kids. I don't want them to shoulder it. Of course. It's not their choice. Right. It's dads. I, I had a friend that came on the show and I've told the story now, maybe a 10, 20 times. So forgive me, dude, or whoever's listening right now. I spoke with a friend who didn't believe in anything mystical or spiritual, and he attempted to get possessed by witches. He wanted to be hexed to prove how absurd it was. Okay. And so he goes through this whole thing, and I'll spare you all the specific details, but he goes on TikTok and tell these witches to hex him, and they're like, well, we need a piece of your hair. And he's like, hard, fine. I'll mail it to you. And he goes through the whole process of taunting these witches to hex him. And then nothing happens yet. But then he comes on the show and shares it with me. And he's like, yes, this is just like a funny prank that I pulled. And there's all sorts of different mischief that he pulled to like, you know, kind of, you know, mess with them. And while he's telling me the story, the lights start to flicker in the studio. And I was like, what is going on? Like, is this a prank that he's doing on me? It's lights that we've used for hundreds of episodes, almost 500 to this point. They've never flickered before. Since I even used them for live shows and I'm doing stand-up comedy, they never flickered then. I've never seen them flicker. And yet they did in the exact moment that he was telling me the story. And it gave me a lot of pause. Maybe the most significant spiritual thing that's ever happened to me. I grew up Catholic my whole life, and I've never had a moment like that it was so tangible that made me go like, what is this? And I even spoke with a priest friend about it. I was like, what do you think's going on? He was like, I would get that place blessed if you can. And his estimation, his quote was, the devil was winking at you. What do you make of that experience? Well, it's interesting. Look, I was cracking up because you could have a new age or come in and smudge. You could have other people come in. You could have a whole retinue of seekers come in and do their thing for you. Look, assuming that it wasn't just some random coincidence, and there is, of course, random consequences in our world, but it sure as hell doesn't sound like it. I often say to people, we don't know how the invisible world works. And that could be understood in a fortifying positive way, and that could be understood in a scary, negative way, and they're both true. Maybe at that very instant with your friends speaking confidently about nothing strange going on and all is just ordinary and mundane under the sun. Something happens. Now, I often say to people, when you're praying for something, when you're praying for something, keep praying, keep praying, whatever your religious orientation, because we don't know how the invisible world works. And if it's real, whichever it is, you never know when that very moment will come where the key turns, and you may receive exactly what you need. You may not receive it in the mind's eye form that you expected it. In fact, almost by definition, it may seem strange and unfamiliar, and you want to push it away. There's a lot of religious parables and myths in which a king or a spiritual messenger is disguised as some ragged vagabond, and people who take in that figure are blessed with incredible gifts. There was a virtue of hospitality in the ancient world that we've lost track of today. But you'll find that in Hebrew scripture, you'll find that in the Greek myths, you'll find versions of that story all over the world. That's a lot like when wishes come to us. They come in an unfamiliar way. So on one hand, it could be maleficence-winking, but on the other hand, it also in a different scenario could be that instant of prayer or wishing where there is some response from the unseen world. It's mysterious. And we don't know how it works. So I don't speak of faith. I think of persistence, and I encourage persistence. Maybe not along the line of what your friend did, but at least he proved something to himself. Certainly to me. Yeah, it just was a very shocking moment where I was like, "I gotta get back." Did it change him? That I can't say. I actually don't have a call of problem. I gotta reach out to him and see how things have been. It's probably been a year maybe more since we had this conversation. So I'm curious what he's up to now. But it's things like that that make me go, "Okay, because I haven't had that many, you know, parapsychological experiences, whatever you can call them." Yeah. But there's been a couple like that, like dreams that I've had that seem to be foreboding. Yeah. Both positive and negative. I've had, you know, other, I've spoke to an exorcist. And in the conversation, a light flashes behind him that I didn't realize until after it came out and people commented. And I was like, "What is going on here?" Yeah. And to me, I'm like, "My immediate because of my framework is like, oh, this is demonic, this is negative." So I'm curious, like, in your perspective, I know there's practitioners that would invoke Lucifer, or they might invoke Satan. Yeah. In some capacity. I even notice you maybe have a pentagram on your hand. Oh, there's something for everyone here. So, like, how do you square this with like, "Okay, I'm pursuing good." And I want to have like human flourishing that is positive, but also invoking what many people would consider a negative entity. Yeah. For me, good is conduct. All ethics is conduct, and ethics itself is empathy. I try to abide reciprocity.
I try to abide loyalty, solidarity. I don't speak of love very much because I think that's a dodge. I think that's the way we hide. I don't love humanity, but I love certain individuals, and I try to be very generous with them. I like measuring affection and realness by generosity, because it's actual, it's tactile. Everybody who claims to love humanity, watch your back, watch your back. Why? Why? Because I think it's just too damn sweeping, and I think we as a human community make claims about love and hating war and wanting to steward the environment and all kinds of things that we don't care about, and we don't really act on, and they're perfumery. They're sheer perfumery. I get really worried when I hear people speak about ethics in a sweeping way. What I want to know is, and there might be some people who find this very quotidian, but I want to know, have you ever stayed up all night with a sick child? Have you changed a diaper? How many tuition checks have you written? Because I can damn well tell you that if you want to talk in terms of love, enumerate it by those acts, not by I love humanity. I don't know what I can do for the environment. I'm as concerned about it as anyone else, which is to say not very, because I don't do shit. I have a condition of running at my apartment. I'm drinking out of a plastic bottle right now. My computer and everybody's computer on which this show is going to be watched is eventually going to wind up in landfill and some poor kids backyard in the Philippines. So I want to know about generosity. I believe in intimacy. I believe in solidarity. I believe in not playing pylon. And most of all, I believe in not trash talking people online, which is killing our civilization. And it's not the algorithms fault. And I think that we have to measure ethics by conduct, not by what associations I claim. Right. I think that's valid. I think often about the quote of Mother Teresa, which perhaps is apocryphal, but I like it regardless, is if you wish to love humanity, love your family. And I never heard that. I dig that. I really like that. It's a way for me to kind of, I guess, zoom in on what is actually possible within my purview. Like this old, maybe it's a stoic idea of tending to your garden. Yeah. And that is what I try to do as best I can. I agree with him. So I do love humanity. Yeah. So I think. Well, Bravo. You know, I'm not going to try to take it from somebody. It's just my measurement. I've been cast out of places and I've had knives put in my back by people who claim to love humanity. You know, I can assure you. People who talk about service and have the most flowery religious ideas are the first ones to slam the door on my fingers and other people's fingers. So I've gotten a little jaundice in that regard. But I like measurement. I like evaluation. I like to be able to really see that if a person needs money and I love or have some affection for that person, if I have it, I'll goddamn give it to them. And I won't charge them interested. Right. And I think we all need to get down with more behavior like that. Yeah. I think that's fair. What about things like sigil magic or even like sex magic? Yeah. I think it's very real. And I experiment with it quite a bit. Sex magic is really interesting. There's an ancient idea that you'll find in Socrates. You'll find it in Plato. You'll find it in Taoism. You'll find it in the Kabbalah. You'll find it in Tantra. That the sexual urge is the urge of life aiming to replicate itself. And so we experience the sexual urge obviously through physical desire and through the act of either physical satisfaction or procreation. But this ancient teaching holds and you'll find this in Plato's Symposium where an Egyptian priestess named Diochema is explaining the Socrates. Sex magic has at its basis the idea that this life energy that we experience as sexual desire is life seeking to replicate itself. And we understand that only through physical procreation, which it is. But that's not all it is. And that if you can through a kind of mental act, a sort of mental transmutation, redirect at a time of your own place and choosing the sexual urge toward a hallowed task, whatever it is, might be something athletic, might be something intellectual, you'll bring greater strength, enthusiasm and acumen to that task. That's sex magic. Sex magic can take many different forms. But I try to boil things down to their. I try to reduce things to their real essence, their real core. And that is a form of sex magic. And you'll find expressions of it sometimes in euphemistic language throughout a vast range of ancient religious literature. The idea of sexuality as a life force seeking replication. We understand sexuality as being a wish for physical satisfaction or procreation, which is legit. But that's very narrow and it can go far beyond that. Yeah, I think almost in like a cosmic way. Again, this is probably highlighted by my religious upbringing. But like things like self pleasure. I almost have a version to it because it feels like it's stripping away the cosmic force behind this thing. It's not even Catholic teaching, I don't think. But to me, on a personal basis, pornography, you're releasing of energy towards something that is negative. And in many ways, I don't think this is good. And so on a cosmic level, this is something that I think I try to avoid for the reason. And then I don't hear people really talk about that. And almost sometimes when I speak with people in a cold practice, they'll say, like, oh, well, if it's channeled in this way, the energy can be kind of reinterpreted as something different. Do you think it's something that people should veer away from? Is it something that should be done with specific type of intention? Like, how would you interpret that? I think sex magic, as I've been describing at this kind of active mental transmutation where you, just through a mental shift, redirect the sexual urge toward a hallowed task, I think that's a very legitimate expression of human agency. At the same time, I also really do agree with you that sexual acts, bereft of some kind of emotional commitment, can leave a person in the end feeling very empty. I'll never forget, it's the funniest thing many, many years ago. I knew a guy who was like a real swinger in the '70s. And he was part of the sex drugs and rock and roll generation. And he was sort of a, I don't know, kind of a chin-out arrogant guy. And yet he got very quiet once, and he was saying that back in his wild days, he had like some Monagé Twain. He said, when it was over, he said, you know, the thing is, when it's over, what have you got? What have you got? And it was the only time I ever heard him express self-doubt in that way. And I think as one gets older, that becomes more meaningful. Yeah, it's just something that I'm cautious with. Even like intentionality or like sigil magic. I'm curious about people to have like intrusive thoughts, because I share this feeling with you where, you know, I do think thoughts in some way can affect reality. I don't have any type of statistics or data to support this. This is kind of like a personal feeling. But with that, sometimes I'll get these intrusive thoughts ever since having a kid in particular where I'm like, oh, I hope it doesn't fall, I hope I don't drop him. I mean, all of these horrible, morbid things. And I know many parents have similar sort of feelings. And then I'm like, oh no, as me thinking about this or dwelling on this, going to somehow cause it to be. And then it creates this almost like superstitious like OCD. Yeah. And I'm curious if there's anything within your work that you would say, like, oh no, you can address these things and it doesn't always manifest. Right. Like, how would you guard against that? Well, look, seen from one perspective, if we think in terms of the multiverse, it could be that we're recreating or we're selecting a different strand of reality, localizing a different strand of reality into our perception all the time. If you ask me, where did you grow up? What were your parents' names? What did they do for work? I can respond to all of that. And they would feel as real and as persuasive as the words I'm speaking. And yet it's possible if one abides the multiverse interpretation of physics that we're recreating at every instant. However, I would also say that the turn key of reality, I think, is emotionalized thought. You're not having a sustained wish if an intrusive thought enters. If you get worried like Jesus, did I turn off the stove? That doesn't mean the stove is on. It would have to be, I think, something much greater and further than that. The placebo effect doesn't occur just because someone says, "Hey, feel better." It occurs because somebody's having an emotional experience that some kind of therapeutic effect is legitimate and is warranted. So I speak in terms of warranted belief. I want people to have warranted belief. And that's usually emotional. That's usually evidence-based. That's usually a really concretized form of expectancy. So I don't think just any random thought is going to act out in some negative way. Thank goodness. Feel better. What about things like demonic possession? I think there are cases that are legit. You know, I gave my rap earlier about not using the term demon in a negative way. I buy the antique form of neutrality. But look at humanity. Look at how well we do. Why would we assume that the invisible world is any different? the hermetic dick.
is as above so below. When I look at humanity, I can't fathom that the invisible world is, if it's populated, is any different from us, which is the scariest goddamn thought I could possibly have, because I think humanity makes a very poor accounting for itself. So, do I think it's possible? Yes, absolutely. The less sensationalized the case, I think probably the more likelihood is, there may be something there, but I think it's a possibility. Yeah. I'm curious about it, because it's one of my deeper fears, right? Like this idea of possession, and again, from my Catholic upbringing, but it's something that I think about them, like I don't even want to mess with us at all. Well, speaking of which, the Catholic Church over the past, say, 15 years, has more than quintipled the number of authorized exorcists here in the United States. And if you ask, well, why would that be so? Some people will blame new age culture, will blame people like me for popularizing some of these ideas. It might be attributable in part to entertainment, and I don't mean that in a glib way. We're very influenced by things that we see on the screen. We watch things on the screen, especially in horror movies. And we see projections of real possibilities of our lives. For example, you were mentioning the movie Obsession, which I love. That's a brilliant movie. And the anti-hero in the movie, and I'm sorry for the spoiler alert, makes the tragic mistake not of wishing for love, but of wishing for the love of this one particular person. And he fucks with another person's psyche. And it's the classic human conundrum. We wish not for the condition, but for our mind-side picture of the condition. And it's deadly, and it's deeply fucking frightening. Everybody who watches that movie relates to that. Horror movies are like that. We see a movie like The Exorcist. And it turns a key. It taps into something. Nobody watches Star Trek and thinks Captain Kirk is real. But we watch The Exorcist and we're like, holy shit. Maybe. And yeah, it's belief-based. horror is probably the one genre of storytelling that is so totally belief-based that it holds lessons for us in our real life spiritual practice. I was removed by Obsession for that for that very reason. Do you think film and TV can act as portals? Definitely. Definitely. Really? Because I think that they influence the human psyche. I think if it weren't for The Movie The Exorcist, a term like Exorcist might very well just be a crossword puzzle term nowadays. We might not have heard of it. But that movie unlocked it for us. Concepts of Poltergeist and Exorcist and notions of interdimensionality, for example. That starts to cross into sci-fi. But I think these things affect people. And all of our horror is in effect folk horror. You had the golem before you had the Frankenstein Monster. You had the vampire mythos before you had Dracula. You had the wolf man or the werewolf mythos before you had Loncini as the wolf man. So or and for that matter, you had intentional communities before you had midsummer, which has a remarkable intersection with real and actual intentional communities. And you find a through line between folk practice and horror. That's like no other form of storytelling. So it's not just that the horror open support although I think it can. It taps into archetype. It taps into practices that we as a human community have abided for millennia. Should people be cautious? Well, you know me. I'm a deep in the pool kind of guy. So I think they should be cautious with their kids. But but as far as the individual experimenter, I want people to find things. And I hope they find good things. But I appreciate that your friend did that experiment. I hope he's happy today. But it gave us some insight. You know, that's interesting. What's up guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you something. I had one of those days recently where I woke up super tired. I drank coffee and then I drank more coffee because I was tired. I trained badly because I had too much coffee. And then I couldn't sleep because I had too much coffee. And the frustrating part is I'm doing all the things I'm lifting, I'm eating protein, I'm taking creatine, I'm trying to sleep. I'm occasionally fasting because someone on YouTube told me it was good. But sometimes I'm still walking around feeling like I'm only charged to like 60%. And that is what got me thinking so seriously about testosterone. Like I think about testosterone a lot because it's the thing that makes me feel amazing. And that's why I've been taking Marsmen. Here's what I learned. Your body can be making testosterone, but a portion of it gets bound to a protein called SHBG. It's literally like the testosterone's there, but you can't use it. It's in jail. 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So you can try it and pay attention to how you feel and see whether Marsmen fits your routine. And for a limited time, the listeners of this show, if you are a camper, you are going to get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts when you go to men. Go to Mars dot com. That is men go to Mars dot com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Make sure you tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite sent you. Now, let's get back to the show. Yeah, I get I told you I had a friend who wrote a book and had through dreams was told that the book opened a portal. Yeah. And it gave him a lot of concern, but he was like, did I do something bad? Like, I didn't know what I was doing. But like, did I act as a channel for this negative force started out? He seemed to think that it was a negative outcome. Yeah. My suggestion to your friend, and this might be the old book editor in me speaking, is bravo forge forward because he's obviously doing something of real meaning. Now, nobody likes to have nightmares. And I'm, I understand that as a consequence, but look, he's an artist. He's an artist. People have been driven mad by their art. People have practiced their art until the point of physical depletion. He didn't get into writing because he wanted to be safe. He got into writing because he wanted to be an artist. That's sometimes what being an artist does. Right. Are there any spiritual forces you wouldn't have with? No, they're right. I'm saying anything. No, I mean, are there any spiritual forces that are holy evil? No, I don't believe so. You know, if you go back to the early Hebrews conception of Satan, who they called ha satan, the adversary or sometimes the prosecutor or the disruptor, that being served a definite purpose in life, in a certain sense, in a certain sense. And I would probably say this to your friend, the horror writer. Friction is the price of creativity. And without friction, we wouldn't be worthy of the term human in all its splendor and ignoability. And if you dial back to the most ancient forms of worship and spirit contact, you find that the non-human intelligences are a hell of a lot like us. If one looks at the creation story of the Western world, for example, the Odyssey, biggest movie in the country right now, okay, Trojan War. How did the Trojan War start? Where did it come from? Well, mythologically, mythologically, Eris the goddess of chaos didn't get invited to some wedding banquet. And she was pissed off. So she threw a golden apple called the apple of discord into the wedding banquet. And the apple said the words on it for the fairest. So some of the female goddesses get into a fight over who is the fairest. And eventually, this leads to the events that erupt in the Trojan War. So sexuality itself, we were talking about sex magic, sex transmutation, is at the heart of the Western story. It's at the heart of how we understand we as a Western world got to be here. Now, Eris the goddess of discord. She was hurt. She was jealous. She acted out in a way that we as humans recognize. I don't call her evil. I might say that the fight that ensued was foolish and mercury thought, I'll fix this. I'll transport them to a faraway island where they can fight there and all get hurt. Well, a lot of fucking people got hurt. Unfortunately, plans go awry. There's foolishness. There's jealousy. There's betrayal. I wouldn't say that's evil. I would say it's projections of ourselves. I see. What do you take? I guess, what do you make of like the Gnostic tradition of this idea that there's a demure creation is created by this pseudo god that is under maybe the control of the monad and that where we are subjects of this material reality that we need to try to escape? I think Gnosticism and it's been reborn in our era in ways that no one could have predicted is an extraordinary, symbolical, and spiritual understanding of truth. That, for example, is why I take the Barbie movie, for example, first 20 minutes of the
The Barbie movie is the finest, popularized narrative of narcissism I think we've ever seen. Barbie starts thinking of her own death, her own mortality, and realizes, "Oh my God, this is not a real world I'm living in. This is an airsatz world. I'm under the control of something I didn't understand, so she begins her journey." Now dig this. That movie played around the world. It was popular in Saudi Arabia. It was popular in China, and everybody gets it. Like, "Oh yeah, you wake up to the reality that your world is not your own, that your underlaws and forces that you didn't recognize, that are keeping you from your sense of true individualism, vision, selfhood, Saudi, a deeply conservative, religious society, China, and officially atheistic society, wildly different societies, and yet audience members, they get it. Everybody's like, "Oh yeah, I get it. This is freaking me out." Same thing with the Matrix. Nostecism has re-emerged in our era. I think, of course, there's forensic details as to why things discovered and so forth, but it's re-emerged because it's spiritual truth. I think it reveals ourselves. Interesting. Could you share, you've kind of floored it with it, but could you share any personal experience that you think is a tangible, just anecdote of something that happened to you that you feel like is inexplicable in some way? Well, I'll really abbreviate it. Really abbreviate it. There's a talk online called "Empire of Mind," where I tell this story in the full version. Years ago, I was part of a very intellectually rigorous intellectual order, and I'm sorry, a cult spiritual order, and my teacher, who's now dead within this esoteric group, gave me a really wild instruction one day. This was in the pre-digital era, or digital commerce, was just in its nascent, and long story short, I had to purchase these pink, heart-shaped buckets for a very particular purpose in connection with a session that we were doing in the woods, and I couldn't find them anywhere. And I really wanted to please my teacher, and I worked really, really hard, and I'm abbreviating this on the brink of giving up, and I mean literally on the brink of giving up. I was on the East Side of Manhattan, and I was running an errand at this nothing-little neighborhood grocery store, and I was just about to give up, and I just paused, and I went to the back of this nothing-little grocery store, dusty dingy place, and there's a gleaming pile of pink, heart-shaped buckets, and they had just come in that day. It violates every actuarial table, even in the abbreviated version I'm telling. And at that moment I knew that there is a causative quality to thought and persistence, emotionalized thought, and I had worked, and I do believe that unflinching perseverance, well it might be a nice outward ethic for people, and it does function as an outward ethic. It has a spiritual dimension. That's interesting. I've heard stories like this so many times, and even close friends of mine who desire so badly to achieve a goal, and then they achieve it, and it's miraculous, it's against all the odds. I mean, weird anecdote, but I even think Argentina's performance in the world cup is partially the fact that they love Leo Messi so much, and that the power of belief, they're in my opinion, a underpowered team compared to many of the other teams, but they believed so much that they made it to the line. There's some quality to it. I'll tell a story that just happened to me about a week ago, I was teaching in a new age center in the Hudson Valley, called the Omega Institute, and a guy Jacob who was sitting in on some of the sessions. He was wearing these Japanese boots that I really loved, and I said, I really love those boots, but I'm more of like a high top guy, I wanted a higher boot. We long story short, the great seeker, writer, spiritual writer, Damien Eccles, who's a friend, came to campus, and we met, and we hung out a little bit, and I propose nothing. I was very interested in these boots the sky was wearing, which we're given to him as a gift by Damien, and that night, my wife, Jacqueline and I were searching online for these boots, the high top variety, and we narrowed it down, and we talked about it, and we talked specifically what kind of boot, what not kind, why, and I was like, okay, I'm just going to hold up. The very next day, Jacob comes into my class with a spanking brand new pair of the very boots that we were looking at with labels on that had also been given to him by Damien, but he wasn't that into, and he elected not to wear. He said, I don't know if these are going to fit. They fucking fit like a glove. It was just a weird moment, and a person might say, well, that's ordinary, it's not the same thing as some great victory, but the very ordinaryness of it is, for me, what made it so compelling, because it all played out in real time, and it had all these witnesses. My wife was shocked, Jacob was shocked, Damien was shocked, and there it was. Interesting. Now, before we leave, what can you say about Kabbalah and other types of Abrahamic mystical traditions? I know people have talked about Sufism in a similar way in the Islamic tradition of some type of mystical interaction with Allah in the present, and Kabbalah similarly within the Jewish tradition of a way to understand God and creation, Hashem through this creation of humanity through contraction, and there's so hard and things like that. What can you say to the mystical traditions within mainstream religion? Some mainstream religion and occultism intersect. They must intersect, because they're both part of the human story to know itself. And so within Kabbalah, you'll find traditions that were once oral traditions, and that are much older than the written works themselves, passed on to the seeker, to try to devise some sense, some conception of the point and purpose of the cosmos. And you've reminded me of something, I don't want to go off track, but that's the book Meditations on the Tarot, speaking of how occultism and mainstream religions intersect. Meditations on the Tarot is a book that was written under the byline anonymous, but I published an edition of it, and I'm not betraying any confidence, as to say, that it was written by a now deceased conservative Catholic theologian named Valentin Tomberg, and Tomberg maintained that there is no division between the central basis of hermetic thought, Greek Egyptian hermeticism, as above so below, law of correspondences, and church teaching and Catholic theology, and that the Tarot cards themselves are a kind of hermetic window onto concepts within esoteric philosophy that are not at odds with ideals within Catholic theology. I published an edition of this book that, for the very first time, was issued with an afterward by a conservative Catholic theologian, Cardinal Hans Urz von Balthazar. The German edition of this book, in two volumes, has been photographed and verified on the desk of Pope John Paul II, a book on Tarot, Meditations on the Tarot, by anonymous, the author being Valentin Tomberg. We draw lines of artifice. There are overlaps in the search to know that allow us to understand how a cult concepts can enter cabala, hermetic concepts can enter Catholicism, spell work, and other cult concepts can enter sufism, which is the mystical wing of Islam. I was privileged to have a sufi teacher, we've got to throw out the walls. Walls are not where truth is. It's interesting that a Catholic, I mean, the Pope would be reading up on Tarot. Not just any Pope, I mean, as if there's such thing as just any Pope, but the formative Catholic figure of the 21st century, 20th century. There are two volumes directly on John Paul's desk, and Hans Urz von Balthazar was nominated cardinal by Pope John Paul II, and he writes the afterward to the addition of meditations on the Tarot that I published. But we as a culture, we cannot hear these things. We cannot receive these things because they run so deeply counter to our ingrained notions that they don't penetrate, but if a person looks, they're there. What is the primary claim of that text that would square with Catholic teaching? This is above so below, which is the central hermetic dictum, and that appears of all places we were talking about this in the previous show. That's from the hermetic text, the Emerald Tablet, which was translated from Latin into English for the very first time by Sir Isaac Newton. And that text begins true without falsehood, certain, and most true. That which is above is as that which is below. It's a law of correspondences. And Tomberg makes the case brilliantly in meditations on the Tarot that there's nothing in that central Greek Egyptian concept that runs counter to church teaching. And he uses each of the major trumps of the Tarot as a kind of journey into what he calls Christian hermeticism. These are windows of symbol into the ancient world and how it marries to Catholic theology.
And so as above so below, this be that God creates man in his image. Not only God creates man in his image, but it stands to reason, if we accept the key premise of hermeticism, we are created by a kind of infinite mind, which the Greek hermeticists refer to as noose, sometimes translated as great light, sometimes translated as infinite mind, which projects its thought figments through different concentric circles of reality. And we dwell in one of those concentric circles. So as above so below, God created man in his own image, the two echo one another and suggest that as we were created by an infinite mind, so can our minds create in ways that go beyond cognition, motor skill, but there's an actual expressive, concretizing element to the human mind. That is an aspect of hermetic philosophy. How does Kabbalah fit with this? It seems like many occult traditions will draw upon kabbalistic elements, and Freemasonry has sort of, I think, a very clear kind of connection to Kabbalah in the tree of life. Without question, Kabbalah is a Jewish sounding of universal tradition. I was speaking in terms of concentric circles of reality. So within the depiction of the Kabbalistic tree of life, which wasn't actually drawn at least in a way that reached us until the renaissance that was drawn by a Christian Kabbalist. And you will see that the individual is supposed to pass upward, upward, upward through these concentric circles, shedding vice, attaining virtue, getting closer and closer to the Godhead or the Katerra crown. And that squares, for example, with ancient Egyptian philosophy. That squares with Hellenic philosophy. That doesn't run counter according to Thomburg to Catholic theology. So you start to see these are universal spiritual symbolic understandings of humanity's situation. And they run parallel. They overlap. Interesting. The symbolism of the tree of life is very interesting to me. Yeah. And I think the symbolism of the, I mean, really every religion and every philosophies is fundamental to understanding it. So this book that I have behind me as well as in my hand, what can you tell me about the symbolism of this book? Oh, I appreciate you're asking. That's my new book, Esoterica, Formula's Against the Fault Self. I really make the effort in that book to take all of this symbolic material and boil it down to practical possibilities for the individual and daily life. The cover was created by fine artist John Newsom, a wonderful friend, and there's a page in the back of the book about the cover where I talk about some of the symbolism, the wings, the owl, the labyrinth, John also encrypted an extraordinary array of geometric messages within that cover. It's the shape of the pyramid, it's the shape of the star of David. It's a universal shape. And so the cover in itself is a kind of talisman, the interior of the book, really distills insights from esoteric philosophy into ways that I think will prove actionable for the individual and daily life. It's a sort of step down in a sense from the secrecy and the rigor that that philosophy demands, but we need it. Our time and our era needs it. We as a human community are in trouble. And so I think this descending octave, which this work may be, is necessary to respond to that trouble. Is the owl moloch? Is the owl here moloch? Oh no, the owl isn't moloch, but moloch is quoted in the book. The owl is the symbol of wisdom, an owl can be a predator, an owl can be a protector, an owl was the spirit guide to manurva, and as it so happens, in terms of the myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and bringing it to humanity, owl pellets are what early hominids burned in order to create fire. And is that connected to the fire here on the edge of the labyrinth? Flames of awareness, there's a positive force, there's a negative force, there's a reconciling force, which is, could be seen as symbolized by the center of the labyrinth. That's a very important aspect of esoteric philosophy. The world stands on forces of three. Interesting. And then the interesting skulls share an eye. Yeah, let that eye be single. And you see a skull with three eye sockets. Again, it's sort of a joining of inner and outer selves of opposing, of positive joining and of reconciling, a reconciling force in the center. I see let thine eye be single as a statement that has deep roots in esoteric philosophy. I would say on the surface and the surface is very important. It means let the inner and outer shine from without you. But it also means abiding and understanding that let's say friction and creativity join into one reconciling whole. We're not separate from one another. We're not separate in terms of our traditions. We're seeking, I believe, a reconciling whole. Interesting. There's an old depiction of Christ in the same way. I forgot exactly what the name is, if you could pull it up. It's basically Christ's two with the sharing an eye, perhaps it's even three. Oh, that's fascinating. And it was supposed to be an older depiction. I think of the Trinity and the church forbade it because they said that it was invoking a heresy that it was somehow showing that the Trinity is distinct and not triune. Oh, I see. But it was an interesting depiction of Christ that I'd never seen before. And it was used, I mean, probably prior to the schism, but it was an early depiction that I thought was so fascinating. It's just reminded me of that. I think I will have to ask John about that. But collaborating with him was a dream come true. The author photo is, which is on the back. I was taken by Sante de Rosio, a true American master. And to work with people you can look up to, there's no greater gift. Hellenable vaske on yourself. That's the t-shirt. That was a gift from the youth section of the Theosophical Society. Oh, I see. I'm curious. Lastly, I know we probably should wrap, but there's too many things that I need to ask you. What do you think of Ball, B-A-A-L? Oh, well, look. The Mediterranean, the biblical lands, were home to hundreds of tribes who had their local deities, and one, the Judeans, had a deity, which historically surpassed all others. But Ball and the vast range of Canaanite gods and the different iterations of gods that ran through the Aramaic lands, these were local deities that people regarded the same way we regard Yahweh or Jehovah. There was a cause-in-effect relationship. There was a petitioning, a seeking of survival. There are practices in the Mediterranean that did not endure. Some practices involved human sacrifice as they did in Mesoamerica. Some practices, in fact, all practices passed a certain point involved animal sacrifice. We have discontinued these things. There's a different kind of sacrifice today, and I think that sacrifice involves the paying of debt for the circumstances of comfort that we in the West live in, which we have not paid for, and a person should try to be individually aware of that. Well, Mitch, this has been phenomenal. Pleasure. I am truly so grateful. I am absolutely going to read this book, and I would love to chat with you again after I do. Very happy to, my man. You've definitely given me a lot to think about. Appreciate it. I'll probably still pray to Jesus Christ tonight, but I've definitely opened my mind to many different ways to see spiritualism. Thank you. I really appreciate your time. Appreciate it, my man. Thanks again to FreeCast for sponsoring this video, and remember to use the link in description for a $10 bonus when you sign up.
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