Explore every episode of the podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib

On this episode. I’ll be talking about the spiritual state of the world with the creator and host of the HERMITIX PODCAST, podcast host and creator JAMES ELLIS.

Talking about the constitutive forces working through all the cultural, political and economic things going on in the world today is no easy feat.

And it brings special danger when talking about what’s coming. Predictions that come from prophecy can lead to a dense, spiritual error. For example, see spiritual author, teacher, and practitioner Alan Chapman on episode 383 of the Guru Viking Podcast. Speaking with host Steve James, he recounts the prediction and prophecy he made about a terrible event in September, which he publicly warned others about. The events didn't come to pass. The interview is powerful and bracing, largely because Steve is patient and Alan is vulnerable. He looks into the potency of spiritual error, the error in this case not being receiving the intensity of the vision he had, but rather reporting it and formulating a prediction based on it. I respect Alan's work (he's has been on this show too - on AEWCH 241 with Duncan Barford and then later, offering a New Year reflection on AEWCH 312), and his honesty offers its own potency which I think most spiritual "teachers" would learn so much from.

I’ve addressed a lot of the pitfalls of this sort of thing and other spiritual challenges on AEWCH 231 where I talk about true and false spiritual paths. But let me state directly here that when we go into the future for pictures, the spiritual pictures what we encounter will be fixed; and fixed pictures can only (or almost only) be offered to by spiritual forces that are not interested in human freedom. That’s not to say that those pictures are always wrong but that when they are fixed, they are not open to human directive.

This is, by the way, a big problem for a lot of astrologers, for example end up being anti-human because they make fixed predictions. (Not all of them of course!)

So when I do an episode like this one with James, where we’re giving a picture of what’s happening spiritually, and also think about where it’s all heading, it's really important to do all that and leave human freedom intact, and the ability for human beings to change anything at any moment.

Total liberation is always available, and so is development.

I recorded this episode of just before the elections in the US. I certainly don’t want to designate US representative politics as some giant sign of change in the world.

But that feeling that things are changing can show us what is possible in each of our hearts.

The outward picture tells us about something inwardly available that can truly be brought into the world.

I do hope that this spiritual state of the world is something I do with James each year.

Until then, look for me on Hermitix in an upcoming episode! You can also check out James's "school," the Hermitage, here and listen to us talking on Hermitix back in July.

To the present, the future coming towards us, and the past we're creating,

Friends,
The aesthetics of horror, at least in the US, have traditionally overlapped with heavy metal and death metal music. You know what I mean here: dark-clad figures and crazed clowns, bats, black clouds, and thorn-branched fonts. Sometimes they even share imagery, like the band Obituary’s cover for their Cause of Death album and a book of short stories by HP Lovecraft (painted by artist of the fantastique, Michael  Whelan).

I love horror with these aesthetics - but I’m glad another form seems to have opened up too. Sometime in the past 30 years, the horror trope of the final girl - the last surviving character of a horror novel or movie - began to highlight not the scariness of the monster, but the resilience of the monster’s victims.

The trope of the final girl insists on survival in the face of a world of danger. Often dangers that were at first hard to believe, hard to convince people of, and those included (until the final girl became a thing in horror) the expectations and beliefs of the audience.

For me, the final girl shows a shift of footing for horror as metal - immersion in the spectacle of the grotesque and dramatic - to punk: determination to fight back and connect with a force of will that was always there but not always expressed.

Punk rock is more than just survival, however. Its starting point is a knowingness that things are not okay. Punk is music with lyrics about the state of the world, and it has a sound that reveals a world that looks and feels differently than the one we’re told to accept.

It’s also the antithesis to the time spent in so many horror movies, where characters must spend inordinate amounts of time convincing each other that a threat exists. Punk already knows there's a problem. By the time you get to the show or play the record, you’re in the observation and receiving the sounds of the community, the solution, the alternate reality that we know can exist.

In a horror movie, there's the monster monster, and there's the monster of people who refuse to believe what is apparent, obvious. The final girl and punk decides to live against both adversaries.

So now that the final girl has created a sort of bridge for us from what I’ll call metal horror to punk rock horror, who is developing punk horror? Who's pushing it forward?

On this episode - the final in this year’s horror upon horror series, I’ll be talking with an author who does just that about a film that does the same.

KEITH ROSSON is the author of eight books so far, including Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, and his masterwork, Coffin Moon which is one of the most compelling novels I've ever read. What a huge surprise for a vampire novel! It is a swift, unstoppable thing. His most recent novel, Crone is about a girl that disappears and a correlating sightings of a strange and threatening witch-like being.

Keith and I talk about punk rock and horror and then move into a conversation about Jeremy Saulnier's 2015 punk rock slasher horror film GREEN ROOM, in which a punk band pisses off a bunch of murderous neo-Nazis and has to figure out how to escape disastrous and confining circumstances.

Punk rock and horror are two of my favorite genres of art - and this episode is my first comingling of the two - I’m so excited to share it with you

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Six authors.

Four horror movies.

Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib
This is Horror upon Horror.

Friends, I’m sure you know the THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) by now but if not, here’s the plot: three students go out into the woods to make a documentary about local legend of a witch. They’re never seen again. A video is found later of their footage. That’s it.

You probably also know that it wasn’t like other movies when it came out, but was marketed in the most bizarre and convincing ways: missing posters were put out of the three actors that appear in the film (Rei Hance, known in the film as Heather, Donaghue' Michael, C, Williams; and Joshua Leonard); and in fact their IMDB pages listed them as deceased. There was a short documentary about the documentary made, and aired as if it were real. There was all kinds of chatter on the then-burgeoning Internet about what it happened to these three students.

On top of that. it wasn't filmed like other movies, not even found footage ones. The cast themselves were directors of the film, along with the overall directors of the film along with Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, since they filmed the bulk of the movie.

While the characters of the Blair Witch Project were investigating folklore, the actors and producers were also creating it.

In other words, the found footage was actually found footage. The directors did not know what the cast had filmed because they sent them out on missions to film and turn the refults to them later. For instance, they were sent to certain locations to talk to town residents about the legends of the Blair witch and some adjacent murders. The promptings were brilliant. There was, for instance, a actor who was a plant in a diner not spoken to until after the main actors walked around and talked to other unknowing people. The effect is that they were stimulating the idea of witch for everybody else in the diner but not involved.

Later, when the cast members enter the woods to go looking for signs of the witch, they are prompted by the directors to certain sites and cues at those sites, and told to film the whole time. Their moods were intensified by bad weather, long shoots, surprises, coldness and camping. All of it brings out tremendous performances from the three of them.

I went to see the Blair witch project in the theater right when it came out I saw it in Allentown, Pennsylvania was with some friends. We all thought it was real.

The whole movie is tense, horrifying, truly frightening. There are moments when the screen is pitch black, so the entire theater was was pitch black too. And people were screaming.

When it was done -- and I’d never had this experience before nor have had it since -- the entire audience sat in silence until the credits finished rolling.

What a new dimension of horror to be brought into the world!

And it’s one that echoes into our own time, with the difficulty of interpreting what is and what isn’t real on the screens that we face and encounter each day. The Blair Witch Project is the forerunner of DIY projects, of found footage, of the tensions between reality and unreality, of constant surveillance of our most vulnerable moments... So many things were set free into the world by this movie. There was nothing like it at the time, and few films take such great risks to such great effect.

My guests are PAUL TREMBLAY, last on the show on AEWCH 235 (with CJ Leede) and is the author, most recently of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, and also Horror Movie, his most famous novel A Head Full of Ghosts and my favorite novel of his, Disappearance at Devil's Rock.

&

SARA GRAN was last on the show on AEWCH 233 (with Nathan Ballingrud) and is the author of what is recognized as one of the most terrifying horror novels of all time, Come Closer. She's also the author of the incredible occult-horror-detective story, The Book of the Most Precious Substance.

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AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 328: HORROR UPON HORROR PT 2 - DAN CHAON on HIDDEN LIVES and 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib. This is Horror upon Horror.

Friends, we all have hidden lives. From the lives of our internal organs, which are working within you right now, to the lives that we imagine and fantasize for ourselves yet will not achieve. The most obvious, and yet in some ways the most hidden life, is that life of death itself.

We carry this death within us every day. The skeleton which lurks just beneath our flesh, washed by fluids and blood each day, is death's emblem.

And each of us makes our own deaths the project of our lives. Every step draws us closer, every action has a result, an effect, that shapes the way in which we will change from a living person to a dead one.

Inside all of our choices, there lives death.

The same is true fro the lives of civilizations, which hide away the seeds of their own demise in the flourishes of progress. In apocalypse movies, death reveals itself as the coexisting state. This is most apparent in Nia DaCosta's 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE, the movie my guest DAN CHAON chose to talk about on this episode.

In Dan's fiction, hidden away lives lead people down the path to their own doom. In his frightening story “The Bees" in which a man’s second, secret, hidden family, creeps back into his circumstances and destroys the life he’s built for himself. In his novel Await Your Reply, in which a man looks into sinews of conspiracy to figure out where his brother has disappeared to. Of course, to look at sinews is to cut into anatomy, to bleed out.  And in Chaon’s latest, One of Us (which takes inspiration for its title from the 1930s Todd Browning film, Freaks)  the lives 1915 circus performers are explored, as well as the lives of two children fleeing a murderer who speaks to the dead.

The lives we hide away always whisper to us. They have their own secret voices that ask:

Can your surface-life endure me? Or will your world end the second I’m revealed?

Support the show on patreon: Patreon.com/connerhabib

Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib

This is HORROR UPON HORROR

On these episodes, we'll be thinking through the creation, reading, and viewing of the most vital and visceral art: Horror, and I'll be doing it with the frightening luminaries of the genre. People who are unafraid to endure the horrific imagination, and able to bring it to you.

On this first episode, I’ll be talking about nostalgia in horror with authors Nathan Ballingrud and Sarah Maria Griffin and then we'll move onto our discussion of the amoebic violent power of Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob.

Unlike other monsters, the blob has no direction, no real personality. It doesn’t want anything. It’s not even hungry; hunger would imply some sort of desire or longing. Instead, it’s drawn to whatever is close and warm, drawn to incorporate it, to grow with the heat of flesh, bone, and blood.

As it gets bigger, it needs more heat, more blood, to keep going.

This is Horror upon Horror. The blob. A form older than vampires but newer in consciousness. It’s outside of time. It’s what was in the microscope made large, larger, until it envelops everything in its path with crushing pressure and dissolving acidity.

The blob is the pure inertia of motion.

NATHAN BALLINGRUD has also been on the show before, last time talking with me and Sara Gran on AEWCH 233 about cruelty in horror. His book of short stories, North American Lake Monsters is one of my very favorite horror collections. And his trilogy of retro future horror, The Lunar Gothic trilogy, begins with the utterly hideous (in the best way possible), The Crypt of the Moon Spider.

SARAH MARIA GRIFFIN⁠ is the author of the psychic vampire botany horror novel, ⁠Eat the Ones You Love⁠, and most recently ⁠Strange Is the Light⁠. Sarah has been on the show many times (her latest until now was ⁠AEWCH 252 ⁠where we talked about working as writers) and does an annual tarot reading event for patreon patrons.

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AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 326: FELIX JOHN TAYLOR on THE LIGHT OF THE HERMETIC ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

The first time I heard about the Golden Dawn, I was in high school. I was gay, Syrian, reading all the time, shunning sports. My town was filled with neo-Nzis and fundamentalists, celebrated stupidity and football players.

I wanted to feel something like power in a disempowering place, so I went to Brentano’s and found the most startling magic book there. On its cover was a person drawing a pentagram of crackling blue light with a wand. In it, instructions on making magical tools and spellcasting. And in its title, the word magick was written with a K. In contrast to the hell of school, the book represented an academy of magic. I found there allusions to The Golden Dawn, a group from almost a century prior, with secrets of not just power, but antiquity and the cosmos.

But they also seemed rigid, too elaborate and hierarchical. Plus I didn't like their most infamous member, Aleister Crowley, so I turned away from them. As I deepened my interests in occultism into adulthood, my pursuit of esoteric christianity, particularly the work of Rudolf Steiner, I steered clear.

I've become more sympathetic over time to the Golden Dawn. That doesn't mean I'm going to wade into their rituals, but that a real re-assessment has occurred. So this episodes’s guest, librarian and scholar FELIX JOHN TAYLOR ’s beautiful book, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Magic Arts and the Occult Revival was a great find for me. In it, he gives a portrait of the Golden Dawn through its key members and its art. A picture emerges of not just a magickal group, but an art and social movement, working to redefine morality for the sake of inclusiveness and creativity. After all, Crowley fell in love with a drag queen at a gay bar in 1897. Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter influenced the group. So did Steiner, for that matter! W.B. Yeats brought his Golden Dawn work to revitalize Irish identity.

I’m so happy you’ll be joining me and Felix John Taylor in this reappraisal.

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Friends, I've been doing this podcast for over eight years and one thing I've noticed since the beginning: guests always want to talk about spirituality. I know, I know, it's self-selecting. I'M the one who wants to talk about it. Sure, that's true. But also, everyone is EXCITED to discuss it when I bring it up. It's like it's on the tip of everyone's tongues and has been for a decade. Now, it's starting to be fully pronounced, like a spell shouted into the air.

I’m sure you’ve seen it too: whether it’s the convergence of witchcraft and feminism, the popularization of political wellness which has ritual components, the appearance of crystals in the Los Angeles mayoral race, the conspiratorial intimations about black magick during lockdowns... People have been trying to interpret the world through a spiritual lens that religion doesn't seem up to - but the political realm has so overwhelmed people’s perceptions that instead of being TRANSFORMED by spiritual encounter, they're merely grafting it onto already-established, politicized worldviews.

This includes political pundits and secularized media ridiculing spiritual perspectives as a distraction from their failure to scrutinize 60 hour work weeks, economic bamboozling, or outdated attitudes about gender.

I've done my best to mediate this, because I could see it all coming (not bragging, promise, you can hear me discuss it on early episodes!). I’ve tried to occupy a sort of cultural position that was largely held in the past by de-witchers, fairy doctors, alchemical scientists and more, people who separated what's true and false when it came to spiritual paths, critiques, and pursuits. They constituted a whole classes of laborers people largely disappeared by the materialist, academic, and professional world.

But we can’t wait any longer, we need experts in this field. An expert I trust and appreciate so deeply on these matters is Thomas Waters, lecturer in history at Imperial College London (and AEWCH 98 guest)

So we talk together about magick’s role today, and the new magickal realm we find ourselves in.

I’m so excited to share this episode with you.

support the show: patreon.com/connerhabib

buy Magick: Decoding the Visual Culture of Spells, Illusions and Psychic Powers by Thomas Waters from an indie bookshop

buy Cursed BritainA History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times by Thomas Waters from an indie bookshop

I talk with intellectual historian, A.J.A. WOODS , author of the excellent and very readable The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West on to the show to discuss all this.

In their book, A.J.A. traces the great movement of blaming everything good and bad - from trans liberation to sexual abuse, from religious plurality to totalizing Satanism, from fighting state violence to supporting gulags - on something called cultural Marxism.

If it sounds incoherent, that’s because coherence is not really the point. The illusion of coherence is. And the illusion is created by noise and density.

I have my own shaky relationship to the Frankfurt School, and I'm so happy to share this exploration with you in hopes that it will inspire you to rethink and/or revisit these philosophers.

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Friends, “The hour is late. It is time for unwanted guests to leave.”
That's a line from this episode's guest, MITCH HOROWITZ, in his latest book, Esoterika: Formulas Against the False Self.

The book as I see it, is a book of ethics. And its central question is: how do you navigate who you are and what your ethics are when you touch the continuously transformative fires of spiritual pursuits?

In that sense, it is a book for anyone exploring their spirituality.

In it, Mitch traces his own inner (and outer) conflicts with spiritual maxims. Particular to Mitch is the conundrum of: How do I get what I want, yet retain my integrity? What do I do when there's a conflict? And where does magic come in?

This is a great discussion and one where we navigate our own tensions of belief and disbelief; will and surrender.

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On this episode of Against Everyone with Conner Habib, I talk with esoteric author and scholar MARK BOOTH (AKA Jonathan Black), whose excellent new book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE: HOW ANCIENT WISDOM MADE THE WORLD, traces the occult influences found in modern science, especially the science of physics.

Mark’s book is not just an outline of confluences.

In other words, it’s not one of many books already available which seem to validate spiritual wisdom with modern science. Instead, it is something more singular and more needed for our time. It shows how esoteric ideas and thinkers, seers and magicians, intersected with scientists as they developed the theories that live in our own scientific worldviews.

Mark is also the author of one of the best introductions to real esoteric perspectives, The Secret History of the World , as well as The Sacred History: How Angels, Mystics and Higher Intelligence Made Our World and the ebook, The Secret History of Dante: Unearthing the Real-Life Mysteries of the Inferno.

Mark has been a dream guest for me since I started this show over eight years ago. Although we spoke a few times in the intervening years, I'm so excited that we finally got to talk in this capacity, for the podcast.

But we weren't alone! In a perfect example of spiritual entanglement, when Mark brought up the physicist Wolfgang Pauli - famed for the so-called Pauli effect or shorting out technology wherever he went - our recoding crashed completely, and we had to restart the call. 

Luckily, it's still all intact for you!

Using AEWCH 317-320 as a starting point, I talk with JOSHUA RIVERS, poet and host of the excellent BUSY BEING BLACK podcast + frequent AEWCH guest, SHULI BRANSON (host of the podcast THE BREAKUP THEORY podcast, and translator of Guy Hocquenghem's Gay Liberation After May '68.) about the small task of remaking the world.

At the center of the episode is a thought that's something like: We have to lose - via transformation - so much to gain the world.

The last time Shuli was on the show was a conversation with a third person, too, with Dean Spade on AEWCH 277 thinking through how to think bigger than the state.

On that episode, we each brought a question for the other two guests, and we do that again - but this time prompted by Josh.

These are the questions:

JOSHUA: How do you care for what you love?
CONNER: If you let go of the set of capitalism vs communism (or socialism) what’s left in your view of how to change the world?
SHULI: How do you open things up so that you have a new and altered view?

Along the way we talk about poetry, science, occultism, politics, and...well, so much else. And the episode ends with dancing. I'm so excited to share this episode with you.

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Like many people, I often feel that I don’t understand economics, but, like everyone, I have my own role to play in the economy. So do you. So does everyone. We are all in economy, so we all have something to offer in understanding it.
AEWCH 24 guest Erin Ryan once joked that  “Economics is astrology for dudes” 

Economics feels intentionally mystified, filled with untruths and abstractions, and hopelessly complicated. Those who claim they do understand it are usually people (certain kinds of men, as per Ryan’s joke) who use the economy in a certain way, and are therefore limited to a certain view of it.

Because we are kept at arms length from economic understanding, we have to resort to questions like, “Why is this piece of paper worth something?” or , “Why do numbers moving from one account to another mean something?”

If we're not outright ridiculed for asking, we are often left without much more than broad answers that are detached from history and that lead us away from doing anything about whatever we’ve learned.

But these are the questions we need to ask, and we need to come up with new answers.

This is fourth episode in my series of episodes called A New Spiritual Society, working through how to renew, revitalize, and re-engage with culture, politics, and economics by looking at their spiritual heart. 

This episode stands on its own - but you can also enrich the listening by starting with the introduction to this series on AEWCH 317, if you want to hear more about how and why I’m approaching. AEWCH 318 is on culture, and AEWCH 319 is on politics.

I hope you find this look at the spiritual heart of economy gratifying, and a help in circulating new perspectives that are closer to the truth.

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Friends, we might not feel up to the task, of changing the world, but not only are we up to the task, but we are all engaged with it already. Shaping the world is part of being alive and we all contribute, whether we know it or not.

This episode is part of my series on the social art of renewing, rethinking, and revitalizing the social organism:

A NEW SPIRITUAL SOCIETY

This time, I talk about POLITICS - why politics in our time is about so much more than elections, political parties, protests, and laws. It's about time, utopia, and connection.

Support the show today via ⁠patreon⁠

or

⁠Make a one time contribution⁠.

Want to work with me on your creative, business or everyday life? ⁠Click here for a list of services⁠.

Friends, we might not feel up to the task, of changing the world, but not only are we up to the task, but we are all engaged with it already. Shaping the world is part of being alive and we all contribute, whether we know it or not.

Welcome to my new series of episodes on the social art of renewing, rethinking, and revitalizing the social organism:

A NEW SPIRITUAL SOCIETY

This time, I talk about CULTURE, what culture really is in our time and what we're being called to do to renew this sphere so it can be strong in its own right and withstand the pressures of politics and economics.

Support the show today via patreon

or

Make a one time contribution.

Want to work with me on your creative, business or everyday life? Click here for a list of services.

Friends, We might not feel up to the task, of changing the world, but not only are we up to the task, but we are all engaged with it already.

No one who has ever lived, even briefly, has not altered the earth by contributing their own destiny to it, and the way in which that destiny radiated out to affect everyone.

Shaping the world is part of being alive.

We all contribute. This is often broken down into a clunky simplistic and fundamentally flawed statement that “everything is political.” But the truth is everything in our lives - individually, with each other, and with the whole of humanity not to mention the earth itself - is connected to natural, human, and spiritual laws.

How do we bring ourselves out of the automatic everyday ways we shape the world just by merely existing, and into the intentional, purposeful, and true activity of developing a newly spiritual society?

Welcome to my new series of episodes on how to start to renew and recreate the social world in our time:

A NEW SPIRITUAL SOCIETY

Over the coming episodes, I'll be looking into the spiritual heart of culture, politics, and economics, to see what's living there, and how we can bring ourselves to the task of nourishing it.

With Rudolf Steiner's concept of social threefolding as a companion along the way, we'll move past old ideas and into essential, living concepts to move forward.

On this first episode, I introduce what I'm up to, define the terms, set the direction, and invite you along.

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Patreon.com/connerhabib

In an episode that is at once political, spiritual, and intensely personal, I talk about why we need to see the Epstein files in the right light to understand what's at stake: for survivors, for abusers, and for the world at large.

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I talk with author, teacher, and cohost of Weird Studies, J.F. Martel about how art is the only way out of our predicament.

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Buy J.F.'s book.

Listen to Weird Studies.

Asad Haider, the political theorist and philosopher, whose book critiquing identity politics from a (non-class-reductive) leftist perspective, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology remains a powerful contribution and who was on AEWCH 26, died suddenly in December of last year.

I’ve reproduced that episode as AEWCH 314*, with a new introduction.

To plant a tree in Asad's memory, go here.

To support the show, go to patreon.com/connerhabib

In conversation with Pilar Lesko about change, Christianity, the dead, and more.

Happy New Year!

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Friends,

Happy New Year! And welcome to the New Year’s Resolution episode of Against Everyone with Conner Habib, featuring my conversation with esoteric scholar and writer,
MITCH HOROWITZ.

But this show is filled with special guests, including:

• Philosopher and writer FEDERICO CAMPAGNA

• Esoteric teacher ALAN CHAPMAN

• Bestselling author and death expert CAITLIN DOUGHTY

• Mystery and horror novelist SARA GRAN

• Christian Community priest and esoteric christian PATRICK KENNEDY

• Cap'n Jazz, Joan of Arc, and Kinsella & Pulse front person TIM KINSELLA

• Spiritual teacher and abundance explorer PILAR LESKO

• Rapper and cultural theorist VIC MENSA

• Artist and journalist UNA MULLALLY

• Writer and Team Human host DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

On this episode Mitch and I talk about the resolutions sent in by these past AEWCH guests, and I hope our discussion inspires you to come up with a meaningful resolution for yourself, whether you’re listening to this before the year turns over to 2026, or in the days, weeks, and months that follow.

A New Year’s resolution is an expression of vulnerability. They reveal how we see ourselves, our strengths, and our failings, in relationship to the world.

So I (and Mitch!) encourage you to make them, and offer thoughts on how and why.

May this episode be a small well to draw nourishment from whenever you need to access some resolve.

With love, always with love,

CH

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Sign up for a yearlong tarot reading, The Year of Light, with Conner by January 5 2026 and get a discount when you use the code: brandnewyear

At AEWCH.square.site

In this double-length and in-depth episode, I look at the social-political project of the late 19th early 20th century occultist, philosopher, and social reformer Rudolf Steiner with scholars and academics Aaron French and Henry Holland, who are writing Steiner's biography for SUNY Press, and have just offered the keynote at Harvard University's conference on Rudolf Steiner's life and work.

On this episode, we attend to a question Henry asks:

“Is a leftist reading of Steiner possible?"

Please support this show on patreon:

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Friends,
This is the fourth episode* in a series called The Spirit-Era and Its Aftermaths in which I look at the way spiritual, technological, and occult flourishings at the turn of the 19th into 20th century are still with us today, and in fact, being echoed by our own time.
This time, we’re moving closer and closer to our present age, away from the Spirit-Era and into its aftermaths, tracking the ways that paranormal investigations, and paranormal phenomena themselves, changed as they emerged from that era.
And I look into all of the with my guest, journalist ⁠BEN MACHELL⁠, author of the compulsively readable and also illuminating book ⁠Chasing the Dark: A 140-Year Investigation of Paranormal Activity⁠.
One thing I’ve noticed again and again in researching and recording this series of episodes is that the so-called esoteric, the miraculous, the paranormal are all common.
Whether it’s a haunting, someone who is able to accomplish a feat of endurance, or the ways in which the world is simply very strange if we just look at it without taking it for granted: these are not aberrant occurrences. We have all experienced them, or heard about someone who has, or have shared stories about them, or have found some evidence for them or theorized about them.
So when we tell stories about the paranormal, we are really just telling stories about the normal world.
In Ben’s book, he takes a long and thoughtful journey following the life and work of paranormal investigator Tony Cornell, a member of the Society for Psychical Research who appeared on TV, wrote books, and even was featured in a computer magazine for building a device to try to detect paranormal phenomenon. But unlike the performative ghost conjurers of the late 19th century or the fakirs in the early 20th, Tony (1924 - 2010) wasn’t trying to create spectacular performance, and wasn’t motivated purely by egotistical posturing as a debunker either. Rather he sought to understand what was really happening in people’s lives.
Through following Tony, Ben depicts a fascinating alternate history of the everyday: people simply living their lives, but then experiencing something they don’t understand and can't explain, something that feels out of place to reality itself. Sometimes the unexplainable isn’t the phenomena, but a feeling, a need to cry for help.
So a picture begins to emerge - the paranormal as the presence of motivators - whether in our own behavior or in furniture and dishes flying through the air that we can’t grasp, that we need help with.
What a change from where the Spirit-Era started, with the frightening glamour of the table rapping spirits and the ectoplasmic bonds of spiritualist gatherings. And what a difference, also, from the spiritual thinkers who sought to create coherent theories. Here, the theories fell away in the face of spontaneous phenomena for which there were no experts. But if there were an expert, Tony Cornell would be the best of them; and his approach was to live with the uncertain, the unknown.
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This is the third episode in a series called The Spirit-Era & Its Aftermaths in which I look at the way spiritual, technological, and occult flourishings at the turn of the 19th into 20th century are still with us today, and in fact, being echoed by our own time.

The Spirit-Era is marked by occultists, paranormal investigators, and magicians... But it is also marked by performances of all kinds: stage magic, but also actual magic. Stage magic passing as real magic, real magic posing as trickery. There were the performance of spiritualism, of charismatic theologians, and of feats of incredible endurance.

As in our own time, People had difficulty parsing out what was real and what was illusion. And there was no shortage of advice on how to attain magical aptitude and ability, or promises of unlimited health and vitality. 

Beyond this difficulty distinguishing  truth from fantasy, there was a thrilling draw to the ambiguity, and whatever power might be there, in the spot in between what was and what might be. This negative space, this open area of reality, affected people all over the world, including the middle east.

These tensions - between genuine and the spectacular, strengthening and the seducing, are the themes of this installment in the series - on Fakirs & Fakers with DR. RAPHAEL CORMACK, Assistant Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, and author of the highly readable, eye-opening, and excellent book Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult

Raphael’s book, and our discussion connects us to two figures who were emblematic of their time:
The performer-fakir, Tahra Bey, an Armenian performer who achieved fame in the 1920s as a man of incredible talents; not only to drive sharp objects through his skin, to be buried alive and survive, or to lie down on a bed of nails; but also to beguile huge audiences. Tahra Bey, who fooled the world into thinking he possessed both heritage and secrets from Egypt, and that he could teach anyone to do what he did.

The other figure is Dr. Dahesh, Palestinian-born mystic and teacher, founder of the spiritual current known as Daheshism, which still has adherents today. Dr. Dahesh was said to be able to take off his own head, to spring back to life after execution, and to understand the workings of the cosmos. He was also an art collector, for whom a museum in New York is named. He remains a well-known figure in Lebanon where he was both celebrated and persecuted, but eventually moved to Connecticut, where he died in at the age of 74 in 1984.

As Raphael says in this episode, “Writing a history of the occult is writing a history of something that doesn’t quite fit into the box of history, even on its on terms.”

So how do we interpret the performance from the truth? And what does it mean to desire not just the miracle because it astounds us, but the lack of miracles because it allows us to be complacent?

I’m so excited to share this episode with you.

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This is the second episode in a series called THE SPIRIT-ERA & ITS AFTERMATHS in which I look at the way spiritual, technological, and occult flourishings at the turn of the 19th into 20th century are still with us today.

In the second installment in the series, I talk with ALLAN JOHNSON Professor of English Literature at University of Surrey, meditation coach, and author of the excellent book, The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World

In that book, Allan states: “The occult has always walked the perilous line between desiring a textual form while resisting the possibility that this form can ever be completely achieved.”

One of my big frustrations with spiritual influencers is that most of them don’t seem to have a good grasp of art, but particularly literature. They do something like this: they read literature that has magical CONTENT and create metaphors and analogies that - all-too conveniently - mirror the lessons of their own esoteric view. And they generally reach for the usual suspects: Tolkien, Le Guin, Coehlo, etc.

But the location of esoteric strength in literature is less in the content and much more in its FORMS and STYLES. These forms were brought to us most prominently in modernist fiction - in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and more. But also by poets like TS Elliot, Ezra Pound, and WB Yeats.

In the works of modernist writers, the reader’s involvement is demanded to complete the text. These are writers who initiate us as we read their works.

This conversation with Allan offered the chance to explore ideas I'd been longing to talk about for years, I'm so excited to share them with you here.

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This is first episode in a series called The Spirit-Era and Its Aftermaths. Across the next few installments of AEWCH, I’ll be investigating the way the spiritual, technological, and occult flourishing at the turn of the 19th/20th century is affecting our lives to this day.

The Spirit-Era was a time marked by spirits, of course. But also miracles, hucksters, paranormal investigators, and genuine spiritual teachers. There were seances and fakirs, performances of incredible feats in private and on stages both which were thought to be revelations of different worlds, or worlds that could be possible.

The intelligentsia of the time might go to see spirits materialize in dark rooms. They might write novels inspired by meeting  notorious occult figures. Or maybe they would decide to form societies to investigate the afterlife. Many of the Spirt-Era's most famous artists and writers found themselves inspired by and even joining occult orders. New occult organizations and forms - some with anarchist aspirations, others connecting to labor rights movements, still others taking fascist turns, - were rising and falling.

Like in our own era, new technologies emerged and others became popularized. The telephone became more available, and so, later, did the car  and motion picture with sound. But also there was the fortune cookie, bringing a sort of precogniostic levity to the everyday. These innovations marked changing experiences of time and space across the planet.

Plagues, wars, sinking ships. It seemed like there was never a moment of rest.
I’m sure you can relate.

Two themes ran through the Spirit-Era: the shifting relationship of the spiritual and material, and the deep understanding that everything was changing, so anything might be possible.

In these episodes, we won’t just be trying to learn from history to avoid repeating it, but rather to deeply consider the Spirit-Era and conjure its best aspects.

Because within the spectacle, there were many revelations to be had. Some of them we take for granted in our everyday lives, and forget they were handed to us by people who took the great risk or the absurd plunge into the era's spiritual possibility.

We’ll look at the ways paranormal investigations pushed on science, how esotericism informed advancing literature and performance. We’ll even investigate whole world views with their own coherence, that developed at the time, and see why we can learn so much from  them.

And we'll look at why so many of these boundary-pushing advances are stigmatized today. One reason I’ll mention now:
The Spirit-Era is difficult for us because it isn’t part of the past, but something beyond us.

A future where we allow ourselves to think in ways that dissolve the material realm as we know it, and try to understand the forces - whether social, dialectical, economic, or spiritual - fully anew.

The Spirit-Era reflects the past and the future through smoke and mirrors. Yes, the tools of illusionists and frauds. But amongst the trickery, the truth of light and surface is there. In the aftermaths of the Spirit-Era, we continue to use its insights and gestures to figure out what we think is real, what is solid, and where illumination comes from.

Welcome to this series.

On the first episode, I talk with ALICE VERNON, author of Ghosted: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking. The book is vast in scope, and considers the many emotional resonances we have with paranormal investigation, ghost-hunting, and why it is important to us. We start in the 1st century, and go all the way to AI in this wide-ranging conversation about the topic.

But the Spirit-Era here is unavoidable. People grieving, hustling, debunking, and believing all surround the seance tables, inviting new presences, new technologies, and new methods of investigation.

I’m so happy to present this series and episode.

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Friends,
When I was on my book tour for Hawk Mountain, I did an event with Andrea Lawlor where we spoke, at length, about horror. In the Q&A, someone raised a hand and asked:

WHAT IS HORROR?

Andrea and I both laughed. We found ourselves at a loss.

Horror :
Once you consider it, it’s not clear.
There’s the assumption that horror is scary. Sometimes that’s true. But obviously what’s scary for you might not be scary for me, and vice versa, so that can’t define the genre. We say horror has certain elements, but there are different kinds of horror to define its contours, whether it's body horror, slasher horror, cosmic horror...
We might turn to the familiar face of horror - the monster - to see what they reveal to us. But while vampires, werewolves, zombies express, through their differing powers and weakness, different theories about horror, they can't give us a picture of what it is really. They're contained by it.

Horror: Always on, always available, always around us. So… what is it?

I asked my friends PHIL FORD and J.F. MARTEL - the cohosts of the WEIRD STUDIES PODCAST - onto the show to walk into the dark - or is it the blinding, malevolent light? - with me, and with you, to see what we would find there.

Weird Studies is, in my experience of it, anyway, a horror podcast. In fact, my last conversation with Phil and J.F. was on Weird Studies and about horror: on Weird Studies 144, we looked into Clive Barker's Hellraiser and the book it's based on, The Hellbound Heart.

But it's not a horror podcast because it’s always focused on horror; many episodes are about topics and artworks that seem less than horrific (their series on each card in the major arcana of the tarot, for instance, or their episode on Herman Hesse’s novel about enlightenment, Siddhartha).

But there is a quality on each episode - a quality which we discuss in this conversation - of the threat of art, philosophy, image and sound. The way they invade our lives. Rearrange our organs Destroy the world we knew. 

In other words, we might think of horror as a position in time, something approaching or orbiting. Or as something creates shadows by blocking the light, or by creating a void where an object once was. 

You can hear me going in many directions again. Conversation with Phil and J.F. inspires that in me - being pulled in many directions at once. That's another way of thinking of horror: horror as blob; as spreading epidemic, as destroying giant, vaster than the safety of our shelters.

This is what I love about talking with Phil and JF and about Weird Studies, and also why I often think of their podcast as the only true sibling to mine. In conversation with them, everything a springboard for everything. A web of connections. Or maybe better said, a transforming activity, everything metamorphosing into everything else through membranous, visceral, and expansive moves.

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You can also find an almost complete list of the books, movies, etc we mention on this episode there.

Friends,
Is there any ghost lore in your town or where you grew up?
Have you ever seen a ghost?
What are ghosts, anyway?

Three questions, three different ways to approach (or be approached by ghosts).
Ghosts are at the heart of our folktales, our fears, and our fiction. And belief in them is almost universal. Unlike aliens, UFOs, cryptids, and other strange entities, belief in ghosts cuts across all demographics and borders. We're afraid of ghosts and fascinated by them.

As you probably know from listening to this show, or if you’ve read my novel Hawk Mountain, horror is deeply important to me: in forming my imagination, my way of thinking, and even my lens on spirituality. To that end, this is one of two podcasts on the topic.

This time, I just wanted to be personal, to have fun, to explore the pleasure of horror and the many springboards it gives us for conversation. To that end, I invited the hosts of my favorite movie podcast (maybe favorite podcast ever) THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB onto the show, JUSTIN DECLOUX and WILL SLOAN.

This marks the second crossover between our shows, as I appeared on episode 422 of The Important Cinema Club to talk about working with director Joe Gage.

We ask the three questions up top, and explore three completely different representations of ghosts in movies:

• A Chinese Ghost Story (1987 dir. Tony Ching Siu-Tung)

• The Eclipse (2009, dir. Conor McPherson)

• I Am A Ghost (2012, dir. H.P. Mendoza)

We summarize each movie, and then go in... tons of directions. I loved recording this episode, and I hope you do too. Next time, onto the more theoretical-serious kind of fun.

Aside from The Important Cinema Club, Justin and Will have many projects.
Justin is the author Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert Pyun, and has a Blu-Ray distribution company, Gold Ninja Video. He's also the director of films including Impossible Horror , which Will is in, and Teddy Bomb. Will's new book is Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, and he has a great substack here.

An episode that ties into this one, and that has more of my ghost stories in it than this one is AEWCH 138 with Edward Parnell, talking about ghosts embedded in the landscape.

And I mention a great book towards the end, Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture.

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On the second of two back to back episodes on christianity in the world today, I talk with my sister, LAURA SCAPPATICCI, host of the podcast THAT GOOD MAY BECOME.

We ask each other three questions about how christianity came into our lives, even though we were raised with no religion... and how that christianity is sometimes at odds with our communities and even, absurdly enough, at odds with the way christianity is itself of perceived today.

This is a very personal episode, and I'm so happy to share it with you.

Laura was last on the show on AEWCH 225 when she interviewed me about Rudolf Steiner as part of my series on esoteric christianity.

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On the first of two back to back episodes on christianity in the world today, I talk with writer LAMORNA ASH whose latest book, Don't Forget We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion chronicles her conversations with christian  converts and the newly faithful in the still-secular UK.

In the process of writing the book, Lamorna has her own reevaluations of christianity and her own beliefs as a queer person. Of these conversations, Lamorna writes, “They taught me how to believe the belief of others.” It’s a beautiful sentiment and means that Lamorna is untangling the many ways to believe and understand.

But it raises questions, too.

How to believe others’s beliefs if they are threatening? If they are aimed against you? And what about when those beliefs are aligned with powerful political forces… can they be said to even be beliefs then, and not just coerced behavior?

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I'm so excited to welcome philosopher and author Federico Campagna back to the show! Together, we find the magic in defeat and the strength that it offers, using his new book, Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History as a springboard for our wide-ranging and empowering discussion.

Federico gives many potent examples of the hidden strength in defeat. Whether it’s through Egyptian gods or the writer Joseph Roth, esotericists or people who felt the mythic effects of being defeated by Alexander the Great. We witness again and again options that become available for seeing and creating new worlds only when - as Federico writes of the people in the book:

“Instead of clinging to the values of a vanishing world, or embracing the new rising power, they dared to migrate to the grand zero of the imagination where ideas and values can be extracted anew from the infinite virtuality of the possible.”

May this episode bring you strength and magic, even in the most unexpected of places and conditions!

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Friends: We need ideas which are not just radical or "revolutionary." We need ideas, feelings, and actions that work on many levels; that are systemic; that have multiple potentials for realization, and have enough points of articulation that they can touch on their own fabric and maneuver to witness themselves.

And what better place to start then the ground beneath your feet: where you live?

After all, you see the place you live every day. It's entered you as a daily language of patterns. It's become a set of expectations for your feet as you move through the morning. It lives in your lungs and gives your eyes nourishment. And I'm sure it also frustrates you sometimes, makes you feel blocked and angry. You might feel threatened there or bored. But I hope you also find joy, surprise, and feel held by where you live, greeted by each of its days.

When my friend and collaborator - the artist, organizer, and journalist UNA MULLALLY - released her new 10-part podcast series SAVING THE CITY , I found in it a perfect representation of that transformative ideal we need.

I also knew that Una and I had different ideas of what we wanted from cities. I like cars, I have trouble with a lot of bigger cities that Una loves. I even like an area of Dublin that Una has... let's say, different feelings about. But this is exactly right for transformation of a place- discussing with your neighbors what you want, what your concerns are, but most importantly what would bring you joy, piece of mind, excitement, potential, opportunity in the city

This is a long episode, and like a city, it encourages a sort of wandering. Stop along the way any time you want, think about how it will apply to where you live whether it's a city or somewhere else. I'm so excited to share this episode with you.

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Friends, When I started Against Everyone With Conner Habib, there were a few guests I wanted to have on more than just about anyone.

Happy to say, now, on episode 300, one of those central figures to my imagination has arrived for the conversation.

GRANT MORRISON doesn't need much introduction. He's* a rebel artist, spiritual visionary, comic book writer, magician, novelist, and nonfiction writer.

The first time I ever heard of Grant Morrison was here, over twenty years ago. in a talk he gave. And then I met him shortly after (I tell you the story in the intro to the episode). His work, and just his being, has been a guidepost for me since I encountered his work.

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GRANT'S WEBSITE

***

A note on Grant's pronouns: I talked with him after the episode about his preferred pronouns, and he said that the "they/them" pronouns were often used by other people when identifying him, but that he found himself using he/him just as much because both gender expressions seemed to limit what he felt his identity was.

Friends,

After writing my previous episode, AEWCH 298, where I laid out my thoughts on how to reflect on A.I. to get to beyond the basic, boring conversation, I read ADAM BECKER's excellent book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity .

I immediately invited him on the show, and I wish I would've read it before. Even though there is plenty of overlap, Adam's vantage point offer a full vision of tech culture, and reveals just how deeply anti-science is is.

That impact comes from the fact that Adam is great writer but also an astrophysicist, and author of the excellent popular book on quantum physics, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics.

We talk about how we got here in science and technology, why technology has been conflated with science, how conspiracy and science intersect, and what physics has to do with all of this.

Of course the conclusion is that A.I. is not super smart, not supported by smart people, that the fantasies of tech billionaires are bonkers, and that the singularity is not near because it's not even a thing.

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Friends,
One reason I started this show eight years ago was to have big talk instead of small talk, to get us past surface conversations and into thinking more deeply. I hate small talk is because it’s so algorithmic or pre-programmed. It's limited by its connection to the past and expectations. I don’t want to have conversations that could be produced by just anyone in any context with predictable results.

I wanted something more living, surprising, vitalizing; conversations that nourished pushing my thoughts and feelings and actions forward.

So the mission of this show has always been, in a way, to address to algorithm.

The conversations on AI in the public sphere have been so dead and dead-ended even when they’re well-meaning. My big problem is not that people aren't saying brilliant things about A.I. -- I'm not sure I'm up for that task either -- just that everyone is saying the same stupid things over and over. There are phony debates held with unearned urgency, wild projections based on investment fantasies, and anxieties produced by deliberate mystifying hype.

On this episode, I go over 11 thoughts I have on AI to get to where we need to go for a better base level conversation. My hope is this clears out some debris and helps us to start thinking about in new directions.

In other words, this is more about the discussion about AI than AI itself - . I don’t have a “side” on AI - but I want to talk beyond some of the most repeated points

I hope this offers a fruitful new starting place.

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Friends,

Welcome to this massive double-length episode on religion in our time with Diana Young-Peak.

You may not know Diana, or if you do, it may be from exactly 200 (!) episodes ago on AEWCH 97: DIANA YOUNG-PEAK or THE GREATEST STRIPPER OCCULT PRIESTESS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF. That episode was recorded BEFORE I had a podcast - back in 2011, when I was part of her small esoteric church, the Church of the Living Christ Order of Melchizedek.

That episode is at the end of this one - it gives all the context and background. If you want to listen to it first, you can jump ahead to about 2 hours in.

But you can also listen to our latest conversation first. It's both a spiritual assessment of where we are in the world now, and also an assessment of the growing presence of religion and spirituality in people's lives.

Two growing presences that are destined to meet: the presence of mutual aid community building, and the presence of RELIGION. I've never, in my lifetime, seen more interest in spirituality and its most accessible & durable pathway, religion, as I do now. And I've also never seen this many people coming together in new groups of belonging, with the aim of making safe and loving community and making the word a better place,

In my understanding, this is a convergent evolution that is destined for intersection. In eight years doing the podcast, I've noticed time and time again that activists, organizers, anarchists, leftists, and more want to talk about their religious and spiritual thoughts. And I've also gotten the sense that we have crossed into a territory where it is newly allowed.

My observation on this is that it's because new people have been allowed into organizing spaces and communities, and it's not just leftist atheists or white christians. Religious and national plurality has given rise to new assemblages and new belongings that call for new spiritual ways of seeing.

In some ways this is nothing new: spiritual movements, particularly small spiritual movements, are mutual aid movements. They provide space for conversations about how to consider reality, the self, the other, and the all. That necessitates action, and coherence. Feminist movements have roots in 19th and 20th Century spiritualism and magic. There were anti-slavery magic movements. The White Rose, inspired by anthroposophy, resisted the Nazis. But more than that, there's the many many groups living right next door to you and me and everyone holding small meetings. organizing for the sake of a sense of a greater good and full connection to the real.

Diana's group - passed to her from her mentor and founder of the group, Grace Hooper Pettipher - is one of these groups. Meeting together, when I was an active participant, in a small hotel room in San Francisco (now they mostly meet online), there was community building, connection, growth, and attenuation to freedom. I don't attend these days, for the most part, but I have great respect for what Diana and the group do with the religious impulse. And I hope this new conversation will inspire you to think towards or even begin your own path with community-based religion and spiritual practice.

I hope you enjoy this double-length episode.

***

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Lory Widmer Hess is the author of When Fragments Make a Whole, as well as a caregiver and spiritual direction facilitator in Switzerland. Her book chronicles her healing journey with the gospels - through various illness, medical procedures, and emotional and soul challenges - from an esoteric viewpoint.

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Lory's website: https://enterenchanted.com/

Lory's book: When Fragments Become A Whole

Friends,
Against Everyone with Conner Habib is eight years old today! Not many media projects last for eight years or make it up to nearly 300 episodes at this point. 

To celebrate, I talk here about conversation; what it means to all of us.

After all, if I asked you if conversation had changed your life, you’d probably say yes. 

A conversation that set you down a career path, or a new place to move to. An argument that went haywire and ended your relationship. A flirtation that led to the great love of your life.

But we forget, too, that other people’s conversations change our lives. What does it mean to do a podcast, and how has the landscaping of podcasts degraded, fallen apart, as well as grown, in the past eight years? What have I noticed?

As a bonus, I've attached my very first episode at the end. It's clumsy, personal, filled with insecurity and uncertainty. 

Please support the show - all eight years and 295 (free!) episodes of it - on patreon.

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Episode Description

I'm joined by author, teacher, and theorist, Douglas Rushkoff. He’s one of the most important intellectuals of our time, some people call him a futurist, but he's always a step ahead of the future.

The is the part 2 of the conversation we had on Doug’s podcast, TEAM HUMAN called "LIVE UP TO YOUR FOOL POTENTIAL". But of course, it also stands on its own and you don't have to listen to them in order.

This show is supported through listeners. No ads!

Please do support it via Patreon: patreon.com/connerhabib

Conner's Website: connerhabib.com

Conner's Instagram: https:/www.instagram.com/againsteveryonewithconnerhabib

And please also consider supporting Team Human on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/teamhuman

Douglas's website.

I talk with co-hosts of the Light in Every Thing podcast, Rev. Jonah Evans & Rev. Patrick Kennedy about meeting the world not as a "problem" to be solved, but as a realm already overcome by spiritual love.

From the archives - I talk with Italian philosopher and author FEDERICO CAMPAGNA about the urgent task of our time... which is nothing less than the recreation of reality itself!

I talk with writer, author, and esoteric health practitioner ARE THORESEN.

The language of inevitability is upon us, and it is a cruel language, one that allows no discussion of freedom or our ability to direct things. The future - a terrible future - is filled with AI, the effects of climate crisis, fascisms, and wars. And our present - a terrible present - is only going to get worse.

In other words, we're given a unified picture of where we're going and what's happening and how to feel about all of it.

Of course, the language of inevitability can only show us relatively little. A narrow look at presumed (or manipulated) outcomes.

The future is as wide open as ever.
Difference and mutability is closer to the truth: whatever happens will happen differently, to different places, and to each and every one of us.

Why? Because material laws and spiritual laws flourish differently in each person's life. We all have our own levels and areas of understanding, aptitude, capacity, and education. We all express differing variations on one theme, but that theme is the cosmos.

This is the starting point for my conversation with occultist, veterinarian, and author, ARE THORSEN. Are has been on the show many times, most recently on AEWCH 243, when we talked about illness, health, and the end of materialism. Also on AEWCH 205 on Ragnarok, and AEWCH 116 on demonology & nothingness. His most recent books, The Four Doors and Fading and Merging are available via Amazon. Other recent books (which you can order via independent bookstore through the links here) include Meeting Michael: Further Communications from Spirit Worlds and Travels on the Northern Path of Initiation: Vidar and Baldur, the Three Elemental Realms and the Inner and Outer Etheric Worlds.

On this episode, we discuss the technique of connecting with the spiritual world, and more specifically why meditation isn't enough... we need to walk into the spiritual world. And how?

My guest this episode is writer, scholar, teacher, and astrologer, RONNIE PONTIAC. I've been impressed and informed by Ronnie's esoteric work for awhile now, and finally, we got to have our first conversation. And it's a profound one...

We talk about the need for a spiritual path in our moment, and how the alternative is... well, quite grim. We talk about how spirituality can lead us into a path of hatred and personal gain. We talk about my suspicion about astrology, how I think it works, how I think it does’t work, why so much of it is wrong (and why Ronnie is so often right!). And there's so much more on this episode (Including my extended intro on the esoteric aim of being a Friend To Humanity.)

Ronnie was a key figure at the Philosophical Research Society founded in 1934 by Manly Palmer Hall. The PRS is still around, and promotes, teaches, and offers research opportunities into the esoteric & philosophical of all societies; with the values of freedom, community, objective study, and inclusiveness at its core. He's the author most recently of American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World. His forthcoming book, which can preorder now, is The Rosicrucian Counterculture: The Origins and Influence of the Invisible Society.

I talk with spiritual teacher and author Lisa Romero about the challenges that are facing us today and an unlikely key to progressing through them: the esoteric mysteries of Ireland.

This is the is the sixth and final episode in a series of episodes on How To Live in 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. In other words, tools that don’t merely deaden us in the frantic pursuit of survival, but that assist us in nourishing ourselves, each other, and the world, all together.

This time, the theme is READ
and my guest is ALEXANDER CHEE.

At the end of this episode, the exercise is a little different. First we do a reading for you, the listener, in the world and its anxieties and challeneges. We consider what they are, how to approach them, and how not to approach them. Then, Alex and I do a reading for what you could be reading... We draw a tarot card and let it give book recommendations.

Alex the author of three books, most recently his essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, and also two novels, Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night.

This is the fifith in a series of episodes on How To Live in 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist.In other words, tools that don’t merely deaden us in the frantic pursuit of survival, but that assist us in nourishing ourselves, each other, and the world, all together.

The theme isPEACEKEEP
and my guest isCHEYNEY RYAN.

Cheyney works withThe Oxford Consortium for Human Rights. He's a a researcher; professor; founder of the Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict at Oxford; and author, most recently, of the excellent book,Pacifism as War Abolitionism and also ofThe Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility, as well as many articles on peace activism, pacifism, Marxism, and nonviolent action (you can find links to plenty of the here).

PEACEKEEP was a word I had to invent for the show because we have such an undeveloped language of peace. While the lexicon of war is extensive, the act of creating true peace in the world doesn’t exist in an active word. 

That is in part because thewar system - as Cheyney calls the autonomous, seemingly inexorable network of war activities, sites, motivations, and contracts - has instead on the articulation of its own anatomy. It's entranced us into detailing its every contour so that we become more and more convinced of its reality and density.

This is the third in a series of episodes on HOW TO LIVE IN 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop, create, and resist. At the end of each of these episodes, I’ll offer an exercise - a thought exercise, spiritual exercise, or practical exercise - that brings an experiential dimension to what I and the shows guests talk about.

This episode’s theme is DIE
and my guest is bestselling author and host of the Ask A Mortician YouTube channel, CAITLIN DOUGHTY.

This is the third in a series of episodes on HOW TO LIVE IN 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop, create, and resist. At the end of each of these episodes, I’ll offer an exercise - a thought exercise, spiritual exercise, or practical exercise - that brings an experiential dimension to what I and the shows guests talk about.

This episode’s theme is CONNECT
And my guest is organizer, activist, and writer, DEAN SPADE

Our disconnection from each other is the negative space that power thrives in. It's a void that threatens to overtake us with its heavy unfeeling emptiness.

Connection is the remedy, but more than that: it's the great meaning we all seek.

The connections we form with each other can create networks of mutual aid, solidarity, safety, love, pleasure, and happy engagement with the challenges of our time.

Dean's new book, Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together offers a powerful look at connection. And it gives everything its title promises: a wealth of practical steps you can take to learn how to live well in this world through what you learn in relationship with others.

It’s a book about relationships that takes nothing for granted from the dominant narratives that rule our lives.

Rather than trying to fit society as it is, the book asks us what it would look like if our relationships were built out of our desires, including our desire to create a better word through better relationships.

This is the second in a series of episodes on HOW TO LIVE IN 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. At the end of each of these episodes, I’ll offer an exercise - a thought exercise, spiritual exercise, or practical exercise - that brings an experiential dimension to what I and the shows guests talk about.

This episode's theme: PRAY
and my guest, ⁠BASTIAAN BAAN⁠.

Bastiaan Baan is a teacher, author, and was a Christian Community priest in the Netherlands. His many books include the just-released ⁠Trust in the Future: Facing Uncertain Times With Confidence⁠; his book on the relationship between Christianity and the elemental beings, ⁠Lord of the Elements: Interweaving Christianity and Nature⁠; and his exploration of christian paths of meditation, ⁠Ways into Christian Meditation⁠. He also speaks around the world on spiritual topics.

This is the first in a series of episodes on How To Live in 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. At the end of each of these episodes, I’ll offer an exercise - a thought exercise, spiritual exercise, or practical exercise - that brings an experiential dimension to what I and the shows guests talk about. That way, you won’t only be participating by listening, but you can actually bring some of the vitality of the conversation forward.

The theme and action of this episode is ENVISION.
And my guest is ROB HOPKINS.

Rob is the author of From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want and the forthcoming Falling in Love with the Future. He's also the host of the excellent 100-episode podcast, From What If to What Next which features a different conversation with big thinkers on each episode. He's also a founder of the Transition Network, which works via multiple initiatives (planting trees, local food sufficiency, alternate modes of transport, mental health support, and more) to usher towns and communities out of their entanglement with cultural, political and economic death, and into thriving and healthy sufficiency.

The task ahead is daunting: We must totally recreate economy, politics, and culture. How can we move forward with help from the three gifts of the magi: gold, frankincense, and myrrh?