Thoth-Hermes Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Dear Listeners, welcome to Season 1 Episode 4 of Panosophers’ Podcast.  May we express our gratitude for your ongoing support and attention to this venture.    This week, we have the company of Mark Stavish.  Mark is the founder and director of The Institute for Hermetic Studies (IHS).  Mark holds degrees in Theology, Communications and Counseling.  He is a prolific author of depth titles on Mystery subjects, centered on Western Kabbalistic knowledge.  Mark is a longtime friend of our sibling podcast, Thoth-Hermes, and a trove of additional prior conversations may be found there.  The overarching theme of the next two hours centers on: “what can you handle?”  It is plainspoken and direct, while brotherly and benevolent.   We encourage you to listen with ears open to hear.  Mark and Rudolf dive in with the starting context for the IHS: 1990s, East-Coast America.  A time of in-person groups, Gnosis Magazine, and the grit of self-publishing material perhaps too deep for the balance sheets of popular booksellers.  Mark shares stark realities of rejection and adaptation for the sake of creating inheritance to future Seekers- rather than status or income streams.   With his characteristic energy, Mark challenges listeners throughout the dialogue.  He names the essential need for Initiates to handle stark reality, including worldviews not their own, beyond personal identity and ideology.  In doing so, he identifies the need to produce a life-giving vision of the future, least populations be drawn into that which appears to be but is not.  As Mark states, this has little to do with who one wants to see elected US President in “the next election”.  It is this call to Depth that sees Mark and Rudolf explore essential questions: What is ‘tradition’ and why is it a responsibility? What is ‘initiation’ and the mindset of a true Initiate? How does ‘virtue’ relate to potency? Mark issues the Saturnian challenge to grow past “Tik-Tok clutter” and “podcasting, publishing, and product” marketplace of Occultism.  He names the Aquarian postwar Esoteric awakening as a response to mass trauma, “most vibrant when truly counter-cultural” and small-group relational.  Along the way, even the esoteric Christ is alluded to warmly.  Turning to ethics around public divination of societal energies, Rudolf and Mark note the need for maturity in any Initiate claiming to do this.  The qualifications include a true education in all of politics, history and economics- imbuing a nuance which returns to Tradition.   May this bring a cornucopia of fruit for all of us.  Music played in this episode Find out everything about our musical guest today, KARL YOUNG, and about the Shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute, on his own website. Click here All tracks are from his CD "Lost in the Wood" 1) FOREST FLOWER (Track starts at 5:52) 2) YAMAGOE (Track starts at 53:34) 3) MURASAKI MURAIKI (Track starts at 1:39:12) Intro and Outro Musicespecially written and recorded for the Pansophers Podcast by Chris Roberts

You can also see this episode as a video on YouTube at https://youtu.be/BoFy2Q_o6GI

Welcome to Season 11 Episode 4 of Thoth-Hermes Podcast…. Though with our guest in this dialogue, who can be quite sure of linear time? Rudolf and Karin are in conversation with author Dr. Eric Wargo. Academically an anthropologist, Eric has extended his spirit of scientific enquiry through Hermeticism, Alchemy, and into the contemporary “paranormal” discourse at large. Most specifically, he has taken on depth exploration of time: time loops, retrocausation, and precognition. This branch of study began for Eric in 2009, after having a UFO/UAP Experience. This anomalous experience created his initiation into the branch of modern scientists fully versed in scientific method yet fully aware of the mountain of Spooky anecdotal evidence of More. Law of Large Numbers? Yes, acknowledged: and gently set aside. Materialist explanation? A precise language with descriptive validity and profound explanatory limitations. Experience and initiation- their distinction, and coexistence- are honored throughout this conversation. Eric encountered break-out success with his 2018t book “Time Loops” (which Karin is on record as “passing out almost like Gospel” and scribe Emily keeps in her inner temple box of books). He has also written on Precognitive Dreaming (2021). In his current release, “From Nowhere”, he applies these insights to creativity. Eric notes the role of skilled stress states, flow states, altered states, and creative states in the enhanced experience of precognition. He also invites a cultural shift towards the upfront naming of retrocausation; moving past Cartesian duality; and transcending the labyrinth closures found with all of free will, predestination, and Many Worlds theory. In the expanse of unknown, this interview spans a variety of lenses on time and anomaly. We hear a definition of “retrocausation” that includes both the science of the subatomic level and the co-existing validity of intuitive experience. The occult Higher Self as perhaps the Long Self which Eric articulates in relation to precognitive dreaming. The notion of “flipping Freud” and symbolic precognitive insight as the method the Long Self can use to address our agency. The challenges of True Will, Free Will, and dynamic interaction with choice. Eric suggests that our “intentions” may frequently be misrecognized precognitions. If this sounds like one wild moebius strip of a conversation: it is! And highly enjoyable. After you listen, carry receptivity for unfolding Wonder in your life events.

This is a warm November welcome to Season 10 Episode 11 of Thoth-Hermes Podcast. Today’s show brings us into conversation with American writer Peter Levenda. Peter has authored a range of titles on histories of American occultism, Nazi occultism, and the dynamics of conspiracy theory. After successfully pursuing an international business career Information Technology, Peter attained an MA in Religious Studies and Asian Studies. Peter is a member of the American Academy of Religion, several societies, and a member of AFIO (the Association of Former Intelligence Officers). Peter is careful to distinguish his expertise as around the context and content of conspiracy, rather than their promulgator. Repeatedly in the interview, he stresses the importance of listeners self-educating on the factors that make populations generally- and occultists specifically- vulnerable to conspiracy content. Peter also clearly notes that he is a “left-leaning” political “independent” capable of engaging with a variety of worldviews. Peter also offers the Adorno “Fascism Scale” as a resource for study. Peter shares formative childhood experiences- rejecting his childhood Catholicism, while retaining the seed of mysticism. A fearful encounter on a mountain in 1963 cemented his personal conviction on the presence of More. High school found Peter conducting seances, reading Crowley and the Tao Te Ching. All of this is reported with a combination of good humor and lasting reverence. Rudolf and Peter explore his writing, some of it based around his premise that “America is a haunted house” of unceded territory carrying the displaced and disregarded practices of the First Nations people. Additionally, the influence of encroaching European settlers’ own occult traditions and folkways. Turning to the West at large, Peter and Rudolf distinguish between the “traditionalist” and “surrealist” edges of esotericism; one edge flirting with the Authoritarian Right and the other edge liable to persecution from the former. Peter describes the use of “fiction” as parallel to Surrealism in the ability to analogize “truths” that cannot be proven as “non-fiction”, in the midst of grey area on both. Peter suggests this wisdom is present in many Holy Books. Peter identifies “magic” as situated in a space between Science and Religion, with the Shadow of conspiracy theory. A comprehensive take-down of conspiracy mindedness in the contemporary United States follows, including: “longstanding” inadequacy of news media, a population demotivated to learn context for theories, and the dearth of “tik-tok enlightenment”. Peter further names related internal difficulties within occult groups, including sections of the contemporary Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and the leadership of the late James Wasserman; the New York-based Wasserman and Levenda were aquaintances for decades. While not an OTO member, Peter suggests that Chapter 3 of The Book of the Law is a “cri de coeur” of colonized and oppressed spiritualities, while naming Crowley as a member of the “Victorian drawing room” British colonial system unable to acknowledge that facet of his prophecy. Peter invites the necessity and potency of African, Afro-Carribean, South American and Asian practices into modern Esotericism: “the Law is in front of us all”.