Magus in the Media

Can music become a modern mystery school? In this conversation, I'm joined by Frater R∴C∴ of the Hermetic Podcast to explore the life, music, and esoteric influences of Reverend Maynard James Keenan, the voice behind Tool, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer.

We dive into the relationship between music and magic, the role of the bard, sacred geometry, Drunvalo Melchizedek, the Merkaba, Hermeticism, and the Golden Dawn. Along the way, we explore initiation, psychedelic experiences, spiritual transformation, and how art can change the way we understand ourselves and the world.

It's a wide-ranging conversation filled with personal stories, humor, mythology, and the possibility that music itself can become a path toward greater self-knowledge.

Explore Frater R∴C∴'s work:
Hermetic Podcast: https://hermeticpodcast.com
Arcane Research Society: https://arcaneresearchsociety.com

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In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. Ian C. Edwards to explore the meeting point between occult philosophy, continental thought, depth psychology, and lived magical experience.

We move through Crowley, Heidegger, Austin Osman Spare, Andrew Chumbley, being and non-being, the abyss, True Will, embodiment, sovereignty, and what it might mean to understand magick not simply as ritual, but as a way of perceiving and becoming in the world.

A deep conversation on philosophy, psychology, occultism, and the hidden structures that shape how we experience reality.

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What happens when the things we’re told to trust no longer match what’s actually underneath?

Kaiva and I start with the recent UC Davis avocado oil study and what researchers found in products from brands like Siete, Primal Kitchen, and Chosen Foods. From there, the conversation opens into something much bigger: Flock cameras, surveillance, the loss of privacy, corporate power, AI, deepfakes, and the increasingly difficult question of knowing what is actually real.

At times it feels like we’re living inside the kind of world Philip K. Dick was writing about decades ago, where the image and the reality beneath it become harder and harder to separate. From the food we eat to the cameras watching our streets, how much of what is being sold to us is actually what it claims to be?

This is a conversation about deception, discernment, privacy, technology, and learning how to see through the representations of reality we’re surrounded by every day.

The map is not the territory.

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Lon Milo DuQuette is a scholar, author, magician, and one of the most authoritative voices on the work of Aleister Crowley, Thelema, and the Thoth Tarot. His books include Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, My Life with the Spirits, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, and his newest work: Young Aleister Crowley and the Magician's Revolt, a novel.

In this conversation we get into what Crowley was actually after, why his lust for self-realization is not the same thing as rebellion, and what it means to walk into the Golden Dawn revolt as a young initiate with no idea what you have stepped into. We talk about Yeats, MacGregor Mathers, and the real historical figures Lon has fictionalized into a cinematic story that has been 25 years in the making. We also get into what Thelema actually asks of a solo practitioner, why initiatory oaths are made to yourself and no one else, and the one line from the Book of the Law that Lon says contains an entire religion on its own.

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Amazon is buying physical books, cutting off their bindings, scanning them for AI training, and destroying the originals. Court documents have also revealed Anthropic’s Project Panama, an effort internally described as wanting to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”

But what happens when the physical book disappears and its digital representation becomes what future generations encounter?

Tonight we go from Amazon and Anthropic into the Library of Alexandria, Fahrenheit 451, Orwell’s 1984, General Semantics and “the map is not the territory,” hermeneutics, historical memory, and the growing distance between actually reading a text and asking AI what that text means.

Are we building the greatest library humanity has ever created, or something that may eventually replace our need to enter the library at all?

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Angel Millar joins Magus in the Media for a deep discussion on initiation, modern masculinity, Freemasonry, the sacred feminine, Jung's anima, the Warrior Mystic path, and his new book Supernatural Woman and the Male Initiate: Bonded Through Dreams.

What role does the supernatural feminine play in a man's journey? Why has initiation disappeared from modern life? And what can ancient traditions teach us about meaning, embodiment, and transformation in an age of chaos?

🔔 Subscribe to Magus in the Media for weekly deep dives into myth, magic, and meaning: the esoteric lens mainstream commentary refuses to pick up.

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Why does the world feel fake, and why does it feel like everything is speeding up?

In this conversation with Kaiva Rose, we get into Philip K. Dick, AI, accelerationism, Kali Yuga, the cult of celebrity, media, robots, religion, and the strange feeling that we may be living through the end of one age and the beginning of another. We also talk about how reality gets filtered through screens, institutions, algorithms, and narratives, and what it means to stay grounded, human, and discerning while all of it keeps accelerating.

A conversation about myth, magic, meaning, technology, and how to keep your head when the world feels increasingly unreal.

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What if philosophy was always an initiation, a living practice, a rebellion against the assumption that you already know what you are?

Dr. Danielle Layne is a professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University, director of the graduate philosophy program, and founder of Palinode Productions and Khora, a philosophical search engine and social platform designed to connect ideas and challenge perspectives.

We move from Orphism through the pre-Socratics into Plato and the Platonic mysteries, and into what it means to live philosophy as a rebellious, embodied practice.

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We have access to more information than any generation in history, so why does it feel like we understand less?

In this Monday Night Live, Kaiva Rose and I ask what happened to the Renaissance mind and whether we are confusing access to information with actual knowledge and wisdom. We explore AI and cognitive offloading, pre-digested knowledge, social media and algorithms, the loss of deep reading, apprenticeship and embodied practice, and why returning to source material still matters.

From Plato, Jung and Ludwig Klages to the Pandaemonic, cosmogonic Eros, magic, mythology and the living world, the conversation becomes a larger question about how we recover a direct relationship with reality. We also follow that same thread into food, agriculture, marketing and the ways we increasingly outsource the basic things that once connected us to our communities and the world around us.

Maybe the Renaissance mind isn't dead. Maybe we're being asked to build it again.

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This conversation with Ike Baker of ARCANVM focuses on magick, the Western Esoteric Tradition, and embodied practice shaped through time, discipline, and lived experience. We discuss how magick functions within initiatory traditions, the purpose of ritual, and why moderation and balance appear so consistently across older systems.

Drawing on his experience within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Freemasonry, Ike speaks about initiation, lineage, and what these traditions were meant to cultivate in a person. The discussion also addresses Freemasonry myths, why conspiracy narratives persist, and what often motivates public stories about leaving initiatory orders. In the later portion, we turn toward mythology, exploring why certain stories endure, how myth helps shape a life when taken seriously, how these ideas meet the current cultural moment and much, much more.

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We’ve become very good at measuring the world, breaking it into parts, turning it into data, resources, systems, and functions. But what happens when that way of seeing becomes the only way we know how to see?

In this episode of Magus in the Media, Kaiva Rose and I talk about myth as a living way of understanding reality, not just as old stories. We move through Heidegger, Korzybski, David Beth’s Pandaemonic, astrology, Hamlet’s Mill, tradition, technology, AI, surveillance, and the question of whether the world is still alive with meaning beneath the systems we’ve built around it.

This is a conversation about perception, memory, the sacred, and what it might mean to remember the mythic world.

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Collin Conkwright of American Esoteric joins me for a long-form conversation on Hermeticism, Freemasonry, and the Western esoteric tradition.

We discuss the Poimandres from the Corpus Hermeticum, ascent through the spheres, universalism, Freemasonry as symbolic transmission, Albert Pike, Chevalier Ramsay, the rejection of establishment churches at the founding, interior discipline, and the role of practice and embodiment along with much much more.

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In this episode of Magus in the Media, I sit down with Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.

We talk about how his path into Gnosticism began through experience and synchronicity, why gnosis resists definition, and how ideas like archons and Abraxas appear in Gnostic texts. The conversation moves through Philip K. Dick, The Matrix, simulation, and why these stories continue to surface when people start questioning reality.

Later, we talk about Miguel’s book The Occult Elvis, how it came to him, what Elvis was reading, and how mysticism and direct experience shaped his life. Toward the end, Miguel talks about personal myth and what he means when he says, “write your own gospel, live your own myth.”

Magus in the Media explores myth, magick, and meaning as they surface through modern stories, culture, and lived experience.

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What are we actually giving our attention, belief, emotion, and energy to every day?

In this live conversation, Kaiva Rose and I explore egregores, ritual, modern mythology, algorithms, political narratives, technology, consumer culture, spiritual practice, and the invisible structures that begin shaping us when we unconsciously participate in them.

We also ask a more difficult question: if our attention gives these things power, how do we reclaim that attention and consciously choose what deserves to be strengthened? From Mark Stavish and Carl Jung to Robert Anton Wilson, Fullmetal Alchemist, ritual practice, community, and the pursuit of wholeness, this became a conversation about sovereignty, discernment, and remembering that we are participants in the stories shaping our world.

Join us live and let’s go deep down the rabbit hole.

This is Magus in the Media.

Welcome to Magus in the Media.

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What do the earliest Sumerian texts actually say about the Anunnaki?

In this conversation with Dr. Heather Lynn, historian, educator, and author of The Anunnaki Revelation, we examine the Sumerian problem, language isolates, the difference between the Anunnaki and the Apkallu, and whether civilization may be carrying memory from a cataclysmic past.

From there we move into ultra-terrestrial ideas, altered states, entheogens, ancient possession rites, ritual practice, chaos magic, and the rise of what we describe as a parasitic class. groups who understood language, symbol, and hierarchy well enough to structure entire societies.

This conversation connects ancient Mesopotamia to modern power, narrative formation, and the role of consciousness in shaping reality.

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David Beth of Theion Press joins Magus in the Media for a deep conversation on his new book, The Black Pilgrimage, anti-transcendentalism, living tradition, Haitian Vodou, chaos magic, spiritual ego, and the crisis at the heart of modern occultism.

Together we explore the pandemonic, the embodied soul, initiation, Heidegger, the dangers of spiritual consumerism, and what it means to confront the world as it truly is rather than escaping into abstraction.

https://kosmicgnosis.com/

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I’m joined by Peter Grey and Alkistis Dimech, founders of Scarlet Imprint, for a long-form conversation on Western esotericism, magic, books, and practice.

We talk through the figure of Lucifer as it develops through Milton, the Romantic poets, and later thinkers, and how those ideas continue to shape modern imagination, publishing, and spiritual practice. The conversation moves through existentialism, Colin Wilson and Faculty X, ritual, embodiment, Butoh, spirit contact, and why the body matters in any serious magical or philosophical work.

We also discuss the role of books as living objects, publishing as a form of praxis, the responsibilities of carrying tradition forward, and how attention, discipline, and study shape a meaningful life.

This conversation will resonate with listeners interested in myth, magic, philosophy, literature, Western esotericism, and the practical realities of spiritual work.

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Peter Mark Adams is a philosopher, poet, and author whose work traces the living transmission of the Western mystery traditions from the Neolithic to the Renaissance. In this conversation we go deep into the cult of Mithras, the encoded Saturnian grimoire hidden inside a 15th century tarot deck, the pre-Bronze Age roots of the bull sacrifice, and why the energy body is the foundation every serious esoteric practice is built on.

His books are available through Inner Traditions, Scarlet Imprint, and Titan Publishers.

Find Peter on Instagram.

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There are a handful of books that genuinely changed the direction of my own studies, and The Secret History of the World is one of them.

For years, Mark Booth’s work has shaped the way I think about mythology, philosophy, Hermeticism, and the Western esoteric tradition. So it was a real honor to sit down with him to discuss his newest book, The Secret History of the Universe: How Ancient Wisdom Made the Modern World.

In this conversation, we explore the hidden mystical and esoteric history behind modern science, from the ancient Mystery Schools and Rudolf Steiner to Newton, Einstein, Oppenheimer, quantum physics, consciousness, and AI. We ask how ancient wisdom shaped the modern world, why so many great scientists were drawn toward mystical and esoteric ideas, and whether science and spirituality have been describing different layers of the same reality all along.

This is one of my favorite conversations I’ve had on the channel, and I’m incredibly excited to share it with you.

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Dr. David Shoemaker joins Magus in the Media for a deep conversation on Thelema, the living transmission of the AA, and what Aleister Crowley was actually building. We cover the myths surrounding Crowley, what True Will really means, why initiation through a living tradition carries something no book can replicate, the relationship between Jungian depth psychology and magical practice, and why the Western esoteric tradition matters more now than ever. Dr. Shoemaker is the author of Living Thelema, The Winds of Wisdom, and The Way of the Will: Thelema in Action, Chancellor and Prolocutor of the Temple of the Silver Star, and a student and supervisor within the AA and OTO since 1993.

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