Frater RC R∴ C ∴: Alright, Welcome to Magick Without Fears Hermetic Podcast. Dr Angela Puca, how was Ireland?
Dr Angela Puca AP: Oh, Ireland was great. First of all, thank you so much for inviting me to your podcast. So I’m glad to be here. Yeah, I was recently in Ireland for two conferences actually. The Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions and the Conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. Usually, we just shorten them with the acronyms EASR and ESSWE but I know that people outside of academia won’t know what that means, so I just try to say the whole thing so people understand. But Ireland was good. I was mainly in Cork and I also go the chance to go to Dublin because there were a few days in between the two conferences so I thought I might as well and I saw some interesting and Esoteric stuff in Dublin. So that was great.
RC: Did you see the Yeats Exposition?
AP: Yeah, I also posted the pictures on my Instagram and my social media.
RC: Oh, I must have missed those, I’ll have to check them out. Yeah, I was really sad that that exhibit wasn’t there in the years that I lived in Ireland. I definitely have to get back and go in and obsess about it to the point where they think I am planning a robbery, you know.
AP: Yeah it’s great. You can see his diaries and yeah, it was amazing. I posted everything on my social media so, if you are interested I think that you will really like the pictures and the videos that I posted.
RC: That’s really cool. And yeah, I relied on one of the pictures on Yeats’ diaries recently as I was finishing up my Golden Dawn phoenix wand. And originally I painted it with three layers of paint in gold for the head and then I looked at his diary and said, wait it’s white. But we’re so used to Israel Regardie and Aleister Crowley’s interpretations of the Golden Dawn that even some of us, I was initiated in the Golden Dawn in 96, even some of us, like me, still get it muddled in our heads, just because the new material that has made changes has retroactively been imposed on the old material to the extent that, famously, people do pentagrams in the LDRP in blue when originally they were done in white. You know, these changes occur somewhere in the tradition by mistake or intention and next thing you know, they are the tradition. So getting original material is always fun for us practitioners which is why people like you, of course, are so valuable.
AP: That’s very nice of you. And you mentioned that you were initiated in the Golden Dawn and probably your listeners and your viewers already know your background but I’m now curious to know something about your background if you feel comfortable sharing.
RC: Yeah, I was initiated into the Golden Dawn Temple Tehuti which is here in Vancouver and was run by a really reputable Adept because sometimes it’s more important who the leaders of a small group are than the overall superstructure around the world, right, the big heads – what matters is the little heads. And so we had good people there and that was a good experience for me. I was young, I was very young, I was 15 at the time. But I had grown up in the Waldorf school, in a Maharishi Transcendental Meditation family. So I was pretty much raised going to psychic classes and stuff when I was an early teenager and so by 15, I felt I was ready for the real business. I also really needed something solid in my life that would carry me through the chaos of family stuff.
AP: Who doesn’t need that?
AP: Who doesn’t need that?
RC: Yeah, well it was very life-saving in that regard. Because after a messy divorce and remarriage with my Dad. You know that sort of stuff can just go on and…
AP: I am very sorry about that.
RC: And all of a sudden, as a kid, can be a very dangerous thing. To all of a sudden have no one around anymore and be on your own at the time and have to realise that in your early teen years you are on your own. In life in general that’s a powerful trauma that I think requires powerful transformation to survive. And that’s one thing that, despite some attempts, perhaps, to deny Magick still offers to people that sometimes they cannot find in any other place. I’m really glad that I found it when I did. And I am glad that I had a good group of people because, you know, things vary. In your doctoral thesis you studied Segnature, did I say that right?
AP: Segnature.
RC: I won’t try to say it right.
AP: It’s fine. I mean you can try and if it’s not perfect, you at least attempted to pronounce it right. Because if you couldn’t tell I’m Italian.
AP: It’s fine. I mean you can try and if it’s not perfect, you at least attempted to pronounce it right. Because if you couldn’t tell I’m Italian.
RC: It’s cool. There are not a lot of Italians. Italian has been a language that I have tried to learn for some years because, you know, as my friends say I only ones that are useless. Like seminary, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic…
AP: Italian is not useless.
RC: Thank you. That is what I told them. Now you have authorised me to slap them for mocking my attempts. But no, lots of people speak Italian. Lots of Italians.
AP: Yeah if you want to live in Italy, learn poetry and literature – lots of other things. Yeah, I think generally, learning languages is extremely important because it is just not about gaining the tools to communicate in different languages, it is also a way of expanding your mind and your mental capabilities. Because when you have to construct a thought in a language you are just not translating word by word, you are developing your thinking in a completely different way, through different pathways. It allows your mind to work, maybe more but in a different way, and so you really expand your capabilities. And I think that, for a Practitioner, I would imagine that that would be also beneficial in terms of magickal practice because there are many exercises that have to do with increasing your mind skills, mental skills. Just saying. And in terms of learning languages that are not useful, tell me about it. I’ve studied Latin, ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Tibetan. Then I decided to also learn languages that are actually spoken, for instance, English, which is the latest one that I’ve learned because of my PhD because I did my PhD in England and then I’ve stayed in England ever since.
RC: Do you enjoy England?
AP: Yeah, I like it here. I think I need to go back to Italy every so often. Otherwise, I really feel homesick. So I remember that during the pandemic I really suffered because of that. There are people here who think I am really proud of being Italian, it’s like, oh you are really proud of your culture. But I never really thought about it before moving here. So it’s the fact that I’m here that makes me more Italian, in a way because it’s like when you are in a different place it is made salient to you the fact that you are not from that place and you start thinking about it more as well because you realise that you move in a different way, you gesticulate in a different way, you speak in a different way and so you start realising that you’re different. I wouldn’t be as talkative and expressing so much of my Italianness had I stayed in Italy, I’m sure.
RC: Yeah, that is an interesting phenomenon isn’t it? I always say that the thing that made me most Canadian was moving to Ireland.
AP: Do you live in Ireland?
RC: I did for a good while there after 2005 and up until the recession. I was in and out because I was playing in a Celtic band so I had a place in the country, in Galway and I was living on Inishmore for a while because the Irish language is one of my great loves and has been a constant study of mine since I was a child, along with my German and French and my usual Rudolf Steiner School languages that we have to learn. So yeah, I agree with what you are saying on languages. Language and instruments and learning music is probably among the greatest challenges and greatest rewarding things in my life. I know that you went to a sort of specialist school as well, though we don’t probably like it when they call it a special school.
AP: Yeah, it depends on what you mean by a special school.
RC: My friends would call it that as a kid and I would be like, you mean elite! You know, or not free for you poor bums. It was expensive but we got a good break because we were poor. Thank you to the Waldorf School for that. What was your school called and what is the style of school? I know you talked to Foolish Fish about that so we don’t need to redo that but it is interesting.
AP: I wouldn’t say I went to a special school by the definition you just gave…
RC: I’m sorry.
AP: … because in Italy school is free, school is public and in fact, I find it fascinating because here in the UK there is the perception that private school is better and public school is worse. And I think it is the same in the US, I am not sure about Canada. Maybe it’s kind of the same. In Italy, it is the opposite and I know that in other countries in continental Europe it is also the same thing. The idea is that when you go to a private school and you pay, it’s like you pay to pass. There is the perception that you need to pay to get your degree. Whereas the public schools are either free or you have very low fees and so it’s really difficult to pass. So if you have a degree at a public school it means you really worked hard because nobody cares if you pass or not. You are not paying for your degree. That’s the kind of perception that you pay for your degree when you go to a private school. Whereas when you go to the public school, which is the most common really, like up until you are 18 school is free in Italy. And the university, the public universities have a fee that depends on your income. There are private universities as well but they are quite rare. And as I said, with a couple of exceptions they are considered to be less valuable than public universities or public schools because if you go to a public it means school you really must have worked hard to get your degree otherwise you won’t get it and lots of people don’t get it. Whereas in England students, once they get in, it’s difficult if they don’t get their degrees. That’s very different in Italy. When you go to a university in Italy a lot of people don’t end up getting a degree. Let’s put it that way.
RC: Yeah, I never thought about that before but it is a good point. I mean do you worry about the university world as much as some people seem to be online? Just a quick aside-note. I’m just curious because there’s so much being spoken of universities and the waste of education and all of that and useless degrees. And there’s some real concern amongst that but at the same time, there is not really anywhere else you can go to learn any of this stuff that we learn or else you are going to become a master of romantic poetry, right? Like, what’s wrong with you wanting to do that? I mean you might not.
AP: Well as an academic, obviously, I love the institution of the university. I understand and acknowledge all the issues that are there when it comes to both the university and academia more generally and the way universities work really depends on the country. So I am more familiar with what happens in the UK and in Italy, of course. So yeah I do see increasing issues in the UK university system. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be the person to say, oh you shouldn’t go to university, absolutely not. I just think that we need to be critical and aware of what the issues are so that we can work and improve the system. But not just dispose of the system altogether just because there are certain things that need changing, perhaps, and it also depends on what is your view and your idea as to how the education should look like. But yeah I am critical of the higher education system but at the same time I am also fond of it so, yeah I would encourage people to go to university and then if there are issues, then reported and highlighted and perhaps, hopefully, they will be worked on and improved.
RC: I think you are very much one of the people who are pioneering, as for example for others, what you can do independently with education right. You don’t have to actually be a lecturer and a working PhD in a university system to put your learning and knowledge to use in the world or to turn it into a career or a side hustle or just to share it for the sake of loving it. Assuming if you study romantic poetry your whole life you really love it. So what do you do with that after getting a degree in it? Well, there are opportunities more and more with the internet economy for better or worse. And so I think it is very cool…
AP: Yeah, I personally like the idea of also working at the university in different capacities. Now I think I am moving more towards doing more research, more research work, as opposed to teaching work at universities just because I think that teaching can be very time-consuming and I feel like I am fulfilling my desire of teaching through my YouTube and my online presence. But I also really like working with other scholars and other academics and being a part of the community, being part of those circles. This is kind of a debate that I have had with myself. I mean would you just go online and leave the university and being affiliated with the university and every time I ask myself that question the answer is always no? I mean it’s no, I don’t want to just be online I also want to be affiliated with the university and I totally respect people who feel differently and they feel like once they have done their PhD they just want to go their own way and do online teaching, that is perfectly fine. For me, the reasoning is that I think that to be an academic you need to work with a university and with other scholars because being an academic means being part of a community and being part of a body of research and being part of a network of mind and people who have different methodologies and different ideas and are advancing the methods and the methods and the type of knowledge and the amount of knowledge we have at our disposal. So I feel that if I were to completely abandon academia and working at a university I would lose the sense and the perception of what academia is doing and what other scholars are up to and I would, perhaps, lose also the… I wouldn’t be as updated with the latest methodology, with the latest research. I think it’s the very specific environment, the academic circles tend to be very… the things that you learn within academic circles are things that you can not really learn outside of them. So that is why my idea is more to bridge the gap between the ivory tower and academia and the public, lay people and the community of practitioners. But in order to be a bridge you need to be in both ways, in both places otherwise, it is not a bridge, is it? So that’s sort of my internal dialogue that I am sharing with you. But I’m not saying that is the absolute truth or anything of the sort but this is my rationale.
RC: Yeah, no, I love it. You bringing up the bridge metaphor and as we talked a bit before we started on my experience with the first Association for the Studies of Esotericism Conference in East Lancing in 04 with Nicholas. It was very hard to get there, I had to borrow money, fly to Toronto take an overnight bus through Detroit, stay in the café all night until the university opened. Walked into the university exhausted hoping…
AP: Was it in 2004?
RC: Yeah, I still have the pamphlets and all that. And people started rolling in and I met with my friend from Harvard Divinity School, Siobhán Cusack, the Reverend Siobhán Cusack, we started to connect with all the people that I’d been connecting with and that was exciting and the next thing you know I got invited to lunch with these people, these people who had been in there and I said, Oh you want me to come and they were like well why not are you hungry? And I was like, yeah I sure am and it was Joscelyn Godwin. I always get confused if it was Clarice Bangert or Alison Coudert, I love them both but I cannot remember, as I didn’t really know them at the time. But the next thing you know I am having lunch with these people, just listening. It was just such an inspiring and exciting experience for me in my life. But then I had to immediately graduate and join a Celtic band rather than pursue it more. But I don’t know, I just needed a different experience for a little while and it sort of took over if you know what I mean. The rise of the esoteric movement and these associations has been just very exciting. Do you think it’s interesting that the rejected knowledge of Esotericism and Esoteric Studies in the university sphere as it has been marginalised? There have been some professorships floating around out there for every esoteric subject. Is it interesting to you that as it has been rejected there it has found a strong voice on the internet due to its being rejected, probably, in the university system? It seems to me that there has been an interesting sort of connection there between the esoteric being a pioneering element in the online education world due to its marginalisation in mainstream academia. Forcing it to find other outlets for its audience. Yeah, I have been thinking about that and I wanted to see what you thought.
AP: Yeah, I think that the internet tends to be generally helpful for niche communities because if the interest in a specific subject is rare, it is unlikely that you will find somebody that has the same interest in your town or in your community or in a place that is geographically near to you. So the internet dismantles the barrier, the geographical barrier. So you can find people who have the same interests from all over the world and so you can create a community that is not geographically based but it is interest-based. I think that generally speaking, the internet has allowed for communities and subcultures even, to create a community and to have their space and have the possibility to share knowledge and gather more knowledge. More generally I don’t think it is just in Esotericism. What happens perhaps that is more specific to Esotericism is something that I talked about with Bernd Christian Otto in an interview on my YouTube channel Angela’s Symposium we were talking about the history and development of Magic and the perception of Magic and he was saying that in the past 50 years have been the first time in history that Magic has been perceived as more positive than negative. And that is because of the media presentations, because of a number of reasons, because of numerous reasons.
I think that Wicca is one of the reasons, for instance, because Wicca was quite helpful in portraying an image of Witchcraft that was more positive, we could say, in quotation marks. I don’t really like these ethical dichotomous terms but you know what I mean. There wasn’t a perception that Witchcraft was all about killing babies and cursing people and damaging people that you don’t like and killing people and all things of these sorts. The perception of Witchcraft was of connecting to nature and that there was a strong ethical stance underneath the magical practices. And I think that now there is perceived by the community of Practitioners as an oversimplification and perhaps not really mirroring what human ethics really is, especially for people who are outside of a certain Christian or Abrahamic morality or perception of morality. So now it has been challenged, it has been challenged for quite some time, that kind of Wiccan ethical stance. But even though it has been challenged by practitioners lately it was quite useful, I think, in breaking the ice and break-through and allowing pop culture to be a bit more welcoming towards the idea that Witchcraft could be something that is beneficial and benign and allows you to reconnect with nature. And then there is also the element of Witchcraft that has been, and this is also due to Wicca and how it was received in the US, for instance, that it has been associated with the gay and feminist liberation movements and so it was also associated with reclaiming the power of the feminine and the perception of spirituality and the spiritual world that went beyond a certain patriarchal, male-based understanding. So that was also conducive in that.
And then you have the pop culture that has started to come up with portrayals of Magicians, Mages, Witches and people who were practising Magic that were portrayed as very positive characters. You have Harry Potter and Sabrina the Teenage Witch – maybe the new Sabrina is a bit border-line but you have many portrayals of Witches and Magick-Practitioners that are positive and you even have with Harry Potter the non-practitioners are the ones who are evil like with Harry Potter and his family. So the narrative is turned on its head. And yeah, I think that slowly and steadily because of a number of reasons and I personally think that Wicca was an important stepping stone but it was not the only one. It was also a change in the culture more generally and the Zeitgeist and the fact that I wouldn’t say that we have become more secular but we have become more pluralist, religiously speaking and even though Christianity is still very hegemonic, as a religion, it doesn’t have that hold on the culture at large as it used to have because there is more inclusion of different perspectives. So there are many elements that are partly due to the change in the culture more generally, partly because of the development within the history of Esotericism and the history of Paganism and Magick practices. But it is a number of concurrent causes that led to Magick being perceived as not scary, not as the devil-work and yeah, I think it is an interesting change.
And another thing that, in a way, helped change that kind of perception is also social media and the aesthetics that have been associated with Witchcraft and Witches and crystals and you associate, you see these beautiful things, beautiful women and beautiful books. I think that is also a form of art and that art and that perception of beauty that you start to see associated with Witchcraft, you know it conveys that sense of peace and connection and connection to nature, connection to yourself and your spirituality and so you start associating Witchcraft with all of those things and not to devil worship, as it used to be because before, I guess 1960 – the 1960s or the 1950s the portrayals of Witchcraft were almost exclusively very negative, you know, portraying something that was extremely dangerous and harmful towards other people and against the community values and the community morals. It was perceived as something disruptive, as something that was other, that was dangerous and harmful and all these perceptions have lessened. Of course, you still have communities that have a perception of Witchcraft but it is not the general perception, the general perception has become more and more positive, more welcoming towards magic practices. I would say that it is still rejected knowledge because it doesn’t quite fit with the dominant cultural framework which is in line with natural science and a certain secular understanding and perception of the world. But it is perceived as less dangerous and harmful.
RC: Yeah, that is such an interesting aspect to it the role of aestheticism and style and fashion and how culture can shift things and even flip them on their heads. I was at a conference, the PantheaCon Conference, the last, 2020 before Covid. I made a crack as I was walking down a hall with some other women and just about all the glitz and glamour that was there with people just looking to buy crystals and I wasn’t being harsh or anything but they were like, hey these people are paying for all this. You know, it is a 6,000-person conference and a really great time. The chance, like I got to present to hundreds of people of my actual audience who were as fascinated as I am by W.B. Yeats and “The Celtic Mysteries” and all that. All that’s paid for by the people, the commercialisation of it. Essentially the aesthetic that has been bought in to make it more acceptable, which isn’t bad. I mean in grade eight during Macbeth I wanted to be one of the Witches and my teacher was like, no Witches are only women, so she cast me as Hecate instead. Don’t ask me to explain her logic there but things have completely changed.
Another thing that has changed, interestingly, as a practitioner I have noticed, in the early nineties, when I was really getting into Wicca, me and my two buddies started a little coven in high school where we could experience some of this stuff for ourselves. I was getting training in the Reclaiming Tradition by Pat Hogan here in Vancouver in like 93, 94 and the Reclaiming Tradition was really good for me at that time. But one thing that I noticed was when they found out I was interested in the Grimoiric stuff and the Golden Dawn they were very hesitant because like they were like they require you to harm animals and wear lion-skins and kill cats and use blood and they saw that as a very bad thing. I wasn’t planning on killing any cats, of course. I figured that was either code or you skipped over that part. I’m still not sure but Jake Stratton-Kent and other good people like that are helping me to figure that out. And now what I’ve seen is with the traditional Witchcraft coming back and things just changing and now it’s ceremonial Magicians and authors like Joseph Peterson saying, don’t you dare kill an animal in a ritual, don’t you dare. But now it is Witches who I hear of doing actual sacrifice. I don’t know what you have heard of that kind of flip but that is a flip that seems to be a kind of interesting one. Just worth noting.
AP: What kind of Witches are making sacrifices?
RC: I didn’t really want to ask too much, honestly, because I am not an anthropologist like you. And also I would be very concerned about offending. I just heard that that is making a comeback in the witch scene whereas it is definitely on the outs in the ceremonial scene. That’s sort of interesting to hear. I’ve heard from a friend, the Esoteric Podcast, I think it was someone from the Coyotal Church talking about sacrifices in rituals they were doing years ago that’s sort of the Gen P-Orridge group, I think, loosely to that scene in LA that I was around a lot in the 90s when I was going through the Golden Dawn initiations at a Temple there. Yeah, there is some radical stuff going on amongst practitioners, I am sure.
AP: Would it be animal sacrifices that they have reported?
AP: Would it be animal sacrifices that they have reported?
RC: I’m sure, Though I don’t know the details. But just the switch of that I thought you might find, sort of… Like, to me it was interesting that in the 90s the Wiccans were definitely don’t harm animals now it’s the Witches being like sometimes you have to, you know, we’re doing this for real. I’m worried that part of that is a reaction to them wanting to separate themselves from the so-called flaky, New-Age Wicca that they’re in rebellion against, at times, in traditional Witchcraft. I also wonder about how much there really is evidence of traditional Witchcraft but I think you and Ronald Hutton probably have already covered that on your channel.
AP: Yeah well when it comes to Witches performing sacrifices, I’m not aware of that. Nothing of that sort emerged in my research so far. There are animal sacrifices being made in certain traditions you know even in Afro-Brazilian traditions and in some native traditions, you can find something of that sort. Although in that case it’s very contextualized and it’s more similar to, well it really depends, of course, on the kind of ritual but in some cases, you can see that the killing of the animal is also associated with feeding yourself with that meat. So there are cases where it’s more like sacralising the food that you are going to eat. In other cases, it can be an offering to a specific entity. So it really changes and I think it’s very difficult to generalize, you need to see the practice in the specific context, in the specific tradition and with the people that do it and why they do it. But in terms of thinking about the magic practitioners in the western world. Yeah, I’m not aware of that, nothing of the sort has emerged, unless they practice one of those traditions. But yeah, if anything emerges in the future I will let you know but you were asking about traditional Wicca?
RC: Traditional Witchcraft versus Wicca. Yeah.
AP: Or Witchcraft well what do you mean by traditional Witchcraft?
RC: Yeah, exactly, I don’t even know if that’s a can we should open, right here?
AP: That’s not – traditional Witchcraft, it is not a terminology that means anything, it is too generic to mean anything. If by traditional Witchcraft we mean the traditional magic practice then of course there’s no such thing because every single place in the world has had their own magic practices that have evolved over time. So you don’t have one traditional Witchcraft you have several traditional Witchcrafts. Yeah, but it also depends on the place and I think wanting to find the one true tradition or the pure tradition or the, you know, these things are problematic and they are very often based on a mythologised understanding of what Witchcraft is. And even an oversimplification because you want the one tradition, when you don’t have the one tradition, you have millions of traditions.
RC: Yeah, I remember that was one of the most interesting things for to me to learn, studying the early days of Christianity in grad school, it was to realise the plurality is so overwhelming, you don’t understand. Like my teacher was saying you don’t realise in the first century they had a ton of churches worshipping the hermaphroditic Jesus. I was like what? He’s like, yeah they had this like this was a thing. You have no idea how many different varieties of practices and religions and spiritualities there are. So it’s very hard when you fall into perennial thinking, right. Dan Attrel did a great epic four hours on that on that with the Sledgehammer on there.
AP: Yeah, I’ve also talked about Perennialism quite a lot on my channel and even with my Patrons. So yeah, I think it is one of the lens that practitioners tend to use and want to use is Perennialism, you know, that perception that everything comes back to one, that there is one truth underlying all the different traditions. Then there’s the concept of the Prisca Theologia which is the first theology, the first religious practice. But these are all things that are more steeped into the myth than they are in reality and in history. Because in history, you have several traditions and if you want to see one underlying truth and that all the Gods are the same God well, it’s just confirmation bias that you apply and cherry-picking, when it comes to the characteristics of the Gods that you only pick the similarities and you completely discard the differences and the cultural and contextual elements that are so important for academics. So academics are definitely not perennialist but I’d say that the large majority of practitioners are Perennialists. And that is fine, it’s not a critique. I mean it’s just a different thing what academics do is very different from what practitioners do. Practitioners are interested in their beliefs, in cultivating their beliefs, finding their own truth and making it and turning it into magick-practice or spiritual practice.
What academics do is very different, it’s getting accurate knowledge and you don’t get accurate knowledge if you discard details and if you pretend that the cultural and contextual elements are not there because it sounds really nice that Aphrodite and Venus are the same exact Goddess because they’re both related to love and beauty. And a scholar would, for instance, like Aphrodite and Venus, what a scholar would do they would look at the history and how the two deities got to be associated, what is the specific time they got associated, what was lost when that syncretism occurred and what was gained and how it developed further and how that syncretism changed forever both the perception of Aphrodite and the perception of Venus. And even when they try and associate deities that are quite similar and have actually been syncretised because sometimes I also see entities being lumped together that have never been syncretised in history. But even in the cases where they have been syncretised, like in this case, you will still see that there is a certain temporal bracket where that occurs and it occurs in a very specific way. And as I said, it really changes how those entities were perceived compared to before. Before the Hellenisation of the Roman gods, for instance, the Roman gods were seen more as forces of nature. It was the Hellenisation that anthropomorphised, that made them resemble human beings, the Roman Gods and Goddesses – so are they the same entity?
Well if you’re a practitioner you will look at the entity and perhaps be in contact with the spirit and then the spirit may tell you yes, I’m both Venus and Aphrodite and Jesus and everything else. And in that case, it is part of your spiritual experience and no one can you tell anything about it because it is your experience. And it is valuable because it is the experience that you have but if we look at the history of those entities then we need to look at the evidence and the historical developments. And this is something that perhaps Anthropology has taught me, I always respect the personal experience of practitioners. So if you have an extremely meaningful spiritual experience where you have a spirit that is in communication with you and they say that they are a number of entities and they are the essence of those entities, I don’t know, I’m just making this up. I would still see that if that experience is meaningful for the practitioner, it is a religious experience and it is their personal experience with the divine but it has little to do with the history of those entities. So I would say that that experience is valid for the practitioner and for their religious experience but if they go into the world and they say, well actually these entities are all the same because I was told this in this meditation or this visualisation or whatever it was, then they run into inaccuracy when it comes to delivering knowledge that is not accurate. It would be more accurate to say this was my experience, if this experience can help anybody I’m just offering it but sometimes you may see practitioners that because they have had a certain experience they just claim it to be the truth and that’s a very Abrahamic way of going about having spiritual experiences if you ask me.
RC: There’s a really interesting parallel going on or not going, on but in the magical world, sort of liturgically as it were, to this Perennialism a particularity issue. Which, you know, the whole Perennialism thing that’s one of the reasons I was I’m really glad I went to university because if I just stayed like a pleb teacher in the Golden Dawn system without actually going to
grad school and all this, I don’t think I ever would have really understood the issues with Prisca Theologia, Sophia Perennis and just you know this kind of level of critical thinking and hermeneutics in general. It’s just it really does change your brain in many ways back in university when you’re learning to think better or differently. And of course, the challenge – it actually did challenge a lot of my thoughts and beliefs as a practitioner. I mean aside from just realizing that the gospels weren’t written by the four dudes. It’s quite a reshaping and so the interesting parallel is in ritual practice these days between say, Thelema and the Golden Dawn traditions there’s a debate between people who feel that any ritual sort of based on another ritual is the same ritual in essence, right. Because it’s all coming from the same source and we’re all humans and because any ritual that we do with the right intention will connect with the same source and since all forces are one force, it’s the same ritual.
But those of us in the Golden Dawn side of things tend to look at it that if you make an adaptation of ritual it’s a new ritual. If you change, something the way from the way it’s done, it’s not that thing anymore, right. Just like if you modify the Supreme Ritual of the Pentagram, as Crowley did, to become the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram. You can’t say, so this is where it becomes a practical day-to-day issue between practitioners, right, you can’t say that one thing is the other. What Crowley’s Greater Ritual the Pentagram is doing can’t be what this other Golden Dawn Supreme Ritual the Pentagram is doing because they were they’re two different things. And so it’s an interesting reality to see that I think play out in a sort of microcosm within ritual practice and development within practitioners and I think there’s a lot to be gained from understanding the value of particularities. Even in our emic world of practising magic because of the respect, it gives to the form and structure, history, tradition and creation of those things in the first place. I mean why do we keep doing rituals at all, why do we still have churches and faiths and liturgies and why actually need to do this? I think it was Filip who was talking about the fact that we actually still don’t really even know what religion is. I forget what his channel’s name is, we should shout out his channel, not that he needs any….
AP: Let’s Talk Religion.
RC: Let’s Talk Religion, yeah and Filip is his name. Yeah, he’s great, everyone, all you guys in this community are great. So thank you again for all that. But yeah, I think there’s a lot to be gained from maintaining these traditions and you see this struggle in the Golden Dawn world between people following Regardie’s books and those drawing from the original source material. You know there’s tension there, of course, because some people are using modified rituals that were accidentally modified, not intentionally but accidentally and therefore they’re not as traditional. And some people, of course, then get to say, oh it’s not real, which is always fun, so always a fun accusation, right and what you do isn’t real.
AP: Yeah, I think that’s a difficult matter because it depends on if you analyse it as an academic or as a practitioner. So if you analyse the matter as a practitioner, the way you see these kinds of things will massively depend on your belief system and your worldview. So for you, the focus is the energetic working and the magical working and affecting a certain change. The specifics of the rituals and all those ritualistic elements and even aspects of the traditions will matter less. Whereas, if for you the ritualistic elements are an integral part of your religious experience and of the magic practice and you strongly believe that changing it will have a completely different effect then for you those kinds of details will really matter. So I think that whether you lean more towards the traditional ceremonial kind of perception or the more eclectic, energy-based, more fluid – I don’t know how to describe it – perception, it really depends on the belief system.
RC: Woo-woo?
AP: No, I wouldn’t say that because that’s kind of undermining and I don’t do that.
RC: Good, I’ll do that for you. I’m just having fun.
AP: Yeah, I think that they are both valid in their own rights because there are some practitioners that find benefit in focusing on those details and the traditional elements and other practitioners that find value in doing it in a different way. And from a practitioner’s point of view, I would say that all are valid if they create meaning in your life and they enhance your spiritual experience. As an academic, from an academic perspective what matters is the history. Well, if you do history of religion you will study it historically, so if you have to identify the lineage of the Golden Dawn you will look at all the developments and evolutions in terms of the texts that have been written and the things that have been passed down. And if you study this phenomenon from an anthropological point of view then you will collect data from the people that belong to the Golden Dawn. And you will start and identify patterns of meaning that are created by the beliefs that people within that community hold, the beliefs that they hold and the things that they talk about and what are the things, the practices that they believe are more valuable. So you collect all these data and you realise what is the perception that, for instance, Golden Dawn practitioners have about the importance of traditional elements within their practice. So this would be the anthropological outlook, for instance.
Whereas the historical outlook may be based more on text and the history of the tradition. And the sociological, if it was a sociological study, it would be more interested in the effect that the differences in practices and the development of those practices have affected the community more generally. So the impact on the society, in this case, the small community, will be the focus, if it was a sociological study. So even when it comes to religious phenomena it really depends, when you study them from an academic point of view, it really depends on the field that you are in, whether you are a Historian of Religion, for instance, Ronald Hutton is a Historian of Religion. Whether you’re an Anthropologist of Religion like myself or if you are a Sociologist of Religion. So you really also have different perspectives even as an academic to look at a specific phenomenon. But in terms of practitioners, as I say from a practitioner’s standpoint, I think what matters to people is their experience. And I think that I can say that, even as a scholar because one of the things that you realise when it comes to magic-practising traditions and magic Practitioners, is that for them what counts the most is their experience and the theory comes after. So usually the experience and what feels meaningful and feels transformative and feels effective to the Practitioner is the foundation and then the theory comes after. The theory must be in line with their experience and not the other way around.
That is something that I have found, for instance, studying magic practitioners. So I would say that perhaps for the ceremonial magicians the experience of the ritual and especially done in a specific way and the experience of a traditional way of doing things may be more meaningful, may give them, may provide them with a more meaningful, effective spiritual experience. But that doesn’t mean that it has to be true also for the eclectic Practitioners that have a different way of perceiving their spiritual practice. So I would say that from a practitioner’s point of view it is a relativist matter because it strongly depends on the experience of the individual and the belief system that the specific practitioner holds and also the world view that the specific practitioner has.
RC: Yeah, very interesting. I don’t know if you… I hope also when I used the word woo-woo I didn’t mean that negatively. I don’t know if you know but Tommy Kelly the Irish Magician has taken it back, so we’ve taken back woo-woo. It’s a positive thing. Now we’re running with it like go woo-woo, you know, it’s just like let’s own our own ambiguity.
AP: Yeah, I have one of my patrons, Hank, who also uses it in a positive way. So yeah.
RC: Yeah, I used it in a positive way acknowledging the reality still that it represents, like you said, both these things have benefits and flaws to them and in our approaches and all of that and it is interesting how it all comes down to experience in so many ways. It maybe is one of the things that makes Magick fundamentally different from religion, in fact, because if your experience contradicts your religion, well things might not go so well for you, especially if you tell too many people what you’re thinking. Whereas in Magick we alter our tradition almost for experience a goetic Magician will change the names of the spirits even if they’re old famous spirits in their book of invocations if the spirit tells them it’s a different name. This is my name, this is my real, real name, this is my real, real name, cross it out, put in the real, real name. So that’s a very interesting thing, reality.
AP: I have a video on my YouTube channel on the difference between lived religions and institutionalised religions and as I explained in that video I think that also happens with people that follow a specific religion that there is a discrepancy between what people should do and what they actually do. But maybe it is a bit, you know, to a lesser degree compared to magic practitioners.
RC: Yeah, I used to be a Roman catholic. So I sort of get it. I mean that that discrepancy, actually, my inability to be congruent with the faith was what prevented me from staying Roman Catholic. I couldn’t be congruent with myself because I didn’t actually believe all this stuff they believe, especially when it comes to social teachings, for example, that was just so… Anglicanism was a perfect fit after that. C.S. Lewis’s advice was well in hand, don’t try and make a religion change to accommodate you just find one that suits you a bit better and go have a wonderful life. So God bless C.S. Lewis. I want to talk a little bit about Woulter Hanegraaff if you don’t mind. Because he’s been a major inspiration like all of these fellows have been for me for many years and I’m very excited to read his new book. I hear you’re doing a book study in your Patreon, which everyone should go join in. Yeah, I’m sorry I can’t be a part of that book study. But I’ll read it when I get around to it. He had an article in Religion magazine and in Religion magazine that really I found quite astounding because he was sort of taking to task the entire field of Religious Studies and essentially, reading between the lines, it seemed to me, I actually covered that article on the podcast it was a very exciting episode because it seemed to me what he was saying was like he was almost saying as close as he could without actually saying it, that maybe Religious Studies departments should be renamed ‘Spirituality Studies’ because what he was saying was like, he was saying there may not be as full of future in Religious Studies as there could be if we opened up to the spiritual aspect and element in humans lives. Which Religious Studies sort of cuts through that a bit.
Maybe it is opening up more and more now but just seeing his article and his hope for maybe re-imagining how we look at religion in a way that can actually include the spirituality of the person at all because it’s always a problem. Even in academia, you see this, I do a lot of John Dee studies because I teach in Enochian Magic and do it regularly. And with John Dee studies in a lot of writing, one of the problems is they’re rejecting out of hand the possibility that the experiences he’s having have any validity. And as soon as you do that you’re not going to understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, right. If your assumption is that there are no spirits and that if that’s all make-believe or essentially mental illness then how could you come to a correct conclusion about what the reason for doing all of this is and why this would be done this way and that sort of thing? So you know they miss a major component of John Dee when they ignore his Christianity and the Apocalypticism that goes hand in hand with his time. I mean he was doing that stuff at the end of a century like we’ve just lived through and of course millenarianism comes into play in almost every case like that, right. We always say the world’s ending, every hundred years without exception it seems.
AP: Especially every thousand years.
RC: Especially.
AP: But yeah, if you follow my social media you will know that I have met Woulter or I should say, Professor Hanegraaff…
RC: Yeah, it was a great interview with him I really loved your interview with him.
AP: Yeah, I thought he was great. He’s a great speaker and a great writer but we also had private conversations. So I know how he thinks about these kinds of matters.
RC: Yeah, well that’s why I was excited to ask you because after that religion article, he wrote that article a few years back and then his new book is hermetic spirituality and I was like okay…
AP: Yeah, yeah, so we also had private conversations about this matter of religion and spirituality and I think that he strongly believes that, at the moment. F or him, in the conversations we’ve had, which is also mirrored in the interview on my YouTube channel, it was more moving from using the term philosophy to using the word spirituality as opposed to moving from using the term religion to the term spirituality. So because what he was arguing is that many of the practices that we call Philosophy, especially when it comes to Hermetic Philosophy they are actually Hermetic Spirituality, they are not philosophical. But they have been called philosophical because they have been made to appear more rational and less spiritual so that they could be more acceptable. They have also been Christianised, so the Corpus Hermeticum that we have, the Hermetic texts, the ones that have survived, have survived because they were more acceptable to the Christian writers that allowed for them to survive and some of those texts were lost. And many translations are either Christianised or, in fact, one of the things that I was talking about with Wouter is that he says that there is no good English translation of the Corpus Hermeticum because I was about to do a Magus Lecture because every month I do a lecture for my Magus and upper-tiers-level Patrons, and I was planning to do a lecture on the Corpus Hermeticum and Hermetic texts and Hermetic Spirituality with my Patrons because they were very fascinated by my interview with Professor Hanegraaff. And I contacted him because I was wondering whether there was a good English translation that he would recommend because one of my Patrons also asked for that. But he said that he doesn’t think that there is a good English translation. And I was also saying that there was a conversation going on that in a private, social media space. But yeah, one that he recommends a German version and a French translation but there’s possibly going to be a good one in English in the coming years.
But yeah I think that the issue is that quite often, you know, through the past, since there has been especially in the past and now it is lessening but there used to be a Christian hegemony even when it comes to culture. Then in order for things to be acceptable enough to survive, they needed to either resemble Christianity or the Christian religion, the Christian mysticism in one way or another or they needed to be rationalised and resemble Philosophy like you know, Greek Philosophy, for instance. So these are one of the two things that have happened with Hermetic texts, so that’s one of the reasons why he argues that it’s now time to recognise and acknowledge the fact that it’s not Hermetic Philosophy, it’s Hermetic Spirituality and I agree with him. And I think that the time has come for this kind of acknowledgement because if you read the Hermetic texts they are not really that philosophical, they are very practice-based. So I think that they are there are philosophical elements. So there are, I would say, philosophical elements for sure but they are philosophical elements that are geared towards… the reason why those philosophical elements are there is because they want to be conducive to the spiritual practice of the reader or the person that is trying to employ the things that are written in those texts. So I agree with him, that is more Spirituality than it is Philosophy and also there’s the matter that calling it Spirituality, perhaps, allows us to broaden Religious Studies as a scholarly field in universities. But I think that this is also happening in Religious Studies more generally around the world. So the category of religion has been challenged by many Religious Studies scholars so even those outside of Esotericism, Religious Studies scholars have challenged the category of religion, they have highlighted the fact that religion is not just the so-called world religions and it’s not just religions that resemble a certain structure, mainly a monotheistic kind of structure, that the category of religion should be more inclusive to the other religious forms that do not resemble that specific structure. So yeah I think that that’s also important to highlight and that this is a conversation that has been going on in Religious Studies for quite some time now.
RC: Yeah, I wasn’t aware of that because I’ve not been in the academic world for a while. So yeah, thanks for letting me know that Dr Hanegraaff is not the first to raise an issue with that… it’s really interesting to imagine…
AP: Professor Hanegraaff is the first to highlight the issue when it comes to Hermetic Philosophy and in his case, he was specifically talking about Hermetic Philosophy being acknowledged as being Hermetic Spirituality as opposed to Hermetic Philosophy. So as far as I know he was not really talking about the category of religion but I just added that that is also going on among religious scholars because I thought that could also be of interest.
RC: Yeah, I know it is. Do you see Religious Studies being called something else in the future? If it were to change its name. I mean the only reason I can think would really change its name is to maybe encourage people to fill the classes up. On on a fundamental level, if ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right. If an entire field is working then there’s no reason to change its name but if a field’s in trouble maybe a slight name change, in folk refocusing could include more people within its interest and purview. And there’s a lot of people who want to study more religion and spirituality in our world and are glad that Christian hegemony has waned and that there’s a freedom to really actually explore and talk about almost anything these days without fearing religious persecution, at least here in the west, right.
AP: Yeah, although it’s still more difficult to get funding for the research and things that are.
FC: That’s another issue. Let’s not talk about funding.
AP: Yeah that’s another issue. So I’ve never heard any conversation within academic circles when it comes to re-branding or renaming Religious Studies as a field, although perhaps including spirituality could possibly help but the reason why I’ve never heard this conversation going on is because the study of spirituality is already part of Religious Studies for Religious Studies scholars. In fact, as a scholar myself, as an academic myself, sometimes I would really hope that more practitioners would use more the term religion. I shouldn’t say that because I’m kind of waiting for it to happen because the term religion is more of a… how can I put it; religion is a social actor and it enters the public discourse more directly. Spirituality isn’t. So sometimes I feel like it’s a pity that, for instance, Magick Practitioners or Esotericists refuse the term religion instead of reclaiming it. Because I think that it would benefit Practitioners more, let’s put it that way, if they because otherwise you’re just leaving the term religion to those religions, the so-called world religions that now scholars in Religious Studies really don’t like that category anymore, the category of world religions that includes, you know, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, Hinduism and some others but it’s not inclusive and the rationale for what counts as a world religion and what not still tends to be problematic because it tends to resemble a certain structure, let’s put it that way. So religious study scholars are already talking about the fact that the term religion should be more inclusive and so practices that Practitioners would call spirituality, Religious Studies scholars would already argue that they are religious. But since the Practitioners themselves are not calling them religions they are, in a way, giving away that term and that category that is a powerful social actor to those other religions and they are removing themselves from the conversation in a way. So that’s my perception sometimes, that it would benefit practitioners.
RC: You think, they’re sort of shooting themselves in the leg a bit?
AP: Maybe a little bit.
RC: Why not participate it’s like, if you don’t show up you don’t get a vote, right?
AP: Yeah, in a way, yes and I understand why that happened. I think that there was, you know, the Practitioners especially those who do not follow the Abrahamic religions, they just hate the
structure and the hierarchy and the dogmatism of religion and they associate the term religion to those with those traits. But is it really the case that religion can only be that? Or is it also that spirituality and spiritual experiences are also religious experiences and that perhaps religion doesn’t have to be dogmatic necessarily, that there are religions that are dogmatic and hierarchical and structured in a certain way and other religions that aren’t and that there is variety across the different religions. But obviously, especially when you study these things as an Anthropologist what matters is how people construct meaning around these terms and so what I see is that there is more of a movement towards starting to use the term religion but it is still in its infancy, I think. So people still tend to associate religion with traits that they don’t want, that they don’t feel belong to their practice and so that’s why they prefer the term spirituality or Witchcraft or other terms specific to the kind of tradition that they follow.
RC: Yeah, we might have lost some understanding of what religion means in this bifurcation of I’m spiritual but not religious or the bumper sticker “Spiritual People Inspire Me, Religious People Frighten Me.’ You know, you see this on the West Coast especially because you know it’s all ‘hippie hippie land and all the draft-dodgers came up to Vancouver on the West Coast as a protest for the Vietnam War and I was mainly taught in high school by American draft-dodgers who became teachers and this separation, I think, between the dogmatism of the religious upbringing they had with their parents in a much stricter, you know, the baby boomer generation versus all of a sudden it was the, you know it’s the 90s and everyone, like gurus, were very big you know, Osho and Maharishi, which is what my family followed, just brought me, spirituality into this crazy 90s boom that we call the New Age, right. One of my favourite books is Dr Hanegraaff’s “New Age Religion and Secular Culture” which honestly I think every Magical Practitioner should read, though maybe it would disenchant them too much I don’t know or just give them a headache. What are your thoughts on like, I think the practitioner world should be mobilized by all of you to generate money for scholarships and chairs in Departments of Esotericism? That’s what I think should happen. I even gave you…
AP: Oh I would hope that happened because at the moment it’s really difficult to…
RC: That’s what I want to make happen. Actually, I did a presentation at the University of Canterbury to Dr Angela Voss’s grad students and PhDs in 2019, when I was doing my little European lecture tour and stuff about ways to make this possible because I was heading to the States after, to do a bunch of stuff and I’d meet a bunch of people, a lot of people who have the resources to decide to do something like that and they can make it happen, right. And I was sort of curious what the groundwork and how that could play out at. To do the logistics of that you know I for me a dream would be to like get a scholarship happening under Nicholas’s name or something like that, just because my whole doctoral experience was so impacted by finances, lack of finances and his death and eventually, that it was really tragic. Yeah, at the same time I feel very lucky to have had the experience I’ve had. But I do think the practitioner-world which, is starting to gain more benefits and understand and recognise the benefits of academic research. I hope there’s this bridge that we can build of harmony and synchronous, what’s the word, I don’t know the word but get the money from the practitioners to form you know chairs and scholarships, I think that would be something anyway. Anyone involved in that mission has my full support and as much time as I can give to it and I hope academics increasingly realise that there is a lot of appreciation in the practical practitioner world for the work that’s being done and we could do some cool things in the future. Losing the Exeter program or it was at Lampeter in Wales when I joined, but losing the Exeter program was I think a big loss, a tremendous loss to the field and of course we still have Amsterdam and the program there and of course, the Sorbonne though I don’t know what Faivre is up to these days.
AP: Faivre passed away. Yeah, he passed away last year.
RC: God bless that man.
AP: Yeah, both Hanegraaff and Pasi and Bogdan have written something in the ESSWE newsletter about that and also in blogs and their social media. Yeah, he passed but there are a couple of universities in Sweden that also that are also teaching Esotericism. So next year the ESSWE Conference will be in Sweden, in fact. There are quite a few Swedish scholars that are amazing in the study of Esotericism and I have interviewed a few on my YouTube channel like Dr Henrik Bogdan, Dr Manon Hedenborg White and there’s also what’s his name? It escapes me now and there there’s one on Satanism (Per Faxneld) that was more recent. For some reason, I can’t remember his name now.
RC: He’s an American guy isn’t he?
AP: No he’s Swedish as well.
RC: Some of you Europeans speak English so well we can’t even tell the difference, especially the Swedes, they’ve got that English down. Sorry. Your English is outstanding.
AP: Per Faxneld.
RC: Say his name again.
AP: Per Faxneld.
RC: Okay.
AP: But you were complimenting my English, go on.
RC: Well your English is obviously good even not to mention getting through a doctoral program in English. And all that it’s impressive but you repeat even assuming it’s good, you drop words all the time. I’m like damn I wonder if that’s a common word in Italian and therefore she’s using it or has she just got that bigger brain.
AP: Well yeah, I think it’s because I read a lot, obviously. So I acquire more terms in my vocabulary because of that. And also because I talk with a lot of academics and scholars and so I think that that’s why my vocabulary is richer than others. And also maybe I think that I converse, more especially in English, I converse more with other academics and in a scholarly, university conference kind of setting than in a more colloquial way, because since I started my PhD, basically academia took over my life. I’m hoping to get my life back and find a bit more balance in the future. But yeah, I’m trying to say that my social time is usually when I go back to Italy with my Italian friends and so I don’t have much social time in English and as a consequence, my language tends to be a bit more academic-y, in a way because that’s what I do. English is my work language in a way.
RC: Yeah, oh man languages are great, so much fun, so much fun. I’m yeah always, always trying to improve them a bit. We talked about Woulter and the yeah the spirituality thing versus the religion thing. Well do you think would it be okay if we said goodbye now and did a little snippet for my Patrons? Just a little bonus thing for them.
AP: That’s fine.
RC: All right well, thank you very much, Angela, of Angela’s Symposium, Dr Puca, sorry. Wonderful and it’s an honour to have you on Magic Without Fears the Hermetic
Podcast. Folks thanks for listening. You can find me through the links below and more about Angela as well. If you’ve stuck to the end, bless you with wisdom and all of that.
AP: And thank you very much for inviting me, and if people are interested in following my work they will find the links in the notes or in the info box, depending on where you’re seeing this but yeah, my project is called Angela’ Symposium. So you will find me under that name or Dr Angela Puca.
RC: And you have a book coming out, of course, through, through…
AP: Yes.
RC: My favourite publisher my buddy, Christopher Lerick put out his book through Brill and one day, one day I’ll get it. It’s been 20 years but you know I’m saving up, still. We’re probably over-blowing this you know because occultists, if you haven’t noticed, tend to spend maybe even five, six hundred dollars on a new book these days, for those pretty editions, right. So maybe you academics need to start being like my book’s coming out from Brill I know it won’t cost as much as if it was through Scarlet Imprint or Anathema Publishing but you know please support my work and buy a copy because compared to some occult books Brill is actually not that crazy expensive.
AP: Yeah, but I’m not sure if you know this but we don’t earn much from academic books at all.
RC: So I know that I know that. That’s why I put my stuff out by myself, on, you know.
AP: Well I think that authors of books that are not published with an academic publisher. They earn much more in terms of royalties but when it comes to academic publications either you don’t earn absolutely anything or you earn very little, like peanuts, as they would say here in England. So I feel bad that my book is going to be expensive and it’s not going to fund my work either but that’s the publisher in the field and so in order to enter the conversation and being part of the academic circle, there are certain publishers that are considered more relevant. So it’s more a decision that plays into my career more than my funds.
RC: Well, yeah, publishing, having your book put out by Brill is like going to a good university or any other great accomplishment. It’s pretty hardcore, you’re pretty hardcore. You went with the hardcore publisher, it’s fucking Brill. So congratulations on that, that’s awesome. Yeah and you know you can always get these books through universities and people know that, a lot of people realise these days that you know university libraries are accessible and you can always get them.
AP: So even public libraries.
BC: Yeah, yeah.
AP: So you can get an interlibrary loan.
RC: What’s the title of your book?
AP: I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet.
RC: You haven’t even chosen it?
AP: No well, I’m still working on it because this is my PhD dissertation turned into a book and I do have the title of my PhD but I’m not sure if it’s gonna work for the book. So I will be having a session with my Patrons because you know, I very often talk with my Patrons about this kind of stuff and there’s one of my patrons who’s a librarian. So yeah, I want to get a title that conveys what the book is about because the title now is very academic but I’m not sure how interesting and appealing it would be to the general public and I’m hoping to reach out to the general public as well. So that’s why I’m not sure that I will be using the title of my PhD.
RC: Yeah, you got it. My master’s was called “Hermeneutics and the Post-Modern Epiclesis.” When I put that out I changed it to “The Ethics of Understanding God” but with God crossed out because, you know, Jared-erasure all that. So we’ll do a little Patreon bonus segment now for all my wonderful Patrons. Thank you for being here and see you all soon.
AP: Bye.