440 - Dr. Zachary Porcu - Journey to Reality: De-Secularize Your Life

The Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau

Education, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 933 Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this conversation I speak with Dr. Zachary Porcu about his book, Journey to Reality: Sacramental Life in a Secular Age, and the challenge of explaining true Christian thinking to modern people. We discuss how modern assumptions about the world make it difficult to understand ideas like sacraments, participation, and the relationship between the spiritual and material. Dr. Porcu explains why he wrote the book and how reframing basic categories—what we mean by God, religion, and reality—is often necessary before theology can make sense.

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/Qd9xENDzfRo
Please review the Symbolic World podcast on Spotify or Apple podcasts.

Dr. Zac’s website and book: https://zacharyporcu.com/
The Roots of Everything podcast (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@TheRootsofEverything
Substack: https://zacharyporcu.substack.com/

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The problem with history is that you are in it. Plutarch teaches us to read power symbolically—asking "whom does the hero serve?" to predict leadership patterns before they play out.
Presenter: Pavel Shchelin
Duration: 8 weeks studying the lives of Greeks and Roman Lycurgus, Alcibiades, Lysander, Pompey, Caesar, and Octavian –as living patterns, not dead men.
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Date: May 14-16
Place: Broadview Heights, OH
Buy your tickets now and get $50 off with the early bird sale through March 26th. Don't miss out! Hope to see you there: https://symbolicworldsummit.com/

Timestamps:
00:00 - Coming up
01:03 - Intro music
01:29 - Introduction
03:54 - Jargon
05:46 - Matter and spirituality
08:49 - Re-enchantment
13:10 - What you see
22:09 - The moral and physical laws
31:01 - Occult converts
36:39 - Supernatural experiences
40:54 - What do we do?
46:46 - Meditation
49:47 - On American religion
52:16 - The rational and the esoteric

🔓 Become a patron to support us and unlock exclusive monthly symbolism content: https://thesymbolicworld.com/subscribe
💻 Website and blog: http://www.thesymbolicworld.com
🔗 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanpageau
🎧 Listen to and review The Symbolic World podcast:
-Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0gI8bUwPtT3gkduHqNh6M5
-Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-symbolic-world/id1386867488
Our website designers: https://www.resonancehq.io/
My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson: https://matthewwilkinson.net/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I don't know if I should say this.
0:01.3	I love catechizing former occultists because they get it.
0:06.6	I've had more than one person say to me, yeah, I was getting way too deep into this.
0:11.2	I was being haunted by these demons.
0:12.9	I couldn't deal, like, figure it out.
0:14.9	I heard about orthodoxy.
0:16.6	I didn't know what it was.
0:17.6	I put icons up on my house and the demons stopped attacking me.
0:20.9	So I'm all in.
0:22.7	And I'm like, great.
0:24.0	I mean, so, you know, it's, it's, we laugh and it's funny, but it's so real for these people.
0:30.6	And, and, and so that I bring this up as an example because that's the kind of person with whom you don't have to have any
0:39.0	iconoclas in discussion, right?
0:41.7	That, all that kind of, well, but the Old Testament says, blah, blah, blah, you can't make
0:46.9	a graven image.
0:47.7	Like, that's so academic, you know, when somebody's being haunted by a demon and they put
0:51.8	icons up and the demons go away.
0:55.2	There's no...
0:56.0	It works, man.
0:56.9	It works.
0:57.9	There's no...
1:00.7	And it's not academic.
	...

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