Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, the show where Canada's top comedians answer Canada's top questions like, is Winnipeg the best place to raise a family?

We're expecting to raise a little heck with this one, so don't miss it wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast.

Thank you. ABC podcast. Welcome to your bonus episode.

This is The Devil You Know.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and this time our guest producer, Carolyn Kendrick, is talking to

Justin Sledge, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, and host of the YouTube channel, Esoterica.

You also know Justin from the sixth episode of our show, and here you're going to get to hear him dive deeper into the topics that have fascinated him and led him into the work he does today.

And, of course, as someone accused of being a teenage Satanist,

he wanted to get to the bottom of who this Satan character really is.

And so in this episode, he and Carolyn talk about his studies of Western esotericism

and the origins of Satan himself.

Once again, we're learning more about the moral panic,

which might seem irrelevant to our lives until suddenly we need to know what it is,

how it works, and how it prays on people.

Hi. Hi, yeah, my name is Dr. Justin Sledge.

I am an expert in Western deserticism, so that includes things like magic and alchemy and historical witchcraft and the occult.

But studied academically, I can't teach you how to do it.

I'm on Hogwarts or anything like that. But yeah, I'm an adjunct professor, and also I run a pretty popular YouTube channel called Esoterica. And there I cover topics in esotericism, but from

an academic point of view. And for listeners who are unfamiliar, can you tell me why you make the distinction between

studying esotericism academically versus non-academically, I suppose?

So I studied academically just because that's sort of the tool set that I have available to me.

...