Welcome to Roon soup, a podcast about magic, culture and the paranormal.

Coming to you from...

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. Enjoy.

Today on Roon soup we speak to Cultural Anthropologist, researcher and practitioner Ben Joffi. Ben's particular areas of expertise include the anthropology of magic, the Tibetan diaspora, ritual and esotericism.

Ben, welcome aboard.

Hello.

All right, Mr Joffi, dialing in from a university in South Africa in almost the middle of the night.

Thank you very much for being so accommodating.

But Ben, were you a weird kid? Question one.

I must certainly was a weird kid? Question one. I most certainly was a weird kid.

I think that maybe it was a bit of determined.

I checked a number of boxes.

I'm a special needs, I was a special needs child. I was a special needs child. I was born 11 and a half weeks early and spent the first two odd months of my life in an incubator.

I'm also queer.

And yeah, so I guess that already kind of, the beginning of my life was highly medicalized people were

treating me as as special in other ways and so my kind of burgeoning interest in the

occult sort of in some ways was combined with that as well.

Just to end up there Ben because this is take two of our attempts at discussions because we had Skype

Grimlins yesterday but I was thinking about the the sort of premature

birth thing because a very dear friend of mine had a kid 18

months ago and she was very premature right and you if you had been born at any

other time you would have died.

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