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

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host.

This week sees the return of one of the show's most popular guests, Lionel Snell, aka Ramsey Dukes.

Earlier this year, Lionel released a fascinating book, My Year of Magical Thinking, which went straight to the top of my

teetering to read pile, and, thanks to one of the few upsides of long haul travel, finally got moved

to the red pile. Lionel returns to answer my many questions about it.

Linal, aka Mr. Dukes, welcome back.

Oh, thank you.

It's a pleasure.

Wonderful.

Well, we were just commiserating before I hit the record

button about the time it takes to both write a book and and indeed read them and and for me I was actually saving your book for the flight to

LA and I got that under the way but

congratulations for getting a book out this year I'm great one of us did and I have a whole bunch of I think

interesting questions because this was for someone who I hesitate to say grew up with

your books but in a way I did for me in many respects the latest work is a book in its own right but it was also some interesting cheat notes for me in

kind of correlating where I now think maybe some of your ideas came from. So it was a fascinating read and congratulations.

Oh, thank you. All right. Well, I'm going to just jump on in with some of the questions that I scrolled down during the turbulence.

Question one. One thing I might explain is, know the reasons for writing what might seem like just

a sort of expansion of sosopamy after all these years and it's that I've been very much in the company of people who, in my terms are religious,

you know, in other words, they're politicians, academics and people who are properly religious Muslims and Christians a lot of those in South Africa

and there's very little sort of comprehension or really wanting to know about magic.

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