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 we welcome back an oft requested guest. Dr. Jeff Cripple.

Jeff is a scholar of comparative religion based at Rice University and the author of many important books that are

named checked regularly on the show or the blog, soon to be included by his

latest one secret body which he joins us to discuss today.

Dr. Cripel, welcome back.

Happy to be back.

Well, congratulations on this, your best book, if I may say.

Well, thank you for saying that.

That's a compliment I take it.

Oh, absolutely. I loved it.

It genuinely was one of the best books I can recall reading so I'm really looking forward to this

chat.

Great, I can't like to hear what you have to say.

All right, so we'll begin with why this book, which I think we could fairly describe as a summation or re-exploration of a lot of your previous published work and why now are you leaving as Dr.

Cripple? No I'm not leaving I'm not leaving I'm not going anywhere good I expect

ten more books yeah no this, there's really two reasons behind this book.

One is this kind of, it comes out of my lecturing experience where I travel to different universities in both Europe and the states and

everyone seems to associate me with a different book and it's it's a book I've written but it's a completely different book and they don't seem to know about the other books and so I sort of realized that I really couldn't expect anyone to read six books and figure out what they have in common and so it was my

responsibility to do that and the second reason was I myself wasn't so sure if the books had some deeper

subtext to them if they were bound together in some way and I wanted I wanted to

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