Do you have a favorite? Not meant to, but mostly the unloved ones, the unvisited ones, the cases that get dusty and ignored.

All the broken and shunned creatures.

Someone's got to care for them.

Who shall it be if not us?

Yes. Welcome to Roon soup, a weekly podcast about magic, culture and the very best new and old ideas for living in this world, coming to you from 43 degrees south on a small farm in deepest Tasmania.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host.

This week we welcome back to the show

occult historian public intellectual and fan favorite

Mitch Horowitz. We also welcome to the show as a first time guest

Richard Smoly. Richard is a writer, editor, and public speaker specializing in esoteric thought.

He is the author of numerous articles and books, including the classic and one of my personal

favorites, The Dice Game of Shiva. The original plan for the show was to do something

like a deep dive on the history of new thought as well as an examination of other quote unquote non-Western traditions that might look something like it.

And we definitely do get there, but in between me organizing this recording and the three of us jumping on the call,

James Randy finally died.

Mitch has written a piece about him that was certainly a lot more above the belt

than the one I would have written, but he nevertheless got some,

mostly idiotic pushback on it. So the show begins there and it sort of evolved consequently into a discussion on theories of mind

and how we critique them and all that kind of good stuff so enjoy. All right that's recording. Mitch Horowitz Richard Smoly

thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Nice one. Well as sort of, you know, chatting to you guys over email

arranging this episode, I want to have a discussion

about how we do history of thought and history of consciousness in Europe and or in the European tradition and then having

...