Hello, symposiasts! I’m Dr Angela Puca, on a livestream now – an unexpected livestream. And as you guys know, I’m a PhD and Religious Studies scholar, and this is your online resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, Paganism, Shamanism, and all things occult.

I can already see some people in chat, which is exciting, and some of my patrons, so I will just say hi in a minute. But just for those of you who don’t know, I’ve recently launched my website, drangelapuca.com, and my newsletter. So you will find the links in the description and in a pinned comment when this livestream ends. And also, for everybody really, if you like my content and you want me to keep going, I really appreciate any kind of support that you can give to the Symposium. Whether it be smashing the like button if you like my videos, because obviously, I wouldn’t want you to smash it if you didn’t, but hopefully, you do like some videos over here, and sharing the videos around and leaving comments. I always appreciate reading those. And if you have the means and can help the project financially, I would really appreciate it if you support it with a one-off PayPal donation, by joining Memberships, my Inner Symposium on Patreon, you can buy my merch, and you’ll find all the links to support my work in the description of all of my videos and in a pinned comment.

So, let’s start and look at the chat. So, first of all, thank you, thank you so much, Andrew. Andrew is also putting the links, for those of you who want to look up my website and my newsletter.

Hi Hank, nice to see you here. And nice to see you, Dave and Prometheus as well. I think that I saw João somewhere. Yeah, thank you for moderating the chat as well. And thank you, Gothic Extravaganza. And I’ve been called Dragon Angela lately for some reason. But yeah, it’d be interesting to know why that is. Is it because I wear this, or is it for some other reason? Because I made a video on Dragon Rouge. I’m curious, so let me know.

So some of you guys probably know that I was supposed to be interviewing Dr Amy Hale on Celtic spirituality and Celtic Heritage and interesting stuff like that. But unfortunately, it wasn’t possible, so we have rescheduled the chat for the… I think the 13th. But you can already see it rescheduled if you look at the live streams on my YouTube channel. So I hope that you can make it for that. So I’m afraid that you just have to be here with me, but at least, I think that I haven’t done a Q&A in some time, so perhaps it’s a good thing that you guys can get to ask me all of your questions. I cannot guarantee that I will be able to answer them all, but I will do my best to do so. So let me see if there are any questions.

So Dave is asking, ‘Tell us about all the ways you interact with folks other than YouTube.’

That’s a good question because I think that there are some people that want to… as you know, I tend to use YouTube and my social media as a way of delivering, in a free way for everybody, peer-reviewed and academic scholarship on the topics that we love. And sometimes, I have people and even patrons say, think that they’d like to get more of my opinion, more of my take, which I tend not to do that much, really, if at all. I can think of a few exceptions, but I tend to really deliver the content that is found in the research and in the peer-reviewed academic material. No, I don’t exclude the fact that, in the future, that methodology might change, but I have to say that at the moment, I get a deeper connection with my patrons, of course, on Patreon. That’s always the other thing that I recommend mostly; if people want to have more interaction with me and also with my community. So if it was just for financial support, I guess people would do it. What I like about Patreon is that we have built a great community, so it’s not just a way of supporting the channel financially; it’s also a way of being part of a community and interacting with me more. But now, for those who cannot join Patreon or do not want to join Patreon, there’s also another way to get a different type of interaction with me, and that’s the newsletter.

I started the newsletter because I think it was in the aftermath of the hack, probably you guys know that in April, my channel was hacked. My Facebook is still hacked, I’ve lost the page, but that’s another topic. And if you want to see me get really angry and frustrated, then you can ask about that. But YouTube, I have to say, was great in terms of how it dealt with the hack. Facebook, no, it wasn’t, it’s awful, and I recommend everybody to get off Facebook because it’s awful. But anyway, I’m digressing. So in the aftermath of the hack, I realized that I’m really building a community, and I’m, in a way, building in a foreign land because I really adore YouTube, and of all social media platforms, I was thinking about that the other day, YouTube is the one that I like the most, to be honest. It’s the one that really cares about creators, the only one that I can think of that cares about its creators. So, I’m very happy with YouTube and partially happy with other social media platforms. But you can never know what will happen in the future. I mean, YouTube might decide to shut down or, you know, become owned by Elon Musk. I don’t know anything can happen that can affect things in a negative way.

And so that just made me wonder, it’s like I’m building this amazing community that I really love and this project that I adore, and I spend almost every waking hour working on this project and on my academic projects. But I see it as related because then I am bringing my knowledge into Angela’s Symposium. But I’m building all of this, but you know, tomorrow or in 10 years, YouTube or any other social media platform might not exist, or you could lose them for whatever reason. So that’s why I really got on with the idea of getting my website, drangelapuca.com, up and running, and I created it myself, so if it’s not perfect, you know why. But via that, I also created the newsletter.

And with the newsletter, I don’t have the limitations of the algorithm. I don’t have the limitations of censorship, things that I can say, that I cannot say, which happens on all social media, including YouTube, because obviously, you need to follow the YouTube guidelines, whereas, on my newsletter, I only have to follow Angela’s guidelines, nobody else’s guidelines. So if you want to have a bit of my unfiltered version, my uncensored version, you can subscribe to my newsletter. You find the link in the description, and I will add it in a pinned comment. You’ll find it in the pinned comments of my videos as well. Yeah, definitely sign up for my newsletter because it’s fun. I’ve only released two issues of my newsletter, one of which was yesterday, so I still feel like I’m trying to figure out how it works. So I hope that if you are subscribed, let me know in the here in the comments, how did you find it? There are some patrons that have given me feedback on our Discord server, but every feedback is welcome because I’m really just trying to figure it out myself. So yeah, those are the ways to interact with me more.

Let me see if there’s any other question.

Oh yes, I like that song.

Oh, that’s an interesting question, very serendipitous. Whether I’ve studied Allan Kardec and Spiritismo. I’ve actually recently recorded a lecture on that specifically. I’ve filmed a video course for a Brazilian guy who has his own YouTube channel. I can’t remember the name of the YouTube channel, but his name is Fabio Santos. So the last lecture of the course was on Allan Kardec and the Espiritismo. So that’s interesting to ask that. So I have studied that to give lectures on it, but not in terms of my academic research. But again, when it comes to academic research, for every academic, it’s going to be extremely limited because academically speaking, you can only research very narrow and specific topics. But thanks to Angela’s Symposium and also my teaching, I get to expand more my research horizons, not just to what ends up in academic peer-reviewed publications, but also on the channel.

Oh, I can see Nick in the chat. Hi, Nick. You love the PGM video. Oh, that’s great. It wasn’t particularly successful. I still haven’t figured out why certain videos are successful, like the Inanna – Ishtar video really went great, and the PGM, which I thought would be particularly interesting for people, and it didn’t really do that well. So go figure. I haven’t figured out the algorithm, and that’s why you need to sign up for my newsletter and maybe certain things will show up in your feeds, and others won’t on social media, but you will always get my newsletter, hopefully if everything is working okay. But yeah, I thought that the PGM video would be interesting to people because I often find that in the community of practitioners there’s a lot of discussion about syncretism and whether that’s legit or whether it is valid, and these terms tend to be used in the discourses, that are created within the community of practitioners.

And I find it interesting because, especially on the other side of people that are not particularly in favor of syncretism, it seems like they are trying to sometimes, not all the times, but there’s a view of traditions that is pure, like that you have a tradition that is pure and is that way. And so if you syncretize it, you make it less authentic or less pure or something along those lines. And I find it interesting because magic, ever since I can remember, it’s always been extremely syncretic. And in fact, religion is also very syncretic. So probably every cultural product and religious, whether it be religious, magic-related, spiritual, they’re always very syncretic. That’s why I think in religious studies, we are trying to use methodologies that are able to capture that fluidity because this is particularly prevalent with certain magic-practicing traditions like paganism, for instance, that I, that as you know, I research. But it was actually evidenced even in more in the Abrahamic religions, for instance, in Christianity, I think, it was a Strenski who wrote something about provisional belief and the difference between the lived religion and institutional religion, which is interesting because if you don’t look at what the dogma says, but you look at what people do and what people believe, you will find that not only then it tends to differ quite significantly from the dogma because everybody reshapes it in their own way. They are very often elements of syncretism that wouldn’t neatly align with that specific religion, and so you find really the elements that you may find in other religions that are not dogmatic and institutionalized as well. I think it’s probably more prevalent in non-dogmatic and non-institutionalized religions and spiritualities, but you still find some of that in dogmatic and institutionalized religions. It depends, of course, to different extents. I think that in Christianity, especially in Catholicism, you find a lot of that.

So, do you use Facebook for messaging? You really want to get me angry asking about Facebook, don’t you? So, at the moment, I still have an active page on Facebook. Well, there’s also the page that was hacked and that Facebook has no intention to give me back or take down because they are absolutely incapable of doing the very basics of their jobs. But yeah, the page that I do have ownership of is called Dr Angela Puca. I still have it on because many people have asked me to, and I still need to be on Facebook because that’s how I connect with family members. So instead of getting lots of friend requests on my personal Facebook, I just decided to reactivate that page. But I just keep it there for people that are on Facebook, and I hate every bit of Facebook. So, I hope that that answers your question. So Facebook is not the best way to reach out to me; I’d rather you reach out to me in other ways. Instagram could be, I guess it’s still Meta, but so far it’s been better than Facebook. Everything is better than Facebook.

When can we expect episode four of the Adorno debate?

Yeah, hopefully soon. I have to reach out to Justin to see when we can do that. Even at the… you guys know that I met Filip, Justin, and Zevi at the ESSWE conference in Malmö, Sweden, which was great. A great experience. And there was also… he’s not a PhD student, he’s a master’s student, I think, but it was a student from the University of Amsterdam that reached out to me at the conference in person and said, “Oh, I watched your debate with Dr Justin Sledge on Adorno.” And it was very interesting. He was siding with Justin, by the way, but that’s fine. I always find it interesting how Justin and I are almost literally polar opposites in terms of our views. There are things where we agree, but on most things, we tend to have very opposite views. But I think that it’s great to have a friend and somebody that you respect that has different views from yours because otherwise, it’s boring. And also, I think that we really need to do more of that. My impression is that closing yourself up in an echo chamber where everybody agrees with you, I don’t think that it’s a great thing, to be honest. Whereas finding somebody that you respect and admire that has different views gives you a great chance to explore your views better. And in some cases, you may change your mind. In other cases, you can even cooperate with what you thought before, but you still have to go through different avenues to make your argument and to also challenge yourself by interacting with somebody who is different from you. So I think that’s great.

Oh, thank you! I love that you guys are showing some love to the PGM video because I was feeling a bit bad about it because it didn’t do well.

Are you interested in Marxist class analysis of esotericism, paganism, witchcraft, and your quote?

I think that Justin would be better than me at that. You probably know that Justin is a Marxist and he uses Marxist methodology. I think that it is interesting. I don’t agree with that kind of methodology. I don’t agree with historical materialism. I think that it’s reductivist. I think that you reduce everything to one aspect, one perspective – well, not one perspective, but one level of how things manifest. And the way I think about things generally is that every time that you analyze a complex phenomenon, when you try to pin it down to one answer, one method to analyze it or one specific lens that you interpret everything by, to me, it just is just the definition of not really getting the whole picture. But that’s me, probably. I prefer more holistic methodologies, or you know, you cannot always find holistic methodologies and every methodology is skewed in one way or another. But at least, using more methodologies, and then you look at things from different viewpoints, and then when you try and understand how the different points of view and the different perspectives can contribute to your understanding of that phenomenon that you’re trying to understand. In that case, that’s fine. But I think that it’s very interesting. The Marxist analysis is very interesting.

So let me see if there are other questions.

So, what are my thoughts on Rupert Sheldrake and his work?

I’ve had a lecture for my Magus level patrons on that, on ‘The Science Delusion’ by Rupert Sheldrake. So, if you are interested in that, if you join as a Magus and higher tier, you can still have access to that lecture and all the previous lectures. They are always accessible for all the Magus and higher tiers on Patreon. So, I think that it’s interesting to challenge the dogmas in science. Whether I agree with him or not, I think that I suspend my judgment on that because I’m not in Natural Science. I’m an academic, but I’m not an academic in Natural Science. I’m an academic in Religious Studies, and I feel like I don’t have enough expertise or information to have a very adamant stance on what Rupert Sheldrake says.

What I think, though, is that he gives very interesting points for discussion. Whether you agree with them or not, I think that there is some truth in what he says, to be honest. But I tend to suspend my judgment. I’m not like totally in favour of what he says or totally against what he says. I think that those dogmas of science that he describes are things that need to be challenged. In case those are indeed the assumptions that are the basis of science, I guess that some scientists might say, ‘Well, those are not really dogmas that science works upon, but it’s more like all the evidence suggests that those things are the correct starting points for scientific investigations.’ But on that, there is a bit of a debate, so I think it would be very interesting to have a scientist on the channel to discuss those things, to be honest. I even thought about bringing my sister on, probably not on the channel but on my Patreon because my sister is a scientist, by the way. But yeah, I think those are definitely dogmas that need to be part of the discourse, so it’s important to ask questions. That’s one of the things that I always want you guys to get from what I say on the channel, generally speaking.

I often say that I don’t believe in the truth. I see the truth as a metaphysical concept, a religious stance, something that you have faith in. So, I don’t believe in that personally. I think it’s something that you have to believe in. Obviously, the truth and the facts are two different concepts. That’s why to me, the truth is something that is quite metaphysical and religious. If we want to talk about what is a shared reality that is very easy to give evidence of, then I would call that fact. A fact that is part of our intersubjective experience. I personally struggle with the concept of Truth with the concept of objectivity. I think that they don’t really take into account the reason that there’s any such thing as objectivity, but there are facts. So, there are definitely facts, and for me, that is more the intersubjective field of experience that we have. So, I would still not call it objective. So, I feel like it conflicts with historical materialism as well.

So, hi Hank, thank you for your donation. Dr. Puca, there are times when you need to have an Italian rant ready to hit Doctor Sledge with, just saying.

Okay, that’s fine. Next time that I disagree, I will start just talking in Italian, you know. Guys, I forgot – you just reminded me that when I was in Malmö, something very special happened. I was part of the foundation of the very first Italian academic association for the study of esotericism. So, it was fun. I mean, it was very interesting because we also signed this piece of paper, which was just normal paper, and we were joking about the fact that it was this foundation document. And I was asked by other scholars, ‘Why don’t you do a YouTube channel in Italian?’ because I’m Italian, and there are scholars in Italy that say there’s nothing like what you do in Italian or in Italy. Why don’t you start a YouTube channel in Italian? And since they told me that on that special occasion in Sweden, I thought about that for a few days afterwards, and then I gave up. Well, I think that theoretically, it would be great to have a YouTube channel in Italian, but in practice, I don’t think that I would be able to sustain it because having this channel is already a full-time thing, and unfortunately, I don’t think that with a YouTube channel in Italian, I would get the support needed to keep it going. So, I’m very honoured and grateful that my Patreon community and the members of the YouTube channel and everybody who sustains the project financially are there, but I think it would be very difficult to get support in Italy for a YouTube channel in Italian. So, I don’t know, it would be great in theory, but I’m not sure I have the time, and I’m not sure it would be sustainable.

But there is one thing that is exciting, and we need to thank one of the patrons who is in the chat here, and that’s Dave. He’s been working on getting my podcast up and running because some of you may know, but most of you probably don’t, that I started the podcast in 2020. I only posted the intro and then I just abandoned it because I realized that I honestly didn’t have the time to also do podcasts. And then Dave, but also other patrons in the past, were saying, ‘Why don’t you just use the audios from your video?’ because I also have very long interviews and long live streams that they would do well as podcasts, and that’s a good idea. And it is a way of repurposing my hard work and the content that I’ve created. But even the fact of extracting the audio from a video singularly and then uploading and adding all the information, all of that, it’s really a time commitment that I cannot afford at the moment. And so, Dave is working on creating software to extract all the audio files from my videos and upload them on my podcast.

Yeah, shout out to Dave, and thank you so much for all the help that you’re giving. I also gave you a shout-out in the newsletter, and also Andrew, of course, is a constant shout-out for everything that he does for the channel. And thank you also to João and Edward for moderating, but I have to say Andrew does a lot for this channel. So, yesterday when I sent out my newsletter, I also put a link to the very first interview that he and I did when I hit one thousand subscribers on YouTube. And it was interesting because, you know, I see him as my first Patron. There was somebody else who signed up right before him, but then he left. So for me, he’s still the first Patron. So yeah, I’m really glad that I have a great Patreon community, and lovely to see Hank here. He’s always helped immensely with my project.

So let me see if there are other comments. Sorry, I meant other questions.

You mentioned doing a Latin course. Would you consider doing a Greek course with a focus on being able to study texts like Iamblicus or the PGM (Papyri Graecae Magicae) and so on?

That’s a good idea, and again, this is something that I revealed in my newsletter, yesterday, the one that I sent out yesterday. I’ve been thinking about launching video courses. That’s another thing that I’d really love to do and structure properly. But I have to tell you that if I do that, I’m a tough teacher. I know I would want to assign certain tests and exercises so that I can see whether people are progressing or not. So, I wonder whether people would like that tough teacher approach.

Yes, the ideas that I talked about in my newsletter yesterday were one, on a course on Latin. I know that there are some of my patrons that are interested in learning Latin, and you probably know that I’ve studied Latin and ancient Greek growing up, long before I knew any English, to be honest. I did classical studies growing up, so they decided that languages were more useful than English for some reason. It’s kind of funny because I’ve studied many languages properly at either university or in the lyceum, the high school, the classical High School in Italy, but English I’ve learned by myself. I think that I’ve learned English via other languages actually because when I was studying Sanskrit and Tibetan, there was no grammar and no dictionary in Italian. So, I had the dictionary Sanskrit English, so I had to also then translate from English to Italian. And the same was for Tibetan. And I remember that my professor of Tibetan said that the course wouldn’t allow us to learn Tibetan but it would allow us to learn English because of that. And because Tibetan is so incredibly complicated, you really properly learn it when you go there and spend a lot of time in Tibet, especially if it is the modern Tibetan.

I took courses, both in classical Tibetan and modern Tibetan. At the time, I was more interested in classical Tibetan, that’s why I also took Sanskrit because people who are more interested in the modern world would take Tibetan and Chinese. You had two Asian languages that you could choose, so I chose Sanskrit and Tibetan because clearly, I was more interested in the classical side, in the Buddhist and tantric and yoga and all those kind of traditions that I wanted to study, especially the ones that had some magic because that’s always been my main interest. But anyway, I’m digressing, as I often do, and then Andrew will tell me off because of that.

So, I was thinking about doing a course on Latin, but how can I make it interesting for people that are interested in historicism? I thought, well, we could learn the grammar and all the grammatical rules, the conjugation, and the declensions, and try to translate texts from the esoteric sphere. I guess the challenge will be to find texts that are at different levels and that are somewhat similar in terms of a time period because Latin evolves over time as well. But it would be an interesting challenge, and it would take quite a lot of time to structure that course. But I think it would be very cool if I managed to put it together and launch it. I think it would be a very, very interesting course, and I could do that in ancient Greek as well, as you said. Yeah, you gave me another idea. The problem is that I have too many ideas and too little time, but yeah, those are two great ideas. Thank you for that.

Another course that I was thinking of launching is one on Italian witchcraft because I don’t make many videos on the channel on Italian witchcraft. I don’t think it’s a worldwide interest, but I also know that there are many people, with Italian heritage, in English-speaking countries that don’t have access to authentic material because there isn’t much of it, to begin with, and what there is, is in Italian. I think that sometimes this shocks English speakers, but it’s the truth. So, I thought that to bridge that linguistic gap, I could also give a course on Italian witchcraft where we also cover books that are in Italian and the information that is in Italian and is not available in English. I think that when I moved to the UK, even I had, slightly, the assumption that everything that is in other languages would be translated into English, but it turns out that it’s not true. In fact, I had read books in Italian that were translated from French that have never been translated into English, and that’s a pity because there’s a lot of anthropology of religion, especially in Shamanism and even magic practices and paganism that is not translated in English at all. So, you can read it in French, and sometimes it’s translated even in German and Italian, but not in English. That surprised me, so I guess that I was also under the assumption that everything would be translated into English, but it’s not like that, guys. So, that gives me the opportunity to translate things for you because of the possibility of accessing different languages.

Let me see if there are other questions.

So, Draska’s Mike, thank you so much for your donation. Would you consider doing it? Oh yeah, that’s the one that I’ve just replied to. Yes, so the answer is yes, I would consider that, and it would be a great idea. I just really need the time and the means to do that, but that would be a great idea. I think it would be just great to structure it as I said, in a way where you study grammar and then you see the application of the grammar in text that you guys are interested in. So, I would have to select quite a few texts at different levels, which is what they do even when I studied Latin. When I was studying Latin, they would still select texts from Latin authors, but some were simpler, and others were more complicated. So, there were some that had a lot of first declensions, for instance, and those were the ones that you would translate first, and then when we moved to the second and the third declensions, you start translating things that are more complicated.

So yeah, I wonder whether I will be able to find texts that are at different levels of grammatical complication. That’s a good challenge, but let me know, guys, if you would be interested in these courses and if you would take them.

Hank says if we take the Latin course, can we bribe our way to an A?

No, I already give lectures to my Magus and higher-tier patrons, but in that case, it’s just giving a talk and then having a discussion with the community. Whereas if I were to do this video course, then you would see the dark side. Well, I would want people to progress. I think that it’s very different to give a lecture and have a discussion, but if you want to learn a language, you have to put in an effort, and at least my experience within the UK is that the system is very different from Italy. But yeah, I would be tough, so take that into account when you let me know whether you’d be interested or not.

I love ancient languages and I would love to learn more and then apply them to esoteric studies.

Ancient languages are very fascinating, and as I said, I studied them growing up, which is bizarre, I guess, for most people, especially in English-speaking countries. When I was a pre-teen studying Latin and Greek every day, I wasn’t particularly happy about it. Well I’ve always loved studying but it was really a lot because every day we had to translate – it’s called “aversion,” in Italian it’s called “versione.” So the closest thing that I find in English is “version,” so we had one in Latin and one in ancient Greek to translate every single day. It was a lot, and then we also had all the other topics and things that we had to study, like philosophy, literature, chemistry, and all the other things. It was a lot, but thank you.

That’s good to know. If I know that there is interest, I would definitely design those courses because even before I launch them, it would take a lot of time just to design them and to gather the different texts that I want to include that we can translate. Then I have to look up good resources in English as well because when it comes to Latin and ancient Greek, obviously, I studied that growing up and it was on Italian course-material. But in terms of dictionaries and grammar I would have to find something that I like, and I think is structured in a proper way.

Let me see if there are any other questions.

I hope that you guys are not disappointed that we didn’t have the chat with Dr Hale, but we will make up for that.

Ngo Nfinda, says, “I would be interested in Italian folk magic.”

Yeah, that’s something I think would be interesting for a lot of people. For me, that would be an easier one to put together compared to the ancient language one. Now, that’s more complicated. The one on Italian witchcraft, it would be a bit easier. It’s just that I know that people will want to learn how to do it as well as the history. But I think that I can deliver all the information, and if people want to use it to practice, then it’s done.

Ficino would definitely be included. I mean, how can you not include Ficino, if possible, especially if you’re interested in magic?

So, let me see if there are questions that I’ve missed.

In regards to Christian magic, the monks of Mount Athos claimed Hitler to be their personal protector yet stalled his men. What could have happened if they had sent priests and icons to Berlin?”

I have no idea about this. I’m sorry about that.

Thank you. Sanskrit is easy. It’s all Yoda talk. George Lucas doesn’t have a creative bone in his body.

Well, if you think that’s the case with Sanskrit, you will think the same about Latin because the order of things, the nouns, the verbs, and the adjectives, those are different in Latin as well. So, that would apply. In fact, you probably know that there used to be this idea that Latin and Greek came from Sanskrit, that all the Indo-European languages came from Sanskrit, and that Sanskrit was basically the root language of Indo-European languages. That idea has been discredited. I think that between the late 19th century and the early 20th century, everybody was obsessed with finding the most ancient root of this and that, and sometimes things were misinterpreted to try and answer that question and that urge they had in that time period. So, I think the same happened with Sanskrit. But having said that, if you look at Sanskrit and then at Greek and Latin, I swear that it feels like there’s an evolution there. At least anecdotally, it does feel like they come from Sanskrit because you have the simple example that I can give you is the terms “father” and “mother.” In Sanskrit, it’s “mata-pita” and then you have in Greek, it’s “mētēr-patēr,” and in Latin, it’s “mater” and “pater.” When you have more vowels added in, it really sounds like it comes from there, and then you have more vowels added in.

That’s a simple example, but there are many others that came to mind when I was studying Sanskrit. There were also claims from people that are in linguistic studies that if you learn Sanskrit, then it will be easier to study any other language. But these are sort of maxims that Sanskrit professors want you to believe. I’m not sure if that is true, but definitely, to learn Sanskrit, you need to be skilled enough that it will probably be easier to learn other languages, that’s for sure. But that’s probably correlation more than causation. So that’s your approach to magic.

Does it presuppose a secular philosophical framework, or might magic infuse your academic work? I need to drink before answering this.

So the answer is no to both, I guess. If you are asking whether I believe in magic or not, well, you know that I don’t share my beliefs. But let’s say that I believed in magic; it doesn’t mean that my academic work is infused with magic. No, because I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, and I’m not trying to say anything bad about you, LM. I’m absolutely not. It’s just very common unless you do academic research. You wouldn’t know. I didn’t know either before I started my PhD. So I think it’s fundamentally a misunderstanding of how academic research works. And that’s why I always emphasize that there’s a massive difference between an academic that writes books, even commercial books, and an academic that writes peer-reviewed academic scholarship. There’s a massive difference, and it’s not in the person. It’s in the study because that has a specific methodology. So when you do a study that is academic, it doesn’t really matter what your beliefs are because to do a study, you have to use a specific methodology, and methodologies don’t really take into account whether you believe in something or not.

What you can do is perhaps choose a methodology that you think is best suited to answering your research questions. And what could affect perhaps your research is, for instance… Well, I was just thinking about what we were saying earlier about Marx’s theory and historical materialism. I think historical materialism, for instance, it would be impossible to use that methodology to study contemporary paganism.” And that’s because when you do an academic study, your objective is to answer research questions, and these research questions want to gather accurate knowledge about the subject of your study. So to gather accurate knowledge, you need to use the methodology that has proven to be most useful in gathering knowledge that is accurate at that given moment in time, given the information that you have at your disposal and the means of data collection that you can employ. So it doesn’t really matter if you believe in magic or you don’t believe in magic. If the study is academic, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t affect your results because you’re going to use a methodology that then has to pass through peer review, which means other experts in your field will have to evaluate whether your methodology, your data analysis, your data collection, and all the processes were done in a way in a correct way. And by correct, I mean in a way that has been proven to lead to the most accurate knowledge that we can get at a given time, given the information we have. So then it doesn’t really matter.

So, whereas if you, if we were to talk about me doing something that is not academic, like writing a book that is for a commercial publisher or a novel, I definitely want to write a novel; it’s still in my bucket list. But my novel will definitely not be academic, even though it is written by an academic, because it won’t follow that methodology. It will follow my heart, and there are going to be also my beliefs in that, but that’s more of an artistic endeavor.

So I think there’s a huge difference between a work that is academic, whether it be historical or anthropological or whatever the discipline may be, and a work that is perhaps even written by an academic or a scholar but that’s for practitioners, for people that practice that specific tradition. So, the objective is different. If I write for practitioners, the objective is to write something that they can use in their practice, to give them inspiration, to give them ideas or rituals, or whatever it is that I want to do, but something that is, in a sense, quite practical.

With academic work, I want to deliver accurate knowledge, and then there are cases where you can still use that knowledge for your practice, but that’s not the direct objective and aim of that kind of work, if that makes sense.

What’s happening? What’s Dragon Child? What am I missing?

So I think that academic work tends to always have a secular perspective in that it doesn’t endorse any specific religion. If you’re a good scholar and you apply proper methodology, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in what you study.

What’s happening? What’s Dragon Child? What am I missing?

So I think that academic work tends to always have a secular perspective in that it doesn’t endorse any specific religion. If you’re a good scholar and you apply proper methodology, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in what you study.

What’s happening? What’s Dragon Child? What am I missing?

So I think that academic work tends to always have a secular perspective in that it doesn’t endorse any specific religion. If you’re a good scholar and you apply proper methodology, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in what you study.

Oh, the book name, okay, I get it.

Let me see if there are other questions.

Any books you recommend on hysteria or personality disorder versus Spiritualism/Spiritism? What about Italian spiritism in general? Grazie.

On Italian spiritism, do you read Italian? If you read Italian, oh, what’s his name? Now I’m blanking out. I have a paper that I gave at the University of Pisa on him, Fulvio Rendhell, yes, and there’s also a paper on that if you’re interested in my YouTube channel. So, that’s Italian spiritism. There’s a YouTube video where I recorded my research paper at a conference. But when it comes to hysteria, personality disorders, and spiritualism, no, I don’t think that I have any recommendations at the moment, I’m afraid. I would have to look it up. I’m sorry.

Do you have any personal reservations against teaching Italian witchcraft as a practice? Do you feel that is something that you would have permission to do from your informants?

That’s a good question. Yes, so one of the things that you have to do, we’ve talked a lot about academic research, one of the things that I haven’t touched on at least not on this occasion, but I have in the past, is that one of the things that are fundamental is getting ethical approval. If you don’t get ethical clearance on your research, your data is invalidated, and you cannot use it. So with the data collection that I did with my research, everything, so all my informants gave me permission to use that material and that included the publication of my thesis. So I would assume that it’s already in the public sphere. Well, not already, it’s on embargo, but because I’m publishing the book, I’m about to publish the book on that. But I was also thinking of writing another book on Italian witchcraft that is perhaps not academic and that collects all the things, the practical things, that I have learned on the field and that perhaps people can use. And when you say whether you need the permission of my informants, I have the permission of my informants for everything that I’ve learned during research. If it is about, if your question is about closed practices, open practices, or the kind of conversation, this is a very recent conversation, the one on open and closed practices. And with Italian witchcraft, it’s complicated because if you have read my paper on that, there’s the difference between the old generation and the new generation of senatorial Italian witchcraft. It’s not Stregheria, by the way – for everybody listening who still thinks Stregheria is Italian witchcraft, it is not. I have a video on that, and I will stop here because that’s another topic that gets me angry, and I’m trying to be nice and positive over here. Stregheria is not Italian witchcraft; it’s an Italian-American tradition.

So, the actual Italian witchcraft… you know, the witches are called Segnatori, which is the male plural, or Senatrici, which is the female plural, and the key practice is called Segnature. So, the old generation was not very inclined to divulge these practices, whereas the new generation is much more open about sharing these practices and allowing people to practice them. So, I don’t think that whether it’s an open practice or a closed practice, I don’t think that you can very easily answer that, to be honest, because part of the reason why the older generation of Segnatori was not keen on talking about these practices is that they would be persecuted. So now that witchcraft is a bit more accepted in the general culture, you can see that they are coming out with that and having Facebook groups and even talking on social media about these kinds of practices. So I guess that you could also speculate that it wasn’t bound by secrecy necessarily. There are certain things that are bound by secrecy, not the practice in and of itself, but there are, for instance, the words of power, those are bound by secrecy, and they can only be passed down at specific times. But I wouldn’t see that necessarily as a closed practice anyway because there are segnature that people can do and others that can’t. So, it’s more about what are the things that you can do and what are the other things that you cannot do, rather than as a whole it’s a closed practice or it’s an open practice. It’s a bit more complicated. I think that the whole conversation about open and closed practices tends to be not nuanced, to be honest.

Let me see if there are other…

Okay, so it was what you meant, closed versus open practices. Maybe they would be okay with you writing about it, maybe they would be less okay with you teaching to others.

I don’t think so, to be honest. I think you’re referring to cultural appropriation, and it’s not really something that is talked about in Italy, maybe just in relation to… I think the concept of cultural appropriation in Italy was imported from the US, so it tends to be related to those conversations around the Native Americans, rather than appropriating – because that’s our culture. I mean, that’s our own indigenous culture. So, as an Italian, it belongs to me as well. And what do you know, maybe I do come from a family of Segnatrici.

As a long-time magical practitioner, there are certain practices that I do not discuss with others, even though I’m in it. Well, that’s totally to be respected.

I think there are reasons to be secretive about certain things, and in other cases, secrecy can have reasons that go beyond the esoteric practice per se.

So, I think we’re drawing to a close.

Do you have an interest in “Jarry/ ‘pathophysics“? Yes, yeah, that’s very fascinating. I really need to make a video on that as well.

So yeah, I guess that we can wrap it up here, and thank you, everybody, for coming over to this conversation. I’m sorry that we couldn’t have the expected interview, but I hope that you found the Q&A interesting nonetheless. And let me know in the comments what video topics you would like to see on the channel.

So, if you watched up until this point, whether you are live now or whether it’s on-demand after the video has streamed, please let me know in the comments what kind of topics you’d like to see in future videos. I can’t promise that I will do all of them, but if I see that there is a topic that a lot of you guys really want to see and get many likes, for instance, then I would definitely do that.

Oh, this is lovely, thank you so much. That’s lovely, thank you so much.

Thank you all, guys, for being here, and again, please sign up for my newsletter. I hope that you will find it fun and give me some time to develop it because I’m still figuring it out. You’ll find all the links in the description, and I really hope that you will also consider supporting my work in any of the ways that, again, you find in the description. The one that I recommend the most is always Patreon because it also builds our community. But any kind of financial support really helps this project going. And if you cannot help in that way, you can also help by sharing my videos everywhere you can, everywhere there might be somebody interested in studying esotericism, magic, and paganism from an academic point of view. So, thank you all, guys, for being here, and it really means the world to me that we have this community. It’s difficult for me to express it in words, but thank you all so much for being here and for every like, every share, every support that you give me. It really means everything. So, thank you all for being here and stay tuned for all the academic fun.

Bye for now.

Streamed 21 Jul 2023