ANGELA'S SYMPOSIUM 📖 Academic Study on Witchcraft, Paganism, esotericism, magick and the Occult

What if everything you think you know about the Witches' Sabbath is wrong?
The broomsticks, the Devil, the midnight orgies on remote mountaintops: this image has haunted the Western imagination for nearly six hundred years. But where did it actually come from? Was it an inquisitorial fantasy imposed from above? A distortion of real folk traditions of spirit-flight and nocturnal procession? A recycled conspiracy theory older than Christianity itself? Or something stranger than any of those?
In this video I trace the Sabbath from its origins in a handful of Alpine witch trials in the 1430s, through the great demonological texts of the early modern period, to its reinvention by romantics, feminists, and modern practitioners who know the image was constructed and use it anyway. I cover the Cohn vs Ginzburg debate that still organises the field, the Friulian benandanti who fought witches in their sleep, the antisemitic roots of the word "sabbath" itself, Margaret Murray's influential and almost entirely wrong witch-cult hypothesis, and why the Wheel of the Year is a twentieth-century invention. I also look at where the term "esbat" actually comes from (spoiler: not where you think), the connection between the Sabbath and the Wild Hunt, and what contemporary Italian folk practitioners make of all this today.
This is serious historiography made accessible, not dumbed down. If you want the real story behind one of the most persistent and misunderstood images in Western culture, this is it.

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00:00 Introduction: The Witches’ Sabbath Explained
01:41 What Is the Witches’ Sabbath?
04:61 The Alpine Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath
09:01 Demonology, the Malleus, and the Stakes of Witchcraft
15:01 Cohn vs Ginzburg: Who Created the Witches’ Sabbath?
22:36 Folk Traditions, Night Travel, and Regional Witch Beliefs
25:26 From Michelet to Murray: How Modern Witchcraft Reused the Sabbath
30:50 The Witches’ Sabbath Today: Politics, Film, and Online Witchcraft
30:06 Flying Ointments: What the Evidence Really Shows
38:49 Reading the Witches’ Sabbath as a Palimpsest
41:33 Celebrate your Sabbaths in Angela’s vibrant Inner Symposium

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Join me for a livestream interview with Cherry Parra, author of The Left Hand Path of Tarot, as we explore shadow, divination, witchcraft, and the transformative power of tarot through a left-hand path lens.

Cherry Parra is a Mexican left-hand path witch residing in Mexico. She majored in Hispanic literature and has an innate and inherited connection to occult practices, with her magic stemming from a matriarchal lineage of healers. Her great-grandmother was a witch and curandera, a traditional folk healer from Oaxaca in southern Mexico, whom people in the community would seek out for healing matters of body and spirit.

Cherry’s work centres on illuminating the uncomfortable truths many prefer to avoid. For her, the shadows are both a second home and profound teachers. She lives and maintains a closed spiritual practice in Mexico, where she reads tarot for a select international clientele that includes artists, creatives, and visionaries.

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Join me for a livestream interview with Dr Gal Sofer on the complex histories of Solomonic magic, learned magical literature, and the transmission of esoteric knowledge across Jewish, Christian, and Arabic-speaking contexts. We will explore what it means to call a magical tradition Solomonic, how texts, images, and ritual technologies travelled across languages and cultures, and why the history of magic is far more intricate than simple questions of authenticity or invention.

Dr Gal Sofer (MD, PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of the Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research focuses on the history of science, magic, and Kabbalah from the late Middle Ages to the present, in both Jewish and Christian cultures and across multiple languages. His work examines the transfer of knowledge between languages in Europe, the visualisation of scientific and religious knowledge, and the visual aspects of learned magical literature. His first book, Solomonic Magic: Methodology, Texts, and Histories, was published by Brill in 2025. His second book, Conjuring the Arab Magician: Intercultural Histories of Magic, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.

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The Green Man was invented in 1939.
Not the carvings. Those are real, they are medieval, and they have a fascinating Christian history. But the god, the named figure currently worshipped across contemporary Paganism as an ancient vegetation deity, was assembled in the twentieth century from a misread folklore article, a collapsed witch-cult theory, and a Jungian response to ecological anxiety.
This video tells that story properly, with the scholarship, the primary sources, and the reception history. No gatekeeping, no debunking energy. Just the real genealogy of a god we made ourselves.

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REFERENCES 📚
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Alchemy is far more than the myth of turning lead into gold. In this video, I explore how alchemy developed across Hellenistic Egypt, China, India, the Islamic world, and Europe as a rich tradition that united experiment, medicine, cosmology, and spiritual transformation. We look at major alchemical ideas, key historical figures, and the practices that shaped both occult traditions and the emergence of modern chemistry. This lecture also examines the major scholarly debates around alchemy, showing why historians no longer see it simply as failed science or pure mysticism, but as a complex way of understanding matter, knowledge, and the transformation of the self.

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RECOMMENDED READINGS 📖

REFERENCES 📚
(Check the related slide on screen)

MY SET-UP 🛠️
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00:00 Introduction | What This Alchemy Lecture Covers
02:07 History and Evolution of Alchemy | Origins, Practice, Spirituality and Science
05:22 What Is Alchemy? Practices, Texts, Roles and Transformation
07:00 Hellenistic Alchemy | Alexandria and the Origins of Western Alchemy
10:16 Hermes Trismegistus | Hermetic Foundations of Alchemy
13:54 Chinese Alchemy | Immortality, Cinnabar, Waidan and Neidan
17:28 Indian Rasayana | Mercury, Tantra and the Alchemical Body
20:58 Islamic Alchemy | Translation, Jābir ibn Hayyān and Arabic Science
24:35 Medieval and Early Modern European Alchemy | From Scholasticism to Chymistry
26:47 Renaissance Alchemy and Paracelsus | Medicine, Spagyric Art and Iatrochemistry
28:15 From Alchemy to Modern Chemistry | Boyle, Newton and Lavoisier
35:48 What Was Alchemy? Proto-Chemistry, Spiritual Practice or Both?
40:49 How Alchemy Shaped the Modern World | Conclusion
45:01 Join Dr Puca’s Community | Substack, Memberships and Updates

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