BONUS Episode: The Only Dogma I Like Is the Movie

Two people who left religion keep finding its shape in the places that promised to be the opposite of it. The rule of three is penal substitutionary atonement wearing a pointed hat — a claim stated as a law of the universe, binding on everyone, held in fact by one tradition. This is an episode about authority: who takes it, what they point at to justify it, and what's left of a practice once nobody is allowed to tell you yours is wrong.

The cup is a skull. The top is popped off and it's full of blood, held up in two hands, and the deck's creator says the Suit of Cups is there to honor the many days he spent in the 1980s reading horror paperbacks. An ace is the pure potential of its suit, so this is the undiluted thing itself: feeling, value, relationship, everything a heart can hold — served in a severed head.

What starts as a seasonal pull turns into ninety minutes on dogma. Matt gets his first piece of hate mail and is delighted by it ("I got called the beast"). Jaye Anne names the mechanism underneath the purity policing she watches in six-hundred-thousand-member witch groups, and lands somewhere harder than either of them planned: that spiritual colonization is always the first colonization, and the line gets crossed the moment you tell somebody their practice is wrong.

In this episode

• A dog named Gerald, who is audible to nobody but Matt
• Finding the Mórrígan by way of The Craft and a trip to Savannah
• Why the tarot's correspondences are all made up, and why that costs them nothing
• Todd Alcott's Horror Tarot, and last year's Southern Haunts Oracle
• Occultists who still believe the devil is going to get them
• Purity policing, hex discourse, and the rule of three as universal law
• Jaye Anne's dream of a fourteenth-dimensional being, and what it asked about her shoelace
• Damien Echols on death row with nothing but a cell, a body and a practice — and why those practices fell apart the moment he got out
• Food insecurity, a Pizza Hut buffet in blue bins, and learning to cook by substitution
• Belief as a tool you pick up, use, and put back on the shelf

Lines that landed

• The rule of three to me is the same thing as penal substitutionary atonement. It is stated as if it is true for everyone. It is a principle of how the universe works. But as it turns out, it's really only the Wiccans that think that. — Matt
• And the only dogma that I like is the movie. — Matt
• But where you cannot go is saying, but your practice is wrong. Ever. — Jaye Anne
• The first assault of colonization is the spiritual colonization is always first. And that is the first line that is crossed. — Jaye Anne
• Do you consider the tension in your shoelace to be of consequence to you? — Jaye Anne, quoting a fourteenth-dimensional being
• You don't always need to do magic. You don't always need to work with spirits. Sometimes you just need to work. — Matt
• If anybody tells you that you're supposed to see a certain thing and you don't, you're not doing it wrong. The more you're worried about doing it wrong, the harder it's gonna be for you to let go and just let stuff come. — Matt
• It was when I learned to stop trying that stuff really started to work. — Matt
• I haven't made a ton of money doing magic. I found love before I did magic. But it's that peace and groundedness and like I'm gonna be okayness. That's the power to me. — Matt

Referenced

• Todd Alcott's Horror Tarot — the deck Matt pulled from
• Southern Haunts Oracle — last year's spooky deck, by his friend Stacey
• Damien Echols — Life After Death, High Magick, and The Alchemy of the Broken Blade
• Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs — and the regional herbal Matt still wants for the Mississippi Delta
• Dogma (1999)
• The Craft
• The Weston A. Price Foundation's litigation over soy protein in prison food

What we left unresolved

Whether there is such a thing as a wrong choice. Matt won't say there isn't, but he won't define one either — every attempt collapses into enumerating exception categories until you've twisted yourself into a pretzel and no longer know what's real. Which is, more or less, the thing he left religion over.

Chapters

1. 0:00 — Welcome, and we're leaving all this in
2. 3:07 — Gerald, and whether Magic Audio can hear him
3. 4:53 — Not a funny kick. A horror kick.
4. 6:16 — The Craft, Savannah, and finding the Mórrígan
5. 7:41 — Who gets to write a culture's history
6. 12:24 — The correspondences are all made up, and that's fine
7. 21:59 — The pull: Ace of Cups, a skull full of blood
8. 24:18 — Todd Alcott's Horror Tarot, and a suit built from 80s paperbacks
9. 29:28 — Terrified of the supernatural since childhood
10. 34:37 — The occultists who still believe in the devil
11. 38:12 — When online community meant showing up at the same time
12. 40:35 — Purity policing, and our first hater
13. 42:22 — The rule of three is penal substitutionary atonement
14. 44:39 — Nobody gets to tell you your practice is wrong
15. 47:29 — The fourteenth-dimensional being and the tension in your shoelace
16. 51:25 — You are already personalizing it
17. 54:00 — Peace and groundedness is the power
18. 56:21 — Damien Echols: a cell, a mind, and a practice
19. 58:47 — Blue bins of Pizza Hut, and thirty pizzas at Pizza Inn
20. 65:15 — Learning to substitute, and learning herbs
21. 69:34 — I want the principles, not the laundry list
22. 73:41 — Belief is a tool you pick up and put down
23. 78:31 — Is there really such a thing as a wrong choice?
24. 81:35 — Was there a through line?
25. 88:29 — Where to find us

~1h29 · One moment: Matt realising mid-episode that a Halloween conversation pulled from a horror deck was scheduled to air in December, and Jaye Anne saying the obvious thing — make it a bonus.