Two of my Recent Interviews that Discuss Gnosticism, Stargazer & Vampires

An old picture of me when I used to work for 'The Master' in El Paso as a guardian for his demons, back in the eighties
A bit late, but we are in the timeless realm of the Virtual Alexandria (and Strawberry Fields forever!). You can find my second interview at The H20 Network with the Tethys of Podcasting herself, Dia Nunez. Our first half dealt with the Divine Feminine in Gnosticism-- Mary Magdalene, Sophia, Barbelo, Norea, Eve, and all her avatars, ranging from where she is found in the Nag Hammadi to where legendry has misplaced her throughout history. Our second part we sizzled by roasting the modern Gnostic/Occult/Esoteric movement. Let's face it-- Orthodoxy ignores us when just years ago we frightened it. We are becoming a New Age joke, and rightly so. This is a call to reformation before we're buried under a sea of self-important misinformation. We had some good questions from callers and chat-room peoples; and Tessa Dick joined us towards the end. Heresy shouldn't be this much fun!

Listen to it at the link provided, at our main player, us just down below:






Also, here is an excerpt from my interview in the latest issue of The Gnostic Journal 4 . The tables were turned, and Andrew drilled me goodly. And yes, in correspondence with the writing of Alan Moore and Stephan Hoeller found in this issue, there was roasting of the modern Esoteric movement once again.  In both interview, we do eventually discuss Stargazer and vampires. If you ever cared about how I came into Gnosticism and Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, here is part of it:


APS: You're best known as the host of Aeon Byte, formerly Coffee, Cigarettes & Gnosis, an Internet radio program devoted to Gnosticism. How long has that been going?
MC: It will be five years this May. So I've been at it for five years.
APS: How many shows have you packed in in that time?
MC: If you include the Schroedinger's Diary series with Anthony Peake, and some other lateral stuff that I've done, I would say at least, at this point, over 200 shows, and I feel I have just scratched the surface. That's the exciting and frustrating thing.
APS: So you're planning to go on for a good while yet.
MC: I have no idea. I never planned to do more than eight shows when I started. I never planned to go more than a year. Every time I tell myself it's time to hang up the hat more interesting revelations keep happening.
APS: So it was meant to be eight shows at the beginning. Why did you decide to do an Internet radio program?
MC: Well, at the time I had just started delving into Gnosticism. I had found myself, in a story that I don't want to give too much detail to, excommunicated from a Gnostic church—believe it or not, but it did happen! I also found myself under some sort of weird on-hold for esoteric secret organisations, and I said, "Well, this is ridiculous. I'm tired of this secretive stuff and I'm here in no man's land." So I decided I would take the proverbial bull by the horns, and do something about it, make public what so many people insist on being secret, which is ridiculous. At the time I was listening to Freethought Media, which was a humanist/atheist Internet station, and it was a great place. Robert Price used to have a show there. The Rational Response Squad was broadcasting there, which was famous for debating on CBS Kirk Cameron and his banana theories. Dangerous Talk with Staks Rosch was there, and that's a very popular show with the atheist community, and they had a lot of other cool shows. I proposed to the owner, how about if I do just a quick series on Gnosticism, since at the time the Gospel of Judas had just been released, and the whole Da Vinci Code machine was still very strong. Yet at the same time nobody knew who the Gnostics were. So I proposed to the owner—and he had this attitude that the enemy of my enemy is my friend—and he gave me some spots and I put out the first eight shows, and then I realised that the rabbit hole went a lot deeper than I'd ever imagined.
APS: Did you have any background in broadcasting?
MC: No, absolutely not. I do have a degree in communications, and I've done some journalistic work. But the other thing that inspired me too is that at the time I felt that I'd gotten on the right path, and I decided that the show would be my way of tithing or volunteering to the Gnostic cause, since again I was sort of homeless and didn't know how else to do it. That was really another one of my drives for creating the show.
APS: I can't resist asking, but you're presumably not going to tell us which Gnostic church it was that you were kicked out of.
MC: Not publicly, but privately a lot of people know about it. It was really a bizarre situation because somehow I got accused of casting magic or being some kind of sorcerer in this church, and at the time I had never studied any sort of magic. But somehow this slanderous thing got turned around towards me, and I got quickly booted. It was kind of hypocritical because this church was known to practise a lot of magic behind the scenes. It's an old story, but I guess it worked out well.
APS: I have some sympathies with atheism myself, as long as it's not too aggressive—I'm not an atheist. But what was the ongoing reaction to your program, which isn't rationalist in tone?
MC: It was mixed. You had the atheists who found it fascinating on a scholarly level, you had atheists who said, ah-ha, I have a new weapon against the orthodox, because now I can beat them up with another stick, the stick of the Gnostics and their views, and of course you had the fundamentalist atheists, the jihadist atheists, who just attacked me viciously from the start. What is the proof? What is this, what is that? So it was a mixed bag, but it's like anything in life, there's good people and there's a lot of jerks. 
APS: How long did you last with Freethought Media?
MC: I lasted a year. Eventually it went down because some of these shows were springboards to many ventures that were very successful, and they started branching out, and in a sense they started cannibalising Freethought Media with their own websites and blogs and so forth. So eventually Freethought Media just collapsed, and I found myself once again an orphan, so I just had to set up my own home page, and perfect it, thegodabovegod.com, and just start broadcasting directly from there. 
APS: So you were thrown out of a Gnostic church for supposed magic, and you were thrown out by the atheists for Gnosticism.
MC: Yeah, the story of my life. When I do wrong it seems nobody cares, but when I don't do wrong that's when they nail me. It's not that uncommon of a story when you think about it.
APS: After a year you had the feeling that there were enough people interested in it to continue, and you were finding enough people to interview too.
MC: For the first few years I still had that mindset of tithing and volunteering. This was my gift and I thought that this was something that would be eternal. You have to remember that when I started doing this the word podcast didn't even exist, so I wanted it to be a place where I could give a lot of alternative views, not just on Gnosticism, but on anything esoteric or occult. Because it was the Internet I knew it was something that would be eternal and everlasting, at least I hoped so. Now it seems that Obama has this kill switch on the Internet. It looks like governments can turn you off at the drop of a hat. But it was altruistic. It's always been a bootstrap venture and nobody has to worry about me making a lot of money from this. Even back in Freethought Media I was competing with some big names—Robert Price and the Rational Response Squad and the Infidel guy—and the owner kept calling me and saying, you know, you get the second highest ratings in Freethought Media, so I thought, "Wow, that's great. So there is an interest out there." 
APS: So we have to mention it: Voices of Gnosticism.
MC: Isn't this a kind of nepotism, Andrew?
APS: It is, but we have to do it. It's the modern world, self-promotion and all that. So we collected a good collection of your interviews with scholars for Voices of Gnosticism. You wrote introductions to each of them. It's a great selection of perceptive interviews with the best scholars of Gnosticism and early Christianity. Which of these scholars did you enjoy interviewing the most?
MC: For Voices, I would say that they are all extremely enjoyable. What I found, and wrote in the introduction, was that they were all very passionate, almost to the point of being eager, and always very friendly and helpful through the whole thing. Some of us still keep in touch. We talk here and there, exchange ideas, and so forth. So I can't say that there's one who is more favourite than another. At the time I remember I could call up Bart Ehrman and say, "I have this little podcast, do you want to come on the show?" Back then he was already a bestselling writer who was appearing regularly on TV and documentaries, and he simply said, "No problem, let's do it." So all of the scholars have been great, and very graceful, and I can admit that I have not met one big ego in all my years of doing Aeon Byte. Apart from myself!
APS: And that's the one you want to meet and understand.
MC: Yeah, that's the one I'm fighting to the very end.
APS: Then I'll phrase it another way. Out of the scholars that you've interviewed, which do you find the most stimulating and most appealing in terms of their work?
MC: I would have to say that it would have to be April DeConick, because I see her as someone who will take risks, but still within the field of scholarship and sober history. I guess she gets that from Jeff Kripal who's the head of the department at Rice University. He's an amazing scholar, but he goes to places which most people would find shocking, but again he couches it with sound scholarship and ideas. I also feel that April DeConick has an instinctual way of understanding the Gnostics. Her work on understanding how much the Sethians were dependent on astrology, or astrotheology, and Egyptian magic and theurgy and so forth is something that other scholars have tiptoed around. And the way that she was able to go against the grain when the whole world was having an orgasm over finally finding their heroic Judas beyond the Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus Christ: Superstar, I thought that was really great, and she brought a lot of insight into the Gospel of Judas. I've interviewed Jeff Kripal, and he was wonderful too, because his book The Serpent's Gift, is really part of the spirit of Aeon Byte, which is to distil Gnostic wisdom in a way that is not only understandable but helpful to our modern world. And Jeff Kripal does an amazing job at it.
APS: And I would guess that you have a favourite out of the scholars who didn't appear in the Voices book?
MC: Yes, which one?
APS: Robert Price?
MC: Well, we all remember the time we lost our maidenhead, Andrew. Robert was my first interview, and it's one that I can't forget. I had nothing. No credentials, no experience, and I simply called him up and he said, let's do it. Within a week we had conducted the interview, and he gave me an hour and a half of gold. Beyond that, we have become friends, and I can relate to him in so many ways. He is considered on the fringe, since he's no longer a professor because he'd rather go on his own. He's a mythicist. He has a great passion for the protestant Christians and the radical Dutch schools of the nineteenth century. He is always up to date on the latest biblical scholarship, he's extremely passionate about Gnosticism, and like me he's a big fanatic for science fiction, comic books and Japanese anime. So we tend to connect very well.
APS: Thanks to you, he has an article in this issue of The Gnostic.
MC: Although he considers himself a skeptic, I've always told him, Robert, you're a closet Gnostic. Why don't you just come out? His just laughs and stays silent. He won't deny it or accept it.
APS: Probably only about a third or a quarter of your interviewees or academic scholars. Which of the other guests have you most enjoyed interviewing?
MC: I can only say that I really enjoy all of them. As an author of both fiction and nonfiction, I respect anyone who writes a book. I know they have put their heart and soul in it. Sure, there's a lot of scholarly Ed Woods out there in the field, but they really have a passion for their ideas, and even if most listeners reject the ideas outright as being foolish, this may cause other the listeners to at least start thinking along other avenues, or at least reinforcing where they already knew. So I pretty much treat every guest equally. A lot of them are very grateful because often people will just scan their guests and do just a little cursory research, but I really delve in. I will read every book that I get, I will do as much research on them as I can, and eventually I want to become a single white female to them. I want to get right into their heads so the interview goes well, and most of my guests are very grateful and respect what I do, regardless of my personal views.
APS: Some of the people you've had on seem a bit wacky in their theories. We don't have to name names here. What's your attitude towards that, and how do you select people to interview?
MC: At this point in time, they come to me, and even back then they came to me. But a lot of times it could be something that's going on with society right now. Often it's simply looking at the shows, and saying, okay, this area should be explored, this other area should be explored. So eventually everything ties in. One day I should have this vast Jorge Luis Borges library that never ends, that would be a dream come true. I don't see a problem. I know that sometimes people say to me, well, why do you interview all these conspiracy theorists. I think that the word "conspiracy theory" is a sophist argument. It's a term people use to marginalise you just like the words Gnostic or Manichaean were used to marginalise people in the past. And of course I have to add the Gnostics were quite probably the original conspiracy theorists. That's why people who are in secret societies have such a fascination for them. The Gnostics were the first ones, as far as I know, who stood up and pointed at their own supreme being and his agents and said, "Oh my God, they are the cosmic BP Oil or Monsanto Corporation or Rothschilds." The universe is really a prison, and it's not some sort of Pythagorean wet dream. It's a badly built prison, a house of cards that will crash on us. And like many conspiracy theorists they were mocked and disdained by Jews, Pagans and Christians alike. Being paranoid sometimes means that you've been paying attention all along, so I like to leave all options on the table. With the variety of my guests, I even have guests that are completely diametrically opposed to the Gnostic worldview. Most people should definitely download this one, but I had Peter Jones, the author of the very popular The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back, which basically decimates the ancient Gnostics and the modern Gnostics, and he's a Presbyterian Calvinist minister. I decided that he needed his chance, or the other side needed their chance to give their case, and I called him up, and he said "Yeah, let's do it," and we had a great conversation. He knew more about Gnosticism than 95% of modern Gnostics did, and since he was a Calvinist there was no pressure as I'm sure he believed that I was going to Hell and he was going to Heaven. There was no worrying about anything. We already knew what was going to happen! So that was another great interview that I enjoyed. There's no reason to despise the opposition. I would have thought that the ancient Gnostics didn't think that the opposition were bad people or immoral people, or anything like that.  They just thought they were wrong.
APS: This is something that's emerging a bit as a theme in the current issue of The Gnostic, partly because I asked Stephan Hoeller the same question and I have about twenty pages of blather that I need to boil down into a column. But how do you view the relationship between the academic research into Gnosticism and the attempt to practise as a modern Gnostic. I don't call myself a Gnostic, so I manage to sidestep any . . .
MC: Responsibility?
APS: Right, any responsibility! But there's a lot cooking in the academic community with the deconstruction of Gnosticism, and there seems to be this reconstruction emerging that integrates it back into second-century Christianity, and seeing it as contributing in its little way to the development of the church. Everything's being shuffled around, people say that Gnosticism doesn't exist, we're misreading the context, and all of that. But people are trying to practise as modern Gnostics, and there is a Gnostic worldview. How do you see the relationship between these two separate endeavours?
MC: Well, I definitely see a big divide between them. I wish it wasn't so, because each has a lot to offer to the other, there's no doubt about it. When, for example, in Voice of Gnosticism, these scholars have spent a good part of their lives studying the ancient Gnostics. As historians they're not just interested in data. They truly want to walk where they walked, they want to feel the culture that was around these mystics. They actually want to know what these ancient heretics were feeling and experiencing at the time. And when you read some of the parts of Voices of Gnosticism, what they say sounds better than any Gnostic priest I have seen at a church, and I have been to many of them. When Marvin Meyer begins to talk about the Gnostic Judas, and what the Gnostics stood for, it's very uplifting. The same when April DeConick talks about the Sethians and their views on God and their views on the universe, or Einar Thomassen when he starts to speak about different ways the Valentinians saw Jesus Christ, it's extremely educational and inspiring at the same time, and it should be! These scholars know the Gnostics better than anyone. As far as the other side goes, I would probably have to be critical of them because I feel they haven't really gone far enough into really understanding what Gnosticism is, or what the Gnostics were really trying to convey. I can understand because, let's face it, the Gnostics were never really allowed to mature, and maybe that's not a bad thing. So you maybe have to create a God of the gaps with the Gnostics, and people have started inserting Daoism or Chaldean theology or nineteenth century occultism into it; but now that we have all this data and the scholars have done such great work, there's no reason to not start getting into the true essence and ethos of the Gnostics.  It's all there! 
APS: There is quite a difference between the ancient world, or the time of late antiquity in which the Gnostics lived, and the modern or postmodern world in which we live. For most of us it's difficult to take the gnostic myths too literally. We might find a core of ideas that maybe accurately represent the way that the world is. How do you approach that? What is your Gnosticism?
MC: I would say first of all, you've got to know your material. If we expect a Muslim to know the Qur'an, and not just know the Qur'an, because we don't want them to take it literally, we want them to understand and see it in a historical perspective, but also read the Hadiths, also find out how scholars have interpreted it, and how their theologians have been able to fit the essence of Islam and make it work for their specific time. The same goes with the Christians. A Christian is expected to know his Bible, and is certainly expected to know the thinkers around the Bible, and their heroes, and their theologians, and their martyrs. So why Gnostics are not expected to know that is beyond me. Scholars are to blame in a sense for that too, because everybody seems to get stuck on the "greatest hits" collection of the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas, Thunder the Perfect Mind or the Secret Book of John, but that's not all of it. Would you ask a Christian or a Muslim just to stick to a few passages? No. So I think we need to go deeper into the other Gnostic texts. And it's my experience as we go through it, and I'm sure also yours, and the scholars admit we have a long way to go, you do find almost the complete worldview, and a great framework for the Gnostic spirit. And you can certainly put it to work in a modern context. No one has a problem with William Blake, or Philip K. Dick, or Carl Jung and their adaptations. So why not do it ourselves?
APS: And how are you doing that yourself?
MC: Well, this is another key and I think why, in my estimation, why the Gnostic spirit is so important these days. I'd been reading Gnosticism and studying it, and it was just kind of curious to me. In a sense it was a little bit boring until I got into the fun stuff, like the Sethian mythologies and all the cosmologies, and all the science-fiction, almost Lovecraftian stuff. It was when I started reading Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, and LeCarrière, The Gnostics, these books didn't show a mirror into me, they actually showed a mirror into society. So you begin to study what the Gnostics were going through in those Greco-Roman times, and you see that the social-political atmosphere is so similar to what humanity is going through in the last hundred years, it almost becomes simple to translate Gnosticism into a modern context. Philip K. Dick does it very well, and so does Philip Pullman, Alan Moore, William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Castenada. They haven't had a problem with it. They've done it very well, and made it very impactful into seeing what we are and what condition we're in. I think that they're right in getting into what the Gnostics thought 2000 years ago.
APS: What's your take on things like the pleroma, the demiurge, aeons and archons and the makeup of the human being? How have you digested the Gnostic ideas and to what extent do you, for instance, see there being a force that corresponds to the demiurge, or a being that corresponds to the demiurge? Maybe I'm being a little bit literal, but do you see what I'm getting at?
MC: I think Stevan Davies put it in his book The Secret Book of John: Annotated & Explained, Gnosticism "is a developmental psychology, a descriptive Middle-Platonic philosophy, and most importantly, a cosmic mythology all rolled into one." So in a sense you can almost go up these levels and mix and match them. I've never seen a lion-headed snake talk to me so far (well maybe when I was doing acid).  I haven't met an archon. But as principles of the universe I think that they're pretty much right-on. And I always tell people, please take this as literally, as mythologically, as psychologically as you want. Whatever works for you. I'm very agnostic about what's on the other side of the material world, but I do know that for me the Gnostic framework fits the best. I think the proof is in the pudding. We are in a prison, we are separated from our true selves, and we've got to be honest with ourselves. When I was doing a lot of shopping around for religions, what they offered me was coping skills, or promises of happiness and peace, and so forth, all based on the material world. But what happens to most people, and what happened to me, is that you turn a corner and you get a frying pan in your face. Things crumble, or you can just gird your loins into denial and just stand there. But to me Gnosticism was just great, it was because it was so honest. It didn't say the Titanic was sinking, it said, no, the Titanic already sank. We're floating in an ocean of despair and suffering with our little whistles, and we're just hoping for these apostles of light to catch us and pick us up in their boats. I think humanity needs to become honest with itself, because the truth is there is an ultimate duality that should have never mixed together, you can call this flesh and spirit, or you can call this information and the material world, or you can call it consciousness and unconsciousness, or you can call it whatever you want in whatever age you are. For Blake Gnosis was Imagination, and to Jung it was obviously psychoanalysis, and so forth. Philip K. Dick gave it a very technological vocabulary. I think we need to start becoming honest that as humans we can't cope with this world, we never have been able to cope with this world, we truly don't belong, and in this place called a soul there are two forces, spirit and matter, that are always going to be allergic to one another. As soon as we accept that, I think that's when we are going to start making improvements in our inner personal lives as well as in humanity in general. Mani himself gave a very basic concept. He said Gnosis is separating light from darkness. I think that's where we need to go, in my personal opinion.
APS: You talk about the Gnostic spirit. I presume you would admit that other religions and worldviews can also provide a way. Would you see them as lacking some truths that Gnosticism possesses? 
You can find the rest of our interview by purchasing The Gnostic Journal 4 (and a whole lotta more amazing articles). While the Master is away, let's all walk like Torgo!