The Podcast Pentagram: Occultism in Catholic Media
The Occult Revival in Traditional Catholicism- Part V
In Part IV, we traced how esoteric and occult themes have infiltrated traditional Catholic publishing houses, institutions, and even liturgical spaces. But the reach of this revival isn’t limited to bookshelves and pulpits. It thrives in the algorithmic bloodstream of digital Catholic media.
From YouTube channels to podcasts, Substack newsletters to social media threads, a new class of Catholic influencers is rebranding Catholicism as a mystical labyrinth of symbols, initiations, and secret knowledge, complete with tarot aesthetics, alchemical analogies, and gnostic vocabulary, all cloaked in the language of tradition.
Gnostalgia and the Rise of the Esoteric Podcast
One of the most explicit examples is the Gnostalgia Podcast, a show that openly describes itself as exploring the intersection of traditional Catholicism and “Western esotericism.” Its guests include figures immersed in Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and occult metaphysics, all while invoking the language of monasticism and Latin rite piety.
These episodes often play on traditional aesthetics: Gregorian chant intros, Gothic fonts, iconography; to launder gnostic themes like the divine feminine, spiritual ascent through secret knowledge, and the rejection of external religious authority. What passes for mysticism is often a mood-board of heresies.
The hosts, and many of their guests, clearly long for a version of Catholicism that feels more enchanted. But what they end up selling is initiation. The Church has seen this pattern before.
Sebastian Morello and the Self-Defense of Esoteric Influencers
When challenged for their proximity to occultic or gnostic ideas, many of these influencers double down rather than recant. A perfect example is Sebastian Morello, whose book Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries prompted criticism for its ambiguous praise of magical traditions and syncretistic mysticism.
Rather than clarify or retract, Morello took to Substack to defend himself. In “Snuffing the Pyre: A Reply to Michael Warren Davis,” he insisted that Catholic mysticism is often misunderstood and that critiques of syncretism are simplistic. In short, he conflates legitimate mystical theology with magical religion.
Instead of explaining why Morello’s beliefs are incompatible with Catholicism, in this case I think an audio is worth 1,000 words. In this excerpt from the Gnostalgia Podcast: The Gods on Their Knees, Morello matter of factly describes how the manifestation of Valentin Tomberg, the author of Meditations on the Tarot, was guiding his writings from beyond the grave as a “god” literally present in his living room. I ask that you listen to this podcast excerpt and ask yourself if what you are hearing is anywhere close to something that should be presented as Catholic…
Morello’s book was published by the publishing company Os Justi Press, owned by none other than Catholic Traditionalist fixture, Dr. Peter Kwasniewski. Far from distancing himself from the work, Professor Kwasniewski defended both it and Morello vigorously on his Facebook page giving them both renewed credibility among many Traditionalists.
I stand by Morello and his book 100%, and recommend it wholeheartedly to all intellectually adventurous readers looking for a potent critique of the disease of modernity coupled with a profoundly incarnational and sacramental vision of Catholic life pointing the way to the remedy.
From Devotion to Aesthetic Fetishism
What connects these podcasts and influencers is not doctrine but affect. Their appeal lies in mood: old books, obscure saints, arcane vocabulary, dimly lit altars, and embroidered vestments. The supernatural is no longer a dogmatic reality to be believed, but a symbolic system to be explored.
This trend is particularly strong among younger Catholics disillusioned with modernity. They crave the supernatural not as revealed truth but as imaginative escape. It is a fantasy Catholicism, more aligned with medieval RPGs and folklore than with the Council of Trent.
They want to fly dragons over rainbows, chase leprechauns, and fight the Jabberwock. They are cousins to the ghost hunters.
Their opposition to modernism is real, but they react not by returning to Thomism or magisterial tradition, but by romanticizing magic. It is a supernaturalism unmoored from discipline.
Jimmy Akin and the New Normal
Jimmy Akin, senior apologist at Catholic Answers and host of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, often navigates this terrain with finesse. When callers ask about tarot or astrology, Akin doesn’t outright condemn. Instead, he issues measured cautions: astrology can be abused, tarot is risky, but these practices aren’t always mortally sinful.
In doing so, he shifts the tone from rejection to nuance. Occult practices become spiritual curiosities: entertaining, maybe even useful, if handled correctly. His podcasting brand has the feel of coast-to-coast AM with a rosary.
To the average listener, the message is clear: the Church isn’t against mysticism. You just have to do it responsibly.
The Alien, the Apologist, and the Ethicist
Consider this gem from the podcasting underworld: an episode of Pints with Aquinas in which Matt Fradd interviews Catholic Answers apologist Jimmy Akin about UFOs, Freemasonry, and Bigfoot. Yes, really.
At one point, the conversation takes a detour into the truly extraterrestrial. Akin recounts a case of alleged alien abduction in which the abductee claims he was forced to copulate with an alien female. Rather than laugh or change the subject, Fradd gamely asks the obvious next question: “Would it be immoral to have sex with an alien?”
What follows is not satire. Akin launches into a meticulous Thomistic moral analysis of alien-human intimacy, parsing whether it would be fornication, bestiality, or perhaps morally permissible depending on the alien’s level of rationality.
There are no words, but there is a video:
I’m not suggesting this is occultism. I’m suggesting it’s theological cosplay. It’s a symptom of what happens when Catholic discourse is unmoored from pastoral seriousness, doctrinal gravity, and any contact with sane priorities.
We live in a moment when Marian devotions are collapsing, catechesis is decimated, and liturgical abuses rage, but Catholic podcasting has time to debate interstellar breeding ethics.
Evangelization or Initiation?
The Church teaches that the purpose of evangelization is conversion: a turning toward the truth. But what many of these Catholic media outlets promote is not conversion, but initiation.
They do not lead people to Christ so much as lure them into a symbolic world, promising illumination through mystery, arcana, and interior gnosis.
This is why figures like Morello, Akin, and podcast hosts with gnostic sympathies are not outliers. Their content thrives because it blends spiritual aesthetics with an ethos of esoteric exploration. Orthodoxy becomes not a demand of the intellect, but a flavor of the imagination.
The Medium Is the Mystery
Catholic media, like all media, shapes formation. And when podcasts, TikToks, and YouTube reels adopt esoteric aesthetics and syncretic content, they don’t just “explore,” they catechize. They re-train the senses. They substitute ambiance for truth.
What you feel becomes what you believe.
And so the revival of traditional Catholicism online faces a quiet danger: that in fleeing the desiccated rationalism of modernism, we fall into the luminous abyss of mysticism unhinged.
In Part VI, we will explore the doctrinal and metaphysical core of this trend: the revival of Sophiology, the mystical cult of the divine feminine. Beneath the beauty of Marian devotion lies a shadow theology that must be exposed.
Note: I would like to thank Alistair McFadden (@JustACatholic1 on X) and his work “Observations on the Influence of the Occult in Traditional Catholic Discourse” found here (https://justacatholic.medium.com/observations-on-the-influence-of-the-occult-in-traditional-catholic-discourse-2d798e5ba51c) for inspiring this series.
Disclaimer:
This article presents theological critique and religious commentary based on publicly available materials, official publisher catalogs, and the known writings of referenced individuals. No accusation of personal wrongdoing is made toward any author. All analysis is offered in a spirit of fidelity to Catholic teaching and pastoral concern for the salvation of souls.
Thanks, Chris, for a hugely enjoyable plunge into the fantasy land of esotericism. Morello's idea that he is being guided by the long dead Tomberg raises all manner of questions. Like, has there been a funnier Catholic article in the last ten years? Is there anything left of Peter Kwasnieski's reputation? Is there anything left of Catholic teaching on death and judgement if Tomberg is apparently not in Heaven, Purgatory or Hell, but still hanging around Morello's study?
Apparently the great Tomberg scholar Roger Buck thinks that Tomberg is now a daemon or maybe a minor god, rather than a Dickens type spook. So maybe he has been granted an exemption from Judgement. Whatever he is, I hope he sticks to guiding Morello and leaves me alone. I live only 15 minutes' walk from Tomberg's house and he could easily find me.
It astounds me that this work is not more widely read. Matt Fraud, for the record, had way too many Pints with Aquinas years ago when he interviewed Christopher West regarding JP2's problematic (understatement) "Theology of the Body", which reads like a Cathar Handbook. Miss Happy Catholic also had a similar interview, where the Marital Embrace is seen as some type of Sacrament. An Anti-Book of Tobias.
It astounds me that Dr Peter Kwasniewski would be defending purveyors of this thinly veiled Astrology. But then again, the Zodiac has always been the gateway for this hermenuetic, as it is mentioned in Job, emblazoned on the cope of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and used legitimately for signs and seasons. Yes, the Zodiac does tell the Story of Creation. But the Stars do not scribe individual destinies, nor tell a future hidden in the Free Will of Men, but only points, as does the Apocalypse, to the ultimate destiny of Creation.
Of course, we can thank mainly Pius XII for this trend. The man "liberated" Biblical Exegesis from the School of St Jerome, baptized the "Theory of Evolution", subscribed to modern cosmology, with its "infinite" stretches of space and "galaxies" "light years" across, all of which an amateur astronomer proved to be a pile of crock when he showed that "distant galaxies" were in front of stars just a few "light years away" with a piddly three inch telescope. (I won't go into how the moon is a plasma lens reflecting the dome, pockmarked with huge craters from the flood era impacts, and how Apollo could have no more landed on the moon than a fighter jet could land on a cumulus cloud.) Pius XII also apparently believed in the "Big Bang", all the evidence for which was shown to be a pile of crock by same said astronomer, who discovered more "red shifted" objects to be in front of those having practically no "red shift". It would seem all these "red shifts" are nothing more than lower atmospheric anomalies which pulse and feed off the magnetic field similar to the Northern Lights, and ditto for all those "Pulsars" and "Quasars".
(I'm not going to get into any Flat Earth debates here. Let me just say that, like the Sedevacantist question, there is ample room for many viewpoints and hypotheses. Suffice to say that Cosmology and Optics is a heck of a lot more complex than either side would care to admit, and is not reduceable to the Newtonian Calculus.)
The main problem, of course, is that Traditional Catholic Schools continue to teach Sheeple Cosmology and Sheeple History. When we begin to understand that the earth is not whizzing through space, the Heavens and the Earth really were created in Seven Days, and all the "evidence" for evolution and outer space is nothing but fraud, one can laugh at the whole history of modern science, from Newtons trite little Heliocentric model (which was laughed out of the universities of Christendom before the Revolution) to Kepler's desperate attempt to patch it by postulating that NOTHING is causing the earth to have an elliptical orbit (which explains the lack of parralax one would expect in Newton's Universe, but nothing else) to Maxwell, who is trying to stuff the cosmos with mass so it adheres to the Gravitational Constant, to Einstein, who filled the cosmos with Black Holes (I will not even attempt a pun, for the sake of the children.)
God Bless your work, Chris Jackson...
In the Holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary.