There's a meme that's been evolving since 2021, and in its current chaotic incarnation, it's become accidentally magical—even if the people using it don't realise it.

In this episode, I'm unpacking "do it for the plot" as a practical framework for the year ahead. Not just as permission to take risks, but as a way of activating synchronicity and maintaining agency when things inevitably go sideways on the way to your goals.

I'll walk you through how to use this alongside your existing magical toolkit—your amulets, your enchantments, your divination practice—and share the diagnostic story I keep coming back to for checking where I'm actually at versus where I think I am.

I'm also introducing a new project I've been wrestling with: hospicing modernity's magic. Because the late twentieth century gave us some genuinely powerful techniques wrapped in a frame that insists magic isn't real. I want to find a way to respectfully retain the useful stuff and jettison the less-than-useful.

There's practical advice here for interrogating your intentions for 2026, plus some thoughts on why the slacker-era re-enchantment is officially over and what needs to replace it.

Happy new year, kids!

At this time of year, when many of us are rudely awoken from our hard-earned slumber by multiple ghosts wanting us to support their gofundme or something, I thought we might look at ghosts.

What are they? Are they even real? And if they're not, what are they for?

And the exploration is framed by a series of strange experiences I had recently at Australia's most haunted site and possibly the cruelest place in the entire British Empire, Port Arthur.

Enjoy!

PS - Let me also take the opportunity to sincerely thank you for listening, watching, supporting and sharing the various Rune Soup offerings in 2025. Have a wonderful Christmas.

Austinmas 2025! Can you even believe it? Legendary astrologer, Austin Coppock, returns to the show for a look at what 2026 has in store for you.

Here's what we cover:

🪐The end of "nothing ever happens" energy
🪐 What war looks like in the Age of Air
🪐 January's hidden assemblies and the parade before Pluto
🪐 Neptune's 13-year sign change
🪐The Saturn-Neptune conjunction and its strange history with Russia
🪐 Why March could see dangerous confusion and technical disasters
🪐 April's straightforward brutality
🪐 The sweet spot worth planning around
🪐 Late June's triple switcheroo
🪐 Mars-Uranus in Gemini and American history
🪐 August's grinding square with both malefics in their fall
🪐 The shadow over November's "jolly conqueror"
🪐 What 2026 sets up for early 2027
🪐 Solar eclipses and kings who bump their heads

🪬🪬How To Use The Astrology in Your Life🪬🪬

January's Gift
Use the hidden assembly energy for genuine visioning. Where does your capacity for struggle go? What's actually worth anything? What are your sneaky little moves? Get trajectory set before the crazy train.

April's Pressure
Mars-Saturn conjunctions every two years aren't new—but this one's in Aries with Neptune. Being pushed beyond reasonable limits. A week's work in a day and a half while already burned out. Endurable, but genuinely shitty.

The May-June Repair Window
Not just absence of destruction but actively sweet and reparative. Build here what you couldn't build in the storm.

Lucifer: Praxis!

Peter Grey joins the show once again to talk about his explosive new book. We explore who the being of Lucifer is, his relationship to western magic, western magicians' relationships to him and how the current of liberty, individualism and legitimate rebellion have shaped centuries of culture.

An excellent discussion about a milestone achievement in western occulture.

Get the damned book here.

Enjoy!

Synchromystic raconteur, author, and pattern seeker Christopher Knowles returns to the show, as well as the wheelhouse, for this one.

Not that we would ever need one, but the flimsy excuse for Chris coming back this time is so that we can discuss his amazing new book, XF-ULTRA: The X-Files, Conspiracy Culture, and the National Security State.

• Can a 90s genre TV-show both explore AND generate high strangeness

• What happened to our ancient mythology?

• Who is called to tend the flame of our culture's sacred stories through the chaos all around us?

Even if, almost ESPECIALLY if, you've never seen The X-Files before, this journey down to the underworld and back up through the trash stratum of popular culture has wider metaphysical implications that make it essential listening.

Show Notes

• The Secret Sun on Substack.
• Get XF-ULTRA: The X-Files, Conspiracy Culture, and the National Security State.

In this episode, Dr Radin returns to the show to talk to us about his amazing new book, The Science of Magic.

We look at

• Meta-analyses with trillion-to-one odds.

• Hotel poltergeists that target specific researchers.

• Spoons that bend without force.

• Sigils. Always, always sigils.

Radin explains why materialist skeptics have run out of arguments, how belief literally structures the universe, and why your unconscious mind might be doing magic right now.

If you liked Real Magic, this one takes the conversation even further. The dominant of wider inclusions has surely arrived.

• Pre-order the new book

• Dr Radin's website

Filmmaker Richard Stanley joins us to unpack his incredible book "Otto Rahn: Grail Hunter" - the true story of a gay Jewish medievalist who became the SS's chief grail hunter in Nazi Germany.

We explore Stanley's own supernatural experiences on Montségur (getting trapped by lightning), the brutal genocide of the Cathars, and why this whole story feels disturbingly relevant right now.

From Lucifer's emerald diadem to disappearing treasures to Stanley's decades-long quest through the most mysterious corners of southern France.

Good times!

Show Notes

• Get the book here.
• Previous documentary trailer mentioned in the episode.

Vanese McNeill, co-producer of the Magical Egypt series, returns to the show. In this episode, we explore the hows and possible whys of spirit involvement in history, from the super-elite level down to the everyday. And also across to some of the sillier claims about AI floating in the air like so many plasma entities.

And all of this was inspired by a post Vanese wrote on the Magical Egypt substack about ontozoology back in June.

So that's where we begin, and this is where we go after:

1. The Ontozoology Framework

• What invisible beings actually exist in the ecosystem

• Moving beyond Christian binary (demons vs. angels) to animist complexity

• The difference between malevolent, benevolent, and simply non-human agendas

2. Catherine Austin Fitts & Demonic Capital

• The exact quote about interdimensional intelligences controlling capital

• Why this is being discussed now by credible people

• The problem with oversimplifying complex entities as "Satan"

3. Conscious vs. Unconscious Elite Collaboration

• How much is deliberate ritual worship vs. unconscious possession

• The decline of magical literacy among modern elites

• Why materialist worldviews make people more vulnerable to influence

4. Historical Magic & Modern Mind Control

• Ancient Egyptian spirit relationships as information exchange

• How modern "operations" are rituals without the practitioners knowing it

• Predictive programming as contemporary magic

5. The AI & Slop Demon Problem

• Why "The Architect" and similar AIs aren't sentient but are dangerous

• How AI creates mental conditions ripe for spiritual colonisation

• The difference between AI hosting demons vs. AI making minds available for possession

6. UFOs, Aliens, and Interdimensional Beings

• The reframing of UFO phenomena as spiritual rather than extraterrestrial

• Catherine's invitation to meet "aliens in human bodies"

• Distinguishing between visiting organisms and native invisible ecology