Tune in next Tuesday to hear me on Matthew Sweet’s ‘Free Thinking’ programme along with Jessica Gossling, John Tresch and Chris Gosden. Matthew had seen me speak at the Magickal Women conference and invited me along for the free-ranging chat. You will be able to listen to it live or on catch up, because unlike BBC television, radio is not geo-blocked. We had such fun yammering on that there may be a longer version available as a podcast. Even the birds outside my window got a tweet in; lockdown recording allows more random factors.

I think it will be an entertaining conversation. I was a little giddy from suddenly being given rein to talk to an audience after not having to converse with students or much of anyone else since March. One thing I wanted to emphasise more though I quickly veered off into other things is how often poverty and magic overlap, especially when it comes to faking magic. I was reminded by reading this article which John Reppion helpfully tweeted into my timeline. This jumped out at me:

We learn that the Wizard had, some seventeen years before, been a porter in a ‘respectable establishment’, but that he had subsequently turned to magic to make his living, a talent he had learnt from his mom.

I did manage to mention the two sort of channels magic took: the powerless and the powerful. The former used magic because they had no other recourse; the latter because even the power they had was not enough. Sounds like a familiar dynamic, eh? Michael Bailey has written a lot about how the elites take necromancy into satanic magic, including here.

Tune in Tuesday and hear more (UK 2200, US East coast 1700).