Podcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP)

Podcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP)

Exploring the forgotten and rejected story of Western thought

Episodes

The Horoscope of Islām and The Alchemical Stone: Maria Papathanassiou on Stephanos of Alexandria, Part II

March 4, 2026 • 32 mins
In Part II we explore two of Stephanos' works: the astrological piece entitled Apotelesmatikē pragmateia, with its katarchic ‘Horoscope of Islam’, and his influential, vexing, and beautiful alchemical work, On the Great and Holy Art of Gold-Making.
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Philosophy and Occult Sciences at Constantinople: Maria Papathanassiou on Stephanos of Alexandria, Part I

February 25, 2026 • 41 mins
We speak with Maria Papathanassiou about Stephanos of Alexandria: the last known Platonist/Aristotelean philosopher trained at Alexandria, a politically-connected courtier at Herakleios' Constantinople, a Christian, an astrologer, an alchemist, and more.
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Esoteric Orthodoxy in East Rome: Jonathan Greig on Maximus the Confessor

December 6, 2025 • 72 mins
We head back to Constantionple with Jonathan Greig at the controls, to discuss the quintessentially Orthodox mystic, Maximus the Confessor. Late-Platonist apophasis meets hard-core ascesis, and Maximus follows the theology where it wants to go, sometimes to his own cost.
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Introducing the Apocalypse of the Pseudo-Methodios, with Christopher Bonura

October 26, 2025 • 71 mins
Christopher Bonura introduces us to the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodios, a seventh-century Syriac prophetic universal history. Come for the Arab conquests reflected in Christian revelation, stay for the apocalyptic Roman emperor.
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Jewish Apocalypse in the Seventh Century: Martha Himmelfarb on the Sefer Zerubbabel

September 27, 2025 • 47 mins
In this interview we explore a crucial document of seventh-century Judaism: the Sefer Zerubbabel, an apocalyptic ‘future history’ allegedly written in the past. The Temple will descend, the evil Armilus (son of Satan and a statue) will wreak havok, and two messiahs will arise to redeem Israel.
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Touraj Daryaee on Zoroastrianism in the Seventh Century and Beyond

September 13, 2025 • 43 mins
With the Arab conquest of Sasanian Persia, a new religion enters the west. Once the great religious Other to the Græco-Roman world, the Zoroastrians are now part of the story of western esotericism. We explore their extraordinary religion with Touraj Daryaee.
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Ahab Bdaiwi on the Rise of Shī‘ī Esotericism

July 25, 2025 • 29 mins
In Part I we looked at the political events leading up to the formation of the Shi'a. In Part II we see that it did not take long for things to get very esoteric. Come for the programmatic esoteric hermeneutics, stay for the occult sciences.
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Ahab Bdaiwi on ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, his Family, and the Origins of Shī‘ī Islam

July 18, 2025 • 38 mins
We pick up from our last episode, where geopolitics and esotericism met in the crucible of Roman, Sassanian, and Arab political struggles. Ahab Bdaiwi threads the labyrinth of the earliest historical sources for the birth of the movement within Islām which came to be known as the Party of ‘Alī, or the Shi‘ā.
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Seventh-Century History for Students of Western Esotericism

May 13, 2025 • 55 mins
We return to the history of late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia. Momentous events occur, empires rise and fall, and Jews, Christians, and Muslims all suddenly develop new apocalyptic notions. Come for the dry historical exposition, stay for the esoteric divine kingship.
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Introducing the Qur’an Part III: Qur’ānic Texts vs. the Qur’ān

May 2, 2025 • 55 mins
We discuss some of the history of how the Qur'ān came to be ‘the Book’: it started in the oral milieu of the high-octane early Believers' movement, and ended up in written form as something called the ‘Uthmanic recension. Many esoteric things happen along the way.
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Introducing the Qur’ān, Part II: Ambiguity and Esoteric Themes

April 18, 2025 • 71 mins
We begin to explore the esoteric side of the Qur'ān, examining several case-studies in terms of ambiguity and esoteric themes. It turns out that every letter of the Qur'ān is an esoteric text.
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Introducing the Qur’ān, Part I: Revelation, Text, and History

March 14, 2025 • 57 mins
We cover some basic territory in introducing the Qur'ān, the holiest text of Islām. We introduce the text, discuss the traditional story of the Qur'ān's revelation, the modern text-critical enterprise of Qur'anic studies, and try to pin down the elusive character of this book-that-is-not-a-book.
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Fred Donner on the History of Early Islām

February 7, 2025 • 53 mins
We discuss what little we know and how much we don't know about the nature of the early ‘Believers' movement’, the nature and origins of the Qur'ān, the curious case of the so-called Constitution of Medinah, and what went on during the earliest decades of the Arab conquests. Fred Donner is our guide into unknown territory.
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Matthew Melvin-Koushki on Islam, ‘the West’, and Western Esotericism

January 20, 2025 • 64 mins
We welcome Matthew Melvin-Koushki back to the show to discuss how we might improve our historical picture of western esotericism by including the vast majority of the surviving historical dossier of western esotericism. There's only one problem: in order to do this, we need to embrace the Islamicate world as a major part of the west.
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Introducing Islām

January 3, 2025 • 73 mins
With Episode 200 the SHWEP has reached a milestone of sorts. We are in the seventh century, and the world-order suddenly changes irrevocably as a new political force arises from Arabia: the Believers. We discuss three main respects in which the history of Islam is the history of western esotericism.
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Paul Pasquesi on the Book of the Holy Hierotheos

December 24, 2024 • 57 mins
We discuss one of the lesser-known, but most esoterically-important, classics of Syriac spiritual literature, the Book of the Holy Hierotheos. Hierotheos was said to have been the teacher of Dionysius the Areopagite, but he wrote in Syriac, and taught a suspiciously-Evagrian practice of ascent to god.
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The Pseudo-Dionysios, the Esoteric, and (Christian) Mysticism

December 22, 2024 • 66 mins
We turn to the questions: What is ‘mystical’ in the Corpus Dionysiacum? What is esoteric? The answers we come up with involve pretty much every aspect of the western esoteric traditions, and, after all the initiatory liturgy, esoteric scriptural hermeneutics, and theandric activity are cleared away, there remains the ascent to ‘the ray of the divine shadow’.
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Naming Divine Nothingness: Introducing the Pseudo-Dionysios

December 17, 2024 • 69 mins
Into the divine darkness of a hyper-non-existent god walks the Pseudo-Dionysios. In this episode we join many esoteric currents from the antique and late-antique past into a new synthesis which will forever shape western esotericism going forward.
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One Empire, Many Names: Reading “Byzantium” with Anthony Kaldellis

October 22, 2024 • 82 mins
We are delighted to speak with Anthony Kaldellis about ‘Byzantium’, fabled empire full of Greek-speaking Romans which never fell until the fifteenth century, and which plays an outsize role in the history of western esotericism. Come for the historiographical debates about the term ‘Byzantine’, stay for the ‘Byzantine’ court astrology.
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Contested Esotericisms at the End of Antiquity: Simplicius, Philoponus, and Olympiodorus

October 16, 2024 • 60 mins
We discuss three of the most important thinkers from the final generations of philosophical teaching at Alexandria. One is an upstart Christian. Two are esoteric Platonists of the Golden Chain. One may or may not have been an alchemist.
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