As you can see, this conversation was recorded last spring, but I got around to listening to it only this month.

Both Rufus Harrington and Judith Noble come from initiatory British Wiccan traditions. A psychotherapist by profession, he is also a trustee of the Doreen Valiente Foundation, which protects and preserves many of the original Books of Shadows belonging to Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente.

Nobel herself is an artist and professor of Film and the Occult at Arts University Plymouth (UK). “She began her career as an artist filmmaker, exhibiting work internationally and worked for over twenty years as a production executive in the film industry, working with directors including Peter Greenaway and Amma Asante. Her current research centres on artists’ moving image, Surrealism, the occult and work by women artists, and she has published on filmmakers including Maya Deren, Derek Jarman and Kenneth Anger.”

A lot of the interview deals with “What is initiatory Wicca?” and “How has it changed since they were brought in?” — forty years ago in Harrington’s case. So it’s not like nothing has changed since Stewart and Janet Farrar, who were Alexandrian initiates, were discussing these issues.

Esoteric Crossroads: Scholars Meet Practitioners is a spin-off from Stephanie Shea’s main podcast, Rejected Religion, created in collaboration with the Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices. Shea herself has studied at Amsterdam Hemetica, the university’s center for “Hermetic philosophy and related currents.”

You can find episodes of Rejected Religion listed at its site, at the usual places such as Apple podcast, or on her Academia.edu home page. There is a Patreon site too, with the usual “the more you pay, the more access you have.” (Some content is free; other content becomes free after a time.)