{"podcast":{"title":"Back from the Borderline","slug":"back-from-the-borderline-4079851","podcast_index_feed_id":4079851,"rss_url":"https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69","website_url":"http://backfromtheborderline.com","image_url":"https://assets.pippa.io/shows/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69/1735679446378-b2e8272f-396f-4979-a13e-2172ecffa88e.jpeg","author":"mollie adler","episode_count":358,"summary":"Back From The Borderline is a podcast about depth psychology, symbolism, spirituality, consciousness, and the search for a more meaningful life. I started this show years ago while trying to understand my own mind. Somewhere along the way, the questions became much bigger than me. They led into Carl Jung, mythology, Christian mysticism, dreams, tarot, philosophy, esotericism, religious history, artificial intelligence, and the symbolic patterns that quietly shape the way we see ourselves and the world around us. The word borderline has taken on its own meaning over the years. It speaks to the edge almost all of us eventually reach. That place where our old explanations stop working and we’re asked to learn an entirely different way of seeing. That’s the space my work inhabits. Some episodes are conversations with researchers, psychologists, philosophers, historians, and spiritual teachers. Others are long-form essays where I follow a question wherever it leads. Lately I’ve been especially interested in symbolic literacy, the way images, myths, dreams, and archetypes quietly organize human life, often long before we’re consciously aware of them. I’m not very interested in being “ce…","last_synced_at":"2026-09-08T16:23:45.590679+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851"},"episode":{"title":"Aleister Crowley’s Thelema: Sex Magick and the Problem With the Prophet","slug":"aleister-crowley-s-thelema-sex-magick-and-the-problem-with-the-prophet","published_at":"2026-08-18T09:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/aleister-crowley-s-thelema-sex-magick-and-the-problem-with-the-prophet","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851","url":"https://shows.acast.com/back-from-the-borderline/episodes/aleister-crowleys-thelema-sex-magick-and-the-problem-with-th","audio_url":"https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/60e8deaefb090f0013116d69/e/6a82128b6e5b5bfda6381052/media.mp3","summary":"Aleister Crowley had a beautiful idea, and then he built a religion around himself. This episode takes Thelema seriously enough to examine what Crowley was actually teaching. True Will sits at the center of it, alongside The Book of the Law , Aiwass, the Aeon of Horus, sex magick, Babalon, and Crowley’s claim that humanity had entered a new spiritual age. He drew heavily from the Golden Dawn and Hermetic Qabalah, then remixed and recast those traditions through his own revelation and his own ideas about freedom, sexuality, and authority. I’m interested in the point where spiritual freedom starts giving one man an extraordinary amount of interpretive power. Crowley’s treatment of women, the role of the Scarlet Woman, the use of sex as magical technology, and the theology built around Babalon all deserve much more scrutiny than either Satanic Panic or Crowley worship tends to allow. True Will can absolutely be understood as disciplined vocation rather than appetite, and many modern Thelemites read Crowley critically while taking consent and individual freedom seriously. The harder work here (that I attempt to undertake in this episode) is taking a hard look at the actual religion without turning it into either “evil” or “enlightenment”. This is a study of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema from inside the Western mysteries, with plenty of sympathy for the questions Crowley was actually asking and very little patience for the places I think his answers went badly wrong. Next week, we’ll be following Crowley’s massive influence all the way into online spirituality, Existential Kink , modern shadow work, sacred sexuality, and the high-ticket coaching economy. CONTINUE THE WORK: Join the BFTB Patreon → https://patreon.com/backfromtheborderline You’ll get: ☆ Weekly bonus episodes ☆ H…","meta_description":"Aleister Crowley had a beautiful idea, and then he built a religion around himself. This episode takes Thelema seriously enough to examine what Crowley wa…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":6833,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/episodes/aleister-crowley-s-thelema-sex-magick-and-the-problem-with-the-prophet/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/back-from-the-borderline-4079851/aleister-crowley-s-thelema-sex-magick-and-the-problem-with-the-prophet.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}