PayPal and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel is embarking on an unusual intellectual journey this fall—delivering a sold-out four-part lecture series on the biblical figure of the Antichrist. The private lectures, which will be held at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, represent the latest evolution in Thiel’s increasingly public theological interests that intertwine his Christian faith with his concerns about technology’s potential to enable authoritarian control.
Harvesting plants and performing various tasks at specific times and under specific conditions is a regular practice in various occult systems, I’m not sure of the significance of mugwort, I chose it at random. I don’t think Satanism is “real” occultism, it doesn’t appear in the historical record until the accusations of the midaeval Catholic inquisition, of which most accounts are cartoonish fabrications or refer to pagan, Hebrew, or various forms of foreign cultural mysticism as “Satanic”.