Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio. Well,
Speaker 1: welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Nori with you.
Speaker 1: A cult specialist. Sal Santoro back with us, a co
Speaker 1: owner of the Crooked Path. Now that's a leading traditional
Speaker 1: witchcraft store in the Los Angeles areas. Sal's thirty five
Speaker 1: plus years experience in all things magic has led him
Speaker 1: to become one of the go to sources for demystifying
Speaker 1: the misunderstood craft. Sal continues to strive to make the
Speaker 1: occult accessible and inclusive to all of those who seek
Speaker 1: it out. Sal sentaorro back on Coast to Coast, Hey, Sal,
Speaker 1: have you been all rich? How you been? Sorry? Good
Speaker 1: to hear from you. You too, my friend? What's new
Speaker 1: with you? What's new? So much is new? Something's going on,
Speaker 1: you know, things, moving on, times, moving on, the stores
Speaker 1: doing really good. Actually it was kind of neat because
Speaker 1: Patty Negri was just on your show not too long ago,
Speaker 1: that's right, And I was like, oh, Tema said I, So,
Speaker 1: I love her. She's like my sister. She's a very
Speaker 1: very good person, great, great person. How did you get
Speaker 1: into this? I get into the occult? I mean it
Speaker 1: started in New England and well, I mean I graduated
Speaker 1: high school in eighty two, so it probably started around
Speaker 1: seventy nine. And you know, it was me and my
Speaker 1: friends in the woods in the pre internet days of
Speaker 1: New Hampshire and we were trying to find out information
Speaker 1: on it, you know. I mean we're in New England
Speaker 1: and there really wasn't much out there then. And I
Speaker 1: got my first witchcraft book, which was Mastering Witchcraft by
Speaker 1: Paul Howson, who is still with us today. He's about
Speaker 1: eighty years old now. It was just a really great
Speaker 1: starter book and that put me on the path. And
Speaker 1: from there I started reading Crowley and just kept moving
Speaker 1: on through. When I got to California, I found my
Speaker 1: first cousin, and long Beach at Ias a cat. Thank god,
Speaker 1: you're warning Salem, Massachusetts trying you know still, you know still,
Speaker 1: I was just talking to somebody, one of my students
Speaker 1: about that actually earlier today. You know, when I was
Speaker 1: a kid in New England, it wasn't like Witchcraft row there.
Speaker 1: You never, it wasn't like that. You know. It became
Speaker 1: very trendy in the last fifteen years, right where all
Speaker 1: those stories just lined the streets. But it was not
Speaker 1: like that at all. His tourism'm pretty big in Salem.
Speaker 1: I well, now, yes, but New England. I mean, of
Speaker 1: course you've got to you go to the House of
Speaker 1: Seven Gables, you know, you you see some of the
Speaker 1: early politicians homes and you know, people of that nature.
Speaker 1: You know. But that was what it was about. And
Speaker 1: then of course, you know, we had the one Lori
Speaker 1: Cabot store and she had the official witch of Salem
Speaker 1: going on, and she held that for years and she
Speaker 1: did really good with it, you know. So that's fantastic.
Speaker 1: And since we last spoke, which I can't believe it
Speaker 1: was already two years ago. Yes, COVID, wasn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're right in the middle of it. Actually, you're right,
Speaker 1: it was in the middle of the beginning of it,
Speaker 1: right right. So you've been doing a lot of things
Speaker 1: since I have, I mean a lot's been A lot's
Speaker 1: been going on. I've I've further developed the coven that
Speaker 1: I run out of the store. Um, I've reached now
Speaker 1: I think I've taught my ten weeks to witchcraft. I've
Speaker 1: taught about We're thinking about five hundred people at this point.
Speaker 1: Pretty somewhere in there. Um, people love the course. And
Speaker 1: actually I just had class tonight and those this present
Speaker 1: classes on me was on the second to last class
Speaker 1: of the series and we were just reminiscing about that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so we've been teaching, Um, going to Greece,
Speaker 1: you know, go to Greece every year with Popia of course,
Speaker 1: and enjoying crete because it's like my favorite place in
Speaker 1: the world. Um. This year started out weird. Um, my
Speaker 1: mother passed away. Oh I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was really weird. She was ninety six years old.
Speaker 1: Ninety four blesser you know, and just you never you're
Speaker 1: never ready to lose your mom. No, it was hard.
Speaker 1: But this past weekend I flew to Florida and I
Speaker 1: celebrated my father's one hundredth birthday. Oh my god. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was a bombardier on the B twenty four in
Speaker 1: World War Two. My father was World War Two veteran.
Speaker 1: I lost him when he was eighty eight. He would
Speaker 1: have been a hundred years old this February. That is amazing,
Speaker 1: they're the same age. Yeah. My dad was in the
Speaker 1: eighth Ar Corps, you know, and then he totally did
Speaker 1: the ball bearing runs over Germany. My dad was in
Speaker 1: Germany the Battle of the Bulge. Wow, I wonder if
Speaker 1: they knew each other, you know, you wonder my dad
Speaker 1: was stationed in England. I don't know. I don't think
Speaker 1: my dad, while he may have come from the England
Speaker 1: area when they shipped them overseas. Yeah, see, my dad
Speaker 1: was in there. He didn't like to talk about the
Speaker 1: war too much, is it mine? My father was very
Speaker 1: much not that guy you had. You always heard people,
Speaker 1: you know, you always get those different people that loved
Speaker 1: talking about it. My father, I mean what I got
Speaker 1: from him. The first thing was and he he was finished.
Speaker 1: They offered him as service revolve where they offered him
Speaker 1: all the stuff. He just took it to the end
Speaker 1: of the line and gave it back to the music.
Speaker 1: I want nothing to do with it now. I did
Speaker 1: my time. I'm done, And he walked away. There was
Speaker 1: a Greece goddess by the name of was it the
Speaker 1: Hecate God? Yeah, for sure, Sam, How did you unravel her? Well?
Speaker 1: Et um? You know, I'd always known about her. She
Speaker 1: um has always, you know, been a prevalent word in
Speaker 1: Indi occult and I mean Shakespeare even mentions her in Macbeth.
Speaker 1: He doesn't do her very good justice though. He kind
Speaker 1: of makes her like an old look like an old crone,
Speaker 1: when actually she was like actually technically made it looks
Speaker 1: like Medusa. Yeah, well Medusa as a Gorgon, which would
Speaker 1: be a correlative and a relation almost conflation to Lakate,
Speaker 1: which was an aspect the ecat gorgon or the gorgon
Speaker 1: aspect of a kate um but Ekante I found when
Speaker 1: I went to Greece, and um, you know, I've been,
Speaker 1: like I said, I'd been a practitioner all these years,
Speaker 1: but I never worked with a deity or an entity.
Speaker 1: It was always just told me excale planetary magic. And
Speaker 1: when I was there, she came and she made it
Speaker 1: very obvious. And once I got home and I had,
Speaker 1: you know, interaction with her in the occult world, she
Speaker 1: gave me missions and one of them was to open
Speaker 1: the store and open up a temple to her, which
Speaker 1: we have succeeded in doing. Right now we have we're
Speaker 1: trying to make it the first official temple of Hekat
Speaker 1: in southern California. And your wife scree, isn't she Yes,
Speaker 1: she's very much a Greek woman. Yes, yeah, Greek Canadian
Speaker 1: as she likes to say, Yeah, but that's where it
Speaker 1: came from. And ekat is she's my breath. She changed
Speaker 1: my life. Does she come to you in a dream state?
Speaker 1: How does she come to um? Well, initially she came,
Speaker 1: you know, like I wasn't expecting it. We were literally home,
Speaker 1: like like not even two days and it was like
Speaker 1: an image that was like right over the side of
Speaker 1: my bed. And that's how she first came to me.
Speaker 1: And after that, I, you know, it started becoming a
Speaker 1: lot stronger, and then I started learning more about her
Speaker 1: and I studied different backgrounds. I mean, there's some really
Speaker 1: great authors on Nikati. There's a big resurgence for her
Speaker 1: right now. So she's becoming a goddess that a lot
Speaker 1: of people know about. She's even mentioned on TV shows now,
Speaker 1: Like she was just in the an episode of White Lotus,
Speaker 1: that show that was just out, and they mentioned her
Speaker 1: in it. These these two girls mentioned her worshiping her
Speaker 1: in the Moonlight. But you know, it's just because she
Speaker 1: in pop culture. She's found her way back in and
Speaker 1: it's amazing because she's the mother of the crossroads. You know,
Speaker 1: she was conflated later with Isis in Egypt, and she's
Speaker 1: one of those proto deities, you know that's just older
Speaker 1: than old. Was she a witch or a goddess? Well
Speaker 1: she was. She was definitely a deity. She was a
Speaker 1: titan She was pre Olympians. She was like Zeus, but
Speaker 1: well she was. She was more Titanic, and she fought
Speaker 1: with Zeus to put the rest of the Titans down
Speaker 1: so Olympic the Olympus gods could reign. And because of
Speaker 1: that Zeus was so well, you know your Greek mythology.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I have to, because I teach it and
Speaker 1: I share it, and I you know, it's it's my
Speaker 1: blood now. But you know, when Zeus saw what she did,
Speaker 1: he basically gave her the three realms, which is the
Speaker 1: Uranic realm and the Cashonic realm which is the underworld,
Speaker 1: and the Horizontic or the earth realm. And that's why
Speaker 1: you sometimes when you see ACTE, she is depicted as three.
Speaker 1: And it's not because she's a maiden mother crone. It's
Speaker 1: actually because she is all three of the realms of
Speaker 1: our life. But she's always been young. But then when
Speaker 1: Shakespeare got ahold of her, he turned her into this aspect.
Speaker 1: It was chrone like and that spurred her into being
Speaker 1: a darker goddess. So she she was very much the
Speaker 1: dark aspect, but she was never aged until much later.
Speaker 1: Would you say so that the interest in the occult
Speaker 1: has grown over the last few years incredibly incredibly much.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's well, you know, it's it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like trends, George, It's kind of you know,
Speaker 1: like how we see you know, rock and roll come
Speaker 1: and go, you know what I mean, you see changes
Speaker 1: in name, same thing with fashion and like like when
Speaker 1: you look at punk rock in the seventies and the
Speaker 1: resurgence in the nineties and you know how it moved through. Um.
Speaker 1: The occult is like that there's always going to be
Speaker 1: people that want another answer, and that more of an
Speaker 1: dependent choice, more of a more way of looking things
Speaker 1: from another another site. And not all occult has to
Speaker 1: deal with spirituality. You know, you could have spirituality involved
Speaker 1: in your occultism. Okay. And you know that word occult
Speaker 1: to most people, they get it confused, almost conflated with cult.
Speaker 1: But anybody that understands it, they know that occult means
Speaker 1: to be hidden from view because it was arcane knowledge
Speaker 1: that was that was kept from view to the masses
Speaker 1: for so many years. And that's where occult isn't comes
Speaker 1: from from the ocular aspect, right, occult and m But
Speaker 1: most people now see that as cult and they think
Speaker 1: of like the negatives, which are what Manson did in
Speaker 1: the sixties, you know, And so that associates them by
Speaker 1: the name. I think, does that bother you that people
Speaker 1: think the occult is evil? I believe, I mean yes
Speaker 1: and no, I you know, yes, I don't think things
Speaker 1: and I don't think anything should be necessarily deemed as
Speaker 1: evil or good. There is there is good and bad
Speaker 1: in everything, as we know, you know. And when you
Speaker 1: when you look at magic, you have to look at it.
Speaker 1: And I say magic was a kay as in causing
Speaker 1: change with will by using the elements and the planets. Okay,
Speaker 1: when you're dealing inns in that aspect, you it's up
Speaker 1: to the individual to utilize what they're doing for one
Speaker 1: reason or another. Now, we can't deem what's bad or
Speaker 1: what's good for anybody else but ourselves, because we're all
Speaker 1: free thinking and we have our own views, right, and
Speaker 1: we want to hope for the best out as people,
Speaker 1: and which is I think what we've always done since
Speaker 1: the beginning of time is to look at the best
Speaker 1: in people to know that these things are here. And
Speaker 1: I think that that's why people fear it, because you know,
Speaker 1: they associated with kind of like cheating or or mainlining
Speaker 1: into something where they don't have to go through maybe
Speaker 1: a deity to get to it. They can take on
Speaker 1: the responsibility of causing change with will themselves. How much
Speaker 1: of it includes learning about magic? A lot of it. Well,
Speaker 1: when you think about magic, when we use that word,
Speaker 1: there's so many different versions of what that right, and
Speaker 1: you spell yours with a K with a K at times,
Speaker 1: I mean so usually when K is put in at
Speaker 1: the end of the word magic, it usually is is
Speaker 1: a notation that connects you more with the ceremonial aspects
Speaker 1: of magic. People like Alistair Crowley is a Golden Don
Speaker 1: the Oto. These were mystery schools that came off of
Speaker 1: the Masonic lodges and the Rosicrucian systems, right and around
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty that's when all that started and Crowley developed
Speaker 1: the K to keep it separate from press digetation. That's
Speaker 1: a good point and it does it sticks out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it totally does, and people are like, oh with okay,
Speaker 1: you know, but a lot of people that are into
Speaker 1: low magic and witchcraft they don't want to really use
Speaker 1: that because there's some people in the occult realms that
Speaker 1: don't necessarily agree with Crowley's views. And that's okay, because
Speaker 1: everybody has has a belief in and what they want.
Speaker 1: If don't right or wrong there, but so they stay
Speaker 1: away from the K aspect. And but when you think
Speaker 1: of that, the magic with the K what you're usually
Speaker 1: discussing has to do with a lot with Kabbalah, you know,
Speaker 1: the Tree of life, planetary magic, so more working with
Speaker 1: the idea of harmonizing with the supernals on the Tree
Speaker 1: of Life and communing with Ketter, which is basically the
Speaker 1: emanation and the worryings of the beginnings of all life
Speaker 1: and creation. How did magic evolve into sleight of hand
Speaker 1: in terms of things is something I don't know how
Speaker 1: to cross that over. That's not something I'm I have
Speaker 1: a definite answer on. But I believe that the real
Speaker 1: from what I can assess, is because of the mystery.
Speaker 1: I think that came a lot in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: because when you know, when the Industrial age was born
Speaker 1: and Industrial Revolution was coming up. This is when the
Speaker 1: first mystery schools were coming together, and people like Blavatsky
Speaker 1: were involved, and a lot of these esoteric theosophical orders.
Speaker 1: But was also a time for people that were into
Speaker 1: like table filting or tarot card reading, or speaking with
Speaker 1: their family members that have passed away, and that always
Speaker 1: had a mysticism about it. And so I think that
Speaker 1: kind of lumped into like the whole you know, swamy
Speaker 1: kind of vision of what they thought was a person
Speaker 1: that could could tell the future. And it was also
Speaker 1: trickery and the smoking mirrors, morescents into that. We're talking
Speaker 1: without sal Santoro about witchcraft and of course about the
Speaker 1: magic with M. A. G. I. C. K. We'll take
Speaker 1: your calls next hour with him right here on coast
Speaker 1: to coast. It's truly remarkable. You know, people like David
Speaker 1: Copperfield love of course, saying Joel, they're magicians, and they're
Speaker 1: good ones, and they're mentalists, but where did they Where
Speaker 1: would they fit in today with what you do? I
Speaker 1: would be absolutely beside myself if I got to meet
Speaker 1: like David Blaine or any of those guys. Really they're
Speaker 1: skilled I mean those guys are sing pressed digitation. I mean,
Speaker 1: getting to go to the Magic Castle and watching that
Speaker 1: is amazing, you know, Brandon Scott, I know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: The next time you're you're at the magic Castle, ask
Speaker 1: for him. He's a great magician, Okay, you know, and
Speaker 1: see like that, that's all beautiful work and and and
Speaker 1: it just show you how the mind works against the
Speaker 1: movement of hand and the illusion. I think illusion plays
Speaker 1: a lot into that. But magic itself, like what I'm doing,
Speaker 1: is not illusion. It's it's causing change on the material
Speaker 1: plane to get a result. So you can go to
Speaker 1: a change attain something that you are looking for in
Speaker 1: the micro custom in your life. Absolutely, I mean is
Speaker 1: it magic If you go to wish for a better career,
Speaker 1: a relationship, a job, and you get it, that's you know, wishing.
Speaker 1: So wishing is um you know, the word wish can
Speaker 1: be can be construed almost as a a slight version
Speaker 1: of spellcraft, you know, wishing. This is also, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, what is opposite from a wish A curse?
Speaker 1: That's right, you know, most curses though, we know, you know,
Speaker 1: like I grew up in an Italian home back east
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And you every everybody in
Speaker 1: my block were in Milochia and Saint Christopher medal, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, and a crucifix. And I was
Speaker 1: one of those kids, you know, but we were brought
Speaker 1: up to wear that because evil I was envy. And
Speaker 1: you know, when I was a little boy in Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: my aunt Angie used to make me wear a big
Speaker 1: red ribbon on my whenever I wore when I went
Speaker 1: out to avert the evil eye because that was considered
Speaker 1: not a good thing to have energetically, right, so that
Speaker 1: would be like a curse. Where were you born? So? Um,
Speaker 1: I was actually born in Whittier, but I was raised
Speaker 1: in Boston, you were. My mother was raised in Fitchburg,
Speaker 1: no way, Yeah, fifty miles west of the Boston. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My mother is from from Walpole, very close, yeah, very close,
Speaker 1: and my dad's from some of them, and then my
Speaker 1: cousins were from Lemonster and Worcester and everything all over
Speaker 1: the place. I know Lemonster very well. Yeah, in the land.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that that was why that was my teenage
Speaker 1: years I got after the break. I'll tell you a
Speaker 1: funny story about Fitchburg, which was one magical maybe you
Speaker 1: can tell me what you think happened after I tell
Speaker 1: you that. So you've got your coven going, yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's it's growing, It is growing. What does a coven do? So,
Speaker 1: a coven is a gathering of people that follow the
Speaker 1: same piosophical and philosophical system and they come together and
Speaker 1: they celebrate, much like people would gather or convene in
Speaker 1: a church. Um. In this case, it's a very spiritually
Speaker 1: moving thing. A lot. Most most groups work with the
Speaker 1: agricultural wheel of a year um. In Neopaganism, this is
Speaker 1: um where we get spring, summer, we're in a fall
Speaker 1: and the old in Old pagan Europe, you know, this
Speaker 1: is where you're dealing with the beltane and the salon,
Speaker 1: which would be salon would be Halloween, and the beltane
Speaker 1: would be like the birthing of spring, and then you
Speaker 1: get your winter solstice in your summer. So listen to
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