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Jul 2025
37m 33s

the real reason you’re afraid of the dev...

Mollie Adler
About this episode

This episode plunges into the most feared symbols in the Western imagination: Lilith, Lucifer, the Devil, the Serpent, and the Dragon, and asks what we’ve buried, projected, or misunderstood in our efforts to exile them. Even the mere mention of these names makes many people look away. We’ve been taught, almost reflexively, that these figures are dangerous, evil, or untouchable. But that reflex didn’t just happen, it was engineered.


Across time, empires, churches, and ideological orders have taught us to fear the dark not because it is inherently harmful, but because it threatens structures built on binary control. This episode traces the historical roots of that programming and explores how these symbols, stripped of nuance, became scapegoats for archetypal forces that live within all of us. Sexual sovereignty, primal vitality, sacred temptation, and untamed knowledge. When we repress these forces, they don’t disappear, they warp. And it’s that very distortion that becomes the real source of harm from a personal, cultural and spiritual perspective.


This episode is a sober attempt to bring a sense of maturity, complexity, and symbolic depth  to things we’ve been told never to touch. Through myth, history, psychology, and cultural critique, we’ll uncover how our refusal to face the dark makes us more susceptible to possession by it. Not in a supernatural way, but through repression, denial, and disconnection.


If you’ve ever sensed that your fear of “evil” might be masking something more nuanced, more human, and more initiatory, you’re one of the few who is actually ready for this conversation. It’s my hope that you’ll leave with a clearer sense of how archetypes influence behavior, how light and dark must be held in conscious balance, and how growing into true psychological adulthood requires the courage to face what once frightened you.


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