ORIGIN

In 2016, our host Brontë was sitting in a Chicago diner and reading Drawing Down the Moon, the seminal 1979 book on neopaganism in America by the late great NPR correspondent Margot Adler. While she was eating pie, a server walked up to her, pointed at her pile of books and asked, "Do you worship the Devil?"

After a steady adolescent diet of past life readings, womanhood ceremonies, New Age bookstores, and 90s teen witch movies – this was a shock. She realized that not as many people knew about modern paganism and magic traditions as she had previously assumed, so she set out to make a podcast that would share untold (or often mistold) stories of pagans & witches – some long dead and lost to history, and some right next door. The very first episode of Mystic was produced as part of Brontë's journalism Masters thesis.

Every other week, Mystic shares voices of the past & present, building episodes from historical records, archival audio, field reporting, and interviews. Mystic is based in Chicago.

Design

To create Mystic, we partnered with Jenna Blazevich of Vichcraft Design Studio in Chicago. She is responsible for our bewitching logo.

Photographer Mary Roll took portraits of our host.

Music

Our score, including our main theme song "Sirius," was composed by Sergey Cheremisinov.

Additional music by hausfrau.