Welcome to Oh No Rossi Carrier the show where we don't just report on Fringe Science, spirituality, and claims of the paranormal, but take part ourselves.

Yeah, but they make the claims we show up so you don't have to, I'm Carrie Poppy.

And I'm Ross Blacher, and today we have with us our favorite pagan in the world.

Yes, and some people might not know what that is, and think it's some kind of a pig, someone from a big planet, a pagan.

I didn't think that. I thought that. Firelight. Hi there. It's Firelight from Insighting a Riot, the podcast. Don't worry you've never heard of me. That's fine.

Some people might have heard of you for sure. You have one of the most popular pagan podcasts, which is hard to say.

It's a particularly popular pagan podcast. How prodigious and prolific of you.

So tell us a bit about yourself. I go by Firelight. Don't worry. That's not a legal name, and yes, I know how silly it sounds.

In the pagan community, there is sort of this notion that everybody has a magical name.

Yes, I get it. We're all rolling our eyes and giggling right now. It's fine.

But that sort of came out of the notion of the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s when people were really not wanting to give their real names to protect jobs.

And it has served its purpose online so that I can say what I want to say and do what I want to do and not have to worry to terribly much about things like my job finding out what I do and say and having to worry about answering questions.

Uncomfortable questions on a religious level, who I am as a religious spiritual person, what I say on my show and how that pertains to me as a professional individual.

So yeah, the name is Firelight. It's also sort of a send up to some of the sillier names that are out there.

If you get to know me at all, don't worry. Everybody gets to know my real name. You all know my real name.

So about five years ago, I created something called Insighting a Riot. It started off as a blog. It became a podcast where I discussed everything from paganism to social science, current events, equal rights, issues, things like that.

So the Riot was sort of a blending of all of the things that I really love to do. I loved investigating sort of like what you all do, investigating claims, discussing what people believe, why they believe that and then challenge, why they might believe those things.

And I sort of gained a name in my community for being a very incredibly skeptical pagan.

Which seems to draw fire from time to time.

Yeah, it does. Yeah, it has drawn the eye of the community. But I like to think that in the last five years, I've also helped to foster a conversation of a need for education in our community and not just our community, but the general spiritual community.

And everybody seems to get something out of it. I'm a huge supporter of interfaith dialogue.

So just to bring you back a second to something you said a few minutes ago, you said that you adopted your name partly to protect your professional career.

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