Dr Robin Douglas

This article was originally published on 12 February 2025. It was also posted on my Substack. The Employment Tribunal has ruled on a harassment claim which involved the African Caribbean religious tradition of Vodun (generally known as ‘Voodoo’). The case is Wint v Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council 1306321/2023, and judgment was given at the end of…

NONE OF THIS IS LEGAL ADVICE. IF YOU WANT LEGAL ADVICE, YOU SHOULD CONSULT A SOLICITOR. This is a short article on the status of Paganism in English law. I originally wrote it in 2018, and it is not guaranteed to be up to date. Nevertheless, it may be of interest. Introduction Before the nineteenth…

Occasionally, a child will claim to remember having lived a past life. These cases can sometimes be distinguished from childish fantasies by features that seem to link the child’s claims with verifiable details of the past life. Many examples of such stories can be found in the books of Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker, or…

The strange story of the Secret Gospel of Mark In my recent piece on the unexpected finding of religious texts, I left out the most famous example from recent years of such a text being found. I’d like to focus on that episode in this article. It forms a notoriously difficult and bitter academic puzzle.…

Originally posted on 30 January 2025. The rebel Catholic bishop Richard Williamson died yesterday after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 84. A convicted Holocaust denier and defender of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, His Lordship was on record as claiming that 9/11 was staged by the US Government and that the Apollo…

The following text comes from a press report of the funeral of the Baron de Palm, a German esotericist who died in New York in 1876. It may be the first Pagan funeral in the history of the United States. It was also apparently the first occasion on which the Orphic Hymns were used in…

This piece has also been posted on my Substack. Sacred texts have a habit of being discovered unexpectedly. Every so often in the history of religion, something very unusual but very convenient happens. Someone finds an old text containing sacred knowledge which has unfortunately been hidden until that moment. He – it is usually a…

Originally posted on 5 December 2024. Today is the 37th anniversary of the death of Rev. Dr Gareth Bennett. He was 58. He took his own life as the result of a tragic and unnecessary scandal. Bizarrely, it all started when he agreed to write the Preface of the forthcoming edition of Crockford’s Clerical Directory.…

Originally posted on my Substack on 16 November 2024. This week, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, announced his resignation. Welby is the most senior cleric in the Church of England and the figurehead of the worldwide Anglican Communion. It is unprecedented for an Archbishop of Canterbury to have to resign due to a scandal…

Classical education is associated in some quarters with an ideologically conservative outlook. This has been highlighted by an article that has recently been doing the rounds on social media. It is probably inevitable that some of our classical colleagues will dress to the right. We might mention in this regard the Classical Christian Education movement, as…