Sunshine Witchski on The Spiritual Path to Sobriety

Summary

Recovering alcoholic and witch Sunshine Witschke joins host Miguel Conner, himself a recovering cocaine addict, to explore addiction as a spiritual crisis rather than only a physical or mental disease. She describes leaving traditional AA after her many higher powers of gods, ancestors, and spirits clashed with its Christian-tinged culture, and creating the Witch's 13 Steps to Recovery built on tarot, ritual, and community. The conversation weaves Gnostic and Buddhist ideas of illusion, Carl Jung's influence on the 12 steps, and Sunshine's claim that the American Dream is a Masonic-born egregore that has run out of control.

Key takeaways

• 1Sunshine Witschke claims America's founding fathers, involved in Masonic and mystical work, created the 'American Dream' as a collective egregore that was never properly protected and has since run rampant, fueling corporate destruction.
• 2Bill W. said AA's Steps Two and Three came from Carl Jung, while the 12 steps were heavily shaped by the Christian Oxford Group.
• 3Sunshine created the 'Witch's 13 Steps to Recovery', reclaiming the number 13 (13 lunar cycles per year) from AA's predatory '13th stepping'; her 13th step is a ritual to release the world from addiction, performed on Wheel of the Year holidays as 'Awakening Hope'.
• 4Her upcoming book 'The Alchemy of Desire' argues addiction is an energy that replaces a person's chi and eventually calcifies the crown chakra, cutting off connection to the divine.
• 5She founded The Sovereign Phoenix, a federally recognized religious nonprofit set up to protect witchcraft-based recovery under freedom of religion; her first book is 'Sober Witch Life'.
• 6Miguel Conner promotes his Gnostic vampire novel 'Stargazer' and 'The Fall of Sophia', a cinematic retelling of the Valentinian Gnostic myth, and cites Jung's view of alcoholism as possession by a destructive archetype.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Some books do not stay buried. Before Miguel Conor became the Gnostic voice behind Aeon Bite, he wrote Stargazer, a vampire apocalypse that already carried the architecture of Gnosis. A paradise built on captivity. Humanity buried beneath the system. A false goddess calling the prison heaven. And one monster who begins to remember. Maybe the book knew before the author did. Maybe the myth arrived before the language. Now Stargazer returns as a resurrection. New visions, new relics, and a world rising again beneath the red moon. The Gnostic vampire apocalypse awakens this Halloween. Join the resurrection list. Stargazer. Resurrection. Indeed, indeed. Happy heresies and welcome to Aeon Bite and welcome to that introduction for Stargazer. Why did I put it at the beginning? Well, beyond a unique Gnostic tale couched as a vampire apocalypse, a powerful story that has been haunting me and I am resurrecting in various forms of media, including a whole universe. I also realized that, you know, what's, what do they say? All fiction is autobiographical. And the biggest, some of the biggest addicts in the world, as this novel and story says, are those who want power because power is eternally addictive and vampires. Vampires is the great symbol for the addict and the pain and sometimes fun that it is to be this type of addict. And when I wrote this novel, I thought I had my demons under control in my mid-twenties. But after this novel, the bottom fell through and I became a hopeless cocaine drug addict vampire, draining everybody around me, draining my spirit and draining the whole life that I had built. I'll have more about this. But yes, my name is Miguel O'Connor and I am indeed an alcoholic and a drug addict. ...

Excerpt from Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, Sep 10, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.