Lance Baker & Mat Dragonstone | Reiki, Talismans, & The Pleiades Pendulum Set

Summary

Reiki healer and pendulum expert Lance Baker joins astrological magician Matt Dragonstone to discuss a talismanic Pleiades pendulum set they crafted, along with the history of pendulum divination and Lance's claim that Reiki cured a migraine that lasted nearly a decade. The conversation covers why the Seven Sisters appear in cultures worldwide, how talismans are timed to astrology, and whether practicing magic is dangerous, following the early deaths of occultists Gordon White and Tracy Twyman. Host Greg Carlwood closes by describing how he consecrated the pendulum and tried to contact his late friend Gordon White, reporting a mix of hits and misses.

Key takeaways

• 1Lance Baker claims a migraine that lasted nearly ten years after neurosurgery vanished about a week and a half after he received a Reiki attunement and began treating himself.
• 2Baker also claims Reiki broke up his kidney stones and stopped a client's recurring herpes outbreaks for several years.
• 3Matt Dragonstone argues that worldwide Seven Sisters myths suggest the Pleiades legend may be around 100,000 years old, from a time when seven stars were supposedly visible to the naked eye. He credits Gordon White's book 'Star.Ships' as an influence.
• 4The pendulum set was consecrated and suffumigated (purified with incense smoke) following Agrippa's 'Three Books of Occult Philosophy'. The Picatrix is cited as another grimoire that covers the Pleiades.
• 5The episode recounts historical pendulum and ideomotor research: the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona, an alphabet plate dated to 371 CE, mesmerist Guillaume-Pascal Billot's 1825 'knee twitch' communication with a patient, and chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul's blind pendulum experiments around 1812.
• 6Greg Carlwood's pendulum session with Gordon White produced the letters R-O-L-N-O, which he connected to the rose liqueur Rosolio, and the message 'SOMMON', which he linked to the Hebrew root Shimon, meaning 'to hear'. He judged his attempt to identify a London tapas bar a miss.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

All right, people, this is a bit of an outside-the-box episode that ends with a pretty detailed breakdown of a ritual contact experience slash experiment that I had, and I think it took a while in this interview to bring up the fact that I plan to go over the experience in the wrap-up, so I'm letting you know now. So stick with it to the end, or if you just have an interest in hearing how these things went, jump to the wrap-up, because it's kind of a wild one, and it'll all become clear what I'm talking about pretty soon, but all right, enjoy. Well, well, well, I'm just a man whose intentions are good. From the Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood, and it is interesting that no matter what you might think about its usefulness, the art and science of petitioning the spirit, stars, subconscious, or greater cosmos for insights or answers to unanswered questions goes back about as far as we do. What even brought man to think you could throw chicken bones, read coffee grounds, spread cards, or observe smoke signals and make contact or extract information in any sort of reliable way? For almost all cultures outside of our own, signs and systems are everywhere. From animals making an uncanny appearance to lights in the sky that seem to be speaking to us, it was known that we are embedded in a conscious cosmos, and only by engineering our removal from the living world in exchange for a smoke-filled, concrete-covered, uninspired cityscape could we be made to forget something that seemed ubiquitous to everyone else. But we are relearning, and here to teach us are today's guests, Lance Baker and Matt Dragonstone. ...

Excerpt from The Higherside Chats, Sep 7, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.