Behind the Bastards - Part One: Helena Blavatsky: the woman who inspired the Nazis, and Gwyneth Paltrow
Aired: 2022-08-23
Duration: 01:39:24


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (11:35) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  What's up, everyone?
[00:00:37]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:00:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:00:42]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:00:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:00:46]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:00:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:00:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:07]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:15]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:01:22]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:01:26]  I doctored the test once.
[00:01:27]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:01:32]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:01:34]  Grego Lesbi and Michael Mancini.
[00:01:37]  My mind was blown.
[00:01:38]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:01:40]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:01:41]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:01:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:47]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:55]  10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
[00:01:58]  How did this ever happen in City Hall?
[00:01:59]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:02:00]  Jeffrey Woods.
[00:02:01]  A shocking public murder.
[00:02:03]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:02:09]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[00:02:11]  Those are shots.
[00:02:13]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:02:15]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[00:02:18]  That may have been about sex.
[00:02:19]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:02:23]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:30]  Oh, man.
[00:02:35]  Oh, man.
[00:02:36]  Behind the bastards, the podcast about people who aren't good by people who are good.
[00:02:47]  This week, our person who are good is Jamie Loftus.
[00:02:53]  How are you doing?
[00:02:55]  I'm doing good.
[00:02:56]  It's real hot.
[00:02:57]  I'm excited for the episode.
[00:02:59]  It is hot, but you know what a random lady told me once in Georgia?
[00:03:03]  What?
[00:03:04]  When you feel the sun on your back, that's just Jesus smiling at you.
[00:03:08]  Wow, that's a good positive spin for global warming.
[00:03:12]  I like that.
[00:03:15]  There's a good chance that lady didn't believe in global warming.
[00:03:19]  She was a white lady in rural Georgia.
[00:03:21]  So there's not a lot of ways that story is going to end.
[00:03:24]  Super happy.
[00:03:25]  You know what a white lady in rural Georgia told me once when I tried to special order a hot dog?
[00:03:31]  What was that?
[00:03:32]  She said, this isn't Burger King.
[00:03:35]  You don't get it your way.
[00:03:37]  Fuck off.
[00:03:38]  See, I love that lady.
[00:03:40]  I love her too.
[00:03:41]  I'll bet that lady's based as hell.
[00:03:42]  She's a gnarly hot dog.
[00:03:44]  She gave me a really gnarly hot doggy.
[00:03:46]  It was wet.
[00:03:49]  That's what you get for bringing your goddamn big city bullshit to her wholesome small-town hot dog, whatever it was.
[00:03:57]  I came in too hot.
[00:03:59]  I was swinging my dick around exactly to dying.
[00:04:02]  You're swinging your dick around at a hot dog shop, which is basically full of dicks already.
[00:04:06]  So nobody's impressed.
[00:04:08]  Yeah, it was disrespectful.
[00:04:10]  You go and be told off.
[00:04:12]  You go swinging your dick around at a Euro place.
[00:04:15]  Well, that's pretty much perfect because a gyro is basically a pocket, you know?
[00:04:19]  It's the most.
[00:04:21]  It's easy to start having sex with the hero.
[00:04:25]  It is very, it's incredibly easy.
[00:04:26]  A hero or a hero.
[00:04:27]  Both of them very easy to fuck.
[00:04:29]  Oh, both very fuckable.
[00:04:30]  Yeah.
[00:04:31]  Yeah.
[00:04:31]  Although you have more opportunity to get like some hip work in with the hero because the hero, it's just going to come out the sides, you know?
[00:04:40]  Wait, I'm trying to visualize this.
[00:04:43]  It's going to come out the sides.
[00:04:45]  As long as you're fine with penetrating the giro, right?
[00:04:47]  Pushing through that back.
[00:04:50]  We have a very good one.
[00:04:51]  Then it'll stay in, okay?
[00:04:53]  Especially if you like hold the edges up.
[00:04:55]  Whereas the hero, it's just kind of because it's an open-sided sandwich, right?
[00:05:00]  Hi.
[00:05:00]  So that's okay.
[00:05:01]  The open-sidedness of it.
[00:05:03]  Now I know.
[00:05:04]  But you're not going to punch your dick through the bread of the hero, though, because you can just fuck straight through.
[00:05:08]  And they're usually longer than anybody, but somebody.
[00:05:15]  The guy who was really Wilt Chamberlain.
[00:05:16]  Unless you're Wilt Chamberlain, then you might.
[00:05:19]  Off of Wilt.
[00:05:20]  What the fuck?
[00:05:23]  I learned who Wilt Chamberlain was through a Cartoon Network cartoon.
[00:05:27]  Same.
[00:05:28]  Only because.
[00:05:29]  Yeah.
[00:05:29]  Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.
[00:05:31]  Oh, I think I learned about him from an episode of, wasn't he?
[00:05:34]  He was a guest on Scooby-Doo, right?
[00:05:36]  Wilt.
[00:05:38]  Yes, he was.
[00:05:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:39]  It was the mystery of the man with the enormous cock.
[00:05:43]  Okay.
[00:05:44]  That's great.
[00:05:45]  Okay.
[00:05:45]  Once again, the script is really long.
[00:05:48]  It is almost 16,000 words.
[00:05:50]  Yes.
[00:05:51]  Just over there.
[00:05:52]  I'm not, I'm down to fuck a hero sandwich with a with a strap on.
[00:05:59]  Sure.
[00:06:00]  For sure.
[00:06:01]  Absolutely.
[00:06:01]  Without doubt.
[00:06:02]  Absolutely.
[00:06:03]  And I think it's just like about finding the right shop and the right and the right hero, you know.
[00:06:08]  You know, you don't want to be like pressured if you're not feeling it in the moment.
[00:06:12]  Maybe somebody puts like the like jalapenos, but not like the pickled kind that go really good with lettuce.
[00:06:20]  And you're like, well, I don't really want like just a straight up jalapeno on this.
[00:06:23]  I want like that texture change you get when they're pickled, you know?
[00:06:26]  And there's just some food you don't want on your crotch.
[00:06:29]  It's like, have you ever accidentally put Dr. Brauner's soap on your privates?
[00:06:38]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:06:39]  Yeah.
[00:06:39]  Oh my God.
[00:06:41]  After shaving for a party once.
[00:06:43]  Horrible.
[00:06:44]  No one told me.
[00:06:46]  No.
[00:06:46]  I didn't.
[00:06:48]  The bottle famously has too many words.
[00:06:50]  I'm not going to read that.
[00:06:51]  But there are a couple of very important words.
[00:06:54]  Don't put them directly onto your peppermint.
[00:06:58]  That peppermint shit burns like the god.
[00:07:01]  Yeah.
[00:07:01]  I see.
[00:07:01]  It's like fucking dance home in your junk.
[00:07:03]  I stopped listening when Jamie said it was wet.
[00:07:07]  I was showering with someone, Robert, and I did that.
[00:07:11]  And then I had to play it off.
[00:07:13]  Like, it was humiliating.
[00:07:17]  Oh, man.
[00:07:19]  And then it's like he absolutely saw what I had done, but I couldn't admit my mistake.
[00:07:25]  I was too.
[00:07:26]  No, this feels good.
[00:07:27]  It feels like a let's have breakfast.
[00:07:31]  Yeah.
[00:07:32]  I enjoy the feeling of my junk getting burned by a schizophrenic man's soup.
[00:07:38]  I horrify it.
[00:07:39]  Once again, if anyone, it just feels nice just to say it out loud.
[00:07:43]  I've never said it out loud before.
[00:07:44]  I'm glad we're having this five-minute long conversation before I've introduced the topic of the episode.
[00:07:49]  But before you get into that, I just want to say that somebody, please clip this out for TikTok for me.
[00:07:56]  For me.
[00:07:56]  Yeah, let's become TikTok stars.
[00:07:58]  Jamie, how do you speaking of burning genitalia?
[00:08:03]  Do you think about Goop often?
[00:08:06]  Yes, I've been thinking about Goop quite a bit lately.
[00:08:08]  Yeah.
[00:08:09]  And not the Gwyneth.
[00:08:10]  Not a Gwyneth Flamer.
[00:08:11]  I was speaking of the Gwyneth one, but yeah, Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's snake oil brand.
[00:08:16]  Or you think about QAnon a lot.
[00:08:18]  Q just came back on, right, after the repeal of Roe v. Wade, started posting.
[00:08:22]  That's not great.
[00:08:23]  Yeah.
[00:08:24]  Is that on your mind a little bit?
[00:08:26]  No, a little alarming.
[00:08:27]  And literal Nazis, those are probably on your mind occasionally, right?
[00:08:31]  They're on my mind far more than I'd like to admit.
[00:08:34]  What if I were to tell you that the ideas behind all of these groups have a single origin point, and in fact, an origin point in a single woman?
[00:08:44]  They can all trace their lineage back to one broad.
[00:08:46]  What if I were to tell you that, Jamie?
[00:08:49]  I would say I know exactly who that broad is, and I can't wait for you to tell me about her.
[00:08:53]  Yeah.
[00:08:53]  Yeah.
[00:08:54]  We are talking today about Helena Blavatsky, a woman so influential that the only way to start her episode was by spending five minutes talking about burning genitalia as a result of a variety of mistakes and fucking sandwiches.
[00:09:07]  And I honestly don't know where she would fall on any of those issues, to be perfectly honest.
[00:09:12]  Well, that's interesting.
[00:09:13]  We're going to get into this, but she would claim most of her life as a prominent figure that she was utterly celibate.
[00:09:20]  But her biography, at least one of her biographers claim, she was just like, as the kids say, she was balls deep in that Euro, you know?
[00:09:30]  Okay.
[00:09:31]  Okay.
[00:09:31]  So she was in the hero.
[00:09:33]  Okay.
[00:09:33]  I'm excited for this because she has, I mean, I know we're going to talk about it, but she has a jumping off point that directly intersects with the show I was just working on.
[00:09:43]  Ghost ship.
[00:09:44]  She started with some spiritualism stuff.
[00:09:46]  Yes.
[00:09:46]  And then she really took it to an 11 in the least pleasant way.
[00:09:51]  What's interesting, so because your show is about spiritual, specifically American spiritualism, because there's different strains of it.
[00:09:57]  She was kind of, you know what a magpie is, that bird that like lays its eggs in another bird's nest?
[00:10:02]  She was that for spiritualism.
[00:10:04]  She was never a spiritualist.
[00:10:05]  She just snuck in there to sell her own thing.
[00:10:08]  It's a very cool story.
[00:10:10]  I'm very, very excited because I started researching her for the show, and then it just quickly became apparent that not only is there at least a 16,000 word script to be had about it.
[00:10:20]  I could have gone longer.
[00:10:21]  Yeah.
[00:10:22]  And also that, like, like you're saying, like, she wasn't actually in, she was just interested in the eyes and ears that spiritualism had.
[00:10:31]  Yeah.
[00:10:31]  And it's one of those things, the religion she creates, theosophy, I'm sure there's going to be some theosophists that are just going to be livid with us at the things we leave out.
[00:10:40]  I read two biographies about this woman.
[00:10:43]  Both of them were very long.
[00:10:45]  Both of them have so much detail no one would ever need, unless you're interested in specific arguments that weirdo occult people were having in 1885.
[00:10:55]  Like, and it's like pages and pages.
[00:10:57]  I'm kind of interested.
[00:10:58]  And of course, you all know who this guy is.
[00:11:00]  He wrote that, like, so I'm trying to boil most of that out.
[00:11:04]  It's also worth noting, both of the biographers I read are like believers.
[00:11:08]  So there are no credible sources for most of this.
[00:11:11]  There are a few facts that we can say for certain.
[00:11:14]  And then it's like, here's one story.
[00:11:15]  Here's another story because she's like, she's an L. Ron Hubbard figure.
[00:11:19]  She never told the same story about her background twice, basically.
[00:11:24]  So we're going to do our best here.
[00:11:26]  But first, we're going to start well before the birth of Helena Blavatsky by talking about the concept of Orientalism.

=== Ancient Civilizations Debunked (15:48) ===

[00:11:35]  Now, today, Oxford Languages describes Orientalism as, quote, the representation of Asia, especially the Middle East, in a stereotyped way that is regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude.
[00:11:46]  I think today when people use the word, they're mainly thinking of like specifically China, but this includes a lot of colonialist attitudes towards India and obviously towards like the Middle East, towards Northern Africa.
[00:11:57]  And this is a bad thing.
[00:11:59]  If somebody accuses you of being an Orientalist, they're accusing you of a very specific kind of white supremacy, right?
[00:12:04]  But back in the 1600s, Orientalism was still a thing, but it wasn't necessarily white supremacist.
[00:12:12]  You could definitely say it was racist, although even that's a little off to me.
[00:12:16]  Basically, it's it was based on stereotypes of Asia, many of which were wrong, but the stereotypes weren't based in hate as much as the fact that it was the 1600s and it was kind of hard to get good information about India if you were like living in France, right?
[00:12:31]  So like people just like believed things and didn't really have any way to confirm them.
[00:12:36]  Now, specifically, Orientalism in the 1600s would have actually centered more around Cairo and Egypt than it would have, because that was the East, right?
[00:12:45]  That was the, that was the, the like, um, that was the kind of old world to people in that period of time, this Enlightenment period.
[00:12:53]  And it was, it was the center of historic knowledge, right?
[00:12:56]  Cairo had had the Library of Alexandria, this kind of mythic, I mean, it did exist in some form, but this like also very mythical library that's supposed to contain all of the knowledge human beings that it's this, it's this place where you go to find secret truths of the ancients.
[00:13:11]  Hey, I misspoke here and said Cairo had the Library of Alexandria.
[00:13:14]  I meant to say Egypt had it.
[00:13:16]  Obviously, the Library of Alexandria was in Alexandria.
[00:13:19]  It is so fascinating.
[00:13:20]  Like whenever you look at texts from that time, like I know that we're absolutely skull fucked when it comes to the proliferate, like the proliferation of false info now, but just like people in the West, their perception of Egypt would have been formed by only just like a couple of random Western people.
[00:13:38]  And it's gotta be so incredibly vague and entitled.
[00:13:43]  And it's just wild.
[00:13:44]  But it's also, I mean, one of the things that's interesting.
[00:13:46]  So again, in the 1600s, Egypt is kind of like the occult center of Western conceptions of like magic and stuff.
[00:13:56]  The same is kind of true for the ancient Romans.
[00:13:58]  That's the idea of like for how fucking old Egyptian civilization is.
[00:14:02]  2,000 years ago in like Caesar's day, like hip Romans are going to Alexandria, Cairo, to like do some of the same shit because they're like interested in this like ancient mystical tradition and stuff.
[00:14:14]  And they're like multiple gods.
[00:14:16]  Yeah.
[00:14:16]  I can't believe it.
[00:14:17]  Yeah.
[00:14:18]  It's, it's, I mean, they had multiple gods too.
[00:14:21]  But yeah, it's the Romans did, but I'm talking about once we get to just one big guy.
[00:14:28]  Yeah, it remains this kind of, there's this always been this fascination with Cairo and with Egypt in particular as this kind of like center of occult traditions.
[00:14:39]  And it's also worth noting that in the 1600s, like shit like the pyramids, like legitimately, they couldn't imagine how they could have been constructed.
[00:14:47]  They addressed that in the first scene of Despicable Me.
[00:14:50]  Oh, good.
[00:14:50]  I'm glad.
[00:14:51]  Yeah, it was the minions.
[00:14:52]  Inflatable.
[00:14:53]  No, it was inflatable.
[00:14:55]  Oh, okay.
[00:14:56]  Okay.
[00:14:56]  And then the minions.
[00:14:57]  And it was the minions.
[00:14:58]  The minions put it there.
[00:15:00]  They used all their little minion breath to inflate.
[00:15:02]  And then they went to sleep while Hitler was doing his thing, huh?
[00:15:05]  You know, it's fun.
[00:15:06]  They never account for like the other massacres.
[00:15:08]  Like, where were the minions during Rwanda?
[00:15:10]  Like, were they helping out with that shit?
[00:15:11]  Like, were the minions aiding Slobodan Milosevic in the massacre at Srebrenica?
[00:15:16]  Like, were the minions.
[00:15:18]  Canonically, the minions serve the most evil persons.
[00:15:22]  I want to recut that documentary, The Act of Killing, for when that Indonesian fascist is talking about strangle people.
[00:15:29]  There's like an elderly minion behind him with the wire.
[00:15:31]  You are not putting minions in the act of killing us.
[00:15:34]  Someone needs to, Jamie Loftus.
[00:15:37]  So the way in which Europeans during the Enlightenment treat Egypt is not very different from how a lot of New Age truth seekers treat India today, right?
[00:15:47]  Right down to the fact that people from Europe would move there to do fancy spiritual stuff.
[00:15:55]  They do Steve Jobs.
[00:15:56]  Now, obviously, it is kind of like India's kind of the spot for that today, right?
[00:16:00]  Particularly, there's a couple of cities like Rishikesh, where like white people love to go to like learn different sort of like Eastern spiritual traditions and whatnot.
[00:16:10]  A lot of white spiritualists do that.
[00:16:12]  Yeah, and Cairo is not so much, right?
[00:16:14]  You don't hear of a lot of Westerners going to Cairo to like get involved in spiritual stuff today.
[00:16:20]  And the reason why that switch happened, why kind of the capital of, I guess what you'd call Western Eastern spiritualism moves from Egypt to India has a lot to do with a dude you've probably heard of named Voltaire.
[00:16:35]  And Voltaire is real into this idea that there are sacred truths in like kind of Eastern and Asian religion and mythology that Westerners have forgotten.
[00:16:47]  And specifically in a way that like he thinks gives them kind of moral superiority over Westerners.
[00:16:52]  In Candide, he gives kind of the final word in the book to a Turkish dervish.
[00:16:56]  In The Princess of Babylon, he depicts a golden age civilization on the banks of the Ganges.
[00:17:01]  Voltaire was probably classic Voltaire.
[00:17:05]  I know so much about him.
[00:17:07]  I know every word.
[00:17:09]  Yeah, you've famously got Voltaire's face tattooed across your lower back.
[00:17:14]  Voltaire is not mainly something I associate with one line in the Princess Diaries 1.
[00:17:19]  Definitely not.
[00:17:22]  So he was probably the best known and most influential Orientalist of his day, which was like most of the 1700s.
[00:17:29]  This guy lived for fucking ever.
[00:17:31]  He was born in 1694 and died in 1778.
[00:17:34]  Pretty good run for that period in time.
[00:17:37]  I think he had a lot of civilists by the end there, but who did that?
[00:17:41]  Did he not go outside?
[00:17:43]  How do you achieve that life?
[00:17:45]  He did all right for the day.
[00:17:46]  I mean, that's doing pretty good for now.
[00:17:49]  So one of the things that he wrote during his very long life was an essay on the spirit of nations, which listed China and India.
[00:17:58]  He's kind of going through in a list what he views as like the oldest civilizations.
[00:18:01]  And he lists China and India as the very oldest of civilizations.
[00:18:07]  Now, Voltaire was not making any kind of archaeological argument here, certainly not in the sense that you or I would talk about today.
[00:18:14]  He was instead arguing in favor of a concept in vogue at the time called diffusionism.
[00:18:19]  Now, today we map cultural inventions, like say the Phoenician alphabet, back to specific origin points, right?
[00:18:24]  At some point, a person or persons in Phoenicia made an alphabet and it became popular, right?
[00:18:29]  In the same way that like at some point, some motherfuckers made an iPhone and it became popular.
[00:18:34]  But diffusionists didn't think that that's how inventing stuff worked.
[00:18:39]  They believed that there had been some great civilization in the past in which all great cultural inventions came from, right?
[00:18:45]  There was some golden age.
[00:18:47]  Yeah.
[00:18:48]  Like an ideological Pangea situation.
[00:18:52]  That's exactly what they think.
[00:18:53]  That's exactly what they're saying.
[00:18:56]  That's an interesting idea.
[00:18:58]  I think diffusionists believe there had been kind of like a couple of civilizations in the past that everything came from.
[00:19:03]  Radical diffusionists believed that all human culture and technology had like a single origin point.
[00:19:10]  Now, one of the things that was cool about Voltaire was that he argued, and this is what he was doing by listing China and India as like old, because basically, if you believe this, the older a civilization is, the closer it is to like the human original ideal civilization, you know?
[00:19:25]  Like the further back you go.
[00:19:27]  So by arguing that India and China were older than like any of kind of the Judeo-Christian civilizations, he was arguing against the primacy of Judeo-Christian beliefs in the broad sweep of human history, which is a pretty cool thing to be doing at the time.
[00:19:42]  So when he listed India and China as coming before Judaism in his essay, he was making the claim that Christianity and Judaism were kind of copying or descending from older belief systems.
[00:19:51]  Now, a thing that doesn't rock about this is that Voltaire also described the Jews as basically stealing their culture from other people.
[00:19:59]  Right.
[00:20:00]  I was like, that does seem exactly.
[00:20:02]  There's problem.
[00:20:03]  It's good that, like, okay, yeah, in the 1600s, probably Christian people needed a little bit of like a, hey, you're not the center of human development, right?
[00:20:12]  That's parts of the people.
[00:20:13]  They don't like it.
[00:20:14]  They don't like hearing that, Robert.
[00:20:16]  They hate that shit.
[00:20:17]  And the bad part is that Voltaire focuses a lot on the Jews and specifically them as stealing their culture from older cultures and not inventing anything of their own, which is a central pillar of anti-Semitism, particularly Nazi ideology, focuses a lot on like Jewish cultural theft.
[00:20:33]  It's like a huge thing the Nazis are, which for a bunch of Christians is very funny.
[00:20:37]  But anyway, whatever.
[00:20:38]  I mean, well, outside of like just like bald-faced anti-Semitism, is there a reason that he does not accuse Christians of the same thing?
[00:20:48]  He kind of does, but he really just focuses on Jewish people.
[00:20:54]  I'm not an expert on Voltaire, but he does spend, I think most people will agree he was a bit anti-Semitic.
[00:20:59]  Now, anti-Semitic for the time, that's probably too much to say because it was everyone, like there's regular pogroms and shit in this period, you know?
[00:21:09]  So he's pretty in line with a lot of Europeans in this moment.
[00:21:14]  I want to quote now from a fascinating write-up by Dan Edelstein titled Hyperborean Atlantis.
[00:21:19]  Quote, the Jews, as well as every other people that succeeded the Ur civilization, which is like the golden age civilization everything comes from, merely perpetuated a complete cultural system, which they inherited from the primogenitors of human society.
[00:21:33]  At a time when polygenetic theories about the origin of human races were rampant, radical diffusionism was further bolstered by the notion that only certain select peoples would have had the requisite qualities for inventing culture.
[00:21:46]  According to Voltaire, these primogenitors of all human knowledge were Indian.
[00:21:50]  This hypothesis was particularly seductive, as it could be extended to the most sophisticated aspects of human culture, namely the sciences.
[00:21:57]  The belief in the super-sophistication of Brahmanic culture grew stronger after Sir William Jones's discovery of Sanskrit grammar.
[00:22:04]  But even before the Asiatic researchers saw the day, Brahmanism was being hailed as the original science.
[00:22:11]  And this is, you'll see bits of this today.
[00:22:14]  If you listen to like people talk about the Bhagavad Gita, there's a lot of focus, particularly in the West, on like passages that could be talking about witnessing a nuclear weapon and stuff.
[00:22:23]  And right, this even goes both ways because famously was Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita when he sets off the first atomic bomb, right?
[00:22:30]  Now I am become death, such and such, destroyer of worlds, yada yada.
[00:22:35]  But there's these like, you can find a lot of conspiracies about like, oh, these things from the Vedas or whatnot, or these like bits of Indian art kind of look like they could be like a spaceship or something.
[00:22:47]  And so maybe like the Bhagavad Gita, maybe these ancient Hindu texts are talking about some like prehistoric war between advanced, with an advanced human civilization that tore itself apart and we're all living in there.
[00:22:59]  It's a thing people talk about today, right?
[00:23:01]  That's not a particularly common Hindu belief, but it's like a thing particularly Westerners will talk about today.
[00:23:07]  So that's kind of like my, that's kind of my big question so far is like when Voltaire and the Voltaire adjacents talk about India and Egypt, are they talking about the Western perception of Egypt?
[00:23:22]  Is anything they're saying based in actual facts?
[00:23:26]  Yeah, there's usually 10 or 15% actual fact because you'll get like, you know, that's a higher rate than a lot of people.
[00:23:32]  A lot of it is like some Rome for the Egyptian stuff, some Roman or some Greek like spent time in Egypt and like wrote about religious, and half of what they're writing is like maybe they saw some like worship and half of it is like some dude at a bar told them about a ritual.
[00:23:46]  And that all kind of gets like mashed together into like Herodotus writing about like what the Egyptians believed.
[00:23:52]  And then a thousand-ish, a couple of thousand years later, some like European in fucking Paris or London reads that and like, you know, off to the race as we go.
[00:24:02]  You know, I'm hanging out at the wrong bars.
[00:24:04]  The bar I went to last week said that overturning Roe v. Wade was good for me.
[00:24:09]  I just didn't know it yet.
[00:24:10]  Oh, well, that's sounds like a bar in Florida.
[00:24:15]  Fortunately, or Orange County or parts of San Bernardino.
[00:24:21]  It was Atwater Village.
[00:24:22]  Shout out Atwater Village for having some anti-abortion old men.
[00:24:28]  Continue.
[00:24:28]  Yeah, that sounds right.
[00:24:29]  So speaking of old men, Voltaire argued strongly that India, not Egypt, should be considered the font of civilization.
[00:24:36]  So he's saying even the Egyptians are just kind of like copying off of this great original Indian civilization.
[00:24:43]  And as you probably occurred to a couple of people listening right now, the things that he's arguing about and that other writers in the same vein are arguing about meshes pretty well with like the most popular myth in Western mythological canon, Atlantis, right?
[00:25:02]  Okay.
[00:25:02]  Yes.
[00:25:03]  There's not made that connection, but yeah.
[00:25:05]  There's like this perfect golden age civilization with advanced technology that's like somehow got destroyed and we're all descended from them.
[00:25:13]  Like that's not that far off from how a lot of people interpret Atlantis.
[00:25:17]  Now, the original myth of Atlantis comes from like Plato as written by some other dude, right?
[00:25:24]  Like it's not like Michael J. Fox movie.
[00:25:27]  Yeah, no, this is like, this is like when Plato got played by Ewan McGregor 20 years later.
[00:25:34]  Or when Salvador Dali got played by Robert Pattinson.
[00:25:38]  I feel like people all talk about it.
[00:25:39]  Oh my God, that did happen.
[00:25:41]  What a bad thing to do.
[00:25:43]  Especially absolutely unhinged.
[00:25:46]  If you are casting Dali, fucking Pedro Pascal is right there.
[00:25:50]  And he has proven his willingness to grow a mustache.
[00:25:53]  Oh, he's, and he can actually do it.
[00:25:55]  You know who did do it for the role?
[00:25:57]  It's Robert Pattinson.
[00:25:58]  Robert Pattinson, baby.
[00:25:59]  It's all that.
[00:26:00]  And remember me, iconically bad Robert Pattinson.
[00:26:04]  Absolutely outstanding shit.
[00:26:07]  Good movie night vibe.
[00:26:09]  Anyways, continue.
[00:26:10]  According to Plato, it was written by some other dude.
[00:26:12]  Atlantis was the home of a very advanced people.
[00:26:15]  Modern writers always take that to mean like spaceships and free energy.
[00:26:19]  In Plato's day, an advanced civilization meant like their aqueducts worked better, right?
[00:26:23]  Like that's what he was not imagining starships.
[00:26:26]  He was like, yeah, and they're really good at making water move.
[00:26:31]  The roads don't get muddy.
[00:26:33]  Incredible at?
[00:26:35]  Aqueducts.
[00:26:37]  In time, Atlantis mutated as a myth into a pre-Egyptian globe spanning civilization that had colonized the world in a manner similar to how Europeans had started to colonize it in the 1600s, right?
[00:26:47]  The Atlantis myth kind of transforms to ape what Europeans are doing at the same time, right?
[00:26:53]  Europeans see themselves conquering the entire world and colonizing it.
[00:26:57]  And because these myths, like they kind of adapt the Atlantis myth in media res to be, oh, this happened before.
[00:27:03]  And confirmation bias.
[00:27:06]  Right.
[00:27:06]  Loving when people manufacture their own confirmation bias myths.
[00:27:10]  Yeah.
[00:27:11]  Galaxy brain shit.
[00:27:13]  There's a lot of guys who are like super hard for this.
[00:27:16]  Or a good example.
[00:27:17]  Sir Francis Bacon gets his like is just coming constantly over fucking Atlantis in the early 1600s.

=== Atlantis Myth Origins (06:18) ===

[00:27:24]  And yeah, in the late 1700s, near the end of Voltaire's life, an astronomer named Jean-Sylvain Bailey decides to find Atlantis, right?
[00:27:33]  This like, because it's all, it's this, they've decided there's because of folks like Voltaire, they don't really believe that Atlantis is this like Greek island anymore.
[00:27:43]  And in fact, a lot of people are like placing it in the East, but nobody knows where it was.
[00:27:47]  So they all very much believe in this place that kind of its existence, especially if you if you imagine that you're going to find some artifacts that like maybe have some writing and stuff that looks Latin or something in there, its existence could kind of justify what you're doing in colonizing the world, right?
[00:28:04]  If some previous civilization had ruled the world and you're kind of descended from them, you know, that's how what a lot of people are thinking, right?
[00:28:13]  It's so funny to me.
[00:28:14]  It's like the fact that there were people looking for Atlantis back in the day and people like it, they are just like the Bigfoot hunters of their time, basically.
[00:28:22]  And people act like it's the most uncivilized thing in the world.
[00:28:25]  I was like, dude, this used to be a thriving industry.
[00:28:28]  It's a dying industry.
[00:28:30]  If I were at the point I am in my career now, in like the early 1990s, which was famously a period in which there were no problems, I would be doing nothing but looking for Atlantis and Bigfoot.
[00:28:41]  Like, yeah, the thing is, it's not the silliest thing you could do.
[00:28:47]  I don't like when it's treated that way.
[00:28:50]  No, the silliest thing you could do is write a book about how history has come to an end.
[00:28:56]  That's right, Fukuyama.
[00:28:58]  Go look for Atlantis, motherfucker.
[00:29:00]  So Jean-Sylvain Bailey decides, I'm going to find Atlantis.
[00:29:04]  And because history is actually not as cool as fiction, he does not put together a badass steampunk expedition with hot air balloons and shit, which is devastating, Jamie.
[00:29:14]  What a bummer.
[00:29:16]  Devastating.
[00:29:16]  So he's not doing the steampunk cartoon movie that I used to love.
[00:29:20]  No, no, it wrenches my soul in twain.
[00:29:24]  But he writes a bunch of really boring books trying to use math and logic to like figure out where it would have been.
[00:29:29]  Fucking yawn.
[00:29:30]  I know.
[00:29:31]  Fuck you, Jean-Sylvain Bailey.
[00:29:33]  Like go to suck a hero sandwich for homework after it's been fucked up.
[00:29:37]  I want to go to Atlantis, bitch.
[00:29:39]  Yeah.
[00:29:40]  Anyway, whatever.
[00:29:42]  In Bailey, we see the synthesis of the diffusionist trend with a new 18th century appreciation for the value of myths, previously rejected as being the beliefs of pre-rational civilizations, which is a fucked up term, but that's what they're talking about, right?
[00:29:54]  They view earlier civilizations as pre-rational.
[00:29:57]  I don't believe that's the case because you can't survive as a hunter-gatherer if you're not pretty rational, but whatever.
[00:30:03]  Scholarships are.
[00:30:03]  And also are even arguing that the West was rational at this time.
[00:30:07]  Exactly.
[00:30:07]  Exactly.
[00:30:08]  There's a lot that's wrong with Atlanta.
[00:30:10]  This is how they were talking about it.
[00:30:12]  Scholars in this period, though, this is actually kind of in some ways a positive trend where like a lot of scholars are going against this attitude that earlier civilizations had been like just fundamentally irrational and there's nothing to learn about their mythology.
[00:30:27]  Scholars start to argue that like, well, no, there's actually a lot of truth in certain myths.
[00:30:31]  That's why like they spread.
[00:30:33]  And the good, the aspect of this is healthy is, and so we should like study and appreciate the different mythologies and whatnot that human beings have embraced over time because they can teach us a lot about ourselves.
[00:30:44]  Instead, a lot of scholars decide like, well, this must mean that all of these myths are like branches of some great historic truth that has been corrupted over time.
[00:30:53]  And if we can figure out like a secret set of codes that allow us to like peel away the parts of the myths that have gotten corrupted over time, you could unlock a sacred discourse that reveals the truth about history.
[00:31:05]  So that's not.
[00:31:06]  I think you said a sacred discord for a sacred.
[00:31:09]  That was a very funny, there is a special discord board.
[00:31:13]  People are doing that.
[00:31:14]  There is now.
[00:31:15]  Sorry.
[00:31:15]  So Dan Edelstein writes, quote, Hercules's 12th and last labor in the traditional sequence led him beneath ground to capture Cerberus, just as Persephone, another solar figure, had disappeared underground for half the year.
[00:31:26]  These episodes and others, Bailey surmised, symbolized the complete disappearance of the sun.
[00:31:31]  The inventors of the myth must therefore have lived at a latitude where the sun periodically vanished from the sky.
[00:31:36]  Dismissing earlier theories about the location of Atlantis, Bailey thus reached the surprising conclusion that Atlantis lay near the North Pole, roughly where the Novaya Zimlia archipelago is situated.
[00:31:47]  So you see what he's doing there.
[00:31:48]  He's being like, number one, he's saying that like, well, because all of these myths have a common origin point and it's much older, it can't be like Greece.
[00:31:55]  Like it has to be older.
[00:31:58]  The Hercules myths can't have just been some things some Greek dudes came up with when they were drunk as shit around a campfire.
[00:32:03]  It has to originate from somewhere.
[00:32:05]  So let's, well, let's pinpoint within the story.
[00:32:07]  Ah, they're talking about an eclipse, which must mean that they live near the North Pole.
[00:32:14]  In some ways, you got a hand to a certain point.
[00:32:17]  It's very funny.
[00:32:18]  It's very funny the way the logic works.
[00:32:22]  And you're also Africa is also here.
[00:32:26]  Like, there's other places we can explore and trace the myth.
[00:32:30]  I mean, not explore, but you know, again, it is funny that, like, this is one of those cases where the people earlier and who were generally wronger about a lot of things were right about the origin of civilization or writer when they like proposed that it was in Egypt.
[00:32:47]  Because like, yeah, it did start in like North Africa.
[00:32:49]  Like, that's more, more or less North Africa and like bits of the Middle East.
[00:32:52]  It's like only Egypt that is worth exploring.
[00:32:54]  It's just so they go to the Hercules myth, too.
[00:32:59]  Yeah, they, they go.
[00:33:01]  I mean, Hercules clearly grew up in the North Pole, Jamie.
[00:33:05]  I don't know if you've read Hercules.
[00:33:07]  Look, would I watch that movie?
[00:33:10]  A million percent I would watch that movie.
[00:33:13]  There, I like to think, I was like, what would be the like popular current myth that people could that, once uh, society collapses, that uh, future cryptids can uh assume is based on truth?
[00:33:27]  I'm like, is it uh, Aragon?
[00:33:30]  Is it?
[00:33:31]  Yeah let's let's, let's have it be the ripoff of Jr Token like yeah, let's have it be Aragon.
[00:33:37]  Or uh, my favorite Vampire story, Cirque Du Freak, let's have it be Cirque Du Freak.

=== Hercules North Pole Myth (04:50) ===

[00:33:42]  There you go Jamie let's.
[00:33:43]  Yeah yeah, have it, it'll be Cirque Du Freak.
[00:33:46]  Um, that's our, our foundational myth.
[00:33:49]  Um also, I think that Santa Claus should start traveling around with Hercules.
[00:33:55]  Oh 100 but, but specifically young Arnold Schwarzenegger Hercules, where he can't really talk, like in English, like he's just like, he's just like pronouncing words phonetically because he doesn't know what he's saying.
[00:34:08]  I want that Hercules hanging out with Santa Claus just hucking people into the East Bay.
[00:34:14]  Um, North Pole, Hercules is a strong idea for a franchise.
[00:34:19]  Free ip folks go, all right, come on Disney.
[00:34:22]  Money on the table.
[00:34:24]  You know what else is money on the table, Jamie Loftus, tell me what the products and services that support this podcast money we're taking, which is why you're about to hear these ads.
[00:34:32]  I hope they're about to try.
[00:34:34]  I hope Gwynny's about to try to sell you a jade egg.
[00:34:37]  Oh, wouldn't that be amazing.
[00:34:38]  Fingers crossed well, other things crossed.
[00:34:47]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:34:51]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:34:54]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:34:57]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:35:01]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:35:05]  I'm Anna Sinfield and in this new season of the girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
[00:35:10]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:35:15]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:35:17]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:35:19]  The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
[00:35:24]  I said, oh hell no, I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:35:28]  He's gonna get what he deserves.
[00:35:33]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:35:34]  Trust me, babe.
[00:35:35]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:35:45]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:35:50]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:35:55]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:36:01]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:36:10]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:36:15]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:36:19]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:36:22]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:36:23]  That's so funny.
[00:36:25]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:36:33]  Say you love me.
[00:36:36]  You know I.
[00:36:38]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:36:45]  What's up, everyone?
[00:36:46]  I'm Ago Modem.
[00:36:47]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:36:55]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:36:58]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:37:01]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:37:06]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:37:09]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:37:13]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:37:18]  Yeah.
[00:37:18]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:37:21]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:37:23]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:37:31]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:37:34]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:37:41]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:37:43]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:37:44]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:37:45]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:37:54]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:38:00]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:38:06]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:38:09]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:38:12]  I doctored the test once.
[00:38:14]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:38:17]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:38:21]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:38:24]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:38:26]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:38:28]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[00:38:30]  My mind was blown.

=== Con Artist Scandals Exposed (10:54) ===

[00:38:32]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:38:34]  This is Love Trap.
[00:38:36]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:38:38]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:38:42]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:38:49]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:38:53]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:39:03]  We're back.
[00:39:04]  Oh.
[00:39:06]  Have you ever seen a Jade Egg, Robert?
[00:39:09]  I've seen jade eggs.
[00:39:11]  I haven't seen anyone the kind that you stick in your...
[00:39:14]  I've seen some people put some things inside them.
[00:39:17]  I'll tell you that much.
[00:39:18]  Oh my God.
[00:39:19]  I got this friend who can put one of those metal Coke straws all the way up.
[00:39:23]  Anyway, I used to use, I used to use one as a stage prop where I did a show where at the end, like I would have the jade egg in.
[00:39:32]  I would put it in at the beginning of the show, and then people would totally forget I had done that.
[00:39:37]  And they would also assume I never actually did it.
[00:39:39]  And then at the end.
[00:39:41]  Yeah.
[00:39:42]  And then at the end, I would, they would watch me pull it out and people hated it, Robert.
[00:39:48]  They did not like it.
[00:39:51]  But I had a great time.
[00:39:52]  You don't even know.
[00:39:53]  When I was a kid, I had great parties that only happened because somebody was able to hide a bag full of pills inside themselves in a similar way and drive across Dallas when there were a bunch of fucking checkpoints set up.
[00:40:05]  That's a good comrade.
[00:40:07]  That's a good buddy.
[00:40:10]  So we're talking about Bailey and his conclusion that Atlantis lays near the North Pole, right?
[00:40:15]  And this is what brings us the concept that is called today like Hyperborean Atlantis.
[00:40:21]  Hyperborea is this like mythical, in some myths, it's like a whole like Pangea style continent way back in the day.
[00:40:28]  But the Hyperboreans are like this mythical people who had supposedly existed somewhere in the far north of Greece, like far north of Greece and worshipped Apollo.
[00:40:37]  And these kind of Hyperboreans kind of that hyperborea becomes kind of the word for the civilization, the great civilization that everything had originated from.
[00:40:45]  It's also the civilization that Conan the Barbarian comes from in the Robert Howard novels, but that's because Howard is specifically a fan of this like mythology.
[00:40:54]  He's like growing up.
[00:40:55]  This is all still very like when Robert Howard, the guy who creates Conan the Barbarian, is like writing the stories.
[00:41:00]  This mythology is incredibly common because of Helena Blavatsky.
[00:41:05]  But yeah, so Hyperborean Atlantis is the concept that kind of comes up out as a result of Bailey's work.
[00:41:12]  And Bailey argues that the Hyperboreans had been real and that they'd lived up near the Arctic back when the world was warmer.
[00:41:19]  And again, it's face value, that's just another silly myth theory.
[00:41:23]  There's a bunch of different myths about early human beings that are all very fun, but not literally true.
[00:41:31]  I mean, for example, the opening of the movie Minions offers some really interesting ideas about how minions came to be.
[00:41:38]  Well, you know, and Jamie, actually, that's based heavily on Catholic doctrine that's been buried beneath the Vatican for centuries.
[00:41:46]  Well, but minions do believe in dinosaurs.
[00:41:50]  Dinosaurs are a thing for minions.
[00:41:52]  And for Catholics.
[00:41:54]  Yeah.
[00:41:54]  Really?
[00:41:55]  Yeah.
[00:41:56]  Catholicism, they've always been shitty about abortion, but like they've been good about evolution for a long time.
[00:42:04]  Okay.
[00:42:04]  Well, that's good to know.
[00:42:06]  There you go.
[00:42:07]  I lapsed as a bad about is child molestation, which the minions probably helped with.
[00:42:12]  You have to assume, right?
[00:42:14]  Okay.
[00:42:14]  No, they didn't, Robert.
[00:42:16]  Jamie, they're helping all of the villains.
[00:42:18]  What's more of a villain than the Catholic Church in Ireland in like the last 150 years?
[00:42:23]  Well, the English in Ireland over the last 150 years.
[00:42:25]  Do you see them?
[00:42:26]  I believe, unless I was misreading who they were.
[00:42:30]  You see them help at the beginning of the movie.
[00:42:33]  You see them help the dynamic.
[00:42:34]  You see them help a T-Rex.
[00:42:36]  You see them help the meanest caveman.
[00:42:38]  Wait, why is a T-Rex a bad guy?
[00:42:40]  It's just an animal.
[00:42:41]  I hate the word.
[00:42:42]  Fuck this fucking show.
[00:42:45]  You see them help Napoleon Bonaparte.
[00:42:48]  Oh, Napoleon was not a bad guy.
[00:42:50]  He was the only hero in European history.
[00:42:53]  Look, what happens in the movie?
[00:42:56]  And then they find Grew, who is Steve Carell.
[00:43:01]  And he's Hitler?
[00:43:03]  Yeah, I'm going to take that as given.
[00:43:05]  So, Jamie.
[00:43:07]  He is Hitler.
[00:43:08]  Yeah.
[00:43:09]  Again, at face value, this idea of like a Hyperborean Atlantis just sounds like another silly myth.
[00:43:14]  But as Edelstein continues, the impact of Bailey's conclusions here was significant.
[00:43:20]  Quote, Bailey dissociated Atlantis from the Atlanteans, the place from the people.
[00:43:24]  He thus mobilized the myth, tracing its progress from the North Pole through Asia via Mongolia down to India.
[00:43:31]  And from there, from east to west, Atlantis became a floating signifier, an indicator of cultural superiority and originality that could be affixed to any place and people with whom the migrant Atlanteans might have come into contact.
[00:43:44]  By situating their original homeland beyond the scope of empirical inquiry under the concealing lid of polar ice sheets, he turned the Atlanteans into what would soon become the 19th century myth par excellence, the myth of race, and more specifically, the white of the white race's peregrine peregrination.
[00:44:03]  I don't know how to say that word.
[00:44:04]  So basically what he's fucking doing is let me tell you here.
[00:44:07]  Let me explain this.
[00:44:07]  So basically what he's doing is he's saying like the Atlanteans came from this area near the North Pole, which is now under ice.
[00:44:14]  You can't find it.
[00:44:14]  So there's no documentation of it.
[00:44:16]  And after this great calamity, the Atlanteans migrated down, like through China and then into India and then through the Middle East and then eventually to Europe, right?
[00:44:26]  So that, number one, there's elements of like actual history that gels with, right?
[00:44:33]  You have like the Indo-Aryans, we're not coming from the North Pole, but you have these like different groups of people, primarily defined by like their language, that do migrate from vast swaths of like of the globe over periods of time.
[00:44:45]  And so there's bits and pieces of like evidence that shows like, oh, these people here, you know, originally like came from, or at least people migrated down from this area.
[00:44:55]  And like you can see evidence of that, which when you just have bits of it kind of seems to confirm, oh, there's this like migrating race that's bringing civilization in its wake, right?
[00:45:05]  So basically, a lot of white supremacists will eventually evolve into like the Aryan myth, right?
[00:45:09]  That there's this like ancient Aryan race that brought civilization to Europe and it's being corrupted now.
[00:45:15]  But there is this like original pure race that you can trace.
[00:45:17]  And like the Nazis do try to get it.
[00:45:19]  See how they always come back around to that.
[00:45:22]  Yeah.
[00:45:23]  I mean, and it again, there's bits of actual, because there is like an Indo-Aryan like people that travel up from India and eventually make it into Eastern Europe and stuff.
[00:45:33]  But it's not like what the Nazis are talking about.
[00:45:36]  But the Nazis do.
[00:45:37]  The Nazis send researchers to India to like the fucking Himalayas and shit to talk with people that they believed are like the ancestors of the Aryans.
[00:45:46]  Like there's a lot of people.
[00:45:48]  When are they doing that?
[00:45:49]  In like the in the 30s, 20s and 30s.
[00:45:51]  There's an SS.
[00:45:52]  Well, in the 30s particularly, once the Nazis gained power, there's an SS division called the Anenerbe, which is like the SS kind of occult history division.
[00:46:02]  A lot of like historians and researchers are funded by the Nazis to go over into India and find evidence of the ancient Aryans because the Nazis believe so strongly in this idea that there's this Ur culture that are our ancestors that traveled through the world and they've just been kind of like corrupted by mistakenly breeding and like the Jews come into this at a certain point.
[00:46:24]  So you just have to like send someone to find a scrap of information to create your confirmation bias myth.
[00:46:29]  Yeah.
[00:46:29]  And we can, yeah, I'm going to continue that quote now.
[00:46:32]  We can now fully fathom the political thrust of Bailey's gesture.
[00:46:36]  Rather than Orientalize Atlantis, which is what Voltaire had done, he Atlanticized the Orient, making a snow-white northern European people, the Hyperboreans, responsible for the cultural achievements and splendors of the East.
[00:46:49]  He did not deny Oriental achievements.
[00:46:52]  On the contrary, he bent over backwards to concur with Voltaire that Asian civilizations were truly awe-inspiring.
[00:46:57]  But a Hyperborean Atlantis allowed him to credit a European stock with the foundation of these ancient cultures.
[00:47:02]  So Voltaire's like, obviously, like, we in Europe are not so fancy and we shouldn't be as proud of ourselves.
[00:47:08]  Look at how much like grander these civilizations in the East were.
[00:47:12]  And Bailey comes along and he's like, yes, and it's because these white Hyperborean Atlanteans brought them civilization before they brought it here when their civilization was like closer to pure and that's why they had all these achievements.
[00:47:23]  But it's still like white people, right?
[00:47:27]  Yeah.
[00:47:28]  Yeah.
[00:47:28]  It, yeah.
[00:47:31]  Okay, so Bailey's ideas did not gain tremendous ground in his time.
[00:47:36]  Jules Verne actually mocks it.
[00:47:37]  The whole book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is Jules Verne making fun of this guy, pretty much.
[00:47:42]  It's one of those things you don't catch now because it's this argument between dudes who've been dead for 100.
[00:47:47]  Yeah, but Verne is kind of like mocking Bailey specifically in that book.
[00:47:51]  I always enjoy something like that where you're like, yeah, you can read the, like, when do you find out the Wizard of Oz is an allegory for something that you're like, well, I didn't know about these agrarian, like, what this is not relevant to me.
[00:48:02]  But at the time, people were like, oh, he got their asses.
[00:48:06]  Well, and that is the mark to me of like great, like, like, you know, shitty political, shitty fiction.
[00:48:12]  It's very obvious that, like, ah, this is just some like stupid political rant.
[00:48:16]  And if it's really good fiction, you know, there's probably some dumb political rant there because all authors do that kind of shit, but you don't notice it.
[00:48:23]  It's like Tolkien was actually extremely angry about Tory fiscal policy.
[00:48:29]  And that's really what he's talking about when he discusses the delineation of the different orcish peoples from the Elves.
[00:48:37]  It's all about Tory economic policy to continue this joke.
[00:48:43]  That was a lie.
[00:48:45]  I've not found the patience in this lifetime to dive into Tolkien lore.
[00:48:49]  I don't think it's going to happen for me.
[00:48:51]  Oh, it's funny.
[00:48:52]  He really hated the idea that anybody would read anything into his books, but like, but the elves and orcs like things to read too.
[00:49:01]  Like, the man lives through a battle of the Somme in which thousands of his comrades are like sucked into mud and drown in it, like while he watches.
[00:49:09]  And then he like writes in his book about this battle where thousands of corpses are like trapped forever in a bog.
[00:49:15]  And people are like, was this about like, were you like writing about World War One at all?
[00:49:19]  And he like hits them in the face with a beer bottle.
[00:49:21]  Like, fuck you for assuming.
[00:49:25]  Exhausting.

=== Ukrainian Childhood Secrets (06:22) ===

[00:49:27]  What a king.
[00:49:28]  So, Jamie, this somewhat meandering discussion.
[00:49:34]  You know, Bailey.
[00:49:35]  I think it's been very on topic.
[00:49:37]  Yeah, thank you.
[00:49:38]  So Bailey is kind of ignored in his time, mocked by guys like Jules Verne.
[00:49:42]  But about 60 years after he publishes his work, a woman is going to be born who will take his ideas, expand them, and carry them forward into a new and bloodier age.
[00:49:51]  Her name is Helena Petrovna von Hahn, and she's born on August 12th, 1831, in a Katerinoslav.
[00:49:59]  Now, Dniprove, she's a Leo.
[00:50:02]  So she's going to be a little bit showy, Robert.
[00:50:05]  And her whole childhood is in Ukraine, specifically, it's in like a lot of the parts of Ukraine that people are fighting and dying over right now.
[00:50:14]  Her hometown, Katerinoslav, was a very modern city by the standards of the Russian Empire.
[00:50:20]  It had been built just a century before, and it specifically was like a city they had established in like honor of Catherine the Great, who is the ruler of Russia for quite a while.
[00:50:31]  Very interesting lady.
[00:50:32]  Also a good friend of Voltaire.
[00:50:34]  Just interesting note.
[00:50:36]  Now, you may have noticed that she is, there's a Vaughan in her name, right?
[00:50:40]  She's Helena Petrovna von Hahn.
[00:50:43]  This means that she's nobility, but you also might notice that Vaughan is German, right?
[00:50:49]  Yeah, if you're a Vaughan is like a marker that you're a member of like the nobility in German culture.
[00:50:56]  Robert, I'm, I feel like I should have known that.
[00:50:59]  Does it, does everybody know that?
[00:51:01]  Yeah, like the guy who assassinated Hitler, Klaus von Stauffenberg, was Prussian nobility, right?
[00:51:06]  I didn't know that.
[00:51:07]  All right.
[00:51:07]  Yeah.
[00:51:08]  It's why a lot of grifters put Vaughan in their name in like the 1800s, 1900s.
[00:51:12]  It's because they're like pretending to be European nobles.
[00:51:16]  And obviously, Von Hahn is a German name.
[00:51:18]  She's German, but she's Russian because a huge chunk of the Russian aristocracy are actually German.
[00:51:24]  This is going to cause serious problems for some of them in about a century.
[00:51:27]  But at the time, everybody's fine about it because like they're serfs and they don't have any choice but to be fine about it.
[00:51:33]  So anyway, she's German, but she's Russian and she lives in Ukraine.
[00:51:37]  This is the Russian Empire.
[00:51:38]  Not weird at the time.
[00:51:40]  The first great event of her childhood would have been a cholera epidemic, which killed so many people that coffins piled up in the streets of her hometown unburied.
[00:51:48]  Now, her mother was 17 when she had her, which we're going to be talking about that quite a bit.
[00:51:55]  Her mom is also named Helena, and she is not in particularly good health.
[00:52:00]  She and her new baby both catch cholera and nearly die.
[00:52:04]  And in fact, young Helena the baby was so sick that her godparents and household called for a priest to baptize her immediately as a newborn infant because like they thought she was going to die.
[00:52:16]  And according to family legends, Helena's aunt, who was actually also a child at the time, accidentally set the priest's robes on fire during the baptism, which is a pretty cool thing to have happen at your baptism.
[00:52:27]  That's pretty funny.
[00:52:29]  You have to hand it.
[00:52:30]  It's different.
[00:52:32]  There is something about a near-death experience as a baby that will just like set you on the most bizarre life paths.
[00:52:40]  And unfortunately, I am thinking about Elvis Presley and how his twin died.
[00:52:46]  And now they're like, you have to live the life of two men.
[00:52:49]  And then like, you just, if, if something happened, if you almost died as a baby, you're going to have a very fucked up life due to the baggage that you're like constantly reminded of.
[00:53:00]  Yeah.
[00:53:01]  That's why we should hollow out the center of the country and make it a giant child prison.
[00:53:05]  But that's a story for another day.
[00:53:07]  So Jamie, despite the ill tidings, Helena and her mom both survived the epidemic.
[00:53:13]  You may notice that I have not mentioned her father yet.
[00:53:16]  This is because he was a captain with Russia's horse artillery, some fancy royal unit, and he was generally not at home.
[00:53:23]  He first meets his daughter when she's six months old.
[00:53:27]  And this is going to be like the pattern for her.
[00:53:29]  He is away all the time.
[00:53:32]  Now, her dad.
[00:53:34]  Horse artillery is like an elite military unit in this period.
[00:53:38]  Like you're dragging, like it allows you to like drag cannons around and move them into position quickly.
[00:53:43]  And Peter von Hahn is kind of like an elite military commander for Tsar Nicholas I.
[00:53:48]  He wins awards for helping to suppress a bunch of different uprisings.
[00:53:52]  He is a shock trooper for the empire.
[00:53:54]  And Nicholas I, who is like the Tsar at the time, is one of the most brutal and effective Tsars in the history of the Russian Empire.
[00:54:01]  So while Peter's daughter is struggling with her 17-year-old mom to survive cholera, he is helping to crack down on an uprising in Poland.
[00:54:10]  And they kill thousands of people, like stopping this uprising.
[00:54:13]  It is blood running through the streets shit.
[00:54:17]  Now, the primary impact that all this has on young Helena's life is that they move constantly.
[00:54:22]  Also, her dad is 34 and her mom is 17, which is not cool.
[00:54:28]  That's another Elvis parallel.
[00:54:31]  Not at all uncommon for the aristocracy at the time.
[00:54:34]  This would have been kind of weird, I think, for like normal people, but for aristocrats, not uncommon.
[00:54:39]  Were they vaguely related?
[00:54:40]  Do we know?
[00:54:42]  I mean, probably right.
[00:54:43]  But I don't specifically know.
[00:54:45]  Yeah.
[00:54:46]  I'm not going to, we could get into their genealogy, I'm sure, a lot more if we wanted to, but who's got that kind of time?
[00:54:52]  So the primary impact, again, they move constantly.
[00:54:55]  And they're generally, because he's like a military officer whose job is to help put down rebellions.
[00:55:00]  They're not staying in the good cities in Russia, right?
[00:55:03]  They're in backwaters, you know?
[00:55:04]  They're far from famous from the art and cultural scene in Russia.
[00:55:10]  And this is a problem for Helena's mother, who's again also Helena, because she becomes a celebrated novelist.
[00:55:16]  She's a really interesting lady, actually.
[00:55:18]  Again, she marries her husband when he's like, she's a child.
[00:55:22]  But she, as a young adult, she starts writing novels that become actually very popular in Russia.
[00:55:28]  And they're all about women who are in unhappy marriages to brutes.
[00:55:32]  This is like a part of her history that I was like, this is very cool.
[00:55:36]  It is dope.
[00:55:37]  Her mom is a really interesting person.
[00:55:40]  I want to quote a passage from one of her books titled The World's Judgment, which I found excerpted in Gary Lachman's biography of Madame Blavatsky.

=== Russian Marriage Novels (03:23) ===

[00:55:49]  The fine, sharp, and fast mind of my husband, as a rule accompanied by a cutting irony, smashed every day one of my brightest, most innocent and pure aspirations and feelings.
[00:55:59]  All that was sacred to my heart was either laughed at or was shown to me in the pitiless and cynical light of his cold and cruel reasoning.
[00:56:07]  Ooh.
[00:56:09]  So I think you can grasp a lot about their relationship from that passage.
[00:56:16]  I love, I mean, I just always, I don't know, my favorite areas of history are women with no rights finding the way to subtweet their oppressors into fucking oblivion.
[00:56:28]  Like, that is so fun.
[00:56:31]  And not to draw another minions parallel, Robert.
[00:56:35]  Okay.
[00:56:35]  But the man who is at least the co-creator, one could argue, the creator of The Minions, co-director of the Despicable Me franchise, Pierre Coffin, raised by a very famous Indonesian feminist who wrote novels when she was still working as a flight attendant that became very famous, very influential.
[00:56:56]  She marries a French guy.
[00:56:57]  They have a little Pierre Coffin.
[00:57:00]  And what does he do to thank her?
[00:57:03]  Creates the minions.
[00:57:06]  An entire from two generations of a family.
[00:57:11]  Or you can interpret it as all the minions are men.
[00:57:15]  They're all men doing evil things.
[00:57:17]  And you're like, where is he going with this?
[00:57:20]  Does he realize it's all connected in the way that I do when I go on my long walks?
[00:57:25]  You know?
[00:57:26]  We don't know.
[00:57:27]  We don't know.
[00:57:28]  So, Jamie, that's pretty.
[00:57:31]  And I think we can assume from that passage also, sex probably wasn't great.
[00:57:36]  No, probably not.
[00:57:38]  Probably not very good.
[00:57:39]  Probably, probably, I'm going to guess Peter worse at sex than, say, a foot-long subway sandwich.
[00:57:49]  One of the ones on the that herbs and spices bread.
[00:57:54]  The herbs and spice.
[00:57:55]  Well, that's.
[00:57:55]  That's the best bread to fuck.
[00:57:57]  If you're going to fuck some bread, you want to be fucking that herbs and spices, you know?
[00:58:00]  That's the best bread, but I feel like it might have a Dr. Broner's kind of effect on.
[00:58:06]  Yeah, it's going to be a little peppery.
[00:58:08]  That's why you have a mad extra mayo.
[00:58:10]  Yeah, you really need to wash right away.
[00:58:12]  Yeah, you want to, and wash with mayo, right?
[00:58:15]  It's, it's like washing your eyes out with milk if you get mad.
[00:58:18]  Don't do that if you get tear gassed.
[00:58:19]  I'm sorry.
[00:58:20]  I don't even want to spread that.
[00:58:22]  Funny though, right?
[00:58:23]  So I don't know.
[00:58:24]  Anyway, Helena, the mom, was never in, because again, they're both named Helena, was never in good health.
[00:58:30]  So she doesn't ever fully get better from getting horribly sick.
[00:58:34]  And they move constantly, which is bad for her health.
[00:58:37]  They live in army housing, which isn't good either.
[00:58:40]  Although she and her baby still have like, again, they're rich.
[00:58:43]  They have a small army of servants at their beck and call.
[00:58:46]  So it's like hard, but not hard compared to how most people in Russia would be living at the time.
[00:58:54]  When she was two, when Helena the baby, our Helena was two, her mom, also Helena, has another baby named Sasha who dies immediately, which was tradition for roughly half of babies at the time.
[00:59:05]  And you know who else kills babies roughly half the time?
[00:59:10]  Is it the people who sponsor this show?

=== TikTok Rapper Sound (05:04) ===

[00:59:13]  On their special child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia.
[00:59:19]  Leaving a chicken with its throat slit on my front porch every week for six years.
[00:59:26]  I can't pay them to stop.
[00:59:28]  That's right, Jamie.
[00:59:29]  You know why they're doing that?
[00:59:30]  So you keep your mouth shut about the child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia.
[00:59:34]  Oh my God.
[00:59:35]  You're right.
[00:59:36]  And here we are.
[00:59:38]  It's never going to end.
[00:59:44]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:59:48]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:59:52]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:59:55]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:59:58]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:00:02]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[01:00:03]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[01:00:06]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:00:08]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:00:13]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:00:14]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:00:16]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:00:18]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:00:21]  I said, oh, hell no.
[01:00:23]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:00:25]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:00:30]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:00:31]  Trust me, babe.
[01:00:32]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:00:42]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[01:00:48]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[01:00:53]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[01:00:58]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[01:01:08]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[01:01:13]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:01:16]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:01:19]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:01:21]  That's so funny.
[01:01:22]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[01:01:31]  Say you love me.
[01:01:34]  You know I.
[01:01:35]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:01:42]  What's up, everyone?
[01:01:43]  I'm Ago Moda.
[01:01:44]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[01:01:52]  It's Will Farrell.
[01:01:55]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:01:59]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[01:02:04]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:02:06]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[01:02:10]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:02:15]  Yeah.
[01:02:16]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:02:18]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:02:20]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:02:28]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:02:31]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:02:38]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:02:40]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:02:41]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:02:43]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:02:51]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[01:02:58]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[01:03:03]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[01:03:06]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Ones, correct?
[01:03:10]  I doctored the test once.
[01:03:11]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[01:03:15]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[01:03:18]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[01:03:21]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:03:23]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:03:25]  Craig Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[01:03:28]  My mind was blown.
[01:03:29]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:03:31]  This is Love Trap.
[01:03:33]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:03:35]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:03:39]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Amaricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[01:03:46]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[01:03:51]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:04:01]  We're back.
[01:04:02]  Okay.
[01:04:03]  After making Sophie mark a bunch of places in the episode to bleep out the name of cool.
[01:04:12]  I like how you keep calling her Helena the baby.
[01:04:15]  Yes.
[01:04:16]  It does make her sound like a TikTok rapper.

=== Love Trap Indictment (16:12) ===

[01:04:18]  Helena the baby.
[01:04:20]  It does make her sound like a TikTok rapper.
[01:04:22]  She would have, oh my God.
[01:04:24]  I have to say, of all of the bastards we've talked about on this show, easily would have had the best TikTok.
[01:04:31]  I do see what you're saying, unfortunately.
[01:04:34]  She would have, we'll get to that.
[01:04:35]  She would have dumbed up.
[01:04:36]  I mean, her legacy lives on on TikTok, unfortunately.
[01:04:39]  Now, Saddam Hussein, that's a Twitter head.
[01:04:43]  That's a Twitter head.
[01:04:44]  You get Saddam on Twitter, ain't nothing else happening on Twitter.
[01:04:49]  Oh, man, that would have been a good time.
[01:04:52]  He would be making, he would be using the threat emoji often.
[01:04:57]  Oh, for sure.
[01:04:58]  Oh, my God.
[01:04:59]  It would have been incredible.
[01:05:01]  So after this, the family moved briefly to St. Petersburg, right?
[01:05:05]  They get like stationed there for a year or two, which thrills Mom Helena because St. Petersburg is like the cultural center of Russia.
[01:05:12]  This is when her literary career is starting to take off, and she's able to like go to art galleries and fancy parties and sit at salons with other adults who aren't like drunken soldiers.
[01:05:23]  This is like her dream life.
[01:05:24]  She finally gets to live for like the only two years or a year or whatever that she will actually get to be anything close to happy.
[01:05:32]  When baby Helena is six, Peter tells them that they're going to have to move again to the middle of nowhere to brutalize people.
[01:05:38]  And this time, mom Helena says no.
[01:05:41]  She refuses to move with her husband and like go with the army, basically.
[01:05:46]  So she stays in St. Petersburg a while and then her father comes to her and asks if she and her daughter want to go on an adventure.
[01:05:54]  Now, Helena's maternal grandfather, father, had been made a trustee for the Kalmuk, which was a wandering tribe of horse riding warriors who like the part of the area that they lived in, they had like a moving city and stuff that they took with them.
[01:06:08]  And like part of the area that they live in is in Russia.
[01:06:13]  I think they go to a number of places, but like they live within kind of the bounds of the Russian Empire because it's big.
[01:06:20]  And there's different kind of rules for tribal peoples.
[01:06:23]  And one of the things is you've got like this guy who's appointed by the government to be the intermediary of the tribe and the Russian government.
[01:06:30]  And Helena's maternal grandmother gets that job for this group of like horse-riding warrior nomads who are also Buddhist, right?
[01:06:39]  So again, Russia's very fucking big.
[01:06:43]  So he takes his daughter and his granddaughter on a journey to a city called Ostrakhan in the very distant steppes where the Kalmuk are like camping out.
[01:06:52]  And young Helena, as like seven something, eight years old, gets to spend time in direct contact with Buddhists.
[01:06:58]  This is her first experience with Eastern religion.
[01:07:01]  And this legitimately happens.
[01:07:02]  Gary Lachman writes, quote, here the young Helena Blavatsky was exposed to the Mongolian Lamaic system and had her first taste of Tibetan Buddhism.
[01:07:11]  Her mother, too, was inspired by the meeting and later wrote a novel about Kalmuk life, which was translated into French.
[01:07:17]  The prince spent his days in prayer in a Buddhist temple he had built himself.
[01:07:20]  The colors, the images, the incense, the strange words murmured in an unfamiliar tongue must have made a deep impression on the six-year-old, I guess she was six, who had already led a remarkably adventurous life.
[01:07:30]  Blavatsky would later say that her interest in Tibet began at that time.
[01:07:36]  So, and again, Tibet is this kind of mythical place.
[01:07:40]  It is a real place, but like you can't go to Tibet if you're like a Westerner.
[01:07:44]  It's pretty, it's closed.
[01:07:48]  But, you know, this guy, Tibet's, you know, obviously like kind of one of the centers of Buddhism.
[01:07:52]  And so this like horse nomad prince is like talking to this little girl about Tibet and she kind of falls in love with, you know, Eastern religion and mysticism.
[01:08:03]  And after this period of time, which legitimately sounds like a pretty rad experience to have as a six-year-old, the family all wind up back together with Peter in Odessa, mainly because Helena the mom is really sick again and Odessa has these mineral baths that are thought to be good for her health.
[01:08:22]  Yeah.
[01:08:23]  I love old school rich people.
[01:08:26]  It's like, you just go sit in some salt water.
[01:08:29]  You'll be fine.
[01:08:30]  It'll be good.
[01:08:31]  You're like, just go do rich people shit.
[01:08:33]  People were idiots back then, so they just go sit in baths when they could take simple prescription medicine.
[01:08:38]  Any of us could get from a pharmacy today.
[01:08:39]  Like, go to Walgreens, dumbasses.
[01:08:42]  I'm sorry.
[01:08:43]  Did you not consider going to CVS?
[01:08:46]  Yeah, motherfuckers.
[01:08:47]  Loser?
[01:08:49]  Your death's on you.
[01:08:49]  I don't even care.
[01:08:50]  Like, it takes a lot of time.
[01:08:52]  We're about to get canceled.
[01:08:54]  Yeah, we are.
[01:08:55]  Yes.
[01:08:56]  So she probably had, what's the thing?
[01:09:02]  It was like consumption, I think is generally like what people assume she had, right?
[01:09:06]  They just kind of describe her as sickly.
[01:09:08]  So she had some sort of like chronic lung illness that eventually kills her.
[01:09:12]  That again, you could probably knock out in like 10 minutes today.
[01:09:15]  Anyway, she dies in 1842.
[01:09:18]  Her baby Helena, now the only Helena, was 11 at the time.
[01:09:23]  Her mother was 28 years old when she died.
[01:09:27]  Wow.
[01:09:28]  Yeah.
[01:09:28]  So that's has her kid at 17, but she traveled.
[01:09:32]  She got her novels done before.
[01:09:35]  That's impressive shit.
[01:09:36]  That's impressive shit.
[01:09:37]  Yeah.
[01:09:38]  And probably what killed her ultimately was the fact that her doctors kept taking all of her blood.
[01:09:44]  Because again, medicine's not great in 1842.
[01:09:48]  She dies in her mother's arms, which is one of the saddest ways a 28-year-old can die.
[01:09:54]  Yeah.
[01:09:54]  Yeah, that's not great.
[01:09:56]  Her mother, who's probably like 48.
[01:10:02]  So Helena was presumably, like, you know, the daughter, Helena, was presumably pretty devastated.
[01:10:09]  Life goes on, though, and soon she and her sibling, she has two siblings now, are all sent to live with her grandparents because Army guy, like, army dad's not going to take care of him.
[01:10:17]  Like, he's not going to be a single army dad.
[01:10:19]  Like, no, they're going to go live with grandma and grandpa.
[01:10:22]  Grew despicable me.
[01:10:24]  In fairness, these are all rich people.
[01:10:26]  So they're staying with their grandparents at like basically a castle, you know?
[01:10:30]  Like, they're living in like a mansion type palace deal.
[01:10:35]  You know, in kind of like the eastern-y, well, not east for Russia, but east for Europe part of Russia.
[01:10:43]  Gary Lachman writes, quote, she was, according to her sister Vera, the strangest girl one has ever seen with a distinct dual nature.
[01:10:51]  One side of her was mischievous, combative, and obstinate, while another was mystical and metaphysically inclined.
[01:10:57]  Characteristics that those who got to know the mature Helena Blavatsky would agree on.
[01:11:02]  Her aunt Nadia, just a few years older than her, tells us that from an early age, she was sympathetic to the lower classes and preferred to play with the servants' children rather than those of her own class and often made friends with ragged street boys.
[01:11:14]  This solidarity with her social inferiors wasn't uniform, and she once had to apologize to an elderly servant whom she had slapped.
[01:11:21]  And again, Lachman likes Blavatsky and defends her.
[01:11:24]  So it's very funny that he's like, she loved the poor.
[01:11:27]  She did slap that guy.
[01:11:28]  She loved the poor.
[01:11:30]  Well, I also like how it's included in text that, well, she apologized.
[01:11:35]  So, you know, she must have just been having a bad day.
[01:11:38]  Jesus Christ.
[01:11:40]  Yeah, I mean, she was made to.
[01:11:41]  He does say she had to apologize, right?
[01:11:44]  So we're not.
[01:11:45]  Oh, okay.
[01:11:45]  So also she didn't mean it.
[01:11:47]  So also she just didn't slap in that.
[01:11:49]  I mean, again, this is why the servants are a bad thing to have because any kid who has a chance to slap an adult and get away with it's going to try, you know, that's just being a child.
[01:11:59]  I mean, that is true.
[01:12:00]  Yeah.
[01:12:01]  So, yeah.
[01:12:04]  Again, Lachman claims a lot that she like deeply loves the poor and the lower class.
[01:12:09]  I don't see any actual documented evidence of that at all.
[01:12:13]  And the fact that even he is like, yeah, she would slap around the servants makes me wonder if maybe she wasn't playing with the servant kids just because they had to do what she told them because she's the noble girl.
[01:12:23]  I don't know.
[01:12:24]  I do appreciate that he that he left it in anyways, even though it directly undermines his point.
[01:12:32]  I'm like, okay, not the worst journalism, but I mean, the logical thing to do would be to just simply omit that.
[01:12:39]  Yeah, I mean, like all of these people who write about Blavatsky, he's like enthralled by her, but there's so much shady shit she does.
[01:12:47]  Like he can't keep it out.
[01:12:49]  So there's these moments where you can tell like he just he has to include something negative about her, even though it hurts him.
[01:12:56]  Anyway, it's very funny.
[01:12:58]  All of these books about Blavatsky are a little like that.
[01:13:01]  So there is some ample evidence, though, that she was kind of a pretty, what I would call a fun kid.
[01:13:06]  The most detailed stories about her, it makes her sound like the proto-Wednesday Adams, right?
[01:13:11]  Like she's constantly hearing spirits and ghosts.
[01:13:15]  The family manner that she grows up on, there's this subterranean basement system that she spends her time exploring.
[01:13:21]  She's often found down there by man servants, like sleepwalking or talking to invisible companions.
[01:13:26]  So like servants will find her wandering the catacombs talking to ghosts.
[01:13:31]  Yeah, that's dope.
[01:13:32]  That's a cool kid.
[01:13:34]  I like that.
[01:13:37]  She frequently played with beings no one else could see, who she called the hunchbacks.
[01:13:41]  And sometimes she would threaten other kids to like sick her invisible friends on them if they didn't do what she said.
[01:13:48]  And I bet they totally believed.
[01:13:49]  Oh, man, witchy kids are so funny.
[01:13:52]  She does sound pretty cool.
[01:13:54]  Yeah, that's a great use of child ghost power.
[01:14:00]  That fucking rocks.
[01:14:01]  Absolutely.
[01:14:02]  Her sister later recalled, quote, Helena used to dream aloud and tell us of her visions, evidently clear, vivid, and as palpable as life to her.
[01:14:09]  It was her delight to gather around herself a party of us younger children at twilight.
[01:14:13]  And after taking us into the large dark museum, to hold us there, spellbound with her weird stories.
[01:14:18]  Then she narrated to us the most inconceivable tales about herself, the most unheard of adventures, of which she was the heroine every night, as she explained.
[01:14:27]  So she's like telling them lies about going on adventures with her.
[01:14:29]  I was in the, I got taken by like a spirit to this place and like I had to do this and you know, fought this other spirit or whatever.
[01:14:36]  Like she's, you know what, you know what Helena Blavatsky really would have thrived with is some friends to play D D with when she was like 11.
[01:14:45]  It does, it just, yeah, it's a big imagination kid thing.
[01:14:48]  And it just sounds like she didn't have anyone matching that level of imagination around her, which just means that you'll be able to do that.
[01:14:55]  So when she finally gets it, it's going to be with adults.
[01:14:58]  But like, also, this is a period in which if you're into that, there's not like a fictional outlet.
[01:15:02]  Like today, a lot of the bad stuff maybe wouldn't have happened.
[01:15:05]  Maybe she would have gotten really into fan fiction and eventually started writing her own shit and stuff.
[01:15:10]  Well, I think it's interesting because her mom was a novelist.
[01:15:14]  So you think that there would have been that like baseline of like, hey, write some of this shit down, you know?
[01:15:20]  There's bits of that happening here, but especially like it's this, I mean, again, we're kind of like in the period where like Mary Shelley's going to invent the concept of science fiction.
[01:15:28]  So there's not a lot of, there's not a ton of role models in terms of like taking your weird dreams about ghosts and spirits and turning it into a mythology.
[01:15:37]  Learning for that.
[01:15:40]  Learning that Mary Shelley lost her virginity against her mother's own grave was really just like, I think maybe the highlight of my 2022 so we'll do Mary Shelley in Behind the Ladies Who Rocked.
[01:15:55]  Yeah, behind the unimpeachable women.
[01:16:01]  God.
[01:16:02]  Sorry.
[01:16:02]  So, okay, so she's the fucking coolest animal.
[01:16:06]  She's making up stories about spirits and ghosts, hanging out in the catacombs, scaring kids.
[01:16:11]  Pretty dope.
[01:16:12]  So while she's living with her grandparents, and this is in a town on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan, she claims, now we're getting to the things that I don't think happened.
[01:16:20]  She claims during this period, she discovered her great-grandfather's massive occult library.
[01:16:27]  Now, I want to read you how one reasonably credible account written for an unpronounceable Polish magazine by Tomas Stawasinski describes it.
[01:16:35]  Quote, there she found hundreds of decaying books by the 16th and 17th century masters of alchemy and hermetic philosophy, such as Paracelsus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and Heinrich Kunrath.
[01:16:46]  Helena's great-grandfather, a high-ranked Freemason who in the 1770s was initiated into the Rosicrucian mysteries, selected the books for his collection with meticulous care.
[01:16:55]  We're talking about that.
[01:16:56]  Selected his crucible.
[01:16:58]  Yes, we'll talk about it.
[01:17:00]  Okay.
[01:17:00]  Selected the books for his collection with meticulous care.
[01:17:03]  Helena devoured them with passion, and it wasn't long until she became an expert in the field of occultism.
[01:17:08]  The only other person she could tell about her spiritual adventures was Prince Alexander Golitsyn, a colorful character and a frequent guest at Helena's grandparents' house.
[01:17:17]  Golitsyn was a Freemason and a practicing mage whose search for ancient occult secrets had led him to travel to Greece, Iran, India, Egypt, and numerous other places.
[01:17:26]  We don't know much about his relationship with Helena, but without doubt, it is Golitsyn who instilled the yearning for faraway travels in her.
[01:17:32]  Helena wanted to seek out the unknown, the magical, the mysterious.
[01:17:36]  Now, there is a lot going on in those paragraphs.
[01:17:39]  So that is...
[01:17:42]  Yes, she's hanging out as like a 15-year-old girl.
[01:17:45]  Her best friend is a prince wizard, the wizard Prince Golitsyn, which is pretty cool.
[01:17:51]  That's again very cool.
[01:17:53]  There is it.
[01:17:55]  I know that Bolvatsky goes in a wildly different direction, but it's like, I don't know, just like imaginative kids creating, going on to create controversial religions.
[01:18:05]  Huge in this time, because that was also how spiritualism started, was with like two sisters playing a prank.
[01:18:11]  Yeah, we're getting to that.
[01:18:13]  But like, so Golitsyn is a legitimately interesting guy.
[01:18:16]  He, he was in the circle of a lot of major Masonic and spiritual proto-gurus in the day.
[01:18:23]  One of his good friends was a Christian mystic named Carl von Eckerthausen, who was like one of the major dudes who inspired Aleister Crowley.
[01:18:32]  Again, Crowley is like a generation later, basically.
[01:18:35]  So that's the set that Helena is hanging out with as like a teenage girl, these weirdo occultists who are like a generation back from Crowley.
[01:18:43]  Now, Golitsyn's circle of dudes are all just super obsessed with secret societies.
[01:18:48]  Eckertausen wrote about a secret interior church, and they were all very into the Rosicrucians.
[01:18:54]  Now, you had a reaction to that.
[01:18:56]  You don't know who the Rosicrucians are, right?
[01:18:58]  I don't know who the Rosicrucians are, but I need to know.
[01:19:02]  The first thing to know about them is that they didn't exist, probably didn't exist.
[01:19:06]  So when she claims her great-grandfather was one, that's her myth-making, right?
[01:19:09]  But I'm going to quote again from Stolosinski about the Rosicrucians.
[01:19:13]  In 1612, in the German city of Kassel, an anonymous brochure was published.
[01:19:18]  It was a manifesto of the Rosicrucian Order, an organization nobody had ever heard of before.
[01:19:22]  The manifesto claimed that medieval occultist Christian Rosencroy had founded an order that gave its members access to the universal mystical truth about human nature and the ways of the world.
[01:19:32]  Two years later, another manifesto was released called The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencroy.
[01:19:37]  Rosencroy, it's Krutz, Rausenkrutz, I don't know, R-O-S-E-N-K-R-E-U-T-Z.
[01:19:43]  I don't know.
[01:19:44]  Rose LaCroix.
[01:19:45]  Rosencroy, yeah.
[01:19:46]  Rose LaCroix, the hero of the story, is presented as Hermes Trimegistus, a god of Hellenic and Egyptian origin.
[01:19:54]  Hermes is getting heady, Robert.
[01:19:55]  This is getting pretty fucking Hermes.
[01:19:57]  Is the alleged author of the Emerald Tablet, which is like a European alchemical text and definitely like a central mystic document of the Renaissance era.
[01:20:07]  And both of those books had been written by a guy named Johann Andrea, who was a writer, a mathematician, a theologist, and a Kabbalist.
[01:20:15]  So the history of the Rosicrucian Order and its founder were like books written by this, by Johann Andre, this like mystic theologist and Kabbalist who like invents this guy Rosencroy, who isn't real and a mysterious order.

=== Rosicrucian Family Ties (13:02) ===

[01:20:31]  It's like, it's not, it's, it's, uh, it's a, it's, I don't know if it's a prank because I don't know the degree to which this guy doesn't believe in.
[01:20:39]  He like writes a fake manifesto that he, that he, he credits to a guy who doesn't exist, who's based in part on like Hellenic and Egyptian mythological figures.
[01:20:50]  It's a little too, it's a little bit too calculated to be classified as a prank.
[01:20:56]  Yeah.
[01:20:57]  So basically, in 1612, this like Rosicrucian manifesto gets like posted up in Germany.
[01:21:03]  And again, there's not real Rosicrucians as far as anyone's ever been able to prove.
[01:21:07]  But because this thing, it gets goes kind of viral, this like manifesto being published, they become like a conspiracy theory, right?
[01:21:14]  Like people are like, oh, the Rosicrucians are behind this or that.
[01:21:16]  They're the secret order and they have all this influence here and this influence here.
[01:21:20]  And is this like a popular belief or is it kind of a little more esoteric?
[01:21:24]  Dudes are fucking writing conspiracy theories about the Rosicrucians into the 21st century.
[01:21:31]  It goes very viral.
[01:21:33]  So Helena is hanging out with dudes who are super into the idea of the Rosicrucians in this period with occultists.
[01:21:39]  And she has another entry point into weird occult conspiracy theories from the 17th century.
[01:21:47]  Anyway, so sorry, she has another entry point into kind of like occult conspiracy culture, which are the books of her favorite author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
[01:21:57]  Now, this guy, number one, her mom had translated a number of this dude's books into Russia.
[01:22:02]  This is like one of her mom's side jobs.
[01:22:04]  Bulwer-Lytton publishes a very famous book in 1871 titled The Coming Race.
[01:22:11]  Now, it's about an underground master race.
[01:22:13]  The Coming Race?
[01:22:14]  Yeah, yeah, the Coming Race, baby.
[01:22:17]  Coming into a hero.
[01:22:18]  I've watched that one.
[01:22:21]  It's like the great American bake-off, but less horny.
[01:22:26]  So The Coming Race is about an underground master race who have a secret energy called Vril that they use to like, it's their kind of occult electricity almost.
[01:22:37]  And yeah, this book, it's not Bulwer-Lytton, obviously.
[01:22:42]  This is published in 1871, not a Nazi.
[01:22:44]  I don't even think he's particularly a white supremacist, but his book is going to become extremely influential to the weirdest kind of Nazis.
[01:22:49]  Nazis love talking about Vrill today and secret underground Nazi bases in the Arctic.
[01:22:55]  Of that has its origin point in Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race.
[01:22:59]  So, Bulwer is a, Edward Bulwer-Lytton is a very popular author.
[01:23:04]  His books have been translated again.
[01:23:05]  Helena's mom translates them when she's a little girl.
[01:23:09]  And one of the books that Helena would have grown up loving from this guy is Zanoni, which is about a secret order of Rosicrucians who had psychic powers and lived forever.
[01:23:18]  This is probably why Helena later claimed that her great-grandfather had been a Rosicrucian, because she loves these books as a kid and she wants to like tie herself and her family to them so that she can claim to have some connection with these like Rosicrucians from her favorite book that become part of her like conspiratorial belief system about the world.
[01:23:37]  Right.
[01:23:37]  It's like she's making her own occult superhero origin story, right?
[01:23:41]  By tying herself and like, no, my grandfather was with the Rosicrucians and like, you know, these fiction books by Bulwer-Lytton aren't fiction.
[01:23:49]  They're him telling the real story, but he has to keep it secret because it's like a conspiracy, you know?
[01:23:55]  God, I mean, this is such fantasy kid behavior.
[01:24:00]  Yeah.
[01:24:00]  Still, still.
[01:24:01]  I mean, there's variants of this basic art.
[01:24:05]  Like a lot of secret knowledge conspiracy grifters in the modern era have similar stories.
[01:24:11]  Bill Cooper, who's the father of modern conspiracy theories, the first Alex Jones.
[01:24:15]  Yes.
[01:24:15]  His whole backstory is that like he, when he was working at the Pentagon, he snuck into his boss's file cabinet and he like saw evidence of all the conspiracies he would spend the rest of his life talking about.
[01:24:24]  Keith Runieri claimed that he had like interviewed all of the most successful people in the world and had like synthesized the secret information about how to have success from their backgrounds and stuff, right?
[01:24:35]  This is like well-trod guru grifter ground, the idea that like at some point as a younger person, you came across like the font of all secret knowledge.
[01:24:45]  And so you got it directly from the source and you can't show anyone else for like whatever reason, right?
[01:24:50]  You don't have it anymore, but you remember it all and that's why they should listen to you.
[01:24:54]  See, okay, so that brings up an interesting point too, which is like, it's not, yeah, it's not just like fantasy fan behavior because most fantasy fans don't have the access and like wealth to take it as far as what you just described and like what Blavatsky would have had access to.
[01:25:13]  It's like, oh yeah, you can like try to attempt to make it happen because you have more influence and power and money and all that shit.
[01:25:20]  Yeah.
[01:25:20]  And this brings us to the last well-documented part of her early life.
[01:25:23]  Her marriage at age 17, just like her mom, to a middle-aged ass man named Nikefor Blavatsky.
[01:25:29]  He was the vice governor of Erevon in modern day and also Vinay Armenia.
[01:25:35]  Like I think today it's the capital of Armenia.
[01:25:37]  So he's like, he's like the second guy in command of basically that of Russian, like Russia-controlled Armenia in the period.
[01:25:46]  Of their marriage, Lachman writes, quote, One story is that she did so to spite her governess, who said that no man would have so unruly, ill-tempered, and unpredictable a woman for a wife, not even the old gentleman she had recently taunted and laughed at so much.
[01:26:00]  Faced with such a challenge, the teenaged Blavatsky cast her spell and her plumeless raven was quickly netted.
[01:26:06]  Another story is that hearing of the plan to run away with Prince Golitsyn, the family felt duty-bound to protect her honor and its own and hastily shanghai the old, by their standards, Nikephor, into making an honest woman of her.
[01:26:18]  A third possibility is that she married Nikephor out of anger at her father, who had recently remarried to a Countess von Lang.
[01:26:24]  Yet Blavatsky herself tells a different story.
[01:26:27]  Prince Golitsyn, it seems, wasn't the only one who took her mystical passion seriously.
[01:26:31]  In the letter to her friend Prince Alexander, I'm not going to try to pronounce that last name, mentioned earlier, she wrote, Do you know why I married an old Blavatsky?
[01:26:40]  Because whereas all the young men laughed at my magical superstitions, he believed in them.
[01:26:44]  She explained that her suitor had so often talked to me about the sorcerers of Erevan or the mysterious science of the Kurds and the Persians that I took him in order to use him as a latch key to the latter.
[01:26:53]  Right?
[01:26:54]  So, number one, there's a myth that, like, or some people will argue, she and Prince Golitsyn had like a thing, which, by the way, would have been him molesting her because she would have been like 16, but whatever.
[01:27:05]  I was saying, yeah, that her family marries her off to another middle-aged man in order to get her away from this, this, this prince.
[01:27:12]  Um, she claims that no, I took advantage of this guy.
[01:27:16]  I married him because I wanted to get over to like these Armenian and these Kurdish and Persian mystics.
[01:27:22]  And he was a powerful man in that area.
[01:27:24]  And I knew he would like open the door to me getting into there.
[01:27:27]  I actually think she's probably telling the truth about that.
[01:27:30]  She has this guy kind of wrapped around her finger for most of the time that he's alive.
[01:27:35]  I don't have trouble believing that she, this was a calculated move on her behalf.
[01:27:39]  She's good at that.
[01:27:41]  And obviously, you're a fucking 17-year-old Russian noble girl in this period of time.
[01:27:46]  You don't want to grow up like your mom did, married to some like miserable ass fucking soldier dude.
[01:27:51]  If you want to take some autonomy in your life, you have to scheme a bit, right?
[01:27:54]  So maybe that's what she does.
[01:27:57]  Now, Madame Blavatsky, as she becomes known later, would claim for the rest of her life that, quote, I never was his wife, by which she means that the marriage was never consummated.
[01:28:06]  They did not fuck.
[01:28:07]  This is a topic of heavy debate, which I see no reason to wait into.
[01:28:10]  The two biographers that I hate.
[01:28:14]  I mean, of course, the biographies who are followers and fans of hers are going to want to heavily speculate about who and when she was fucking.
[01:28:22]  Exhausting.
[01:28:24]  It is.
[01:28:24]  We will talk about it more because it is relevant because a big part of the religion she makes is like aestheticism.
[01:28:29]  And a lot of it involves sex denial.
[01:28:31]  And there's credible allegations that, like, well, she was fucking the whole time.
[01:28:34]  And obviously that does matter if you're like because there was the celibacy thing.
[01:28:39]  Right.
[01:28:39]  Yes.
[01:28:40]  Anyway, this is a topic of debate.
[01:28:42]  Gary Lachman just takes it as like, takes her word for it and is like, no, she was celibate.
[01:28:48]  She might even have been.
[01:28:49]  Lachman kind of described her as possibly even asexual.
[01:28:52]  Meanwhile, the other biographer I use for this, Marion Mead, who is both way more into woo, she describes herself as like a psy practitioner with psy powers, but also a much more critical biographer of Blavatsky.
[01:29:05]  Interesting.
[01:29:06]  We'll note that she has at least two husbands.
[01:29:09]  At one point, she has two husbands at the same time, I should say.
[01:29:12]  She has numerous lovers.
[01:29:14]  She may have had some kids.
[01:29:17]  And that basically.
[01:29:21]  And one of the fun things is that like later, again, later in her life when she's a guru, sorry to skip ahead a little bit, but she gets like a doctor's to examine her bits.
[01:29:31]  And the doctor's like, it doesn't look like you've had a kid.
[01:29:34]  And she takes that little bit and she strong arms him into writing a note that says, quote, I hereby certify that Madame Blavatsky has never been pregnant with a child and so consequently can never have had a child.
[01:29:45]  And then she uses this note to claim that also she's a virgin, even though that's not really what the doctor says, but she like gets a doctor to write something and then like uses that as part of her.
[01:29:55]  Okay, that is kind of funny.
[01:29:57]  That is kind of funny.
[01:29:59]  I do.
[01:29:59]  I mean, it is like any like information about how doctors treated vaginas at this time is just like so hysterically wrong.
[01:30:07]  Like this was at the same time.
[01:30:08]  It's entirely possible that like she had that doctor looking at her foot and he was like, this seems like a vagina to me.
[01:30:14]  I'm a man in the 1870s.
[01:30:17]  Men in the 1870s, you could be like, okay, like you can examine me, but the lights have to be off.
[01:30:24]  Like, and then you're like, okay, ghosts are coming out of my vagina.
[01:30:27]  And if you don't believe me, you hate women.
[01:30:31]  It's the best.
[01:30:31]  It's the best.
[01:30:32]  It's a good time to be a family or a vagina.
[01:30:36]  So for her part, Blavatsky claimed, quote, never physically speaking has there ever existed a girl or woman colder than I.
[01:30:42]  I had a volcano when constant eruption in my brain and a glacier at the foot of the mountain.
[01:30:50]  Okay.
[01:30:50]  There you go.
[01:30:50]  That's kind of a sexual icon, Helena Blavatsky.
[01:30:54]  I've had ex-boyfriends who have said similar things about me.
[01:30:57]  Yeah.
[01:30:59]  So, again, the two arguments here, either she was basically asexual or she was fucking constantly.
[01:31:06]  I don't know the truth, but there's a lot of fun stories.
[01:31:10]  So she was about to hit the world like a goddamn bomb, right?
[01:31:14]  She's basically an adult.
[01:31:16]  She wants to get out there and travel to all the different mystical centers of the world, but she has to do one thing first, Jamie.
[01:31:23]  And that's get away from her dork-ass nerd of a husband, right?
[01:31:26]  Yes.
[01:31:26]  Can't have that dude hanging around.
[01:31:29]  So she claims that she warned her husband he was making a big mistake before the wedding and begged him to stop.
[01:31:36]  She escaped before the wedding briefly and then got caught.
[01:31:40]  And after they were married, she escapes a couple more times.
[01:31:43]  One indication of things to come when you try to flee the scene of your own wedding.
[01:31:47]  Yeah, into not doing it.
[01:31:50]  Yeah.
[01:31:50]  Yeah, right before their honeymoon, she like bribes some Kurdish warriors to smuggle her out and she gets caught.
[01:31:57]  I think she might have made it to Iran.
[01:32:00]  I hate that she was like put in this position, but I love her tactics to note.
[01:32:05]  It's pretty fun.
[01:32:06]  It's pretty fun.
[01:32:06]  She's like, she's like bribing these like nomadic warriors to like help her escape and like getting caught.
[01:32:12]  And it's this, it's this whole thing.
[01:32:13]  She's dealing, she's like dealing with misogyny with a real dramatic flair.
[01:32:17]  She is wild.
[01:32:19]  It's pretty, pretty wild stuff.
[01:32:21]  So she gets caught again for a while.
[01:32:24]  She's under constant guard in her husband's palace, but Helena keeps her focus and she eventually, yeah, she escapes to Tiflis in Georgia, where she gets caught again.
[01:32:33]  And her husband sends her back to her family so that they can send her and her servants to St. Petersburg to try to like keep a lock on her while they figure out what to do about her.
[01:32:44]  So like she's basically going supposed to be traveling with her servants to St. Petersburg to be like locked up somewhere until they can break her spirit.
[01:32:53]  But while she's on her way back home, she bribes the captain of an English boat to help her.
[01:32:57]  And with the help of an escape kayak, she kayaks to safety, evading her servants and like gets on this boat and gets taken to Constantinople and frees herself.
[01:33:07]  I know.
[01:33:08]  Isn't that dope?
[01:33:08]  That's a pretty cool story.
[01:33:10]  This is cool.
[01:33:11]  This is goddamn.
[01:33:13]  And it's like, I know where the story is going, but I didn't know these details.
[01:33:17]  And they're all cool.
[01:33:18]  And that's dope as hell.
[01:33:19]  And that's where we're going to end for today.
[01:33:21]  Helena Blavatsky has escaped on a kayak to Constantinople, which is pretty cool.
[01:33:26]  I mean, she kayaks in a boat and that takes her to Constantinople, but still pretty cool.
[01:33:30]  Really impressive.
[01:33:32]  All right, Jamie.

=== Kayaking Escape Adventure (03:33) ===

[01:33:33]  Yeah.
[01:33:34]  Have you ever had to kayak away from a bad marriage?
[01:33:38]  No, I've kayaked towards a bad relationship.
[01:33:42]  Ah, yeah, baby.
[01:33:46]  It is the ultimate.
[01:33:48]  Have you ever had to paddle away?
[01:33:50]  I have had some adventures while kayaking that involved a sunken kayak.
[01:33:57]  And I've definitely had some strenuous arguments while kayaking with a partner.
[01:34:02]  I don't like kayaking.
[01:34:03]  I'm going to be honest with you.
[01:34:04]  Not a big fan.
[01:34:06]  Sorry, I got so upset about your kayaking anecdote that I left.
[01:34:10]  Yeah, you have a tattoo of a kayak on your bicep that says, yeah, it says, do not tread on me.
[01:34:20]  Right before you came in this morning, you were drilling holes in canoes because kayakers hate canoeists.
[01:34:28]  Yeah, I mean, you don't feel like you're in a safe, womb-like space in a canoe.
[01:34:32]  I like to feel like I'm being born when I get out of the little boat.
[01:34:36]  Okay.
[01:34:37]  That's right.
[01:34:37]  That's right.
[01:34:38]  Like Jim Carrey in the second Ace Man Shara movie.
[01:34:42]  I was like, where is this going?
[01:34:45]  Yes, exactly.
[01:34:46]  Do you want to plug your shit?
[01:34:48]  Yeah.
[01:34:49]  I guess that the best plug for this is listen to Ghost Church.
[01:34:52]  It's the limited series I just finished that is Blavatsky Adjacent, which I think will become clearer in the next episode, but it's about American spiritualism and a bunch of time I spent with some psychics and mediums in central Florida.
[01:35:08]  Robert's in it.
[01:35:09]  Paul F. Kompkins is in it.
[01:35:11]  Sophie produced it.
[01:35:12]  Ian edited it.
[01:35:13]  It's just, it's just a cool zone jamboree.
[01:35:17]  And it's all, every episode is out now, so you can listen to all of it.
[01:35:21]  And then follow me on Twitter and Instagram if you want.
[01:35:26]  If you don't listen to Ghost Church, it personally hurts my feelings.
[01:35:30]  Yeah, if you don't listen to Ghost Church, I will find you and I will put your children on the blue apron island where they'll be hunted by Elon Musk for food.
[01:35:41]  Yeah, it's Elon Musk and all of his kids go.
[01:35:45]  Somebody's listening with their kids right now.
[01:35:47]  And I want you to know, children, that was a threat.
[01:35:51]  Your parents better listen to Ghost Church.
[01:35:53]  I feel, look, it's high, it's high octane shit.
[01:35:58]  I just got, I do what I would just, I still cut and check Apple podcast reviews sometimes.
[01:36:05]  And I checked, I checked them.
[01:36:07]  And I had one that said, I liked the whole show, but I'm going to stop listening now because Jamie wants the Supreme Court to be abolished.
[01:36:18]  But they still gave me four stars.
[01:36:21]  I just lost one star.
[01:36:23]  I mean, that's right.
[01:36:24]  Incredibly based, I think.
[01:36:26]  Look.
[01:36:27]  Yeah.
[01:36:27]  I was like, you know, that's pretty fair and balanced.
[01:36:30]  Yeah, I have to give credit where it's due.
[01:36:32]  Look, they understand that this isn't the content for them, but they're not going to punish your show for it.
[01:36:38]  They're like, look, I enjoyed the whole show, but we have a personal disagreement and I have to dock you a star.
[01:36:44]  I'm like, all right, you know what?
[01:36:46]  Yeah.
[01:36:46]  Thanks.
[01:36:47]  Fair.
[01:36:47]  Look, you know what?
[01:36:49]  Good for you.
[01:36:50]  Good for them.
[01:36:52]  Good for them.
[01:36:56]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:37:05]  I vowed I will be his last target.

=== Podcast Review Disputes (02:16) ===

[01:37:07]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:37:09]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:37:11]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:37:16]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:37:17]  Trust me, babe.
[01:37:18]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:37:28]  What's up, everyone?
[01:37:29]  I'm Ago Modern.
[01:37:30]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:37:34]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:37:37]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:37:38]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:37:45]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:37:48]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[01:37:55]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:37:57]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:37:58]  There's a lot of life.
[01:37:59]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:38:07]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:38:14]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:38:18]  I doctored the test once.
[01:38:19]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:38:24]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:38:26]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
[01:38:29]  My mind was blown.
[01:38:30]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:38:32]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:38:33]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:38:35]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:38:39]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:38:47]  10-10 shots five, city hall building.
[01:38:49]  How could this ever happen in City Hall?
[01:38:51]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:38:53]  A shocking public murder.
[01:38:55]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:39:01]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[01:39:03]  Those are shots.
[01:39:05]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:39:07]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[01:39:11]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:39:20]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:39:23]  Guaranteed human.