Helena Blavatsky, a prolific con artist, manipulated figures like Henry Olcott by fabricating the Great White Brotherhood and claiming ancient roots for all religions to establish her Theosophical Society. Despite preaching asceticism while smoking a pound of tobacco daily and living lavishly during financial crises, she popularized karma and reincarnation in America through works like Isis Unveiled. Her blend of conspiracy, spiritual elitism, and cultural appropriation laid the groundwork for the New Age movement, effectively merging Eastern mysticism with Western science to create a lasting legacy of alternative spirituality. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:40
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
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.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, how I wish that this was behind the bastards.
We were talking about Rick Springfield, Jesse's girl.
Rick Springfield Song00:03:03
It's everyone here's favorite song.
We all just learned, all of us, our favorite song is Jesse's Girl.
Great song.
Okay.
Speak for yourself.
What is your favorite song, Robert?
It's Jesse's Girl by Rick Springfield.
I want to tell Rick Springfield that I love him, but the point is probably moot.
That is not joke.
What's your favorite song?
What song are you?
I don't know.
I don't think you can really have a favorite song.
Like, because songs are so tired.
I have songs like I have.
There's a Cats in the Cradle.
Different.
No, I hate that song.
But like for different songs for different moments, right?
Like when my mom died, the first thing we listened to was Miserare by the Cat Empire.
And that's like a song for that particular moment.
But like, you know, I like listening to all sorts of shit.
I like, if I'm running, I'm going to put on some infected mushroom or some shit because I want to like get moving.
If I'm sitting and writing, I'm probably going to listen to like Yonder Mountain String Band and Green Sky Bluegrass doing like live shows at Red Rocks and shit because that works good with writing.
I don't know.
Do you ever have a yacht rock moment?
Yeah, I like some yacht rock.
I like, you know who I who I like, Jamie Loftus, is fucking every now and then in the right moment.
Okay.
There's the fucking, oh, God, how am I spacing out his name right?
Five o'clock somewhere guy, Margaritaville guy.
Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Buffett.
Yeah.
I went to Margaritaville last night.
That sounds like I did.
I got, I got an it's five o'clock somewhere, uh, and it cost $500.
And then I went to see Minions Rise of Grew.
All buzzed up.
Wow.
How was the, how was the drink?
How was the Buffett margarita?
It was disgusting.
Yeah, they are.
I love going to Margaritaville because it is the trashiest place you can possibly be as a human being.
There's no battery acid.
It's not alcoholic battery acid anymore.
Nothing's good.
You can't get drunk there.
You could get drunk there.
It's disgusting.
You will give yourself diabetes before you can get drunk at a margaritaville.
But hey, that's why I got it.
They have a fake volcano.
At least the one in Vegas does.
And I love showing up already housed at a margaritaville in Vegas.
Well, you have to because you can't really make a lot of progress there.
You just get completely skull fucked on like cheap liquor that you bought at one of the liquor stores four miles away from the strip.
So it's not like completely ridiculous.
You bring a flask in with you and you add shit to their terrible margaritas and you have one of the worst hamburgers of your life while you watch a shitty floor show.
It's the best.
I can't do the food there.
Even as a joke, I can't do the food there.
But I still do that.
So bet it's like too bad to even eat as a funny joke.
But yeah, if, yeah, five o'clock somewhere at Margaritaville.
And then I, you know, you bring like a couple of nips to put into your soda at the movies.
Or you take some ketamine or you snort some ketamine in the bathroom of a margaritaville off the back of your friend's phone.
Like that's okay.
Katie King Spiritualism00:14:59
And then that's, and some people do that.
And I'm sure they did that while I was there.
Because why not?
Jamie, I've done that.
What?
I've done that.
Probably.
I've never been less shocked in my life.
Probably while you were there, because I'm always at Margaritaville in some form.
I feel like we would really have a good time at Margaritaville.
I saw Margaritaville at an airport in Puerto Rico.
Now we're fucking.
Fuck.
Yeah.
That's the good stuff.
And they just called it Air Margaritaville.
Craziest.
That's exactly what I want.
Okay.
So, Jamie, when we last left off, Helena Blavatsky, H-Blott, H-Blatt, oh, what?
H-blatt, something like that.
What do we do for her nickname?
What do we call her?
H-Blatt.
Anyway.
The Blatt.
The Blatts.
The Blatster.
The Blatzer had just made her way to Crittenden to hang out with this journalist, Henry Olcott, who was getting hard.
Olcott is in this period just getting super pilled on the paranormal.
Yeah, future president of Theosophy himself.
Yeah.
And he, again, he starts off as like this upper middle class lawyer guy who had like done an administrative job so well in the for the Union Army during the Civil War that he got made a colonel and but had just been like waiting his whole life for something weird to make him feel special and again he has he had like he's he's like abandoned his family in order to like become a seeker um his like wife and kids he's a cool dude uh henry olcott so love that For him.
He meets Helena Blavatsky.
She, she reads his articles about this farmhouse medium thing in Crittenden and goes over and just like immediately wraps this dude the fuck around her finger.
Like she is, she is.
This is, and again, she is not.
One of the things that's interesting about her, you talk about like L. Ron Hubbard.
He's conning people constantly, right?
Just his life is an endless series of cons that are at least successful for a period of time.
She's been failing pretty much non-stop.
Like you do.
Which I feel like takes a special kind of scammer to continue persisting in the face of only flops.
She is broke.
Most of her scams are flops.
When she gets someone to believe in her, it doesn't usually mean much of any money.
Like she's not good at this.
So it says a lot about Henry that she so completely, like instantly just like dominates this man's life and mind.
It's very funny.
He was just waiting for this.
Like you get the feeling with Henry Olcott.
He's just this guy who always wanted nothing but like some occult lady to tell him there's magic.
Like he just is ready to be a wizard immediately.
I mean, people are like always looking for confirmation of this.
And I feel like figures like Helena Blavatsky, even though she like could not pull off a scam for so long, like they just like live in people's brains because they like visually represent something that people want to be true.
And even though they can't prove it, they're just so ready.
I don't know.
It's like an aesthetic appeal, too.
It's part of the thing, like J.K. Rowling became a billionaire because she was able to tap into that sort of thing just within a, because they were all like, how many of the people listening right now as little kids like waited to get a fucking letter from a magic school and shit?
Like that's Henry Olcott.
He's like, that's he's like the first of those guys.
That's amazing.
He's like a 50-year-old man.
They're a wizard in Rockwood.
He's a 50-year-old man who's abandoned his children so that he can learn to be a wizard.
One of those embarrassing people who is like, where are those ugly graphic tees?
We're like still waiting for my letters.
Yes, that is Henry Olcott.
And he, yeah, he falls for her immediately.
She does some pretty basic cons.
And he starts to write articles about her.
And I want to quote now from an article published by the Oxford University Press titled The West Turns Eastward.
Quote, Olcott was impressed.
He began to write about her, and she therefore became a prominent figure in the spiritualist movement.
Soon afterwards, defending first the authenticity of the Chittenden phenomena against a skeptical Dr. Beard, and then the authenticity of a similar, of the similar manifestations of John and Katie King in Philadelphia.
So we're not going to get into Katie King often enough, but she's like this guy's dead daughter.
Yeah.
You want to talk a little bit about Katie King, of course, John?
I know about Katie King.
Katie King.
I mean, I, God, I, I also kind of opted not to go into her on Ghost Church because I feel like her story is like very adjacent to, there's like a lot of stories like this at the time, but she, she was a, um, I feel like just sort of another example of a physical medium who, I mean, her thing was like she went fucking big.
She had like an entire separate person that she could quote unquote conjure.
There was like a lot of magic involved, like a lot of magic tricks involved.
And she was able to like really get a gigantic following and then, you know, is eventually exposed and dies in obscurity.
It's the same story.
Unfortunately, that happens a million times, but it, but she's an interesting one.
She, she had a lot of eyes on her.
And it was also like the sexuality element to her performance as well.
And she is one of the things that Blavatsky starts by doing is backing Katie King is like making these, like writing articles and being because she realizes very, because again, she's not been great as a con person, but she's, she's figured some stuff out.
Maybe it's just that she's older and she kind of intuitively grasps that, like, okay, what I need to be doing to start is not push in immediately with my own grift, but establish myself as a credible expert on the paranormal.
And then anytime a paranormal story goes viral, I want journalists reaching out to me, Helena Blavatsky.
I want to be the one to do this.
So she's just trying to become like a point of contact.
Okay.
Yes.
I didn't realize that there was because, yeah, the woman.
So Katie.
That's how she starts.
Katie King is the spirit.
Florence Cook is the medium.
Yes.
Yeah.
I'm not, you know, whatever.
I'm not really anti them.
And, but, like, yeah, Arthur Conan Doyle was really into her as well.
Another guy like Henry Olcott, who was just a perfect mark from the beginning.
So Dr. Beard, the skeptic mentioned earlier, describes the two of them, Olcott and Blavatsky, this way.
Quote, H.S. Olcott is a rabid spiritualist.
He capitalizes both of the R and the S in that.
And H.P. Blavatsky is an occultist who laughs, one who laughs at the supposed agency of spirits, but all the same pretends to be one herself.
But the criticism, so like that's like he notes that, because again, Blavatsky is she's coming at this from a different angle than the actual spiritualists.
She's backing that these people are channeling something, but she doesn't believe it like it's ghosts.
She believes it's basically kind of like psychic imprints of people, if I'm understanding her argument correctly.
And yeah, so the fact that this doctor is like attacking her and attacking Olcott, again, it's the same way shit works now.
It only heightens her prominence in the weirdo spiritualist set.
The fact that like skeptics are attacking her for branding herself as a paranormal expert helps to set her career off.
Right.
Yeah.
And also it sounds like she's also like she's finding a way to like capitalize on the hype of spiritualism without fully backing it to like make space for her to develop her own ideology.
And part of part of, I think, why she's successful is she's she's mutating it a little bit, right?
It's the same way a virus works, right?
You want to, if you want to escape immune capture, you have to like, yeah, alter it a little bit.
And that's what she's doing.
And that the fact that she's bringing something new to what is by 1875, it's kind of boring, right?
Spiritualism is not new.
It's 130 years.
Yeah, new and exciting.
And she is making it exciting again by changing the game.
In 1875, she writes an article in response to another article on Rosicrucianism.
And it was here that she first described her beliefs in a concise way.
Quote, occultism or magic stands in relation to spiritualism as the infinite to the finite, or as the infinite to the finite, as the cause to the effect, or as the unity to multifariousness.
So she's like, what you're actually seeing with these summonings isn't like the thing itself.
It's just like one thing you can do with these spirits, right?
And people are not, people have not actually been like exploring all of the things that magic can bring you.
Now, this was an interesting like flavor variation on spiritualism.
Yes, yes.
And also opens up your ability to kind of like grift off of it significantly.
So this was a really good Good time to be spouting that particular line of bullshit because it was spiritual and religious, but also, and this is something you alluded to earlier, it was more modern than religion itself, which was undergoing a crisis at the end of the 1800s.
Scientific advances had rapidly thrown a lot of old knowledge into disarray.
And many people had come to believe that like scientific progress and Christianity were in direct conflict.
Geologists had pretty recently shown that the world was a lot older than people believed it was like 6,000 years old because some dude in the church like did weird Bible math and like that it was becoming clear that that was not accurate.
Darwin's theory of evolution was like starting to really pick up steam in terms of like widespread acceptance.
And also for the first time, the machines people were making were like things that wildly exceeded anything found in nature, right?
Up until pretty much this point, the fastest way to travel anywhere, unless you've got like a train is a fucking horse, right?
Now people are making like cars and shit.
There's like light bulbs and stuff.
Right.
That's yeah, that is part of like what is kind of like so fascinating about spiritualism was like how they were able to, at least for a while, ingratiate themselves into like, this is a scientifically backed religion.
And they still say that at every single spiritualist service that happens.
And that Blavatsky starts that.
Blavatsky is like the primary motive force behind that switch.
From the Oxford University Press, quote, she described science and theology as two conflicting titans between which a bewildered public was fast losing all belief in man's personal immortality and in a deity of any kind.
She thought that her contemporaries needed a religion that could meet the challenge of modern science.
And she thought that occultism provided just such a religion.
So when she's talking about the occult, she's thinking, talking about like spirits and gods and all that stuff and kind of dealing with it technically the same way that you deal with like physics to put a fucking plane in the air.
Now, as I've noted, she is unique in that she starts pushing this in a really public way, but she's not an original thinker.
She is not creating anything on her own.
And she does her best work.
She's a fan fiction writer, right?
That's essentially what she's doing.
So many like horrible, like eventually horrible spiritual leaders are fan fiction writers.
And she is specific, she is literally pivoting not off of other spiritual texts that people are writing, but a huge amount of what she's writing is her taking fiction that other people had written and like repurposing it.
Particularly the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who's the guy who wrote The Coming Race, which is that book about like underground, a super race.
This is the dude who, again, her mom had translated some of these guys' books when she was a kid.
And Bulwer-Lytton's stories often centered on like a race or a civilization that had been kind of the font of all human culture and science.
There was also this idea of Vrill, which is this like basically like the spiritual equivalent of electricity is kind of the way Bulwer-Lytton describes it.
Yeah.
And for Blavatsky's unfolding, she basically she starts making the case that like, no, Bulwer-Lytton wasn't writing fiction.
Bulwer-Lytton was like tapping into something very true or like, you know, hiding it a little bit or whatever, which I get to be able to do.
That argument is always a fun one of like, they said they were writing fiction, but they didn't realize they were tapped into a higher spiritual power.
And it was a chance.
That's my channeled texts are my favorite shit in the world.
Oh, yeah.
We'll be talking about that.
Yeah.
Jesus wrote this.
You're like, okay.
Okay.
Okay.
My favorite, I own a couple when I was researching Ghost Church, and my favorite one is channeled from someone who died on the Titanic.
Oh, nice.
I would like that.
I may do that for my next book, but have it still be about like cyborg Supermen fighting in a post-Civil War United States, but just be like, no, this was absolutely written by a nine-year-old who died on the Titanic for sure.
This is the message she has for the world.
This is her story.
I do get all the proceeds, but this is her story.
This is her story about horny cyborgs in the 2070s.
This is what she wanted to teach people.
It's an interesting one, yeah.
So, for Blavatsky's unfolding spiritual cosmology, India was going to be like what she gave as the center and source of ancient knowledge.
She wrote that although many Westerners had seen Egypt as the source previously, quote, it has been discovered that the very same ideas expressed in almost identical language, maybe read in Buddhistic and Brahmanical literature.
Now, Orientalists at the time had started again because she's not creating anything out of whole cloth.
She's reading other people's work.
And a lot of Orientalists had started to make the claim that Hinduism predated Christianity.
Blavatsky added their work to her own ideas and to Bulwer-Lyden.
She mashed in real bits of actual religion that she'd encountered while traveling, and she came up with a brand new story to tell people.
Quote: 6,000 years ago, India had contained a brilliant civilization that was overflowing with people.
Later, a matured section of these people had immigrated to Eastern Ethiopia, where they had become known as the mighty builders, and from where they had colonized Egypt.
And finally, Western culture owed much to a Judaic law that had come from these Egyptians.
There was, therefore, an ancient wisdom that underlaid all religions, and this ancient wisdom had definite Indian roots.
As Blavatsky explained, there is not one of all these sects, Kabbalism, Judaism, and our present Christianity included, but sprang from the two main branches of that mother trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the Vedic ages.
We speak of that prehistoric Buddhism, which merged later into Brahmanism.
Now, none of that's accurate historically, right?
I think experts on Buddhism and Brahmanism would all be like, well, wait a second, that's not at all what happened.
And also, experts are just like, where humans, like obviously people, like the first human beings.
I mean, again, this is a contentious issue, but it's not that.
That's not what happened.
There's no, like, all of the evidence we have is not that.
Right.
It's so like, that is like one of, I feel like the huge, huge issues with like all branches of spiritualism is like spiritualism has a particular issue with historically misrepresenting indigenous culture completely and just like co-opting indigenous culture to say whatever they need them to say.
And then Blavatsky is doing that in the East.
Energy Healing Debate00:10:33
She is.
And she's not, again, one of the things that you might argue is positive is that kind of previously the dominant beliefs in Western culture had been like Hinduism and Buddhism were these kind of like weird pagan, degenerate, like not advanced savage and stuff.
Like this was these were especially the British, right?
This was one of the justifications the British had for what they were doing in India was all of these Hindu practices that were just, you know, in their eyes, horrific.
And Blavatsky is fighting against that, is saying that Christianity and Judaism are like them are themselves kind of the degenerated offspring of Brahmanism, of what people call Hinduism.
So you could say that's positive, but also it's not really, nothing she's talking about is real Hinduism or real Buddhism.
She's like using these words and bits and pieces of these stories and mixing it with like her favorite fantasy author.
It's like if you, it's like if you took Zoroastrianism and like jammed it into Game of Thrones and then told people that that was like your an actual religion.
Well, that's the thing is like, and, you know, knock yourself out, but like keep it to yourself.
Yeah.
Or like make it clear that it's fiction.
Don't start a right, like, or yeah, don't start, don't start a religious cult about it.
Yeah, there's nothing wrong if you're like a fiction author of being like, oh, these real world beliefs are interesting and I'm writing this fantasy book and I'm inspired by this and by that.
Like obviously you can do that in fucked up ways, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that idea.
She is just saying, no, this is the real Buddhism and the real Hinduism.
And I'm the one who actually knows what these things are.
That is extra.
I mean, it's like, it's one thing to invent a religion that is all religions, but to like steal, like dishonestly steal from other religions in order to prop up your own bunk religion is just like extra shitty.
Here's the cool thing.
She's also kind of shit talking anyone who knows anything about these religions, including like a single person.
I'm going to read another quote about that.
Quote, Blavatsky justified her selective use of contemporary occultism by using two interconnected distinctions.
If anyone claimed that Indian religions were not as she said, she simply replied that this person had focused on either modern Hinduism or the exoteric meaning of the Vedic works, not on the true esoteric meaning of ancient Brahmanism.
She argued that scholars often fell into the trap of taking modern Hinduism or the Vedas at face value when the true religion of India remained hidden in the esoteric Brahmanical teachings of the Vedas.
Indeed, whilst Orientalists rightly had dated the Vedas as pre-Christian, we should not trust their interpretations of Vedic works since they could not perceive the inner meanings of these works.
Blavatsky wrote, our scientists do not say nay, do not, nay, cannot understand correctly the old Hindu literature.
And so again, she is framing this as like Westerners have misinterpreted this, but she is also at the same time saying actual people in India aren't really worshiping proper Hinduism.
Modern Hinduism isn't right.
They don't understand the secret message of their own religion.
I do.
Right.
Yeah.
Which is just like galaxy brain asshole behavior.
It is just.
Yeah.
It's pretty cool.
It's pretty cool.
I mean, yeah.
She's like, oh, you think that my interpretation of an entire culture is wrong?
Well, argue with the wall, I guess.
Like you're just like, okay.
You just don't get the secret meanings of your own religious texts.
So she began meeting with prominent academic people.
It's just like gay kid girls.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
This is like, this is like the absolute highest tier of cultural appropriation.
Like it does, it does not get more appropriating than this.
This is the top of that particular mountain.
And within spiritualist ideas, that is really saying something.
Yeah, it is quite an achievement.
So she begins meeting with all these academics, writers, and celebrities.
She starts to get very famous doing this, like pushing this line, bringing in these attitudes.
She is part of why the concept of karma gets to the United States in a popular way.
It is because of Blavatsky and like these social scene that she sets up in New York City that asking people, how's your karma, like becomes common in the 1890s?
Like that is, we have Helena Blavatsky to thank for that concept being part of American culture in the way that it is, which is not, you know, to say anything about how karma is actually treated in the religions and stuff, but like why kind of our attitudes towards it.
She starts that.
She popularizes it here.
So she starts, she, again, they call them salons and stuff.
She's always like hanging out with celebrities and writers and shit in these like bars and clubs and stuff, giving talks on different elements of spiritualism.
And she has, she develops as she builds this following all these different little tricks for like making people convinced that she's got the truth.
Her particular favorite is she would have a mysterious person who was supposed to be her master Koot Humi teleporting from Tibet to like New York, deliver a letter to another person who was like, she was trying to bring on as a mark.
Yeah.
Sorry, I forget, is this a real person or is this a person she's made up?
She has made a lot of people.
Okay, this is one of her made-up people.
Yes.
Okay.
So like basically another big spiritualism thing is made up people.
So like, yeah, sometimes it would be like a person in a costume handing over, and we'll talk about this later.
Sometimes it would just be like a letter falls out of, you know, somewhere in the building and like lands on somebody's head.
And it's like, you know, this is a letter written in the handwriting of Kuthumi.
Is like my master wanted you to have this piece of information.
And it's a big part of why people get on the Blavatsky train is like once she meets an individual and she's like, oh, you're a popular journalist or like you're a celebrity.
You've got some clout.
I'm going to make sure you have this like encounter with Master Koothumi that he's like, he needs you to know this.
That's why this letter apparated in front of you, you know?
And yeah, it's fascinating.
It's real, real cool shit.
Her biographer Marion Mead writes that in bringing Eastern mysticism to the salons and upper class parties of New York, Madame Blavatsky, quote, paved the way for contemporary transcendental meditation.
Zin, Hare Krishna's yoga and vegetarianism, karma and reincarnations, swamis, yogis, and gurus.
She is the first guru in the Western world in like a proper sense.
Yeah, it's it's pretty good stuff.
Wow, really, really, really smearing the name of actual gurus.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's cool shit.
It's very cool shit.
Jules Evans writes, quote, She claimed that she had discovered the lost city of Shambhala in the Gobi Desert and there encountered a great white brotherhood.
They were led by the Lord of the World who descended from the planet Venus.
Other masters included Manu, Maitreya, Jesus, and Buddha, Mesmer, and two Indian gentlemen called Master Murai and Koot Humi.
These two lived in a valley in Tibet, in an underground city with subterranean tunnels, from which they emerged occasionally to guide humanity and communicate with their favorite adept, Helena Blavatsky.
Against this white brotherhood, there was a secret order of dark forces, black magicians seeking to gain power and harm humanity.
In the words of Peter Washington, occasionally the war between the lords and brothers reaches a violent public climax in events such as the crucifixion of Jesus, when the esoteric becomes exoteric and the secret struggle is briefly revealed.
Okay, so this QAnon shit.
Yeah.
Absolutely terrifying.
And I think the first time in Blavatsky speak where this is like completely outside of anything that I've studied with spiritualism.
Like this is just like, is this the hard left moment?
Like this is so people have been writing recently.
Some kind of more mainstream journalists have noticed that like the New Age community and kind of the occult community has like a fascism problem that has been increasingly an issue.
Yes.
Yeah, sure.
And a lot of that has come through QAnon.
There's huge New Age elements.
It's very tied into like alternative medicine and like meditation, like different kinds of like energy healing and stuff.
That's all really big in that community.
And there's this attitude that they're really separate.
No, they started these conspiratorial beliefs about there being this secret order of like white hats fighting the evil black hats in the background of everything and that all exogenic, like exoteric conflicts are like really the result of this secret occult conflict.
That is the start of the new age movement.
That Helena Blavatsky is the start of the new age in a modern sense in the United States.
She's the one who not only pertains to like physical health and stuff like that.
Yeah, well, and as it as it pertains to taking things from the East and mixing them up with like other stuff too, right?
Like you can't you can't separate all of that.
Like Blavatsky is again, obviously she's not starting or creating any of this from whole cloth.
She's mixing up strands, but she gets the mixture in its modern sense right for the first time.
Right.
Yeah.
And God, that I'm sorry, that that passage is really sticking in my mind.
Yeah, it's fucked up.
Incredibly fucked.
It's so interesting.
Like the things that she's stealing are so like, I mean, she's stealing in a way that I understand why it like resonated with her audience at the time.
And you can see how it just like descends into fucking madness so quickly.
The stuff with like the energy healing stuff is always an interesting discussion to me because there's some people now who like, I think the real issue is like when it's brought as like, and you cannot use medicine.
Like medicine is not a thing you can use.
It can only be this.
And then that is like, you're going to die.
Like goodbye.
And that's like, I think part of why like a lot of new age people are so vulnerable to like anti-vax rhetoric as well, which like so many of them are.
And I don't know, it's weird.
When I was in Florida doing research, there were some people who were like energy healing over all medicine.
And it's like, you're in danger.
That's fine.
And then there, but there also were people who were like, I like that kind of stuff, but it, but I use it as a tool, like almost more of a meditative tool.
And then I also go to doctors, which I don't really give a shit about either.
She's actually, I mean, part of when she, there are a couple of points in her life where she has health issues and it's hard to tell what's real because a lot of her health issues are like diagnosed by doctors she channels.
So it's, yeah, like that's going on here too.
Dad's Podcast Advice00:04:21
Like it's, it's, it's cool.
Although I haven't come across her saying anything in particular about vaccines, although this is the 1870s.
So that was less of a thing.
Yeah.
But you know what is a thing, Jamie Loftus.
What's thing?
Capitalism.
B. Wow, hot take.
Thank you.
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What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
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Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
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.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Forming a Society00:16:23
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
You know what I liked about those ads, Jamie?
What?
I liked that they were ads for Margaritaville.
God, wouldn't that be amazing?
What if you had like the black card for Margaritaville?
Oh, God.
Where they put actual alcohol in the drinks?
Yeah, yeah.
They're like, did you know that we don't battery acid?
With the black card, you get actual alcohol and they'll go get you a burger from Five of Guys so you can actually consume something that's edible.
Or they're like, no, at very least, they're like, hey, so the burgers still aren't good, but they're not like mysteriously wet.
So there you go.
Yeah, wet in a way that isn't right for meat.
No, it's not moist.
It's wet.
It's wet.
It's soaking wet.
Anyway, go to Margaritaville.
We love it.
Yeah.
So in his first...
What's Blavatsky up to?
In his first article about Helena Blavatsky, Henry Olcott had described her as, quote, a Russian lady of distinguished birth, which is accurate.
He had also described her as having rare educational and natural endowments, which is also probably accurate, although I think he's kind of saying she's hot there.
Then he listed what were becoming the standard cliffs notes of her life.
She had traveled in most lands of the Orient, looked for antiquities at the base of the pyramids, beheld the mysteries of Hindu temples, and traveled with armed escort far into the interior of Africa.
Which I don't believe she ever spent time in Africa other than like northern Africa, like Egypt and stuff.
But like she's not in the Congo and shit.
But that's popular at the time, right?
This is the scramble for Africa going on.
Like white people can't get enough stories of explorers in Africa.
So she's got to throw that in the resume.
Now, at first, Helena played coy about her beliefs regarding spiritualism.
She didn't think any of the mediums who dotted the land were speaking to ghosts, but again, basically psychic echoes.
She was also an occultist, so she believed that magic could be used to accomplish things.
Once she'd known Olcott for a while and the subject of several articles, she confided to him that she had a secret purpose in the United States, which was to reveal the truth about spiritualism to people.
So she brings Olcott and she's like, Look, hey, this is all like, do you want to join me in my secret quest to like pill the world about the occult?
Like, the United States needs to know that they've been getting spiritualism wrong.
And like, I'm trying to sneak into this community to get this across.
So in her public writings and statements, she gradually becomes more and more emphatic about her true beliefs.
And this leads to something of an uproar in the spiritualist community.
Some people pointed out, rightly, that it was dishonest for her to hide her real feelings just to make a name for herself in a field she didn't believe in.
She would later make up lyrid stories about how she'd attempted to join occult groups in Europe and the United States and been kicked out due to some nefarious plot to keep her from spreading her knowledge to the general population.
She would like fake death threats against herself.
She would also fake letters from different occult organizations to Olcott in order to like be like, you have to do this.
We're the order of fucking, I don't know, some Osiris or some shit in Egypt.
And like, you need to do this.
Where do you find the fucking time?
I do, I think it's interesting that she doesn't seem like that.
Like she would have infiltrated kind of any place that was vulnerable to her infiltrating it.
And I, and I, because I was sort of like, because her ideas divert so wildly, so quickly, you're like, why spiritualism?
And you're like, oh, I guess that there's like only so many religious movements that were accessible to women at all.
So that would have been an easy one.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a number of reasons it makes sense.
So after her articles with Olcott start to really get big, she gets a letter from a guy named Jerry Brown, who has a popular magazine called The Spiritual Scientist.
And he basically over time agrees to like, starting with just kind of give it, letting her write articles, he basically turns his magazine into her personal mouthpiece, which she uses to spread her beliefs even wider.
Yeah.
Eventually, all the press around her earns her another interview with a mainstream publication, like the first real big one focused on her.
It's by the Daily Graphic, which is a sizable publication at the time.
Mead writes, quote, At the newspaper office, she blew smoke at the reporter and narrated a life story peppered with more falsehoods than a cookie has crumbs.
Knocking three years from her age, she presented herself as a former child bride married to a daughtering 73-year-old whose habits were not agreeable to me.
And as I had a fortune of my own, I decided to travel.
She mentioned having lived in England and Egypt, also in the Sudan, where she made a small fortune after cornering the ostrich feather market, and at Baden-Baden, where she lost a fortune at the gambling tables.
In fact, she declared, money meant nothing because fortunately she had received a sizable legacy from Princess Bagration.
Goggling, the reporter kept lighting Helena's cigarettes and repeating, that's a remarkable statement, to which HBP would solemnly reply, It's true.
Name-dropping constantly, she reeled off stories about Daniel Holmes, Charles Darwin, whose work she claimed to have translated into Russian while in Africa, Tsar Alexander, and other persons likely to impress a newspaper reporter.
And he seems to be kind of both a little bit, it's a combination of like laughing at her, but also kind of dazzled by her.
He again describes her as handsome and voluptuous in his article.
A lot of all the guys who write about her have to talk about her appearance and stuff.
Yeah.
Narsty, okay.
Yeah.
It's it's it's interesting stuff.
And yeah, by 1875, by late 1875, she's probably the most influential occult and spiritualist like related figure in the country.
And she decides then that it was finally the time to form a secret society.
This one themed after the Rosicrucian lodges that she believed had once existed.
So she and Olcott start what they call the Miracle Club, which sounds like a modern, like, like everyone puts in $10 and you're going to get back a million.
And yeah, that does sound like a place that I could walk by.
It's pretty good.
Even Lachman admits nothing too miraculous happened in it, but he doesn't really talk about what the Miracle Club is.
Mead goes into a lot more detail.
She says it was basically a private seance club for New York socialists who were forbidden to speak about what they saw during the seances, which was mainly just to like make them feel special, right?
Like if you make everyone sign a blood order, I mean, yeah, introduce the exclusionary element.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And this was like a big, especially in New York City, was like middle upper class kind of stuff to do.
I mean, to be honest, this is just a precursor to like the Board Ape Yacht Club and stuff.
Like, oh, you get this like secret chat room with all these influencers and stuff.
And like, nobody gets to know what goes on in there.
And it's funny because usually what happens is nothing.
Nothing at all.
Because these are very boring people looking for something to make them feel exciting.
So the medium that she brought on for this is a guy named David Dana, whose brother was the editor of the New York Sun, which is why she picks him, right?
Because she's always looking for publicity.
The whole thing collapses, though, because Dana wanted to be paid for the work that he was doing.
And Blavatsky was like, oh, no, we're not going to pay you for doing this thing that's making us a bunch of money.
So he does the 19th century version of canceling her on social media.
Olcott later wrote, quote, the wretch failed utterly, not only as a medium, but was also reported to us as having spread calumnies against the one who had done him kindness.
The kindness of unpaid labor.
Yeah.
No, he's getting paid an exposure, Robert.
He is getting paid an exposure, but also they can't talk about it.
Listen, that's been, that's how I didn't make an income for fucking six or seven years.
You were famously channeling people for my miracle club, which we're not allowed to talk about.
Everyone.
We're not allowed to talk about it, no?
No, no.
So despite her growing notoriety, times were tough for an aspiring spiritual guru.
An economic recession had brought a swift end to the easy cash that some spiritual grifters had enjoyed over the last few years.
In a letter to a friend, Blavatsky wrote, There is terrible panic.
Those who have got money hide it, and those who have not are dying of hunger.
It all does sound a lot like NFTs, honestly.
Like there's a weird similarity between like that crash and like the way they write about it, at least.
I know, but it's like, I also don't really buy how she writes about it.
Like I just assume almost anything she says is like overblown, like blown out of proportion because of her flair for the dramatique.
And she, yeah, she's, she's claiming in some of these letters that her income, she's making more than $6,000 a year, which is like a lot of money in the day.
That's a very healthy income.
But she's also claiming at the same time, I'm broke because I keep putting all of the money back into the movement.
Right.
So like she, yeah.
Could be true.
I mean, it's like hard to, there, I know at least with spiritualism, but there, there was always an issue with like the, it being like an influential movement, but the numbers being like constantly like really, really, really inflated to the point where everyone was like, how could this religion be going broke?
And it's like, well, not as many people are a part of it as they're saying.
And it seems fair to say that like primarily the thing keeping her going is Olcott, who's good at raising funds, who's good at like putting money together and stuff.
And he had like pre-existing class.
Yes, yes.
And he's making sure that there's always money.
And she's kind of working him to the bone, right?
Because she has expensive tastes, including a pound a day tobacco habit.
Now, at the time, the center of Blavatsky's social life was the Lotus Club, a parlor where she and Olcott held court with regular audiences of spiritualists, mediums, and quote, bright, clever people of occult leanings, according to Olcott.
Many of the latter were scientists, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and other people with the kind of influence and resources that could support a growing movement.
One of them, Reverend Dr. J. H. Wiggin, edited a paper called The Liberal Christian.
He wrote after a visit that topics at the salon.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not the liberal Christian.
He wrote after a visit that topics discussed in the night at the salon included whether or not flowers had souls, penises and religious worship, gravitation, something called jugglery and chemistry.
I think it's juggling science.
Jugglery.
Isn't that just physics?
Like, what?
That's bad.
It's so funny.
That sounds so silly.
And I'm also like, yeah, that's like exactly the kind of like conflations that would happen all the time of like stuff that sounds absolutely ridiculous.
But like at the time, you're like, yeah, let's not rule out that flowers have souls because we're about to get fucking planes and like x-rays exist.
Like an ice cream has been invented.
Yes.
It's awesome.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
One of the things that this guy complains about that a lot of people complain about is her chain smoking and how bad it makes everything smell.
And again, this is the 1870s.
And dudes keep being like, this lady smokes a lot.
Like this lady is smoking too much.
No one is never not smoking in this period and she smokes.
She's smoking to alarm someone in 1870.
I mean, think about, think about how much a cigarette weighs and think about what a pound a day of tobacco actually means to smoke.
That's like a brick of cigars.
I kind of blocked that out since our last recording.
And a pound, that's a nightmare amount of tobacco.
I hope that that is the only figure in this entire story that has not been inflated.
I don't think it is.
It's absolutely true.
It is one of the reasons why I think that's probably accurate is so many different kinds of people comment on it.
That like, yeah, this lady smokes like nobody I've ever seen.
Now, it was from this porous group of hangers-on who formed Blavatsky's parlor that the Theosophical Society would develop.
Mead writes, On Tuesday, September 7th, a crowd of 17 gathered in her parlor to hear George H. Felt, an engineer and architect, give an unusually dense lecture on the lost canon of proportion of the Egyptians.
This was not Felt's first appearance at Madame's, for he had been introduced by one of the regulars, Charles Sotherin, a rare book expert who was editor of the American Bibliopolis.
Helena had found Felt interesting and asked him to give an informal lecture, which would offer her guests something out of the ordinary.
Having brought with him some nicely done illustrations, Felt began somewhat ponderously by explaining his theory that the architectural proportion employed by the ancient Egyptians was actually preserved in Templar hieroglyphics.
The audience proceeded to yawn, but visibly perked up when Felt went on to remark that the Egyptians had been adepts in magical science and that some of their hieroglyphic figures were realistic drawings of elementals, the messenger spirits who pop up at seances.
He himself, he added modestly, had discovered an ancient formula for evoking elementals.
Would it be possible for him to do a demonstration?
Could he actually call forth an elemental?
He announced that he could if they were willing to finance the operation and pay for his time.
Of course, Henry wrote in old diary leaves.
We passed on an informal vote of hearty thanks for his highly interesting lecture and an animated discussion followed.
While people were chatting, it occurred to Henry that it would be a good thing to form a society to pursue and promote such a cult research.
On a scrap of paper, he scribbled, would it not be a good thing to form a society for this kind of study?
And handed it to William Judge to pass over to HPB, who read it and nodded her head.
Olcott got up and presented his idea to enthusiastic murmurs, and George Felt promised he would teach them to evoke and control elementals.
Thus, it was unanimously agreed that Olcott's society would be formed.
This is what becomes theosophy.
Which, this, based on that description, does sound kind of par for the course with how the great beyond and science were kind of related at the time.
There's usually some sort of like scientific like intermediary.
So, for like, I mean, you know, because you were, you and all of Donkas were all on that entire episode.
It was like ectoplasm.
That was like an excreting goop that mediums could make that would connect you to the, like, this, this all sounds kind of par for the course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And yet, I feel another hard left.
Well, again, because number one, they're trying to actually control this stuff, which is which is different.
But no, it's not wildly different from the kind of things that are going to come later on.
And part of that, part of like the fact that it isn't wildly different is why Blavatsky is not that into it at first.
Again, it's Olcott.
He's the guy who starts what becomes the Theosophical Society.
Interesting.
Now, obviously, later on, she would claim that the society had been formed by her master in Tibet had ordered her to make a society, and like that's how it had started.
My imaginary friend said, Yeah, but she only starts claiming that after it gets big, right?
Got it.
Like, at first, it's small.
There's like financial difficulties.
Yeah, we'll talk about that in a second.
But when they form what becomes the Theosophical Society, it's with the promise to provide seekers with, quote, a synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy.
The society had three objectives: number one, to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color.
Two, to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science.
Three, to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.
Now, despite, again, her later claims, Blavatsky seems to have mostly sat back and let Olcott do the organizing and fundraising while she like smokes a bunch and goes on vacations.
I mean, someone's got to keep mommy full of sigs.
Yeah, keep mommy full of figs.
She's, she's, um, and you know, she was the kind of thing where she would be very hands-off until he did something she didn't like, and then she would have no, she would have one of her ghost or her spirit friends send him a letter that's like, oh, the guys in Tibet want you to do something different, buddy.
Look at that.
It's pretty smart.
Yeah.
Pretty smart.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Of course, there were issues at once, namely the fact that George Felt never managed to summon an elemental.
Henry was hesitant to throw more of the society's money at the man, but Helena convinced him that he would do the deed eventually.
Blavatsky and Olcott00:14:46
So Henry kept putting society money in to like fund this guy who was a grifter.
Felt takes the money and like just disappears eventually.
And this causes skeptics in New York to mock the society.
Membership falls.
There's like articles about this stuff.
And Helena herself stops attending meetings entirely.
Now, she had a lot to worry about in her personal life at this point.
She'd gotten bigamously married and was struggling to hide her second husband from her first one.
She'd also started to work.
Who's Mr. Second?
Oh, there's these two fucking guys.
It's not important.
But yeah, she's definitely like illegally married to two people at the same time.
She's also started to work on a book which Mead writes was intended to quote salvage the ancient world from the modern stigma of superstition and ignorance.
In short, she wanted to write a book that would synthesize all her knockoff Buddhist and Hindu beliefs with American spiritualism.
For months, Henry funded her writing and trips to upstate New York to do more writing while she smoked and fucked her illegal husbands.
She is not getting a lot of writing done for the first like year or so that she's working on this book.
But she is getting a lot of illegal marriage stuff done.
So that's that's good.
You know what else is illegal, Jamie?
What all the products that we're about to get?
That's right.
That's right.
Every product that supports this podcast.
This week is Crime Week, and we are entirely sponsored by illegal explosives, controlled substances, the works of Woody Allen.
Yeah.
All our sponsors.
You've lost me.
You've lost me.
Well, yeah, you know, look.
Look.
You've got to be into crimes.
You've got to be into crimes, Jamie.
Okay, well, I renounce that brand of.
Let's just cut to a break.
Let's just cut to a break rather than discussing the Christina Barcelona.
Oh, my God.
Everyone, go see minions.
Yeah, go see minions.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
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.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
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.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksdad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Jamie, do you think Woody Allen got minions?
Like, if they follow around villains.
I'm not talking to you about Woody Allen anymore.
Can I tell you something, though?
No, okay.
Do you know how I told you earlier I was eating Easy Mac before the episode?
Is that a lie?
Yes, but only because I was eating Swift Mac.
I was eating off-brand Easy Mac called Swift Mac.
Is it easier or is it harder?
It was harder and less good.
Now, do you think the Minions had anything to do with Swift Mac?
No, I don't think that, no, because one thing you have to know about the Minions, Robert, is they love bananas.
And that's kind of like interesting.
Yeah, there's something Freudian going on there, but you think the Minions are going to explore that?
I don't.
Speaking of bananas, speaking of the minions primarily, Olcott is Helena Blavatsky's minion.
And so while she's bigamously married, I like him.
She's grew he's minions.
Yeah, she is definitely grew.
And again, she's kind of abusing him during this period of time because she is living well, right?
She's not only like has these secret husbands, but like she's she's living a life of leisure and luxury off of society money, which is provided by Olcott.
And at the same time, she has started to preach asceticism, the idea that like in order to be an occultist, you have to avoid all of the pleasures of the flesh.
You can't have sex, right?
A good occultist isn't fucking.
You have to be like celibate.
You don't eat meat.
You have to be a vegetarian.
You can't drink alcohol.
And like Henry, a lot of the early culture of like the salon and stuff that they ran together was like based on drinking.
They had a bar.
So he changes his life on a dime when she starts preaching this.
And in fact, he gets so obsessed with like the different rules about food that she is not abiding by herself, but that she makes that he becomes anorexic.
Like he stops eating for days at a time.
Oh my god.
Yeah.
It's pretty, she, she really does a number on this guy.
Oh my God, that's so, that makes me so sad for you.
Yeah, I don't know.
I was saying that was a twist I wasn't expecting.
He is such a, he is such a follower to her.
Like it's amazing.
Like, again, there's a brainwashing situation.
It's either brain, you could look at it that way, and maybe that's the right way to do it.
Or maybe it's just that like for whatever reason, this guy had a hole in his life that she just figured out perfectly how to fill.
Like you do, you get the feeling with Olcott that he was always waiting to be this guy while he was like kind of like sleepwalking through life successfully.
He was like, this is the thing that he wanted was to like be this witch lady, wizard lady.
Be like a disciple of someone.
Yeah.
So while while he's living this way at her orders, Thomas Stawazinski describes Blavatsky's lifestyle.
She worked on it, the book, every day, stopping only for meal breaks.
Her favorite food was fried eggs soaked in butter.
She smoked one cigarette after another.
Olcott estimated that she could get through up to 100 cigarettes a day.
Madame claimed she received a lot of her materials and telepathic messages from Moria and Koot Humi, but healthy lifestyle advice seemed beyond the master's area of expertise.
And she does eventually come out with her book.
It takes her a couple of years, but Isis Unveiled comes out in September of 1877.
Tomas writes, quote, it was founded on one major claim.
All the religions of the world, both those currently followed and the ones to come, derived from one common source, ancient Hermetic philosophy.
Its basic premises are contained in Corpus Hermeticum, a text of unclear origin, translated into Italian and popularized in the 15th century by a Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino.
According to Corpus Hermeticum, the universe is an intricate system of various emanations.
Material reality is a product of a complex evolutionary process, which subtle spiritual levels of existence create new layers, denser and more physical.
The history of the human race is subject to the same law, but in fact, it works in an opposite direction than proposed by Charles Darwin.
Humans evolved downwards, so to speak, from advanced spiritual beings to more lowly forms.
But there is another aspect of it, too.
The human spirit, trapped inside the physical body, misses the perfection of higher planes of reality.
The spirit can develop and protect and perfect itself through theosophy to turn to its sources as soon as possible.
Therefore, evolution is too directional.
Now, Jamie, does that sound like a religion that's popular in the town where you currently live?
Does that sound at all like Scientology to you?
We are spirits trapped in the world, and you can teach yourself to be, yeah, exactly.
No, sorry, for a second, I thought you were talking, I thought you were shit talking Brockton, Massachusetts.
And I was like, no, they're all Catholics.
No, yes, absolutely.
And this is scary fan fiction religion shit.
Yeah.
And L. Ron Hubbard is, he's obviously not alive when she is doing her shit, but he is.
Is he into her?
I actually think that's a good idea.
Oh, yes.
He's hugely into Lavatsky.
He reads her a bunch when he's younger.
Because he's very much into the occult shit of the 20s.
He has sex magic with Jack Parsons, the inventor of the rocket engine, right?
Like he is absolutely into this shit.
Yeah.
And he's clearly read Isis on the field.
Yeah.
In the same way, she's like ripping off the corpus hermetic, the corpus hermeticum.
She's taking bits of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's stuff.
She's mixing in like Eastern religion.
L. Ron Hubbard is just doing a version of what she did to her stuff, too, right?
Like that's, and he's like mixing.
And in his case, he's taking the new, fairly new science at the time of like psychology and mixing that in with this occultist stuff.
Right.
Well, it's also, and like at the beginning of psychology was also like influenced by spiritualism at the time.
Like some of the first psychological texts evolved spiritualism and then like phased it out pretty thoroughly by like the early 1900s, but like early stuff, which I just like didn't, didn't know.
Yeah.
But yeah, all this shit is interconnected.
But that is, that is very, that's, that's ringing some miscabbage bells for Jamie.
Yep.
Now, before Isis unveiled, Helena Blavatsky had been, again, very prominent in the New York weirdo occultist spiritualist scene.
Because of her writing, there were people around the world who knew of her.
But after this book is a hit, and after it, she becomes a bona fide celebrity.
Suddenly, the Theosophical Society was swarmed with new potential members.
New York High Society began to delve back into alternative religion, now with a much stronger occult angle.
From time to time, Blavatsky would put on shows, summoning objects from far away, having letters delivered by her teleporting spectral masters, etc.
With fame came Mo Money, but Jamie, with Mo Money came Mo problems.
Journalists.
That's the first time I'm hearing this.
I know I invented that phrase.
Journalists began to turn their eyes to her budding empire, and they start tearing apart her claims of celibacy and aestheticism because she's claiming, like, right, I have never had sex.
You know, I don't indulge in any of these vices of the flesh, which, like, she's out in public doing all this stuff.
Like, everyone is like, yeah, she's like bigamously married.
Everyone talks about it.
And, like, she's constantly smoking and eating all of this rich food.
Like, where it's like, yeah, like, live your life, but that's, yeah, you're not doing this.
That's, uh, I can't get past your use of the phrase budding empire.
Yeah, it is.
She's, she's making an empire.
Yeah.
I know.
But that phrase is just really, it's like, it's a horny phrase.
It is a horny phrase.
And Helena Blavatsky, probably a pretty horny person, if you can judge by the fact that she was bigamously married.
But we're not ready to talk about that.
No.
So it was pointed out that many of these letters seem to be written in her handwriting by these journalists who start like tearing her apart.
And so it just becomes like the fact that she gets famous also leads to a lot of negative attention.
And you get the feeling it just kind of overwhelms her at a certain point.
And now that she's got money, she has the opportunity to like maintain and build this religion that she started somewhere other than the United States where people are looking too much into her business.
L. Ron Hubbard does this too, right?
He moves to England and then he takes to the sea.
She goes to England first, also like L. Ron Hubbard, and sets up offices there.
But after she's like established theosophy in England, she moves to India.
And that is what we're going to talk about in part four, along with finally a lot more information about how she accomplished a lot of these tricks because it's after India that that becomes clear.
And then we're going to talk about the Nazis.
But Jamie, you know who's not a Nazi?
Finally Release Truth00:04:01
Definitely me.
That's right.
That's right.
Why don't you plug your pluggables?
Awesome credit for me.
Okay.
You can listen to my podcast, Ghost Church on CoolZone Media.
It's about the history of American spiritualism, which I think we've officially now diverged from at this point in the story.
And so you can hear about the history and then me going to a spiritualist camp in Florida there.
Or you can follow me on Twitter at Jamie Loftus Help.
Instagram, Jamie Christ, superstar.
Go nut.
Find Jamie on the internet.
Listen to Ghost Church.
It is the best podcast that you can listen to right now.
Your episode was truly, I think, my favorite in the series.
You and Paul just really, you know, there's a lot on the cutting room floor when you when you finally release the loftus cut and that that full five-hour conversation we had.
Yeah, I think that people are going to be upset, but that people will understand.
You know, it would be controversial to release a lot of what was said.
Yeah.
And I honestly, you know, I've gone back and forth on this a lot, but I think a lot of what we said about Donald Rumsfeld was legally slandered.
Well, why do you think it didn't air, Robert?
That's right.
That's right.
Jamie Loftus protecting Donald Rumsfeld.
And you, the listener, go home and find a way to protect Donald Rumpsfeld in your own life until part four.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
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.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.