Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Helena Blavatsky: the woman who inspired the Nazis, and Gwyneth Paltrow
Aired: 2022-09-01
Duration: 01:15:07


=== Killing The Planet In June (03:41) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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[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.
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[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]  Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
[00:01:37]  My mind was blown.
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[00:01:40]  This is Love Trapped.
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[00:01:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:47]  Listen to 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.
[00:02:01]  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]  I 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, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:31]  Oh.
[00:02:33]  Ah, welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where I brag about how much better the weather is right now where I am than where Jamie is.
[00:02:40]  It's really good.
[00:02:41]  Somehow this podcast has gotten 500 episodes.
[00:02:44]  Really fucked up.
[00:02:46]  Yeah.
[00:02:47]  What an incredible, what an incredible thing for a friend to do.
[00:02:50]  You know, actually, I do think that all of my friends regularly do brag about the superiority of their climate, and I don't appreciate it.
[00:02:58]  Well, everyone used to say that, brag about how nice it was in Southern California, but then we killed the planet.
[00:03:04]  Yeah, I missed that era.
[00:03:07]  Remember, remember?
[00:03:09]  I've only lived in the dystopian.
[00:03:10]  Remember June gloom?
[00:03:11]  Oh, that was the time.
[00:03:14]  Yeah, what is June gloom?
[00:03:16]  Oh, that's when you would get like a little bit like a week or two of cool weather in June.
[00:03:20]  It would be like, no, it'd be like almost the whole month of June.
[00:03:23]  It would be gray and it would be like in the 60s.
[00:03:26]  It was lovely.
[00:03:27]  It was like my entire life until, you know, the planet.
[00:03:30]  A couple of years ago.
[00:03:31]  Yeah.
[00:03:32]  When I moved to LA, it was in like June and I had, I left Texas where it was like hot.
[00:03:37]  I drove through Phoenix where it was unlivable for human beings.

=== The Silmarillion Of Theosophy (15:15) ===

[00:03:41]  God.
[00:03:42]  And then I get to Los Angeles and in Culver City, it was like the first three weeks I was there was like 68 at the height of every day and like partly cloudy, which is perfect.
[00:03:53]  But then we killed the planet.
[00:03:55]  And you know specifically who killed the planet, Jamie Loftus?
[00:04:00]  We're going to pit this on H. Blatt's full stop.
[00:04:04]  Helena Blavatsky is responsible for the oil and gas industry.
[00:04:09]  Yeah, hell block.
[00:04:10]  That's my music.
[00:04:11]  Hell blot.
[00:04:11]  Yeah.
[00:04:12]  She's not, but she is responsible for World War II.
[00:04:16]  And that's today's story.
[00:04:20]  So in 1878, she leaves New York for eventually Bombay, India, right?
[00:04:27]  They stop in England along the way.
[00:04:28]  They set up some theosophical offices.
[00:04:31]  Everyone's going to yell at me about how I say that.
[00:04:33]  Yeah, like migrates from the U.S. to the UK.
[00:04:36]  But she's the only one that continues east from there.
[00:04:39]  So I'm interested in what happens.
[00:04:40]  Yeah.
[00:04:41]  So she winds up in Bombay and she eventually moves on from there a little bit.
[00:04:45]  But yeah, Blavatsky and Olcott bring basically like kind of frame it as like we are returning like traditional Hindu and Buddhist beliefs to India by like setting up the Theosophical Society here.
[00:05:00]  So eventually she, yeah, they land in Bombay and they partner with an organization, an organization called the Arya Samaj Movement, which had been founded a few years earlier by a guy named Swami Saraswati, who was a Hindu holy man who was really angry about the Christianization of his country because the British bring in missionaries, right?
[00:05:18]  Who are trying to like recruit people to be Christians.
[00:05:21]  So there is a lot of, there's actually a lot of folks in India who like what Blavatsky is saying and doing, even though like, one of the things I think that is worth understanding about Hinduism is that it is not,
[00:05:33]  it is not a religion with the kind of strict doctrine that you get in a lot of like Christian religions, where it's like, no, this is like I having spent a lot of time in India, one of the fun experiences you have there is when you like are eating with Indian folks and like just asking them about like Rama and Sita and all these like different gods and goddesses and mythical stories and stuff.
[00:05:55]  Every time you add like if different groups of people are telling you the same story, it's a little bit different every time, right?
[00:06:01]  Because there's all these different like variations.
[00:06:03]  And that's one of the things that's like so neat about talking to people in that part of the world about religion.
[00:06:08]  And so there's not, there's not as much of a, you would expect maybe kind of a backlash, but instead it's more people happy that like, oh, these Westerners actually like our religion.
[00:06:18]  And like, yeah, they, they're interpreting it in weird ways.
[00:06:20]  And I hadn't heard that or that, but like even in the abstract that there is like some interest.
[00:06:25]  Yeah, they're they're coming here to engage with our religion rather than to convert us to theirs, which is like people like that, right?
[00:06:31]  Like, of course they like that.
[00:06:32]  You know, it's not, sure.
[00:06:34]  It's a perfectly understandable thing.
[00:06:36]  And this guy, Saraswati, he wants to push his people back to their like traditional spiritual beliefs and not the shit the British were peddling.
[00:06:43]  And Blavatsky and Olcott, they're basically trying to de-Christianize the West and bring the Vedas there.
[00:06:49]  So yeah, this is actually pretty popular.
[00:06:51]  Like it, not that like a lot of Indians don't become theosophists, but like there's a, there's people like in the country who are like, oh, this is a nice trend to see.
[00:07:02]  So the society does grow around the world.
[00:07:05]  There's something like 130 offices around the world by the time she dies.
[00:07:09]  Like it spreads in a manner that's not why, again, there's a lot of similarities between theosophy and Scientology.
[00:07:15]  Not in terms of the belief system, because number one, much less of a toxic thing.
[00:07:20]  Like, and she is a less toxic person than L. Ron Hubbard.
[00:07:22]  I will give her credit for that on all day long.
[00:07:25]  That's the same thing.
[00:07:26]  That means a hardstick.
[00:07:27]  Yeah, incredibly yardstick.
[00:07:29]  But the theosophical theosophy in general is not like, it is not like Scientology.
[00:07:34]  It is not based entirely around abuse and like secrets and violence.
[00:07:39]  But it does the way that it spreads.
[00:07:41]  There's a lot of similarities between how scientists, because Hubbard is looking at Blavatsky and her example when he's setting up his secret society religion thing.
[00:07:50]  It is kind of wild to see that like ripple effect of like Blavatsky is essentially asking like, can I do spiritualism, but worse?
[00:07:56]  And then L. Ron Hubbard's like, can I do theosophy amongst other things, but worse?
[00:08:01]  And then you could just spiral out from there.
[00:08:03]  Yeah.
[00:08:04]  So that's cool.
[00:08:05]  Blavatsky and Olcott launch a journal, The Theosophist, and she continues to orchestrate control over the movement by having her masters send letters to Olcott and others.
[00:08:15]  Particularly, there will be like high-ranking Indian, like in terms of like their position in society, like Indian folks, people with money, and like high-ranking British colonial administrators who will like come by and like be interested in what she's talking about.
[00:08:29]  And she'll have her masters reach out to them.
[00:08:32]  Sometimes when she's feeling lazy and in an argument with someone, she'll just claim that they've contacted her telepathically directly to like end an argument.
[00:08:39]  Like, ah, no, Koothumi just like DM'd me, man.
[00:08:41]  And like, you're wrong.
[00:08:42]  You got to stop saying this shit.
[00:08:44]  Girl, boss.
[00:08:45]  It's pretty funny.
[00:08:47]  Stawazinski continues, quote, the masters soon began exchanging correspondence through Blavatsky, of course, with an Englishman living in India named Alfred Percy Sinnott.
[00:08:56]  Sinnott was a writer and editor-in-chief of The Pioneer, an English daily newspaper.
[00:09:00]  Soon after Blavatsky's arrival in India, he became an avid theosophist.
[00:09:03]  In 1882, he published a book consisting of his correspondence with Master Koothoumi.
[00:09:08]  Soon after the book's released, a gentleman named Richard Kittle publicly accused Master Koothumi of plagiarism.
[00:09:14]  Kittle insisted that the great Mahatma copied large parts of his book, published a few years earlier.
[00:09:20]  In response, Madame Blavatsky released a letter written by the master in which Koothumi helped to explain the misunderstanding.
[00:09:26]  It was not an act of deliberate plagiarism, wrote Mahatma, but a result of overlapping astral planes.
[00:09:32]  One day, Koot Humi was reading the Chronicle of the Universe, which contains all of the information that ever existed.
[00:09:38]  The master came across Kittle's text there, among billions of others, and failed to identify it.
[00:09:43]  Now, this is the same argument Elon Musk makes when he steals people's memes on Twitter.
[00:09:48]  Sick.
[00:09:50]  So we've been recording this episode for 500 hours, and you just really wanted to say that, didn't you?
[00:09:57]  I did.
[00:09:57]  It is really funny.
[00:09:59]  The Mahatma Papers, we'll talk a little more about them later.
[00:10:01]  The Mahatma Papers are like a huge moment in Theosophy where like they release these.
[00:10:07]  It's basically kind of like the Silmarillion of Theosophy.
[00:10:11]  Oh, boy.
[00:10:12]  But it's a huge amount of it is plagiarized by Richard Kittle because she's a player.
[00:10:16]  Like all she's doing is taking other people's stuff and rewriting it.
[00:10:19]  And she gets kind of lazy.
[00:10:21]  And then when she gets called on it, it's like, oh, this is Koot Humi's fault.
[00:10:23]  He fucked up because he was just like, all of the books that have ever existed or will ever exist are like stored on the astral plane.
[00:10:30]  And he was just like reading it and like failed to, he didn't see like the name on the side when he was like sending it to me.
[00:10:37]  It's pretty funny.
[00:10:38]  It's pretty funny.
[00:10:39]  It's fucking wild.
[00:10:40]  Wow.
[00:10:41]  Yeah.
[00:10:42]  Yeah.
[00:10:42]  He did, he did, he did the occult equivalent of like copy-pasting a Wikipedia page to like turn an essay in.
[00:10:49]  Like the great Koot Humi.
[00:10:52]  And got away.
[00:10:56]  Well, I mean, I guess was accused of plagiarism.
[00:10:58]  Does that go anywhere?
[00:11:00]  Yes, it does.
[00:11:00]  We will talk about that in a boss.
[00:11:02]  Okay.
[00:11:02]  But initially, the rapid growth of the faith and the constant flood of attention, yeah, like this is, these are like the big cracks that start to form, right?
[00:11:10]  So as quickly as things go well for them, shit starts to go badly because she is, I think she's fundamentally kind of lazy, right?
[00:11:16]  Like this is a lazy fuck up.
[00:11:18]  I mean, it does sound like, it's funny.
[00:11:20]  I do feel like this is like a very interesting personality type that has existed in various forms, but like someone who has endless energy to self-promote, but no energy for original thought, which is like, wow.
[00:11:36]  And it's interesting because we have talked about all of the tricks that she does.
[00:11:39]  We're not going to get into now.
[00:11:40]  We're going to talk about how she did them.
[00:11:42]  And it's also really lazy.
[00:11:45]  Like it's much, much like less effortful than you might think.
[00:11:51]  And that's what, like, part of what I find fascinating, like, whatever, like, societal shit aside about the, like, physical mediums is, like, the amount of effort people would, like, the Katie King thing, like for, for, it took a lot of work.
[00:12:06]  It was a lot of work to make shit like that happen.
[00:12:09]  Yeah, but it doesn't sound, but she was not putting in hours.
[00:12:12]  No.
[00:12:13]  Other people are, though.
[00:12:14]  So, okay.
[00:12:16]  She's outsourcing.
[00:12:17]  Yeah.
[00:12:17]  So in India, her two most, again, she's like basically in order to trick people with these, you know, they're dropping the letter.
[00:12:23]  They're doing all these other tricks.
[00:12:24]  She has followers who are helping her carry them out.
[00:12:27]  And in India, the two people who are doing this the most are a couple who we've talked about briefly, Emma and Alex Colomb, like C-O-U-L-O-M-B.
[00:12:36]  They're married and coffee.
[00:12:38]  Yeah, like the coffee.
[00:12:40]  She had met them back in Cairo in 1871.
[00:12:43]  If you remember, she had that like failed spiritual society back then.
[00:12:46]  So she gets to know them then and they kind of stay in contact for years.
[00:12:50]  And by the time she moves to India and sets up shop, they'd gotten themselves stranded in Sri Lanka.
[00:12:55]  And Blavatsky paid them to, like paid to bring them to Bombay and she gives them jobs in the society.
[00:13:01]  And at first, they're like kind of her indentured servants to like work off this debt, their cooking and their cleaning.
[00:13:06]  And because they owe her and like don't really have many other options, she starts enlisting them to help her carry out tricks on people to raise more money for the society.
[00:13:15]  A contemporary source.
[00:13:16]  Literally like carnival tactics.
[00:13:18]  Oh, yes.
[00:13:19]  Yes.
[00:13:20]  A contemporary source who like eventually gets this information because like the Colombes break from her.
[00:13:25]  We'll talk about that in a bit.
[00:13:27]  Reverend George Patterson writes, quote, readers of the occult world, which was a popular magazine at the time, are familiar with phenomena in which Madame Blavatsky's cigarettes and cigarette papers play an important part.
[00:13:37]  In the presence of the inquiring company, a cigarette or a cigarette paper is peculiarly marked or torn across so as to be recognizable again.
[00:13:44]  It is then dispatched by the agency of occult forces to some distant place, and the inquirers are told, well, they will find it.
[00:13:50]  Telegraphic communication renders the verification of the exploit easy.
[00:13:54]  So she will like be sitting in a room full of people.
[00:13:56]  She'll be like, hey, I'm going to prove to you this shit's real.
[00:13:58]  I'm going to telepathically send this cigarette to England, right?
[00:14:02]  So she'll mark it or something, and then she'll like disappear it, a little sleight of hand thing.
[00:14:09]  And then she'll telegraph like whoever it is in England who is like in on the mark with her and be like, hey, did you, what did you, like, look behind the, look around, look behind the bust of this philosopher in your library.
[00:14:20]  And they'll be like, oh, I found a cigarette that's ripped in this way.
[00:14:23]  And everyone will be like, oh, my God, she teleported the cigarette, you know?
[00:14:27]  Okay.
[00:14:27]  Okay.
[00:14:28]  I mean, that is not an effortless, you know, that's.
[00:14:31]  That's not effortless, but it's also she is not the primary source of effort on that, right?
[00:14:36]  Other people.
[00:14:37]  She's delegating.
[00:14:38]  Yeah.
[00:14:38]  That is interesting, though.
[00:14:40]  That's, I mean, there's a lot of shit that you can see.
[00:14:42]  It's very modern, right?
[00:14:43]  Yeah.
[00:14:44]  She's making, like all of the really successful occult gurus, she's making the most of like cutting-edge technology at the time.
[00:14:52]  Now, thanks to letters later revealed between Blavatsky and the Colombes, we know exactly how this trick was achieved.
[00:14:57]  In one letter, she complains that a half-cigarette that had been left behind to be found by a theosophist named Captain Maitland in India had been like cleaned up by a servant or something.
[00:15:06]  And so when he was telegrammed to like when they telegrammed to tell him like where to find it, it wasn't there because one of his servants had cleaned it up.
[00:15:14]  And Blavatsky was enraged.
[00:15:16]  She wrote back to the Colombes, quote, I am sorry for it, for Captain Maitland is a theosophist and spent money over it.
[00:15:22]  They want to tear the cigarette paper in two and keep one half.
[00:15:25]  And I will choose the same pieces with the exception of the prince's statue for our enemies might watch and see the cigarette fall and destroy it.
[00:15:31]  I enclose an envelope with a cigarette paper in it.
[00:15:33]  I will drop another half of a cigarette behind the queen's head where I dropped my hair the same day or Saturday.
[00:15:39]  And yes, she would also drop bits of her hair behind like things and be like, look, the hair was like it was teleported by me or my masters to like show favor to you so you can give us money.
[00:15:50]  Those little physical confirmations that you're a powerful spiritual being is always kind of like a freaky thing.
[00:15:57]  This is unrelated, but every time...
[00:15:59]  Do you ever think about how Rasputin filled his walls with hair?
[00:16:04]  What?
[00:16:04]  No, I didn't know that.
[00:16:05]  It's something I don't actually, I mean, it may not be true.
[00:16:08]  It's a fact that I learned in high school in a class that I took that was that like a house that Rasputin had lived in at some point at like the height of his power after he had died, they were like demolishing the house and the walls were full of human hair.
[00:16:26]  You mean Rasputin, rah-rah, Rasputin, lover of the Russian.
[00:16:31]  Yeah, okay.
[00:16:32]  Wow, who really was gone?
[00:16:34]  Who really liked filling his walls with hair?
[00:16:37]  I have not heard that.
[00:16:38]  I hope it's true, though.
[00:16:39]  I hope it's true, too.
[00:16:40]  Because I do.
[00:16:42]  Well, it's like, yeah, anytime I hear, you know, anytime I hear about a hair-related occult thing, I'm like, oh, like the Rasputin's hair walls.
[00:16:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:52]  I mean, Homst Among Us doesn't stuff human hair into our walls as a hobby.
[00:16:57]  Well, me for one.
[00:16:58]  But keeps me young.
[00:17:00]  Keeps me young.
[00:17:01]  Keeps too young.
[00:17:02]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:03]  It's like jogging.
[00:17:04]  So another one of her cons was to have a letter materialize in the air above a mark and fly.
[00:17:09]  Again, it'll be like set up in like a ceiling fan or something so it like falls from the sky.
[00:17:14]  And of course, these would be, we've talked about this a lot, filled with instructions from Koot Humi or Master Moria.
[00:17:18]  In another letter she wrote to the Colombs ahead of a visit with two wealthy theosophists, she told them, quote, my dear friends, in the name of heaven, do not think that I have forgotten you.
[00:17:27]  I have not even time to breathe.
[00:17:29]  That is all.
[00:17:30]  We are in the greatest crisis and I must not lose my head.
[00:17:33]  I cannot and dare not write anything to you, but you must understand that it is absolutely necessary that something should happen in Bombay while I am here.
[00:17:41]  These two, the two, well, like rich marks, must see one of the brothers and receive a visit from him, the brothers being her master and Koothumi.
[00:17:48]  And if possible, the first must receive a letter, which I shall send.
[00:17:52]  But to see them, the brothers, is still more necessary.
[00:17:55]  The letter must fall on his head like the first, and I am begging Koot Humi to send it to him.
[00:17:59]  We must strike while the iron is hot.
[00:18:01]  Act independently of me, but in the habits and customs of the brothers.
[00:18:05]  If something should happen in Bombay that would make all the world talk, it would be grand.
[00:18:09]  But what?
[00:18:09]  The brothers are inexorable.
[00:18:11]  Oh, dear Mr. Colomb, save the situation and do what they ask you.
[00:18:15]  So, yeah, I mean, that's pretty clear what she's doing, right?
[00:18:20]  Yeah, no, I mean, that's, and it is, I mean, it does sound like pretty durational, too, I think, is like part of what makes it impressive.
[00:18:27]  It's like the same people are coming back and back and back.
[00:18:30]  And, you know, you've, they have to be able to do it.
[00:18:32]  Yeah, to keep them interested, to keep the money going.
[00:18:34]  You got to every, you got to keep giving them these bits of personal connection with Master Moria and Koothoumi.
[00:18:39]  That's what they want.
[00:18:40]  That's what they're paying for.
[00:18:42]  Yeah.
[00:18:42]  And also, I feel like it's what, because like shit like this was like formed in like, or at least with spiritualism, formed in like out of a distaste for like the amount of like shame and rejection that comes with Christian religion.

=== Keeping Fans Hooked Forever (06:44) ===

[00:18:57]  So that so much of this kind of shit is built around like confirmation and affirming things you already believe.
[00:19:03]  Yes.
[00:19:03]  But that, but that creates this whole pressure of like, because I am claiming my religion is backed by science, I have to have things go and go and go in increasingly big and impressive ways in a way that is just like completely unsustainable.
[00:19:18]  So that's that's fat.
[00:19:19]  That's fascinating to hear that she's using such elaborate tactics to kind of keep that up.
[00:19:24]  It is also funny.
[00:19:26]  The first like line, two lines of that sound just like a Democratic Party fundraising letter.
[00:19:32]  We are in the greatest crisis.
[00:19:34]  I haven't had time to breathe.
[00:19:35]  I must not lose my head.
[00:19:37]  Nancy Apollosi, I'm shitting myself.
[00:19:40]  Please open email.
[00:19:44]  So, other letters she sent during her travels in India make it clear exactly how these summonings were handled logistically.
[00:19:50]  Everyone here is madly anxious to see something.
[00:19:53]  I shall write you from Amritsar or Lahore.
[00:19:55]  My hair will do well in the old Tower of Sion, but you should put it in an envelope, a sachet of some peculiar kind, and hang it where you hide it.
[00:20:03]  Or even in Bombay, select a good spot and write to me at Amritsar, and then after the first month to Lahore.
[00:20:08]  So she's like saying, ahead of me, go set up tricks and tell me where they are.
[00:20:12]  So I can go into some guy's house and be like, check behind the bureau.
[00:20:17]  There's a thing for you from it's a lock of my own hair.
[00:20:20]  You know, I teleported it to you.
[00:20:22]  That's like, I mean, I guess she's kind of doing her own thing at this point.
[00:20:26]  She's definitely doing everything.
[00:20:27]  Yeah.
[00:20:28]  Yeah.
[00:20:28]  Like the hair stuff.
[00:20:30]  This is not like hair stuff from across an ocean is not shit I've encountered before.
[00:20:36]  But she's doing, I mean, this is closer to just like elaborate magic tricks.
[00:20:40]  Like yes, she is doing elaborate magic tricks.
[00:20:42]  Yes.
[00:20:42]  Well, and again, she is an occultist.
[00:20:44]  She's not a spiritualist, right?
[00:20:46]  Like the spiritualists didn't really do stuff like this.
[00:20:49]  So one of Blavatsky's favorite tricks involved a shrine to Koot Humi in the Theosophical Society's headquarters.
[00:20:55]  It had locking doors and it was like against a wall.
[00:20:58]  So on a regular basis, they'd open the shrine.
[00:21:00]  People could like pray to the master, burn incense, give him their requests in the form of letters, which would be like teleported to him in Tibet.
[00:21:07]  But the shrine had a secret back door built into it so that when it was locked, a society member could like add things to the case.
[00:21:14]  So periodically when they were guests, they would like have tea and someone would break a saucer or a teacup or even a kettle, right?
[00:21:21]  And then they would take the pieces as a demonstration of Humi's power.
[00:21:24]  They'd put them in the shrine and they'd lock it.
[00:21:28]  And when they'd open it, a brand new one would be sitting.
[00:21:31]  Yeah, it would be repaired magically, right?
[00:21:34]  Yeah.
[00:21:35]  Sent from Tibet.
[00:21:36]  Yes.
[00:21:38]  Yeah, that's a good use of it.
[00:21:40]  That's like what I love about some of those stuff.
[00:21:44]  What a good use of someone's energy and time to fix a plate to make a quote to make a point.
[00:21:50]  Yeah.
[00:21:51]  Again, they're never using these magical powers to like stop genocide in the Congo that's going on in this period or like, yeah, solve any of these mass, like any problems.
[00:22:00]  It's just like, I think it's like a shipped teacup.
[00:22:04]  Yeah.
[00:22:04]  Look.
[00:22:05]  Kootumi's got that shit.
[00:22:07]  Yeah, the civil war going on in China that's killing tens of millions of people.
[00:22:12]  Koothumi does not have that shit.
[00:22:13]  But like, Koothumi's got this saucer.
[00:22:15]  He's going to fix that.
[00:22:16]  Kudhumi, but one fictional character.
[00:22:20]  That's right.
[00:22:21]  Solve that sort of systemic issue.
[00:22:23]  So in one of her letters to the Colombes planning this con, the saucer con, Blavatsky made it clear what she thought she was con.
[00:22:32]  I mean, Jamie, on an on a somewhat related note, we should we should do something in Roswell at some point.
[00:22:37]  But, oh, there's a podcast there.
[00:22:41]  There's just going to be a day where you can text me, meet me at Roswell, and then I'll be like, all right, it's the day, and everything is canceled, and I'm going on a bus.
[00:22:51]  Yeah, yeah, Sophie, turn off the podcasts.
[00:22:54]  Jamie and I got to go to Roswell.
[00:22:56]  Can I come?
[00:22:57]  Yes.
[00:22:58]  Yes.
[00:22:58]  Of course.
[00:22:59]  I'm down.
[00:22:59]  It's a great text.
[00:23:00]  All right.
[00:23:01]  We'll make this happen.
[00:23:03]  Yeah.
[00:23:04]  So in one of her letters to the Colombes, Blavatsky made it clear what she thought about these people who, again, these are supposed to be her followers that she's inducting into the mysteries.
[00:23:12]  She wrote, try if you think that it is going to be a success to have a larger audience than our domestic imbeciles only.
[00:23:21]  It is well worth the trouble.
[00:23:22]  She's literally talking about like this, this saucer con.
[00:23:24]  Like, if you're going to, if you think that you can pull this off, try to get more people in there than just like the normal idiots that we have around.
[00:23:31]  Right.
[00:23:32]  I mean, that is.
[00:23:34]  She does have a good way of laser focusing on like how to make things appear more credible.
[00:23:38]  Yeah.
[00:23:39]  Yeah.
[00:23:40]  That's wow wow wow.
[00:23:42]  She's like, my followers, let's not talk about their intelligence level.
[00:23:46]  It's low.
[00:23:46]  No.
[00:23:47]  Now, obviously, this was a boring time, right?
[00:23:50]  Like, there's not much going on in the world.
[00:23:52]  That's a big part of why spiritualism is a success and occultism is a success.
[00:23:56]  People don't have a whole lot to fill their days.
[00:23:58]  They hadn't invented Twitter yet, unfortunately, tragically.
[00:24:01]  I mean, they're, I politely disagree, but that's fine.
[00:24:06]  People, it's easier to impress people with shit, but even so, it all gets old after a while, right?
[00:24:11]  You can only do these cons so many times.
[00:24:13]  You're like, oh, another lock of your hair in my house.
[00:24:16]  Hooray.
[00:24:18]  So they've got to like, she's got to try new things on a pretty regular basis.
[00:24:24]  And the sheer volume of letters that her master sent out eventually made some folks ask, can I like, can I like see Koothumi?
[00:24:31]  Can he like come over?
[00:24:32]  Can I like see Master Morris?
[00:24:33]  Physical manifestation.
[00:24:34]  This is what always, always happens.
[00:24:37]  We are in Bombay.
[00:24:38]  Tibet's not that far compared to how far Tibet normally is from our asses, right?
[00:24:42]  Like, can we not, and they can teleport, like, they're supposedly teleporting around and handing letters to people.
[00:24:48]  Can I not like, I've given you so much money.
[00:24:51]  Can I like see these guys?
[00:24:53]  Pretty normal request.
[00:24:55]  And we're going to talk about how Helena Blavatsky fulfilled that request.
[00:24:59]  But first, Jamie, you know what fulfills you and me and Sophie and everyone else?
[00:25:04]  Products and services?
[00:25:06]  Only the products and services that advertise on this podcast.
[00:25:09]  Everything else leaves us feeling as if our mouths are filled with ashes.
[00:25:14]  But these products and services fill the yearning void at the center of our souls that has been wrenched open by the pry bar of capitalism and fills our broken, it heals the broken spaces in our souls.
[00:25:31]  That's what these products do.
[00:25:32]  And if you don't, and if you don't like them, tweet at iWriteOK on Twitter.
[00:25:36]  Wow.
[00:25:37]  Wow.
[00:25:37]  Brave.
[00:25:38]  I don't check Twitter anymore.

=== Products That Fill Our Ashes (03:22) ===

[00:25:41]  I won't see you.
[00:25:42]  That's why I told them to go to you, Robert.
[00:25:45]  That was the inside joke that you spoiled.
[00:25:49]  Yeah, well, spoil these ads.
[00:25:54]  What's up, everyone?
[00:25:54]  I'm Ago Moda.
[00:25:56]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:26:03]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:26:07]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:26:10]  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.
[00:26:15]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:26:17]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:26:22]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:26:26]  Yeah.
[00:26:27]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:26:30]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:26:31]  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.
[00:26:40]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:26:42]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:26:49]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:26:51]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:26:52]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:26:54]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:27:03]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:27:07]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:27:11]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:27:14]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:27:17]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:27:21]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:27:22]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:27:25]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:27:27]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:27:32]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:27:34]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:27:35]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:27:37]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:27:40]  I said, oh hell no.
[00:27:42]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:27:44]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:27:49]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:27:50]  Trust me, babe.
[00:27:51]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:28:02]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:28:07]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:28:14]  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.
[00:28:21]  From power to parenthood.
[00:28:23]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:28:26]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:28:28]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:28:30]  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.
[00:28:35]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:28:41]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:28:44]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:28:50]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:28:52]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:28:55]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

=== Carrying Weight On Heads (13:34) ===

[00:29:03]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:29:09]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:29:14]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:29:19]  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.
[00:29:29]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:29:34]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:29:37]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:29:40]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:29:42]  That's so funny.
[00:29:43]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:29:52]  Say you love me.
[00:29:55]  You know I.
[00:29:56]  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.
[00:30:07]  And we're back.
[00:30:08]  We're talking about how Blavatsky, you know, people start asking, can we see these fucking masters that are always giving us orders and stuff?
[00:30:17]  This is a very typical trajectory.
[00:30:19]  But I think she really fucks herself over by implying that he's not local, but not far away.
[00:30:25]  But not all that far.
[00:30:26]  Wait, right?
[00:30:27]  I mean, Tibet is, you know, far from Bombay, but not normally.
[00:30:31]  Spiritualists will normally play it, I think, much smarter and say that their guides are dead.
[00:30:38]  They cannot come through.
[00:30:39]  That is definitely a downside to what she's doing.
[00:30:42]  Yeah.
[00:30:43]  Yes.
[00:30:44]  So in order to trick people, Emma Colomb would later claim that Blavatsky had her construct a puppet.
[00:30:50]  Quote, later, in one of her good moods, Madame Blavatsky called me up and told me, see if you can make a head of human size and place it on the divan, pointing to a sofa in her room, and merely put a sheet round it.
[00:31:01]  It would have a magic effect by moonlight.
[00:31:03]  What can this mean?
[00:31:04]  I wondered.
[00:31:05]  But knowing how disagreeable she could make herself if she was stroked on the wrong side, I complied with her wish.
[00:31:10]  She cut a paper pattern of the face I was to make, which I still have.
[00:31:13]  On this, I cut the precious linaments of the beloved master.
[00:31:17]  But to my shame, I must say that after all my trouble of cutting, sewing, and stuffing, Madame said that it looked like an old Jew.
[00:31:23]  I suppose she meant Shylock, which is like a racist caricature of Jewish people.
[00:31:27]  Madame, with a graceful touch here and there of her painting brush, gave it a little better appearance.
[00:31:32]  So they make this fake head to be Master Koothoumi.
[00:31:39]  Yeah.
[00:31:40]  I see that are my question: Are there photographs of this?
[00:31:46]  Because there are a lot of fun pictures from the second wave of spiritualism of things like you're describing, like paper-mache.
[00:31:53]  Like, but if they're backlit and picked pitch dark, looks enough like a human silhouette that people would really be convinced by them.
[00:32:00]  But then you see a flash photograph taken of them and you're like, oh dear, that is a pile of still wet paper mache.
[00:32:10]  Let's see.
[00:32:10]  Can we find there's definitely like portraits of him that some German guy did, which he looks like Jesus.
[00:32:18]  And again, he's supposed to be like a Tibetan ancient mystic, but also he's like, still looks like.
[00:32:25]  Well, I think he's kind of supposed to be like a member of, I'm not a Koothumi expert, a Koot humologist, they call them.
[00:32:31]  But I think he's supposed to be like, you know, one of these master race type people.
[00:32:35]  And so obviously he looks like a white dude.
[00:32:39]  But yeah, I have not found this head.
[00:32:43]  But yeah, next, she Emma explains like the purpose the doll played in their little con.
[00:32:49]  Quote, the doll plays the greatest part in these apparitions.
[00:32:52]  And as I've already explained, it is carried on somebody's head.
[00:32:55]  But at times it is placed on the top of a long bamboo and raised to show that it is an astral body.
[00:33:00]  But when the doll has not been at hand, even a white cloth wrapped around the person who was to perform the Mahatma was at times used and answered the purpose.
[00:33:07]  And they would do this to like have him deposit letters and like he'd like kind of wave basically at people.
[00:33:12]  Like you give you a second of like seeing Koothumi before he disappears.
[00:33:15]  So it doesn't have to be much, right?
[00:33:17]  You do it at night.
[00:33:18]  You do it from a distance.
[00:33:19]  You know, he drops off a thing and he goes.
[00:33:21]  And then someone's like, no, I saw a Koot Humi.
[00:33:23]  He like graced us with his presence.
[00:33:25]  He's real.
[00:33:27]  Now, obviously, the fact that I'm reading all of this to you, Jamie, I'm not inducted into the mysteries of Theosophy.
[00:33:35]  No.
[00:33:36]  It means that it got out, which means that the Colombes decided to tell everybody, which gets us to one of the more infamous moments in Theosophist history.
[00:33:44]  Oh, I'm very.
[00:33:44]  So wait, sorry, what year are we in right now?
[00:33:47]  This is like 1878, 1880, somewhere around that period.
[00:33:53]  Fascinating.
[00:33:54]  Yeah, I've got a date in there a little later.
[00:33:56]  But yeah, this is so this moment in Theosophist history is called the Colomb Affair.
[00:34:00]  The gist of it is that eventually the Colombes had a falling out with Blavatsky.
[00:34:05]  They threatened to blackmail her and she had them kicked out of the religion and their positions.
[00:34:09]  And in the drama that followed, they took all these letters that they'd been sending back and forth that outlaid out all of the cons they were pulling and they gave them to some local Christians who had beef with Theosophy.
[00:34:20]  So Theosophists will always be like, Well, they were constantly like you can't trust the Colombes and like these Christians had like a reason to want to damage the church.
[00:34:28]  But it's like it also all adds up.
[00:34:30]  And they had a lot of letters that were definitely from Blavatsky.
[00:34:34]  And other people talk about variations of these cons.
[00:34:37]  Like it's just, it's very clear what happened, right?
[00:34:40]  Sure.
[00:34:40]  Oh, man.
[00:34:41]  That is, that is always, that's one of my, that's a, always a fun source of dramatic tension when the uh when the assistant goes rogue.
[00:34:49]  Yes, yes.
[00:34:50]  And and and that, I mean, it happens because she's mean, like she's shitty to work.
[00:34:55]  That's the thing.
[00:34:55]  And that's always why it happens.
[00:34:57]  It's like because either you're not being compensated or treated well.
[00:35:00]  So I promise when we're living on a cult compound fighting the FDA, I'm never gonna be rude to my followers.
[00:35:11]  I may ask you to die for me in a holy war against the food and drug administration, but in a nice way, politely.
[00:35:18]  But in it, oh, but in like a friendly kind of way.
[00:35:20]  Yeah, like in that documentary, Wild, Wild Country.
[00:35:22]  Those people seem nice.
[00:35:24]  I don't think they did anything wrong.
[00:35:26]  Yeah, no, it's been a couple years.
[00:35:29]  I've only seen, I've seen about 500 cult documentaries since then.
[00:35:33]  So I'll agree with your characterization of that.
[00:35:35]  Why not?
[00:35:36]  They seemed fun.
[00:35:37]  Yeah.
[00:35:37]  Let's just move right past that.
[00:35:39]  And assume everyone on Reddit will have no issue with what I've just said.
[00:35:46]  Robert.
[00:35:47]  Robert.
[00:35:48]  He's putting us in compromising positions.
[00:35:50]  Look, if, okay, let who, okay, show of hands.
[00:35:54]  Who has not poisoned a bunch of people in Antelope, Oregon?
[00:35:57]  Come on.
[00:35:57]  Okay.
[00:35:58]  I don't see any hands.
[00:35:59]  I know.
[00:35:59]  No, you are the most loved ones.
[00:36:01]  Not any hands in the air.
[00:36:02]  That's right.
[00:36:03]  We all do it.
[00:36:04]  It's fine.
[00:36:05]  It's like lying to, you know, a trust.
[00:36:08]  Where are you going with this?
[00:36:10]  I'm going to Antelope, Oregon to poison up a fan.
[00:36:14]  Robert, how about you go back to your script?
[00:36:17]  Calm down.
[00:36:18]  Okay.
[00:36:19]  Okay.
[00:36:21]  Blavatsky gets me excited about this stuff.
[00:36:24]  Fussy.
[00:36:24]  So fussy on a Friday afternoon.
[00:36:27]  There's this.
[00:36:27]  All of this info comes out, and these Christians start writing a bunch of articles with like publishing the letters.
[00:36:33]  And it's a big embarrassment, right?
[00:36:35]  Big deal for the Theosophist community, does a lot of damage to them, especially in India.
[00:36:40]  And one of the upsides of this whole weird affair is that Blavatsky's room at the headquarters is inspected by other theosophists and they find hidden doors and passages built into her room to allow her to like sneak around and leave shit and like do her spirit stuff, right?
[00:36:56]  That's okay.
[00:36:57]  Yeah.
[00:36:58]  Okay.
[00:36:58]  So that's like, yeah, so the room has been specifically like rigged for this sort of thing.
[00:37:04]  That is always so interesting to hear about.
[00:37:07]  Yeah, that rocks.
[00:37:09]  That's funny to me.
[00:37:10]  I was interested in like whether, I don't know.
[00:37:14]  I feel like there's all these cases of like even when the big public figure is exposed, like with Scientology or with spiritualism at different times, that there are so many believers at this point that no one even cares.
[00:37:29]  And there's an excuse.
[00:37:30]  But people take it seriously here.
[00:37:32]  Yeah, they do.
[00:37:33]  And you know what I take seriously, Jamie?
[00:37:35]  No, just reading this next paragraph.
[00:37:38]  Great.
[00:37:38]  Okay.
[00:37:39]  So the reveal of her private letters led to a precipitous decline in the fortunes of the Theosophical Society.
[00:37:45]  But what finally forced Blavatsky out of India was a controversy over the release of the Mahatma letters.
[00:37:50]  And these are the series of letters of Koot Humi and Moria that they'd sent to this English author, A.P. Sinneth, that turned out to be totally plagiarized by another dude, right?
[00:37:59]  Cool.
[00:38:00]  Yeah.
[00:38:01]  And they were not only were there a plagiary, but like these are, again, these are like supposed to be mystical revelations of the cosmos by undying gurus.
[00:38:08]  And the person who's not going to be able to do it.
[00:38:09]  And then she control C control V that's so serious.
[00:38:13]  And the parts that aren't ripped off are just like specifically like throwing shade at specific people in the real world that Blavatsky disliked.
[00:38:22]  Like it's this like mix of stories.
[00:38:23]  A plagiarism and an airing of personal grievances.
[00:38:26]  This guy I have an argument with, like the spirits say, fuck this guy.
[00:38:30]  To be fair, how many best-selling books could you describe as essentially a mix of plagiarism and airing personal grievances?
[00:38:39]  I would argue probably a lot.
[00:38:41]  Jamie, my hot dog book, for example, what if I said about coming on here and slandering Michael Crichton?
[00:38:46]  Like, the man's dead.
[00:38:47]  Let's have some responses.
[00:38:51]  Oh.
[00:38:53]  Michael.
[00:38:54]  Did a lot of damage on the way out, didn't you?
[00:38:57]  So this all blew up enough that a British organization, the Society for Psychical Research, and again, this is not like a crackpot.
[00:39:05]  Nowadays, anything with that name would be kind of crackpot.
[00:39:08]  But again, this is like people are trying to see if this is real science.
[00:39:12]  And it is like legitimately, yeah, you would want to like study this to some extent.
[00:39:17]  So this is like, yeah, you would want to like try to see, can we prove whether or not this stuff is real?
[00:39:22]  So they send a fucking dude to India to analyze the letters.
[00:39:26]  And this investigator, Richard Hodson, writes a huge report which concludes that Blavatsky is, quote, one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.
[00:39:36]  Now, Theosophists, you can read.
[00:39:38]  If you want to spend days reading Theosophists tearing this report apart for its supposed shortcomings and stuff, there's a lot.
[00:39:45]  Oh, there's a ton of it, Jamie.
[00:39:47]  Oh, I know.
[00:39:48]  That's why I was like, I'm not covering this.
[00:39:50]  I'm going to bed.
[00:39:52]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:39:53]  It is not worth it.
[00:39:54]  No, you don't need to.
[00:39:54]  Nobody needs to.
[00:39:55]  I'm sure there's a Theosophist listening who's going to be like, Rob, but you're not doing the proper like, I don't care.
[00:40:00]  It's fine.
[00:40:01]  If you want to be a theosophist, be a theosophist.
[00:40:03]  It's not, I don't think there's anything particularly toxic about it in 2022, but like, chill out, man.
[00:40:09]  She was a con woman.
[00:40:10]  Chill out of it.
[00:40:12]  That's Rob Register.
[00:40:14]  I do all kinds.
[00:40:15]  I do kind of like those kind of quotes where it was like, yeah, you know, this person was objectively full of shit, but you kind of got to hand it to her, right?
[00:40:24]  Like, that's what I'm saying.
[00:40:25]  Yeah, she was pretty good at being full of shit, right?
[00:40:28]  Yeah.
[00:40:28]  Yeah.
[00:40:28]  Well, that's how I feel about LRH, you know.
[00:40:31]  By the way, so LR, I'll run Hubbard.
[00:40:33]  Everyone calls LRH.
[00:40:35]  I was like, wow, look at you on a little cutesy, cutesy nickname basis.
[00:40:40]  It's what Scientologists actually do call them.
[00:40:42]  It's like the thing that you're talking about.
[00:40:45]  They'll talk about like LRH tech and stuff as like a big way they'll refer to like Scientology, you know, teachings and shit.
[00:40:53]  But I kind of think that was also Hubbard ripping off Blavatsky because everyone calls her HBP.
[00:40:59]  And in all like Theosophist literature and shit, she's always called HBP.
[00:41:03]  It's very, I tried to watch, I did watch with a couple of friends at the compound a documentary about her, and they kept calling her HPB.
[00:41:10]  And it sounds like HPV when you have like a bunch of people saying it quickly.
[00:41:14]  No, that's my department and I don't have it anymore.
[00:41:18]  Okay.
[00:41:19]  Good for you.
[00:41:20]  Thank you.
[00:41:20]  I didn't know that you could read.
[00:41:22]  Sometimes it just goes away.
[00:41:22]  It's kind of good for you.
[00:41:24]  Yeah, just like HBP eventually went away.
[00:41:27]  I had a very toxic.
[00:41:29]  I had a very toxic thought when you said that.
[00:41:31]  Do you remember how there used to be those god-awful shirts that said the notorious RBG?
[00:41:36]  Oh, God.
[00:41:37]  Yes.
[00:41:37]  Do you think that Theosophist had shirts like that around her?
[00:41:41]  They do that.
[00:41:41]  Are they that kind of?
[00:41:44]  I think we figured out how you and I are going to make a million fucking dollars.
[00:41:48]  Yeah.
[00:41:49]  Notorious HBP where she's like got a blunt in her hand because some people think she smoked a lot of weed, although Lachman says that that's a dirty lie, but Lachman says kind of a conversation.
[00:42:01]  Fucking double down on it.
[00:42:02]  Fuck it.
[00:42:02]  We've got to move product.
[00:42:03]  She smoked weed.
[00:42:05]  She smoked hella herb.
[00:42:07]  Hella herb.
[00:42:08]  I really don't like that I had that thought, but now it's gone.
[00:42:12]  I've released it.
[00:42:13]  Thank you.
[00:42:13]  You released it into the universe back to the Akashic Library.
[00:42:19]  Yeah, it's a gigantic volume sitting in the account of Akashic Records.
[00:42:23]  God, what a nightmare concept.
[00:42:26]  What a hoot.
[00:42:26]  So the fact that the report happens, a lot of the folks who were like, again, the people who make Theosophy profitable, which are people who are kind of into it, but not like haven't lost their minds.

=== Defending Blavatsky's Racism (06:16) ===

[00:42:38]  Maybe they just want something neat, right?
[00:42:39]  Like it's boring being a British person in India all the time or whatever.
[00:42:43]  Boring being a British person in Britain or whatever.
[00:42:46]  And you want a little spice.
[00:42:47]  It's such a snooze.
[00:42:49]  So maybe a lot of them were just folks who wanted a little bit of spice.
[00:42:52]  And when this letter comes out, like a lot of like that, that kind of support, which is where a lot of the money comes from, starts to evaporate.
[00:42:58]  And again, the same way she had in New York, whenever people start like getting wise to her, like any good con artist, she moves on.
[00:43:05]  And Blavatsky leaves India.
[00:43:07]  She returns to Europe in March of 1885.
[00:43:09]  She left in 1878.
[00:43:11]  So she's in India about 70 years, something like that.
[00:43:14]  She lands in Naples.
[00:43:15]  She travels around a bit and she spends most of the next three years living off of a society pension, which I think was quite comfortable, and working on her last book, her very last book, The Secret Doctrine.
[00:43:26]  And that, Jamie Loftus, Sophie Lichterman, brings us all the way back around to our old friend from episode one, Jean-Salvain Bailey, the astronomer who crafted the theory of a hyperborean Atlantis.
[00:43:40]  Now, Bailey effectively orientalized Atlantis, right?
[00:43:45]  Taking the mythical super-civilization of European lore that had been like a focus of occultists and stuff for millennia and shifting it to Asia.
[00:43:53]  When we talked about this earlier, I quoted from Dan Edelstein's Hyperborean Atlantis.
[00:43:58]  Here's him explaining what Blavatsky actually wrote out in her last book.
[00:44:02]  A series of lengthy glosses and commentaries of an alleged ancient book consulted by clairvoyance, no less, the stanzas of Disneyan, I don't know, D-Z-Y-A-N.
[00:44:12]  Blavatsky's text is an anti-Darwinian descent of man that tells the rise and fall of seven root races.
[00:44:18]  We are currently on number five, going on six.
[00:44:21]  Each root race is divided into seven sub-races and is associated with a different continent.
[00:44:26]  Although with continental drift and the disappearance of certain continents, these do not correspond with the ones we know.
[00:44:32]  Unsurprisingly, one of these lost continents is Atlantis.
[00:44:35]  Although writing shortly after Ignatius Donnelly, whose Atlantis, the antediluvian world, launched the Atlantis craze, Blavatsky did not place Atlantis in between Europe and America, as Donnelly had, but rather in the far north, near the North Pole.
[00:44:49]  Indeed, in Blavatsky, Bailey had finally found a supporter.
[00:44:52]  She quotes his works extensively, no less than 22 times, and credits him with having discovered the truth, or at least part of it, about Atlantis.
[00:44:59]  So, the entire cosmology of Blavatsky's last book is based in large part on a mix of Bailey's work and that novel, The Coming Race, by Edward Bulwer-Lyden.
[00:45:09]  Now, where he'd envisioned this underground master race as being like potential conquerors, she sees them as benevolent spirit guides.
[00:45:17]  Again, Koot Humi and Master Moria, they're living underground, right?
[00:45:20]  There's this network of tunnels.
[00:45:21]  There's a super race underground.
[00:45:23]  And she saw Bulwer-Lyden's concept of Vrill as basically being, again, kind of a cult electricity.
[00:45:28]  And as she always did, Blavatsky just rewrote a couple of other people and like mashed it together with a half-understood Eastern religion.
[00:45:35]  And like, that's the association.
[00:45:36]  To confirm what she's been trying to write down for most of her life, that's wild.
[00:45:41]  Now, unfortunately for everybody on Earth, one thing that Helena chose to focus on heavily when she was taking shit from Bulwer-Leaton, or Lydon, Bulwer-Lyden, was the whole race science aspect of his book.
[00:45:54]  Now, this had always been a part of diffusionist thinking.
[00:45:56]  There's always been some weird, like, uncomfortable race shit with diffusionism.
[00:46:00]  Because if you're claiming there's a single source of all invention and creativity and people today are degenerate imitations of past splendor, well, some people are going to be more degenerate than others, right?
[00:46:08]  Some people are going to be closer to the master race than others.
[00:46:11]  So there's, obviously, this has always been a problematic attitude.
[00:46:15]  You see where that's headed, yeah?
[00:46:17]  Yeah.
[00:46:17]  Edelstein continues, quote, Blavatsky also develops to its fullest the racial germ present in Bailey's thesis.
[00:46:24]  Hyperborean Atlantis was home to the Atlanteans, but also saw the emergence of another race, the Aryans.
[00:46:29]  From Blavatsky, the Aryan race was born and developed in the far north, though after the sinking of the continent of Atlantis, its tribes immigrated further south into Asia.
[00:46:38]  For a long time, the remaining Atlanteans and the Aryans lived together.
[00:46:41]  They brought civilization to India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and are the ancestors of the current Europeans.
[00:46:46]  The Atlanteans transmitted to the Aryans all the known sciences and even highly sophisticated technologies such as aeronautics, knowledge of flying in air vehicles, as Blavatsky put it.
[00:46:57]  But over time, the Aryan root race also subdivided.
[00:47:00]  One of the more unfortunate results of this division, Blavatsky writes, was the creation of the Semitic sub-race, an artificial Aryan race.
[00:47:07]  The Semites were but one of the Aryan sub-races, but she draws strong distinctions between them and the others.
[00:47:12]  Quote, With the ancient Aryans, the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime, and poetical.
[00:47:17]  However, much the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim.
[00:47:21]  With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of spirit into matter and the fall and degradation, degradation were hypothesized by him with the result of dragging deity down to the level of man.
[00:47:32]  So the Semites destroyed godliness in Europe.
[00:47:36]  That's why Europeans aren't magic anymore, basically, was the Jews.
[00:47:41]  Okay.
[00:47:43]  This is stuff that like I have not I've read the gist of what she's saying, but never like a direct quote.
[00:47:52]  And it's yeah.
[00:47:54]  And holy shit.
[00:47:55]  Defenders of Blavatsky will say like, well, no, she was anti-racist because she's she claims like one of the things she's arguing is that Europeans, white people have lost the ability to like do magic, which is a thing that like Indians have never lost, right?
[00:48:08]  And like people in Tibet, like there's all these parts of the world and Indigenous Americans, people are still connected to magic and white people are not.
[00:48:15]  And that makes them better than white people in a lot of ways.
[00:48:17]  But also, so I would say she's not a white supremacist, but it is very racist thinking and especially anti-Semitic thinking.
[00:48:26]  Yeah.
[00:48:27]  Absolutely.
[00:48:28]  Like, yeah, the fact that she's not just saying that white people are the master race doesn't mean that it's not very racist thinking.
[00:48:36]  Right.
[00:48:36]  But no, it's extremely.
[00:48:38]  And it's also like that it's classically racist to attribute magical powers to non-white people.
[00:48:43]  Like that's racist in many of the oldest.
[00:48:45]  Yeah.
[00:48:46]  Yeah.
[00:48:46]  It's racist in many, it's very like the arguments people make to try to make her seem like an anti-racist icon are extremely funny.

=== Molina And The Phantom (05:06) ===

[00:48:54]  Funny in this.
[00:48:55]  Right.
[00:48:55]  Like that's like really, man.
[00:48:57]  Really?
[00:48:58]  Yeah.
[00:48:59]  Seventh graders know that.
[00:49:02]  Okay.
[00:49:02]  Yeah.
[00:49:03]  You're going to bat for the the Semites destroyed magic lady.
[00:49:06]  Like that that's where you're that's where you're taking the swing, huh?
[00:49:10]  Interesting take, false.
[00:49:12]  You know who did destroy magic, Jamie?
[00:49:15]  Who?
[00:49:16]  Besides my services, though, not mine.
[00:49:18]  Besides my amazing friend's drawing of Alfred Molina.
[00:49:22]  Yes, Leo.
[00:49:24]  Magic has returned to the world.
[00:49:25]  That's the new Great Awakening.
[00:49:27]  It starts with this.
[00:49:29]  This is my Jesus and the toast.
[00:49:31]  Yeah.
[00:49:32]  So go engage with the returning spiritual occult powers in our new sixth world by purchasing whatever product comes on next.
[00:49:42]  It will give you powers.
[00:49:44]  Or not.
[00:49:47]  What's up, everyone?
[00:49:48]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:49:49]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:49:57]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:50:00]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:50:04]  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.
[00:50:09]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:50:11]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:50:15]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:50:20]  Yeah.
[00:50:21]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:50:24]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:50:25]  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.
[00:50:34]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:50:36]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:50:43]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:50:45]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:50:46]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:50:48]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:50:57]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:51:01]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:51:05]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:51:08]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:51:11]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:51:15]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:51:16]  And in this new season of the girlfriends...
[00:51:19]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:51:21]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:51:26]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:51:27]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:51:29]  The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
[00:51:34]  I said, Oh, hell no.
[00:51:36]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:51:38]  He's gonna get what he deserves.
[00:51:43]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:51:44]  Trust me, babe.
[00:51:45]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:56]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:52:01]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:52:08]  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.
[00:52:14]  From power to parenthood.
[00:52:16]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:52:20]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:52:22]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:52:24]  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.
[00:52:29]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:52:35]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:52:38]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:52:44]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:52:46]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:52:49]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:52:57]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:53:03]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:53:08]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:53:13]  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.
[00:53:23]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:53:28]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:53:31]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:53:34]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:53:36]  That's so funny.
[00:53:37]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:53:46]  Say you love me.
[00:53:49]  You know I.
[00:53:50]  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.

=== Inventing New Anti-Semitism (02:46) ===

[00:54:00]  We're back, and I hope you all used your BetterHelp or promo codes and now have the ability to summon your own erotic drawings of Alfred Molina suckling different furry creatures at his mortar.
[00:54:13]  Or you're getting therapy for the effect that it has.
[00:54:15]  Or you're getting therapy for what it did to you.
[00:54:17]  Yes.
[00:54:18]  Yeah.
[00:54:19]  Just remember that the Alfred Molina with the suckling kittens is not real and cannot hurt you.
[00:54:26]  It can't hurt you.
[00:54:27]  It can only bring you spiritual peace.
[00:54:29]  Yeah.
[00:54:30]  So Blavatsky winds up concluding that there is, quote, an immense chasm between Aryan and Semitic religious thought.
[00:54:38]  They belong to quote two opposite poles: sincerity, sincerity, and concealment.
[00:54:43]  Who can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind?
[00:54:47]  Right?
[00:54:47]  This is again, she gets whitewashed all up.
[00:54:50]  This is really racist.
[00:54:51]  This is, yeah, this is quite racist.
[00:54:55]  This is funny because it's like even critical interpretations of her work still make it sound like, well, a lot of what she said was taken out of context.
[00:55:08]  But this sounds pretty in the text.
[00:55:11]  Yes.
[00:55:11]  Tell me what context makes who can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind not racist.
[00:55:18]  What context could make that not racist?
[00:55:23]  She further degrades Judaism by describing it as a sex-obsessed and selfish cult.
[00:55:27]  Judaism, built solely on phallic worship, has become one of the latest creeds in Asia and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside themselves.
[00:55:38]  Meanwhile, she writes, true Aryans are the most metaphysical and spiritual people on earth.
[00:55:43]  Okay.
[00:55:44]  Yep.
[00:55:44]  And now, obviously, I feel like I don't need to belabor how this is adjacent to Nazi thinking, right?
[00:55:50]  Like, I mean, it's like, we could talk about it for hours, but again, it's like, I don't think that there's really anything to tease apart here.
[00:55:58]  It's just like overtly racist.
[00:56:00]  Yeah, it is.
[00:56:01]  And obviously, like, you know, she's growing up in Russia during a period in which like a lot, the state is incredibly anti-Semitic.
[00:56:07]  There are like pogroms when she's a kid that are celebrated and stuff.
[00:56:11]  She's not, by being anti-Semitic, she's not out of the norm, but the way she's anti-Semitic is completely new.
[00:56:18]  She is inventing new kinds of anti-Semitism.
[00:56:21]  And like cooking that anti-Semitism into like religious texts.
[00:56:25]  Yeah, into religious texts that she's trying to spread as like a pop philosophy.
[00:56:29]  And in the sacred doctrine, she places Jewish people as the opponents of the preordained progress of the races.
[00:56:36]  Quote, this Aryan, non-Aryan, and specifically Semitic opposition would become the great historical paradigm of the racist right, replacing the Marxist historiography of historiographic law of class struggle.

=== Thule Society Cover Ups (12:41) ===

[00:56:47]  Blavatsky also raised the specter of a new race to be chosen from among the most select members of the Aryan root race.
[00:56:52]  This next race would have even greater powers than the present one and would truly produce the Übermenschen of the future.
[00:56:58]  Now, Helena dies in 1891, but her ideas continue to spread.
[00:57:03]  Just as she had first tweaked and updated the work of others, occultists came along to add to her ideas.
[00:57:08]  The first was fascist Austrian occultist Jarg Lanz von Liebenfels, who gave the birthplace of the Aryans as a lost Arctic hyperborea.
[00:57:17]  Hermann Wirth, a German ethnologist, followed.
[00:57:20]  He named the mystical Aryan homeland Thula, or it's spelled Thule, and it's usually said Thule.
[00:57:26]  I think it's actually supposed to be pronounced Thula.
[00:57:29]  But like, this is also the name of like a popular brand of like top racks that people put on their Subarus.
[00:57:35]  The word had other meanings before.
[00:57:38]  It's also the name of my dad's best friend.
[00:57:39]  She's from Greece.
[00:57:40]  It's a Greek name.
[00:57:41]  Is it spelled T-H-U-L-E?
[00:57:43]  No.
[00:57:43]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:57:44]  There's others.
[00:57:44]  There's like Thule and stuff.
[00:57:45]  Like, yeah, I think there's a number of other kind of similar names.
[00:57:48]  This is T-H-U-L-E.
[00:57:50]  I'll call it Thule just because that's usually in Hellboy, they say Thule.
[00:57:54]  So that's what we're going to go with here.
[00:57:55]  Okay.
[00:57:56]  Well, that is, yeah, that is my.
[00:57:57]  Mike Magnola was never wrong.
[00:57:59]  Yeah.
[00:58:01]  In July of 1918, as Germany reeled from starvation and disaster on the Western Front, the Thule myth would be adopted by German theosophist Baron Rudolf von Sibottendorf.
[00:58:11]  He founded a Bavarian right-wing nationalist club and called it the Thule Society.
[00:58:17]  This name set it apart from other more militant far-right organizations, and its cover as an antiquarian historical society discussing the myths built by Blavatsky helped Sabotendorf and his followers avoid police scrutiny.
[00:58:29]  Quote, during the rapid succession of socialist and Soviet revolutionary governments in post-World War I Munich, the Thule Society was at the center of the white or reactionary counteroffensive.
[00:58:38]  Its antiquarian cover may have facilitated this role.
[00:58:41]  While authorities cracked down on more visible nationalist groups, the Thule Society's headquarters at the fancy, I'm not going to try and pronounce the name of this hotel, became a haven for the resistance throughout the turbulent period between 1918 and 1920.
[00:58:54]  Yeah, the holiday inn, the Society of Us.
[00:58:57]  Yeah.
[00:58:58]  So it's an umbrella group for a bunch of different far-right paramilitary organizations known as the Free Corps, Freikorps, right?
[00:59:05]  Like these are using the Thule Society as cover.
[00:59:09]  Now, one of the far-right groups that came under the sway of the Thule Society was the German Workers' Party, or DAP, soon to become the NSDAP under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.
[00:59:20]  Now, the precise connections between the DAP and the Thule Society are debated somewhat.
[00:59:23]  This is often vastly over-kind of emphasized as like the Nazis started as this occult organ.
[00:59:30]  And it's like, no, it's just more that a lot of early Nazis had occult leadings, and this was a good cover for being a fascist in a period when that was more dangerous.
[00:59:38]  And so, of course, like they have, they're related to one another, right?
[00:59:42]  Sabotendorf would always affirm that the Nazi Party was created by Thule Society members.
[00:59:47]  Reginald Phelps is cast out on these claims.
[00:59:51]  And it's worth noting, though, that like you, again, there's a lot of debate about like to what degree was this like an administrative thing?
[00:59:57]  Was it planned?
[00:59:59]  But what's actually true, and Ian Kershaw notes this, is that the Thule Society had a shitload of like members who later became massively influential Nazis.
[01:00:09]  One of these guys was Alfred Rosenberg.
[01:00:11]  Now, Rosenberg would go on to be the Nazi Party's.
[01:00:14]  Yeah, he sucks.
[01:00:16]  Not Milena.
[01:00:17]  No, not Alfred Milena.
[01:00:19]  Rosenberg is like basically kind of like the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party next to Hitler, like the guy making up the most kind of Nazi canon next to Hitler.
[01:00:29]  Another Thule Society member was Hans Frank, who became future governor of Poland and would be executed.
[01:00:34]  I believe he's one of the guys executed in Nuremberg.
[01:00:36]  A lot of war crimes, Hans Frank.
[01:00:38]  He's running Poland for the Nazis, right?
[01:00:39]  That's the kind of war crimes Hans Frank winds up committing.
[01:00:44]  Another Thule Society member was Anton Drexler.
[01:00:46]  Drexler is the actual founder of the Nazi Party.
[01:00:49]  Hitler doesn't found it, right?
[01:00:50]  Hitler's like comes in kind of a little bit later and sort of eventually does take over, but Drexler is the guy who founds it.
[01:00:55]  And before he founds the Nazi Party, and while he's starting the Nazi Party, he's a regular attendee at the Thule Society meetings.
[01:01:02]  Hitler was never a member, and he was definitely not a theosophist.
[01:01:05]  But Rudolf Hess, his one-time best friend, and the guy who actually wrote Mein Kampf with him, like when they're in prison, Hess is the guy who's like taking dictation from Hitler.
[01:01:14]  He later kind of loses his mind and flies a plane to England at the start of the war to try to get the king to ally with Hitler.
[01:01:19]  It doesn't work.
[01:01:20]  He dies in prison.
[01:01:22]  I could have guessed.
[01:01:25]  He was also a Thule Society member.
[01:01:27]  And Hess is super influential to Hitler.
[01:01:29]  Hess is early on, because once they start to get power, Hess kind of gets marginalized because he's very into the occult.
[01:01:35]  He's a little bit of a crackpot.
[01:01:37]  But he is like Hitler's emotional support animal.
[01:01:40]  Like when Hitler's in the early days of the Nazi Party, Hitler probably kills himself without Hess there.
[01:01:47]  Very important guy.
[01:01:49]  Now, Blavatsky herself obviously was not a Nazi.
[01:01:52]  She dies in 1891, right?
[01:01:54]  There's no way she even could have been.
[01:01:56]  But her ideas run through Nazi history.
[01:01:58]  Alfred Rosenberg's book, The Myth of the 20th Century, which he publishes in 1930, is the second best-selling book in Nazi Germany under Mein Kampf, right?
[01:02:07]  That's what I mean when I say this guy is like the number two ideologue of the Nazis.
[01:02:10]  And his whole book is a plagiarism of the secret doctrine.
[01:02:14]  Like he's basically taking the secret doctrine and doing what Blavatsky did with the coming race.
[01:02:19]  He opens the book by restating the myth of a hyperborean Atlantis and insisting that the existence of a, quote, prehistoric Nordic cultural center was the basis of all Nazi race science.
[01:02:29]  Edelstein calls this belief in an Aryan Atlantis the quote foundational myth of Nazism.
[01:02:34]  Blavatsky's ideas about the inevitable progression of races also played into Nazi theory.
[01:02:39]  This gets forgotten a lot amongst all the horror, but genocide was only like part of the Nazi quest to secure a future for the Aryan race.
[01:02:46]  They were not just trying, obviously one part of this is we want to kill a whole shitload of people to stop them from breeding with Aryans and watering down their blood.
[01:02:54]  But like they didn't believe German people were good enough either, right?
[01:02:57]  They didn't believe that there were like Aryans in the way that there needed to be.
[01:03:01]  Another huge part of Nazism is creating a master race through science and breeding, right?
[01:03:07]  Which is like, again, is tied in with Blavatsky's ideas of like, we're on the fifth race, but we're becoming the sixth race.
[01:03:13]  And like, you know, we can, we are creating this like new race that can be like a new kind of master race, but it's going to take, you know, in her mind, it was more like a thing of spiritual kind of progression.
[01:03:22]  But yeah.
[01:03:23]  But yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter whether Hitler was a theosophist or not.
[01:03:27]  Like there's no, just from the handful of paragraphs you've read, it's extremely obvious why it would be an influential text for Nazis because it just confirms stuff that they already believe.
[01:03:38]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:03:38]  I mean, it also, more than that, it likes to do it with some of the things they believe, right?
[01:03:43]  Like, because this had not been, people had been racist and had been anti-Semitic and stuff, but like this specific stuff, the Aryan shit, that was not in the fucking, in anybody's radar until Helena Blavatsky.
[01:03:55]  I'm going to quote again.
[01:03:56]  This is about how she influences their quest to build a master race.
[01:04:00]  Indeed, the horrors of the Holocaust may lead us to overlook the fact that the extermination of the Jews was part of a vaster racial project whose ultimate goal was the creation of a new superior race.
[01:04:09]  The other half of the Nazi racial fantasy expressed itself with particular cruelty in the eugenic experiments performed in SS laboratories, but was also eleventy evident in the highest level of the Nazi party.
[01:04:20]  Certain SS officers apparently mutilated themselves in order to achieve biological transfiguration.
[01:04:26]  Which is cool.
[01:04:27]  Oh, thank you for adding that at the end because I was about to say that.
[01:04:29]  Yeah, it's cool.
[01:04:29]  Yeah, no, it's good.
[01:04:30]  Yeah, it's done.
[01:04:32]  Yeah.
[01:04:32]  I mean, the...
[01:04:33]  You're welcome.
[01:04:33]  Yeah.
[01:04:35]  When you hear that someone has written down, we are on the fifth of seven races, you know, that's headed towards eugenics.
[01:04:43]  There's just simply no doubt about it.
[01:04:45]  Yep.
[01:04:45]  And phrenology and, you know, God knows what else.
[01:04:48]  Yep.
[01:04:49]  Now, well, nightmare.
[01:04:51]  Okay.
[01:04:51]  Today, of course, Blavatsky's rants about the progression of races, the conflict between Aryan and Semitic peoples and Vrill are primarily the purview of the weirdest chunks of the right wing.
[01:05:01]  Fascism has, by and large, moved beyond this stuff, right?
[01:05:04]  There are some weird Vril Nazis out there.
[01:05:06]  One of them has a, I think it's on YouTube.
[01:05:08]  I don't know.
[01:05:08]  He has, he dresses like a robot, and that's weird.
[01:05:13]  But her influence is still deeply felt in the New Age and occult communities.
[01:05:16]  And as a result, aspects of her theology are still making it into new fascist movements today.
[01:05:21]  The Akashic Records are, supposedly, an etheric library that contains records of everything that ever has and ever will happen, right?
[01:05:28]  That's the affinity library.
[01:05:30]  Ever heard of it?
[01:05:31]  It's space Wikipedia that Koot Humi uses to do plagiarism.
[01:05:35]  Now, Blavatsky gets the name, the Akashic Records, because she doesn't speak Sanskrit well.
[01:05:42]  And in Sanskrit, the word Akasha means space facilitating sound, kind of, right?
[01:05:47]  There's not a direct translation, but that's basically what it means.
[01:05:50]  Blavatsky doesn't speak good Sanskrit and mistakenly believed it meant life principle.
[01:05:55]  So she described the Akashic record as, quote, indestructible tablets of astral life or of astral light, a cosmic like wax stamp, basically.
[01:06:03]  Yeah.
[01:06:04]  Buff.
[01:06:05]  Yeah.
[01:06:05]  Infinity library.
[01:06:07]  It's, it's, okay, first of all, my name is wiped out so hard.
[01:06:10]  Excellent.
[01:06:11]  There was a medium I spoke with in Casadega who brought up the Akashic records like as a term.
[01:06:19]  And I was like, what does that mean?
[01:06:20]  I've never heard of that.
[01:06:22]  And they could not tell me.
[01:06:24]  So it's interesting.
[01:06:25]  It's like still a term that floats around, but it's more used to describe like theory and philosophy.
[01:06:33]  They're like, well, yeah, all theory.
[01:06:35]  It's just like a theory or a philosophy.
[01:06:37]  It ties in with diffusionism, right?
[01:06:39]  Because for one thing, what you say with the Akashic Records is there's a single source of truth, right?
[01:06:43]  But the other thing it does, if you're a con person or just like you don't like being questioned too much on your beliefs, you can say that like, well, I know this is true because I channeled this from the Akashic Records and it's like written in some space encyclopedia or whatever.
[01:06:58]  Right.
[01:06:58]  Right.
[01:06:59]  Which is like, it's, yeah, definitely a concept that has been increasingly vaguified.
[01:07:05]  That's why she invents it, because it makes it easier to con people.
[01:07:08]  But over the, it's been more than a century now, the idea has mutated consistently.
[01:07:13]  This segment from an article by Matthew Rinski of Conspirituality does a good job of summarizing where we are now.
[01:07:20]  The amount of information now stored in computer memory and crossing the internet highway daily is literally unfathomable, writes Kevin Tadeshi in Edgar Case on the Akashic Records.
[01:07:29]  And yet, this vast complex of computer systems and collective databases cannot begin to come close to the power, the memory, or the omniscient recording capacity of the Akashic Records.
[01:07:37]  Hindu nationalist spiritual influencer Saguru agrees, equating the records to the internet.
[01:07:43]  It's all there, he told a gathering in 2010.
[01:07:45]  Whatever you want, you can access it.
[01:07:47]  It is all there right now.
[01:07:49]  Goop's resident Akashic reader is Ashley Wood, who dubs the intuitive process a Google search for the soul and teaches a line activation meditation that promises to illuminate the fiber optic connection between the body and the pleiades, where she says the Akashic records are stored.
[01:08:04]  From there, the believer can learn to access the records through a simple banal incantation called the pathway prayer.
[01:08:10]  No special training required.
[01:08:12]  In anti-vax COVID denialism circles, the Akashic Records are now being consulted for advice on how to dispel mental programming and negative agendas promoting the gene therapy of the COVID vaccine.
[01:08:23]  This life coach and medical hypnotherapist suggests in the following sermon that connecting with the profound truths of the Akashic Records can provide a soothing long-view perspective on the medical apartheid of public health COVID protections.
[01:08:35]  She says the records had put her in touch with angels, Jesus and Mother Mary, and she can teach you how to connect this way as well.
[01:08:42]  Well, isn't that so?
[01:08:44]  I mean, based on that, like the Akashic Records truly is whatever you need it to mean to reinforce your ideology.
[01:08:52]  So it can be something as simple as like, I'm a girl boss that wants you to pay me $300 to spew some random shit at you to this is why we're anti-vax and Jesus agrees.
[01:09:02]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:09:03]  And it's like, it's kind of like for as much of a selfish person as she was, the solid that Blavatsky does for the rest of the occult movement is like, oh, here's this thing everyone can use forever to justify whatever bullshit you're trying to cash in on.
[01:09:16]  Right.
[01:09:17]  I mean, because you can be coming from, I mean, it sounds like you can be coming from literally any vantage point politically and leverage this to your advantage.

=== Channeling Spirits For Months (05:38) ===

[01:09:28]  Because, well, then that's like what happens all the time.
[01:09:31]  It's like, oh, I've, I'm channeling this spirit.
[01:09:34]  Like the way that my favorite way that this was like leveraged at like the height of like 1800 spiritualism would be like the Fox sisters would channel like dead senators who had voted to uphold slavery and would channel them and say, I changed my mind.
[01:09:55]  I was wrong.
[01:09:55]  I shouldn't have said that.
[01:09:57]  And that's nice.
[01:09:58]  It can be like this theology can be used in like all these different ways, but some of them are like so that's disturbing.
[01:10:06]  But also it's not surprising.
[01:10:07]  It's too vague a concept to not be used for evil.
[01:10:10]  Yep.
[01:10:10]  And also, I, you know.
[01:10:12]  Well, Robert, I'm, you know, I feel like this is how every, well, I'm upset.
[01:10:17]  Good.
[01:10:18]  I'm glad you're upset.
[01:10:18]  That's all.
[01:10:19]  That's all I ever want is to make you upset.
[01:10:21]  That's why we do stuff.
[01:10:23]  Yeah, we want you upset and to, you know, plug your pluggables right here.
[01:10:27]  Upset and plugging.
[01:10:28]  That's the way to live.
[01:10:30]  Well, you can listen to my new limited series, Ghost Church.
[01:10:34]  It's on CoolZone Media.
[01:10:35]  Ever heard of it?
[01:10:36]  I have.
[01:10:38]  It's the history of American Spiritualism.
[01:10:41]  Yeah, I thought you guys, I mean, I think you guys would like some of the content they're putting out.
[01:10:44]  You know, good shit.
[01:10:45]  Exciting.
[01:10:47]  Advertisers are kind of all over the place.
[01:10:49]  But other than that, I think it's like pretty fucking cool.
[01:10:52]  And once again, issues with that adi-okay on Twitter.
[01:10:55]  Yeah.
[01:10:56]  Hit Sophie Lichterman up at whatever Sophie Lichterman's Twitter is.
[01:11:00]  I don't remember how you write your hand.
[01:11:03]  Trust me, they are.
[01:11:05]  Yeah, I know.
[01:11:06]  Don't worry about it.
[01:11:09]  Listen to Ghost Church.
[01:11:10]  Follow me on Instagram and Twitter if you're so inclined, but I'm really just kind of talking about minions over there right now because I need to find my inner peace.
[01:11:19]  You know who's got a whole fucking room in the Akashic Records, the minions.
[01:11:23]  And you know what?
[01:11:24]  I'm going to announce this now, Jamie.
[01:11:26]  We've been planning to wait a little bit.
[01:11:28]  If you want to win an original song sung by me and Jamie Loftus about the subject of your choosing, get a full face tattoo of a menu, a minion on your own face.
[01:11:38]  That's all it takes.
[01:11:40]  If you do that, we'll write you a song.
[01:11:42]  Absolutely.
[01:11:42]  And look, I'm not going to be picky about the minion that you get full tattooed on your face.
[01:11:46]  No, any minion.
[01:11:47]  Any minion.
[01:11:48]  The one-eyed minion, that complicates things.
[01:11:50]  What with the general vibe of the face?
[01:11:53]  I would recommend going with Kevin.
[01:11:54]  I feel like I have the face shape for Kevin, but that's just me.
[01:11:57]  If you need guidance on like what minion full-face tattoo is best for your face shape, I'm happy to consult.
[01:12:03]  Yeah, Jamie will consider it.
[01:12:06]  I will tell you right now that the song we write is just going to be American Pie, but we'll change the lyrics.
[01:12:12]  But look, it's not going to age well.
[01:12:16]  No, it will not age well.
[01:12:18]  Really, it will get us canceled in like three months.
[01:12:22]  Yeah.
[01:12:22]  Yeah, because you won't quite know what we're talking about, but then three months, you're going to be like, what the fuck?
[01:12:27]  Oh, no, absolutely not.
[01:12:30]  Yeah.
[01:12:30]  Yeah.
[01:12:31]  And so forth.
[01:12:32]  And on that note, bye.
[01:12:35]  Go with Kutumi.
[01:12:40]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:12:48]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:12:50]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:12:52]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:12:54]  We always say that.
[01:12:56]  Trust your girlfriends.
[01:12:59]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:13:00]  Trust me, babe.
[01:13:01]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:13:11]  What's up, everyone?
[01:13:12]  I'm Ago Modern.
[01:13:13]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:13:17]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:13:20]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:13:21]  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.
[01:13:28]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:13:31]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[01:13:38]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:13:40]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:13:41]  There's a lot of life.
[01:13:43]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:13:50]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:13:57]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:14:01]  I doctored the test once.
[01:14:02]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:14:07]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:14:09]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
[01:14:12]  My mind was blown.
[01:14:13]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:14:15]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:14:16]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:14:18]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:14:22]  Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:14:30]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[01:14:33]  How did this ever happen in City Hall?
[01:14:34]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:14:36]  A shocking public murder.
[01:14:38]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:14:44]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:14:46]  Those are shots.
[01:14:48]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:14:50]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[01:14:53]  That may have been about sex.
[01:14:54]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:15:03]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:15:06]  Guaranteed human.