QAnon’s “Great Awakening,” influencers claiming to channel spirits or aliens, prophecies of a glorious Christian apocalypse—all aspects of the modern phenomenon that we call “conspirituality.” A sign of our crazy times?!
Not quite. The roots of this passionate delusion can be traced to an eventful time in American history: the mid-1800’s. In this episode of his pseudoscience series, Julian covers the relationship between famous Spiritualists who talked to the dead on stage, the emerging science of parapsychology, early formulations of New Age beliefs, and the passionate Christian revivalism centered in New York State’s “burned-over district.”
Show Notes
Doomsday Prophecy and Spiritual Porn (earlier episode on 19th century Great Awakening)
Hearing Voices, Seeing Colors, & Fighting Phantoms (earlier episode on temporal lobe epilepsy)
New Yorker: Why Did So Many Victorians Try To Talk To The Dead
PBS: William Miller and The Second Great Awakening
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
New Age grifters who channel interdimensional entities.
And true believers convinced that Jesus is coming back any day now.
Here's another question.
How does the strange hybrid that is conspirituality arise, in which conspiracy theories and spiritual beliefs merge and amplify one another?
And how does conspirituality persist?
Well, one shared element in everything I just mentioned, especially over the last 200 years, is some version of the thing called pseudoscience.
In today's episode, we'll talk about the 1800s and something that is at the root of conspirituality called Spiritualism, with a capital S. And Spiritualism is largely characterized by the public performance of mediums, this is in the 1800s, who found fame by claiming to be in touch with the spirit world.
We'll talk about how this is related to the field of parapsychology, which started trying in that time period to find scientific, or let's say sciency, evidence for paranormal phenomena.
I'm Julian Walker and this is Speak Through Me, part of my series on the pseudoscience connective tissue of the phenomenon that we call conspirituality.
The emergence of the field of parapsychology out of spiritualism comes about at a very eventful time.
Roughly concurrently, we see both what I think of as the primary ancestor of the New Age belief system and the early strains of apocalyptic evangelical Christianity that have become so politically powerful in the U.S.
over the last 40 years or so.
That progenitor of the New Age I just referred to is something called Theosophy, and it is largely the brainchild of someone named Helena Blavatsky.
Now as for the ancestry of our burgeoning Christian nationalism and the apocalyptic tone of the QAnon fever dream that coded so seamlessly for today's American evangelicals, Ellen G. White is to me the most interesting historical figure to look at.
Ellen G. White is the prophet and the co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, one offshoot of which, by the way, gave us David Koresh of Waco, Texas, infamy.
But bear with me, because to get to these important figures, we're going to have to take a journey together through time.
We'll touch on everything I just mentioned, but to see why it is relevant, we'll actually start in the more recent past, like 2020.
Hi.
Well, it's a big portal today.
It's 4-4-4.
So April 4th, those two fours, and then 2020.
April 4th, those two fours, and then 2020. And in numerology, 22 plus 2 is 4, so it's 444, which is a big portal.
So tonight, as you probably know, there's a meditation at 1045 Eastern, wherever you are around the world.
And if we can get over a million people meditating at the same time, then we know from the Global Coherence Project That this can change the entire planet in the best possible way.
In the earliest days of the pandemic, Dr. Christiane Northrup started a daily Great Awakening video series on Facebook.
She did straight-to-camera storytelling about her daily life in the bucolic Northeast, dispensed advice about essential oils and natural remedies, and occasionally treated her audience to quite lovely impromptu performances on the harp.
But there was more.
You see, a Great Awakening was happening and it was an opportunity for all of us to tune in spiritually.
The pandemic and the election year were really about a coming cosmic event and humanity was being tested.
Who would heed the call to become a warrior of light and embrace the difficult process of spiritual ascension?
You've been listening to a Conspirituality bonus episode sample.
To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com slash conspirituality, where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
