Bonus Sample: The OG New Age Grifter: Madame Blavatsky
Born in 1831, Helena “Madame” Blavatsky pioneered the New Age grift. The Russian aristocrat plagiarized her books while claiming to be channeling the “Masters of Ancient Wisdom” to tell a dodgy heroic back-story. She founded the Theosophical Society in New York, claimed to have learned a secret Tibetan language, and laid the foundation for alien channelers and Woo-Anon. She also inspired the Nazis.
In this debut episode from a series on the pseudoscience New Age roots of today’s conspirituality phenomenon, Julian pins Blavatsky on the cork-board map.
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There was once an ancient and sacred time when we lived in harmony with the earth, in touch with intuitive knowing, open to spiritual guidance.
We're not from here, you see.
We were descended from another world, and then we lived on the islands of Atlantis and Lemuria before they were destroyed.
Our true origins lie in the immaterial domain, and our destiny is to reawaken To our innate but slumbering paranormal abilities and divine true nature.
There is an ancient and secret group of masters who've developed great wisdom and supernatural powers.
Some of them are in human form, but others have ascended and they speak to us through channelers.
We stand at a turning point in human evolution and must overcome the forces of animalistic darkness in order for light to prevail.
Now this is all, no doubt, familiar, but I have a wild tale to tell you about the origins of these kinds of ideas, and a shocking connection that reveals how even these romantic and fanciful, maybe kind of harmless-seeming spiritual notions can drive some of the darkest impulses in human history.
We're going to talk today about the OG New Age grifter, Madame Blavatsky.
As well as, toward the end, Heinrich Himmler.
He's the man who ran the terrifying SS and engineered the Nazi death camps.
And all of this was inspired and justified to some extent by his occult beliefs that intersected
with something called theosophy.
So this harmless sounding fantasy style of metaphysical beliefs
has been circulating in the west for quite some time.
It became widespread during the 80s and 90s as New Age spirituality, and this is during a time where natural living and holistic wellness and Yoga and meditation collided with a kind of science fiction mythology around UFOs and alien beings and so-called channelers who claim to be delivering their messages to humanity.
This new-ish cosmology was expressed in books like Bringers of the Dawn by Barbara Marsaniac and that kicked off the whole trend of Pleiadians and messages from the Pleiades and it was borrowed by people
like David Icke and then Alex Jones and morphed into the QAnon fantasies about evil reptilian
aliens amongst us.
And it gave birth to a whole slew of enlightened alien channeled teachers like Jay-Z Knight
who says she has a 35,000 year old Lemurian king named Ramtha speaking through her and
this has made her a millionaire.
It's the lingua franca of things like the Conscious Life Expo and the material Gaia
TV presents in a dizzying blend of alien disclosure and interdimensional spirit channeling and
of course yoga and then paranoid conspiracy documentaries.
And we all know what happened during 2020 as this caught fire.
Just days before the January 6th insurrection, supposed Galactic Federation channeler Lori Ladd told her 200,000 followers on Instagram it was time for lightworkers to charge forward in their armor.
But there are two things we haven't looked at in depth yet on this podcast.
First, the person most responsible for popularizing the core ideas of New Age culture that underlie all of this.
Her name is Helena Blavatsky, and she was born in 1831 to an aristocratic family in the town of Yekaterinoslav in Ukraine, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire.
And second, Remember that five sentence description of new age sounding ideas that I started with?
You know, living in intuitive harmony with the earth, having a divine destiny to awaken to a new plane of paranormal consciousness, having originated in an ancient magical time on Lemuria or Atlantis.
This is all usually associated with light and love neo-hippie types, and more recently the yoga and wellness folks, some of whom got red-pilled into the far-right pipeline since 2020.
Well, Hold on to your crystals, because those ideas actually also characterize the spiritual worldview held by some prominent Nazis obsessed with the occult and indeed with a remixed version of Helena Blavatsky's ideas.
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