Robert Frederick, host of The Hidden Life Is Best podcast, chats to James about the evil genius of Francis Bacon. Frederick makes the compelling case that much of what is wrong with the world today - including scientism and the power of freemasonry - can be traced back to this brilliant Jacobean scholar, polymath and occultist. He also endeavours to persuade James that Bacon, not Edward De Vere, was the man behind ‘William Shakespeare’. A highlight of this freewheeling, illuminating, erudite episode is Frederick’s deconstruction of Romeo and Juliet, an occult sacrifice ritual masquerading as a love story.https://thehiddenlifeisbest.com
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↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.
In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, JD tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/↓ ↓ ↓
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The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk
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There is no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book.
Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011 actually.
The first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when...
The people behind the climate change scan got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scan.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scan...
Who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands up.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring round all those people who are still persuaded that it's a disaster,
we must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Gaia.
No, we don't.
It's a scam.
To the Dellingpod.
With me, James Dellingpod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
But shall we first have a word from one of our sponsors?
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I think you'd be mad not to.
Welcome back to the Delling Pod.
Robert Frederick, man of mystery, aka, appropriately, the hidden life is best.
It would be kind of off-brand, wouldn't it, if you ever showed your face?
You have a point there.
Are you as good-looking as me?
I wouldn't want to start a stampede, James.
I'm kind that way.
I don't know what the weather is like where you are.
Are you somewhere like New York or somewhere?
Yeah, I'm in New York.
We are having some really unseasonally wonderful weather.
Wow.
Such as we've not had spookily enough since the lockdown.
And I think they can control the weather and have been able to for many years.
And it's kind of weird because I'm sitting here in my shirt and t-shirt.
And actually it's too hot.
But if I take off my shirt, it means I'll just be wearing a t-shirt.
And I don't think men...
Men above a certain age, and that kind of means you, Douglas Murray, among other people, men above a certain age should not wear just a t-shirt, no matter how wonderful, how buff they are.
It's just wrong.
Yeah.
Are you with me on that one?
Yeah, I can understand your point of view there, certainly.
How old are you?
I am in my 60s.
Oh, okay.
Well, you definitely, I hadn't a clue how old you were.
You definitely shouldn't be wearing a...
I mean, no disrespect to sexagenarians.
I'm going to be one soon.
But one shouldn't, should one?
T-shirts are just kind of unbecoming.
Well, shorts and flip-flops and all that.
Only for the beach.
Can you remember how long it has been since we last spoke?
I think it's been about a year and a half.
And so much has changed.
Yeah, it was a great conversation.
You've done a lot more.
I mean, people have been clamouring.
People have been begging me to have you back.
Oh, fantastic.
It wasn't reluctance.
It was just pure inertia that stopped me getting you back earlier.
One of the things that's happened since we last spoke is that my very, very good friend Alexander Waugh has died, which is so sad because, of course, one of my ambitions was to get you together.
On stage, duking it out, as you Americans say, over who really wrote the works attributed to the man from Stratford.
Wow, that would have been something.
And now it's never going to happen.
He was really something.
Did you communicate much while he was alive?
No.
I had just really gotten into gear and up to speed.
And I was kind of in awe.
He would say things where he knows so much more about the Elizabethan stage than I do and said some things that were very revealing.
I heard him say once that religion was not allowed to be talked about in the plays on stage, which really makes a lot of sense.
And other things like that.
I think I understand people's obsession with De Vere.
He's just way more sexy than Bacon.
I don't know about that.
I'm not sure that's an argument.
I think Bacon is incredibly sexy, and you have done much to make him so.
Not for the ladies.
I mean, Devere, he's a murderer.
He was an outlaw.
He was wild.
He was a spendthrift.
He was a clothes horse.
He ran through I don't know how many millions and millions of pounds in today's money.
He just...
More of that, like, rebel poet madman that we want our artist to be than this dry lawyer.
I feel like already I'm going to be Alexander's representative on Earth here, and I'm not worthy of the task because I lack his...
I will have you know, excuse me for interrupting, I will have you know that he...
Near the end, and I'm very sorry for your loss, he seems like a dear man.
And he was interviewed at length in Elizabeth...
What's her name?
Winkler?
Oh, who wrote that book.
Yeah, at length.
And he seems like a dear man.
He had accepted bacon.
Near the end, and he had accepted the group theory of authorship, which I think he already endorsed.
That was his position anyway.
His position was always that it was a scriptorium headed by the Earl of Oxford.
But he accepted Bacon near the end.
Were you aware of that?
I'd have to find that in one of his interviews.
Accepted what?
You mean that he changed his mind and thought that it was Bacon, not Devere, who wrote?
No, he accepted Bacon as involved.
Oh yeah, but I don't think that's such a dramatic move.
I mean, I think he was very accommodating, is that the word I'm looking for?
That he was open-minded.
I think his position, and I don't want to misrepresent him, was that the records show, that there is a paper trail that shows this, that Elizabeth I,
there came a point where she decided to recruit the Earl of Oxford, who was on his uppers, but it was also possibly the preeminent poet of the era, to head a scriptorium, which was a sort of propaganda outfit for the Elizabethan court.
And he got some of the best playwrights of his day to write the works of Shakespeare.
And he was the...
He was the kind of the main man behind it.
That more or less is his line.
And he says that he's got the receipts to prove that she did set up this thing.
And De Vere, who was short of cash, blah, blah, blah.
But what I don't want this to be is an Oxfordian versus Baconian debate, because I'm not up to...
Representing, putting in a good show for Alexander.
And I'm very interested in what you have to say, although just one point before I move on.
I don't think that the reasons that people are persuaded by the Oxfordian case is that somehow De Vere, that had anything to do with De Vere's personality, that he was so wild and sexy that this has to be the guy.
I think it's more down to things like...
Numerology, gematria, the codes on the first folio, the autobiographical details, stuff like that.
I don't think it's just like, he had to have written Shakespeare because he's so groovy.
I can see that too.
Well, let me start back where you started.
I'm impressed that Alexander went that far because that's where I'm at too.
This project went straight to the top.
Elizabeth definitely knew.
Haven't you said before, and I don't doubt this is possible, that Bacon was the illegitimate son?
Yes, most Baconians think that.
There's an overwhelming amount of evidence for it.
But Oxfordians sometimes try to say De Vere was her son, too.
Really?
I haven't heard that one before, I must say.
I don't think Alexander said that.
No, let's not go down that.
That's kind of wrong, Ali.
I'm persuaded.
Tell us briefly before we go on.
Because he was an extraordinary character, Francis Bacon.
I'm in awe, more and more.
My theory makes him even more of a genius.
It's crazy how smart he was.
If he had a smart-off...
Between him and John Dee?
Oh, not even close.
Oh, right.
He was cleverer.
Oh, by far.
Although, Dee had the math.
Bacon didn't have the mathematics.
And he whiffed on that, as we say in America, a baseball analogy.
He missed the ball on math, and that's one of the criticisms for him as father of modern science, which is so math-based.
But Dee had the math.
Dee was...
Dee was a genius, I guess, in terms of he put math together and theater and the occult and cartography, and he was very big in early British Navy and British shipping.
So they were in two different realms, and he hugely influenced Bacon.
And I think their interactions have been kept on the down-low.
There's only one recorded interaction of Dee and Bacon, and that was Bacon.
In Dee's library.
But Bacon is known as the book guy who read every book in England by the time he was 18. And Dee had all the books.
So they would have had to have known each other.
And I've discovered this.
Dee was employed by the Earl of Leicester, who was Elizabeth's secret paramour.
Not so secret anymore.
It wasn't even so secret back then.
That's a fascinating story.
And of course...
They were very close in the court.
So Dee and Bacon were close.
And I think purposely they had realized they're going to move the occult offstage.
The occult had to go.
Dee was literally a demonologist.
Okay.
Before we get sidetracked too fast, I just want to go back to...
Sure.
Explain to me the case for...
Bacon, Francis Bacon, being the illegitimate son of Elizabeth I, and the Earl of Leicester?
The Earl of Leicester.
Is that Cook?
Robert Dudley.
Dudley, that's it.
Dudley, yeah, sorry.
Dudley was thrown in the tower because he was part of a rebellion with his father, Northampton.
You told me how to pronounce it.
What's that?
The Duke of Northampton?
Northampton, yeah, that's right.
So he was in the Tower, and he had known Elizabeth since she was a little girl, actually.
This is all Normie history.
Elizabeth and Dudley knew each other when they were children.
They were the same age.
They had played together.
Elizabeth, of course, was in a separate situation.
At any rate, they both got thrown in the Tower of London at the same time.
Elizabeth because she was suspected of fomenting a rebellion against Mary Tudor, Bloody Mary, and Dudley because he had actually been involved in a rebellion that his father lost his head over.
So they were both in the tower, and they were people who were sympathetic to their cause, as there always are with these high-level rebellions.
And it is thought, and there's some...
Evidence for this, I suppose, that they had an affair in the Tower.
Both of them, probably at the end of their life, easily could have lost their heads at that time, as Lady Jane Grey had just lost her head two or three years earlier.
Dudley's father had just lost his head.
So, you know, the idea is that they had an affair, that they liked each other anyway.
How old were they at this time?
25. Elizabeth took the throne at 25. So they're 23, 24. Here's the kicker, though.
That's just the beginning.
That's the setup.
The minute Elizabeth became queen, she installed Dudley as her master of the horse.
And the master of the horse apartment is right next door to the queen's apartment in Whitehall.
And they carried on openly.
Affectionately for years.
And it was well known that Dudley wanted her to marry him.
And there's letters from Spanish diplomats.
A lot of this has been uncovered in diplomatic in Spain.
They had a diplomat at the court, you know, to keep communications open.
And he wrote that they're carrying on.
It looks like she might marry Dudley.
And then there were rumors that she was pregnant.
And there were rumors that she had a child.
And this is also all normie history, that you have to kind of dig for it, but it's not.
There's actually documents for this.
And there were rumors that the queen was pregnant and gave birth.
And Francis Bacon's mother, quote-unquote, you know, air quotes, mother, Anne Bacon, was the queen's lady-in-waiting.
She had been lady-in-waiting for Mary and somehow kept...
In the position, she was a Protestant, but Bloody Mary kept her around, and she made the transfer to Elizabeth, and was still there, and lived right next door, in York House, where Francis Bacon was born.
Then you go from there, they think they just handed the baby off to Anne Bacon, and Nicholas Bacon, who was the...
Keeper of the Seal, who was a brilliant man.
Anne Bacon was the most educated woman in England, probably, because her father was the royal educator.
He had been in charge of Edward VI's education.
So Francis Bacon's, let's say, foster mother and father were both extremely educated.
His mother spoke Latin and Greek.
But the other part is that then Dudley...
Dudley and Elizabeth carried on for years, and it was rumored they were going to get married.
And more scuttlebutt is Dudley was already married, and his wife in England mysteriously fell down the stairs and died.
There's a beautiful painting of that.
Is there more of her being kicked down the stairs?
Yeah, she's dead at the bottom of the stairs.
It's incredible.
And they think she was murdered by Lester.
And Lester was...
A real bad boy his whole life and all kinds of rumors about Lester.
But he employed John Dee as a tutor and extremely close to Elizabeth her whole life and she refused to marry him.
And he finally moved on and became the father of the Earl of Essex.
And most Baconians also think the Earl of Essex was Bacon's brother by Dudley and Elizabeth.
I don't go there because my theory is already out there, and you don't need that.
But, of course, that's the most famous love affair maybe in English history is Essex and Elizabeth.
They made a movie about it, a Hollywood movie.
And there's more circumstantial evidence that gets into the weeds with how Bacon's name was recorded, how Bacon never got an inheritance from his father, Nicholas.
Nicholas had six other kids who all got money, the boys, all got money from him.
And Francis Bacon did not get money because Nicholas expected the Queen to take care of him, which she did.
So there is a lot of evidence that he's the secret son of Elizabeth.
There's a lot more.
I could read it off.
I did write it down at one point.
There's tons more little details.
And then it also helps explain his extraordinary patriotism, his extraordinary loyalty.
To Elizabeth and his outsized ambition to take the Tudor brand or the Tudor mindset global and make Empire.
Bacon was obsessed with the idea of Empire.
So that's quite a case you've made.
I mean, given how hard they would have striven.
To keep all this stuff secret.
There's a lot of stuff there that, I mean, I'm convinced.
Agreed.
Yeah, agreed.
There's a lot more too.
I suppose the reason I'm asking you this, apart from my like a bit of court gossip, is I'm trying to establish what is, the kind of, the influences and the bloodline,
the ancestry that helped make bacon.
The preeminent, well, genius, not just of that age, but probably almost of any age.
I think so, yeah.
Okay, so his foster mum and dad were kind of the cleverest people in the court, less educated.
Yes.
So that would have been, he'd been surrounded by clever people.
And then Elizabeth herself was Friendly bright, wasn't she?
Extraordinary.
Yeah.
She spoke Latin and Greek and she wrote...
Beautiful Latin.
She was brilliant in Latin.
She read everything.
She was interested in everything.
She's a very curious mind.
She was brilliant.
Also, brought up under the circumstances she was brought up under.
But all the courtiers were very highly educated.
If you go back and look at the education of a courtier, it's...
It's extraordinary.
Especially the nobles.
Extraordinary.
They loved books.
And they had all the books.
Like all those, you know, Plutarch and Cicero and Horus and Herodotus.
All these ancient books, they had them.
There have been very few new discoveries.
And they read them.
They had more time on their hands today because they weren't being distracted by Twitter and TikTok and stuff.
They had so much time and they loved learning and they encouraged learning and they wrote poems about learning in deep, deep subjects in deep, deep ways.
I'm constantly amazed at the depth of their learning and how it was encouraged.
And Elizabeth...
He hired Roger Asham, who was then the premier educator.
So there were two of the premier educators in the country, an incredibly educated class of people.
And he wrote a book on educating a young courtier that Elizabeth asked him to write.
And this is Normie history, too.
And it's thought that she used that book to educate Francis through Anne Bacon, and that he was speaking Latin and Greek by the age of seven.
One more question.
How bright was Robert Dudley?
Probably extremely bright.
I mean, he functioned as a courtier and had a long career.
He was involved in a lot of intrigue.
And I think just to survive at that level, it's so cutthroat.
I mean, he was at the highest level.
He was the Queen's paramour.
And had a lot of duties besides Master the Horse.
And kind of stayed undercover all this time.
He wound up marrying Latisse Nollies, whose husband mysteriously was killed and poisoned in Ireland.
And carried on with her.
And was subject of a lot of rumors.
There's this thing that came out called Lester's Commonwealth that accused him of all kinds of dark and dirty deeds that I don't know.
I don't know much about that.
I've never read it.
And he died fairly young.
He got sick and died.
I think he went overseas on some kind of military campaign.
He was probably quite brilliant.
Okay.
I don't know.
So we've got a cast of characters who are super, super bright.
I mean, way brighter than probably anyone living in our own time, because no one is that way educated anymore.
but also super Machiavellian
Machiavellian, at the very least.
And probably worse than that.
I mean, kind of what we might, let's call it by its proper name, evil.
Yeah.
Yeah, the Tudor line is really dark and ugly.
And Henry VII took the crown by force and by stealth and then smeared Richard III.
So to this day, people think Richard III was...
An early incarnation of Hitler because of a Shakespeare play.
Yeah, yeah.
Because the Shakespeare plays were propaganda.
And that just started the ball rolling, shall we say.
And then Henry VIII cut off two of his wives' heads, hung monks, you know, made that split with the church, which I'm not saying he shouldn't have done that because the Catholic Church was so corrupt, but he hung monks.
He killed his best friend, Sir Thomas More, who's now a Catholic saint.
Because Sir Thomas More just said, I'm not going to call you the head of the Church of England.
He became head of the Church of England.
As you know, I'm not telling you anything.
I mean, what an incredible thing to do.
And there's that painting of him.
Have you seen that painting of him where he's standing wide-legged?
Yes.
He's holding some kind of document, doesn't he?
He's got something coming out of his groin area I've never heard explained.
It's just like, he's the bull.
He's the ram.
Or that huge codpiece thing he's got.
What is that?
Well, they all had codpieces, didn't they?
It should have been covered by his coat he was wearing.
I don't know the names of the clothes.
Anyway, he was like, wow, what?
Just briefly.
Brilliant, too, as well, though.
He was quite brilliant.
He was a composer.
He wrote a tract on religion and theology.
It was actually respected, not just because he was the king.
He was quite brilliant.
I don't know about Henry VII, but Henry VII...
I was just going to point out that because Henry VII was...
Because Henry VIII was so colourful, we know how many wives he divorced and beheaded and died.
We overlook Henry VII, who was apparently like a kind of...
He was a weaponised accountant.
He was absolutely, he screwed everyone over.
He was just, I mean, England under Henry VII must have been a horrible, horrible place to live, only eclipsed by the awfulness of life under Henry VIII, who was, I suppose, more capricious, whereas Henry VII was grinding and relentless and would just screw you out of your every last penny.
You're right.
This is a dodgy line.
Brilliant, though.
Absolutely brilliant.
And then add that ambition, that outsized ambition to an outsized education.
And literally Machiavelli, whose book was popular, and he saw the path to making Empire.
And it involved a national poet.
They needed a national poet.
And I think it was probably Bacon that told that to Elizabeth, because he was so well-read.
And they wanted to recreate the Greek and the Roman Empire, especially the Roman Empire.
But he saw that the Greeks had a national poet, the Romans had a national poet.
They had their own mythology.
And I really think that Bacon understood myth and how important myth was to the minds of men.
And even how that related to dreams, which I see because I'm really deep into Midsummer Night's Dream.
Myth and dream and national consciousness were key to creating an empire, to unifying a people.
I'm 100% convinced that Bacon knew this.
And that's what Shakespeare...
It was about creating a national poet and then within that creating myths via the theater because he wrote in his life as Francis Bacon how important the theater was.
He called it as the bow to the fiddle of the minds of men.
This is in his regular writing and how the ancients saw it as increasing virtue in the people and controlled, literally mind-controlled people.
Yes!
He said that, literally, and then he did it as Shakespeare.
Those plays are extraordinary.
And the proof of this is the history plays, our propaganda for the Tudor line.
And the proof of that is Richard III, which is pure propaganda.
Richard III was a decent fellow.
He was by no means evil and Hitler.
So they inverted it, where Henry VII becomes the savior.
And Richard III becomes evil.
And Shakespeare did that.
And you know the movie, The Lost King, about Philippa Langley.
It's must-see.
It's a fantastic feature-length commercial film.
Can I guess, is the king played by a black person?
Don't you hate that?
No, because the hero of the film is a woman.
And it's a true story.
Is she played by Sophie Okonedo?
No, but she's played by, I forget her name, who does a great job and she's ill.
She has, I forget what problem she has.
It makes her tired all the time, but she pushes through.
And it's a true story.
She, pretty much on her own, convincing archaeologists to help her.
Located the bones of Richard III, which were under a parking lot.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So in a car park in Leicester.
In a car park in Leicester.
And in the movie, they very expertly portray Shakespeare as a propagandist and Henry VII as a propagandist against Richard III.
And it actually elevates conspiracy theory to a very high level because these were all like nutty conspiracy theorists who turned out to be right.
Yeah.
And Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare, turned out to be a phony.
And that's very subtly a subplot of the movie.
It's brilliant.
It's a great, great movie.
I mean, you know.
Okay.
I'm going to break the habit of recent acquisition anyway, which is not to watch any.
Any movies post about 19...
I understand.
I think the turn of the century was about when it all started going off.
You might not like...
I mean, here in America, we don't know Steve Coogan that well.
Oh, he's alright.
But he's alright, right?
And it's funny, it's warm, it's genuine, and it's a true story, and it's an incredible story.
They've rehabilitated Richard III, and what's really incredible is they show...
How Shakespeare was a propagandist.
And they don't go into that, of course, but it's all there in that movie.
I strongly recommend it.
What do you think about...
I mean, even though he's died long ago, we still think of Olivier as Richard Crookback.
Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious, whatever it is.
In that period where they wore far too much makeup and they really hammed it up.
And in the same way we associate Olivier with the 1945, I think, film version of Henry V, which is a disgusting piece of militaristic propaganda justifying all manner of war atrocities in the name of Harry England and St. George.
It's nauseating when you understand who was really behind the Second World War and who's behind all wars.
Wars are never in the interests of the people.
So the job of propagandists like Shakespeare is to persuade the groundlings that, yeah, groundlings, grunts, it's really great to die for your country and your king because your country's fantastic.
Anyway, I'm sort of going off on a rant.
100%.
100%.
And that's what it did.
I mean, it's incredible.
They got really lovely, decent, religious people, commoners, Brit commoners, to create an empire.
Yeah.
Through those plays and others.
It's not just those plays, of course.
But they went a long way towards doing that.
They're profoundly effective.
Richard II has that speech by John.
I guess he's John of Gaunt.
This sceptered isle.
I think it's probably the best speech in all of Shakespeare.
It's almost why I think that Richard II is almost my favourite play, because it's just about Shakespeare's most lyrical, and it happens to be a history play, but the poetry is beautiful, and John of Gaunt's speech is the best.
Yeah, where's my sword?
I'm ready.
I will defend this sceptered isle.
It's extraordinary.
It is.
You're right.
And it runs throughout a lot of the plays.
So the history plays are pretty obvious.
Yes.
Anyway, go ahead.
Sorry.
No, no, I wasn't really interrupting.
I was just kind of agreeing with you.
I don't know what stage we're going to introduce your fascinating podcast stroke essay on the subject of Romeo and Juliet.
At any time.
Do you know what?
You're probably not aware of this.
Romeo and Juliet is the play that they give to sort of the...
Well, in the days when school children used to study whole Shakespeare plays, which they don't anymore, but they used to until about 20 years ago.
Romeo and Juliet was the one they gave to the thick children to study, and the cleverer kids got Othello, or if they were really unlucky because it's much longer, King Lear.
Or Hamlet.
Sorry, Hamlet.
Hamlet's a...
I mean, I cannot believe what I found in that play.
I'm stunned.
I made a three-hour podcast, and nobody listened to it outside my little following.
Yeah, but your little following is very loyal, Robert, I have to say.
Oh, good.
I'm very glad to hear that.
I'm loyal to them, too.
They were raving about you.
Oh, that's very nice to hear, because you can sort of feel like a lunatic going into these places.
Taking on Shakespeare is not a great career move.
He's revered.
He's another religion.
Well, this is my career.
You don't want to be another of those Shakespeare academics that infest American universities like vermin.
Oh, it's incredible.
I think every single American university has a Shakespeare department.
Of course they do.
And I'm in deep now because I decided on Midsummer Night's Dream...
To give the academics a full shake, like really dig in, like why aren't they seeing these things that I see in the play?
Maybe they have.
I'm going to give them a chance.
It's fascinating to go through the history of criticism of Midsummer Night's Dream.
But Romeo and Juliet, I mean, I'm still just kind of stunned because it becomes so clear once you see it that...
Juliet was raised as a golden statue at the very end of the play.
And there's alchemy running through the play.
Do you think she's like a kind of proto-Princess Diana?
She's kind of destined to be a sacrificial victim.
That's brilliant.
I didn't think of that.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
Because, I mean, those of us down the rabbit hole are fairly convinced that what happened in the tunnels beneath Paris, near the Merovingian Mervinkian tombs was a kind of a sort of form of ritual blood sacrifice.
I think that's probably true, and I suggest that is still going on, yeah, in the essay.
Absolutely.
I didn't put that together, but yeah, wow.
Well, so yes, you're right.
I mean, it makes sense what you're saying, that there is something...
It's not a romance.
Just give us a few examples of why it's not a romance, why it's much creepier than that.
Well, Romeo is in love with Rosaline at the beginning of the play.
And he's so in love with her, he's beside himself.
He's not the same.
Everyone's worried about him.
And the first thing you learn about Romeo is that he stays out all night and comes home when the sun comes up.
That happens throughout the play.
So that's like, okay.
It sounds like a vampire.
And he's also gathering dew, which I just figured out that little symbolism.
Dew was very important to alchemists.
It had a magical property, especially the dew on certain days of the year.
And he loves Roseline so much he's sick, but he instantly falls in love with Juliet at the party.
Which is odd.
And they mention that, of course.
Fryer mentions that.
And Juliet has decided she wants to be chaste.
She's not interested in marriage.
But they meet at the party, which is a great scene.
And that party scene is always done so well.
And it just sort of lulls you into this realm of beauty and music and good food and lovely clothes.
And then they meet.
And there's the beautiful poetry where they finish each other's sonnet.
Romeo starts a sonnet.
And Juliet finishes it.
And she's saying, I want chaste.
I want chastity.
And Romeo just overwhelms her and kisses her.
And she's instantly transformed by a kiss.
Actually, two kisses.
And she's never the same.
And then, of course, there's the famous balcony scene.
So within...
An hour later, they leave the party.
She goes home.
An hour later, they're at the famous balcony scene.
And they're already talking about getting married because they want to have sex.
But the language throughout the play is extraordinarily sexual.
There's sexual slang throughout, and it's always associated with death and violence.
And it's always quite extreme.
And Mercutio...
He's Romeo's best friend.
He has a friend, Benvolio, his cousin.
But Mercutio, so he's Mercury, so he's Hermes.
He's a fertility god.
Every word out of his mouth is hypersexual.
And a kind of depraved sexuality.
Not like, whoa, she's good looking.
And you can trace it through the play.
The play starts with the Capulet gang talking about rape.
Mercutio's constantly talking about sex.
As Romeo climbs over the orchard wall, he literally says, may you be a pauper and pear and she an open arse.
And a pauper and pear is slang for genitals because a pear looks like male genitals.
An open arse?
It's right there in the play.
Anybody has it, look it up.
So he's talking about anal sex?
He's talking about anal sex to a 13-year-old girl.
Juliet is 13. Yes, I know.
I was going to ask you about that.
So Juliet is 13. How clear is that made in the play?
Extremely.
Okay, so she's 13. Romeo's age is indeterminate, but Juliet, she's two weeks shy of her 14th birthday.
And that's very clear, made clear.
I was going to ask you, how normal would this have been considered for a 13-year-old having...
You could say they would get married.
They were married, and that comes out in the play.
Juliet's mother says, I was married even younger than you.
But in those days, they would marry the girl off but keep her at home.
They wouldn't send a 12-year-old, 13-year-old girl off to another house with the man.
They would still protect her.
And Juliet's parents are very protective of her in the beginning of the play.
And even saying, well, if you're not ready to marry Paris, we'll wait till you're ready, dear.
There's all this love and affection for her.
But it was possible that a 14-year-old girl would get married, or even a 13-year-old girl.
You know, by the way, that Henry VII's mother was 14, I think, when she had him in Wales.
Yeah, it's definitely possible.
It's not outside the realm of possibility at all.
A 13-year-old girl to suddenly be lustful.
Yeah.
A 13-year-old girl would want to hold hands, take a walk, get a rose, have sweet nothing, hug, talk about their brothers and sisters and your parents and your life.
But within less than 24 hours, Juliet is raging.
She's like, raging, lustful creature.
Come, Romeo, come.
Come, night.
The night.
Love, love performing night.
Oh, come Romeo.
It's absurd.
It's pure lust.
She's turned into a creature of lust.
Yeah, and it's amazing that this was taught to school children.
And that we don't notice because the way the language is, it's extraordinarily clever use of language.
He hides all this stuff right in front of our face.
It's extraordinary.
And throughout the play is graphic violent sex.
Until the very last scene where she uses prominent sexual slang like, I'll be the sheath for your dagger.
Yeah, that's pretty subtle, isn't it?
Those are her last words.
Is that what she says?
It's her last words.
That is filth.
It's filth throughout the entire play and they give it to kids.
Midsummer Night's Dream is the same.
It's sexual slang and bestiality and...
Whoa.
It's wild.
And as I understand it, the two key characters are these very dodgy characters.
There's the nurse who I think suckled Juliet and acts as her sort of procurus.
Yes.
I mean, she contrives this...
Is there any...
Hint given as to what her motivation might be for conspiring to get her baby made.
Not really, but I didn't have placed in the essay.
It's in the podcast.
There's two early scenes with the nurse.
And she tells a very strange story about Juliet when Juliet is a little girl.
And she's laughing the whole time and giggling, which throws you off.
That she actually has evil intentions for Juliet.
But the story she tells is very, very weird.
I wish I had it in front of me, but it's a story from the past when she still had her husband, the nurse's husband is dead.
It's a very sexual tale, like she's already sexualized young Juliet.
And it's in the imagery of the monologue where Juliet fell down and said, Bump like a rooster's testicle on your forehead.
And you fell down.
And my husband ran up and said, Oh, you're falling on your stomach, but you'll fall on your back when you're older, won't you, Juliet?
You'll be laying on your back.
And there's all this weird...
I don't have the details, but if you listen to her speech, her monologue, without the laughter, and put just a hint...
Of subtle, you know, ominous music, you'd realise you're in a horror movie.
Do you know what it's like?
It's like Friends.
Some of the scenes in Friends, if you take away the laugh track, you realise that what is being sold is really creepy and sinister.
Exactly the same.
He hides it with her laughter.
It's really weird, her speech, and she sets up the whole thing.
She even gets a ladder so Romeo can climb up into her room.
I can't remember what happens to her.
Does she get killed at the end?
You know what's weird?
She doesn't show up at the end.
The whole town is there.
For the prince to absolve Fryer, three bloody corpses in the crypt, the watchmen caught Fryer with a shovel, an axe, and a crowbar.
A shovel, a light, and a crowbar, which is the tools a grave robber would use.
Everyone's there to hear Montague and Capula are there.
Old Man Montague and Old Man Capula are there somehow.
To hear Montague, Old Man Montague say, I'm going to make a pure gold statue out of Juliet.
Nurse is not there, and I don't get that, and nobody ever brings that up.
Where's the nurse?
Do you know what else I'm reminded of, Robert?
Have you ever seen The Omen?
No.
Ah, Damien is the Antichrist, and...
I think Damien has this kind of nanny-stroke housekeeper figure who's working for Satan to help look over Damien the Antichrist.
I'm just reminded of Nurse when I see that character.
And then you've got Friar, who, despite his name, his misleading name, is probably not a man of God, is he?
He's a pretend man of God.
He's, what I call him, a snake in the grass, a poisonous spider in the cupboard.
He's a Satanist in the church.
He's a sun worshiper.
The clue is that the sun is spoken of as God eight or nine times.
The sun is referenced 19 times.
And Bacon said in his other writing, his philosophical writing, that he writes for adepts.
He writes for initiates.
He actually came out and said that.
Those who have wits to pierce the veil.
You're either an initiate to get the true meaning or you have wits to pierce the veil.
And I think these are signals to the Freemasons that he started that there's Masonic meaning in this play, like look underneath the surface and those sun symbolism, because sun symbolism is the primary symbol of Freemasonry.
It's the primary symbol of Freemasonry.
All the occult.
Almost all the occult, the sun is the primary symbol.
Going back to the ancient religions.
And oddly enough, the sun is called God eight times in the play.
By the friar himself, he calls the sun the burning eye.
The sun's burning eye.
And that's what Mithra was called.
So the symbolism is there for the friar to be...
Up to no good.
Plus he's an alchemist, herbalist.
He makes these really strong potions.
And he has an unnatural relationship with Romeo.
Romeo calls him my ghostly father.
And then he marries them.
Why would the holy man marry a 13-year-old girl to a 17-year-old boy behind their parents' back?
Yeah.
He sets the whole thing up, but we're swayed by the love, by the lust, really, that we...
He manipulates our emotions that, of course, they love each other, they should be together.
So the audience is manipulated to not even notice that the friar has done something he should not be doing.
He really doesn't have the authority to do that.
What do you think the purpose of the friar...
That's a good question.
That's a great question.
Bacon, as a Gnostic, really hated romantic love.
And he says that in a number of places.
Not hate.
He was way too careful to speak in those terms.
But he sort of gently mocks and puts down romantic love and says it's crazy.
It's a form of craziness.
I have it in one of these books.
I'm going to delineate all this at some point.
Kind of made fun of the commoners as a higher being.
So part of this is to assert a superiority amongst the in-group and mock the commoners.
Mock romantic love by making it only about lust.
Then sort of elevate this social engineering where he did bring peace to Verona.
So there's multiple layers.
of meaning there for someone like Bacon to kind of assert the superiority even over his audience who can't see what he's really doing.
Did Bacon himself have a love life?
He was homosexual.
I guessed.
And this of course never came out in his biographies until now.
Now it can be semi-celebrated or talked about but There's eyewitnesses to him carrying on with his servants as an older man when he was in his 60s, near the end of his life.
He married a 13-year-old girl when he was 45 after Queen Elizabeth died.
It seems like he really did want to be king, and it seems like he thought he had a pathway to become king.
There's a lot of circumstantial evidence for that.
They passed a law at some point that Elizabeth's natural issue could be heir to the throne.
Did they?
Yeah, there's a law on the books.
Natural issue meaning not out of wedlock.
That's a natural issue, not a...
I forget the term for a...
Bastard.
Yeah, a bastard could become king is basically what they said.
And I think they held it as an idea that Francis could be king.
Other people think Essex.
So there was that whole Essex rebellion, which you no doubt heard about.
Maybe one of the most famous events in English history where the Earl of Essex gathered a small army and was marching through London trying to rally the townspeople to overthrow Queen Elizabeth or to march on the Queen.
And he could not rally support, although he had a hundred Very high-ranking people marching with him.
People like the Earl of Southampton and a whole bunch of high-ranking people.
And it failed.
They made a Hollywood movie out of it with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, which I've never seen.
They couldn't call it Elizabeth in Essex.
Lytton Strakey wrote a book about it that's fantastic.
It's considered one of the great...
Love affairs in history.
Because Essex and her were also having an affair previously out in the open.
Elizabeth and Essex.
And so Essex lost his head and Francis Bacon was Essex's best friend and his advisor.
And he had pulled back.
So this is a major episode in the life of Francis Bacon.
And Elizabeth...
Oh, and they...
And Essex had Richard II put on, not at the Globe, yeah, at the Globe, which is a play about a deposition, a king being deposed.
And Elizabeth always thought she was Richard II, and she always wanted to know who wrote that play.
Anyway, this all gets kind of complicated in the weeds.
Which I could talk on if I had notes.
I was prepared for it.
But it's a fascinating episode.
Essex lost his head.
One of the highest ranking nobles in the land.
Literally top, top tippy top of the power structure.
They chopped off his head.
They killed a few of the other conspirators.
They let Southampton go.
And Southampton is the one who the sonnets are dedicated to.
I was going to say Henry Roethersley.
Yeah, that's him.
He was involved in the Essex rebellion.
But they let him go.
Bacon had pulled back from Essex.
Bacon saw it all coming.
He was a real prophet.
He saw this coming.
He had given Essex advice.
Essex didn't take his advice.
Some people think Essex wanted to be king.
Other people think Essex was trying to convince Elizabeth to make Bacon the king.
Because she was at the very end of her life.
And she had refused to talk about...
Succession.
Succession.
The whole time.
For various reasons.
Because she knew whoever was next in line was going to have her killed.
So by keeping it vague, nobody...
She was brilliant.
And there's all kinds of rumors that she never even asked, told James Wan could be king.
That got played out at the very last minute by some inside wrangling.
Just going back to the sort of the Gnostic, Mithraism, Sun worship, Pagan stuff in Romeo and Juliet.
We're talking about an era where it was illegal not to go to church, wasn't it?
You were fined or worse if you didn't go to church.
Correct.
It looks like the people running the country were all sun worshippers?
Yeah, there was a separate code of conduct.
For the nobility.
And I think that's being made clear in Midsummer Night's Dream.
But these guys at the tippy-top had immunity from these laws that other people had to follow, which is what Gnosticism is about.
It's antinomian.
It's antinormal.
No moral laws adhere to you.
Because you're above this evil world.
The world is evil, so why should you follow any laws?
On the other hand, there's dualism, so you can follow the laws and even celebrate those laws.
It's kind of like everything goes in the good and the bad.
You can appreciate art.
You can love beauty.
You can make great art.
At the same time, finding the world to be...
Just a mirage, just something that's here to trap our souls.
You can participate in everything.
And you can even participate in what the average person would call evil.
And that would include depraved sex acts, murder.
You would even maybe carry them out to be a complete person, to be a whole person.
And this goes back throughout Gnosticism.
And I think...
Secretly, they were doing that.
I never wanted to believe that, that it was happening amongst these exalted, educated people.
But when you see that in Romeo and Juliet, and you see what was going on in Midsummer Night's Dream, you almost have to come to that conclusion.
And they had protection.
They had multiple mansions.
They had a mansion in London.
They had a mansion in the country.
They could have gotten away with...
Literally anything under the cover of night, as long as nobody ratted them out.
And that's a whole interesting psychological perspective to explore.
But right away, after Freemasonry came above ground, there was the Hellfire Club in London, run by a Freemason.
Francis Dashwood, and there was a guy earlier or later, I forget, I don't have their names in front of me, and they...
You know, did depraved things.
They found skeletons where Ben Franklin was in the Hellfire Club and they found skeletons in the basement of little kids.
Yes.
And they could have been doing very, very dark things.
Just going back to the Elizabethan court for a moment, my late friend Alexander, who was...
Maybe the sweetest natured person I've known and the most generous spirited could never quite go all the way to my position, which is, look, these are the rulers of the darkness of this world, that this is how it's always been,
and they are rotten, and they practice these dark acts to their dark gods.
Alexander was always of the view that...
I mean, obviously he championed Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and his view was, no, James, you don't understand that you can...
I don't want to sort of misrepresent him, but essentially he didn't think that Edward de Vere...
Could have been a baddie, that he could have done bad things and that you can be a genius and write propaganda while yet not being corrupted by, well, the dark forces that I think you and I know.
The dark stuff.
I think where I would depart from Alexander's position and align with your position is that these people...
They looked on us useless eaters as kind of inferior.
Well, we're profane, aren't we?
We don't understand the ways of the initiate, and therefore we don't really count.
They literally think they can become gods, even God.
They're in a war against God, and it's a tenet of Gnosticism that you can become God.
It's crazy.
It's completely crazy.
But it's there over and over again.
You can find it over and over again.
And yes, they are liberated from all constraint.
And I think some of these dark acts bond them.
Oh, just like today.
Everything you were saying about the Elizabethan court strikes me that it's exactly how the...
The people in charge today behave, how the so-called elites behave.
They're into philanthropy, aren't they?
They love being patrons of the arts.
They love showing how much they appreciate art and stuff.
But at the same time, they live in these two worlds simultaneously.
They live in both worlds equally.
They don't see a difference between good and evil.
They're equal.
So why reject evil?
It's part of the world.
And that leads in a lot of directions for conversation now, but I think that these acts they engage in bond them to each other and also incriminate them to each other, like they're guilty on the same level in terms of exposing the You know,
the plot or the plan.
It helps keep everyone silent.
And I think it's also, in a way, addictive.
Like a horrible drug.
Like people that do horrible drugs, but they can't stop doing them.
Well, like adrenochrome.
Adrenochrome, if it's real, it could be.
I've seen some pretty convincing evidence for it.
That's literally an addictive substance.
But I think, I'm wondering if the acts themselves don't become addictive.
Like, they're so outrageous.
Make your heart scream and your emotions go wild.
I hate to even, you know, dwell on this stuff, but I'm wondering if that's why it keeps happening, that it's an addictive act.
Well, that and the fact that Satan wants it.
I mean, he does like this stuff, and he does reward you if you do all this stuff.
Yeah, they could be possessed by demons, right?
There's that.
Yeah, when was that Hungarian woman around?
Elizabeth Bathory?
I don't know her.
The one who just murdered and tortured all her servants.
I'm wondering whether...
Hang on.
Elizabeth Bathory.
Yes, Bathory.
Have you not...
I have come across that.
She is that era.
Interesting.
1560 to 1614.
No kidding.
She tortured and killed hundreds of girls.
But I think that the reason I mention it is I think she was kind of a proto-vampire.
Where was this?
Because I think she drank their blood, bathed in their blood to retain her youth.
Where was this?
In Hungary.
It was in Hungary.
But I think what would have been known to the kind of Hungarian aristocracy would not necessarily have been unknown to the maybe.
No, they were all intermarried for centuries.
There's Gilles Duray, who was with Joan of Arc.
He was convicted of murdering children.
This was about a hundred years before.
Is that how you pronounce it?
I've always wondered that, yeah, Gilles de Rye sounds right.
I was reading it as Gilles de Race, but it's not.
It's Gilles de Rye, yeah.
It's Gilles de Rye.
So, we've sort of, we've dealt with the, I mean, we could talk about Shakespeare, Shakespeare in inverted commas for hours, but I want to talk about Freemasonry and Bacon's,
you argue that Bacon invented Freemasonry.
Is that?
Yeah, the modern version of it.
He coalesced these different strands, yeah.
And why did he do that?
Well, it was the third prong of his attack, his creation of empire.
So he had the national poet and the plays and the entertainment and the bow to the fiddle of men's minds with Shakespeare.
He had the secret society.
He also knew that these empires had a secret society.
Rome had Mithra, the religion of Mithra, which was actually created by the elite in Rome.
It came out of Persia and this Mithra, the sun, and sun worship and the ancient religions of Mithraism.
But it was created in Rome specifically for the soldiers and the merchants for the far-flung areas of the empire, but it also existed in Rome.
And it was very secretive.
And it was only for men.
And it was bonding rituals, and there was human sacrifice associated with it.
Not a huge amount, but it has been associated with human sacrifice.
And these men would go into caves.
And hold ceremonies and had very intense multi-layered initiations that were quite strenuous according to what little bit of information they have about Mithraism.
There were seven grades of initiation.
At one point it got linked up with the cult of Sibylle.
It got linked up with the Sacrifice of bulls and drenching yourself in bulls.
And the cult of Sibley was a goddess who demanded castration of her followers.
But that was more peripheral.
The main thing was for soldiers and merchants and men on the edges of empire.
So there was a Mithranium in London.
And in fact, it's been restored and you can visit it.
And I visited it last summer when I went to London.
They've actually even tried to recreate the experience of being in a Mithraenaeum.
It's quite extraordinary.
So, soldiers and merchants, but not the aristocracy?
Yes, the aristocracy as well in London.
I mean, in Rome, but for the far-flung reach.
But it would be, yeah, sure, if a noble were a general of the army, he would be part of the Mithra cult.
What about the emperor?
I'm not sure.
That's a really good question.
I think so.
I think probably so, because the emperors would get involved with some of these mystery cults.
I don't think they were all bad.
I think there were some positive elements to some of these religions.
Like the Freemasons.
They do good work at the local level.
So Bacon needed this because this was like the secret sauce that held everything together.
And only recently has scholarship come out that every single British regiment had a Masonic lodge attached to it.
And one of the genius elements of Freemasonry is that it's portable.
You don't have to go to church.
You can take the church with you.
And they would have these little lodge accoutrements that it would have in a little chest.
And the soldiers would...
They would create their Masonic Lodge and do their rituals wherever they were in the world, every single regiment.
And the rituals of Freemasonry are really profound.
They have a profound effect on the members, and it's theatrical.
So you get the theater again, and you get this symbolism and Shakespearean language again to mold these men.
In a different way and on a different level, that's really profound.
Freemasonry is very profound, and I think, honestly, even a more important creation than Shakespeare, and almost deeper in a way.
I mean, the understanding of human psychology is so profound in Shakespeare that that's what Bacon had.
He knew how we operate.
He had this extraordinary level of confidence.
That he could control you.
And say it's in Midsummer Night's Dream, where Oberon just completely controls everyone.
Oberon and Puck.
And who is Oberon?
But let's not get off track.
So Freemasonry...
I know.
I'd love to talk about Midsummer Night's Dream, but I'm thinking, how much time have we got?
Let's stay on Freemasonry.
It's really...
It gives so much to the members, and it's not something you sign in blood.
You don't...
You do make a blood oath.
But you don't agree to do dirty things and you don't have to do anything dirty to get in.
It's not like the mafia where you kill someone and you're a made man.
It's just a club for men that it's going to improve you.
It's going to make you a better person.
You're going to study the liberal arts.
You're going to shine your spirit.
You're going to put aside the materiality of the world.
But you're going to do it in secret, in complete secrecy.
And if you let any secrets out, we can kill you, or you will die.
It doesn't say we'll kill you, but you will be punished in the most gruesome fashion.
And just that alone, that you're part of a group that has a secret, is a very powerful thing to give a person.
And then the bonding of just having all these friends, and then they're all supposed to back you up, like you help your brother Freemason first.
So it's very, and really good for businessmen.
It's really good if you're lonely and out of the country back in the day.
One reason it's not popular anymore is because you just don't need it when you travel.
You can find a hotel on, you know.
I get the theory about how it works, but how do we know what evidence service that Bacon created?
So that's my final task of research.
And it's all over the place.
Multiple people have mentioned it.
Multiple people believe it.
I've been assembling the evidence and there's an essay on Patreon and Substack.
It's called The Birth of a Religion.
It's quite a long essay because I just wanted to get as much of it in there as I could and how Freemasonry came out of Scotland.
King James was...
Important to it.
I have a separate essay how the Templars became the Freemasons.
It's kind of the same.
The Templars, kind of the wave of the Templars back from the Crusades, getting burned in France.
Disappearing, sort of.
It's all in the essay.
Coming then out of Scotland back down into England to be announced to the world on 1717.
Part of my evidence, there's quite a bit more, and my next big essay, is that there's so much Freemasonry in Shakespeare, and it's the earliest Masonic symbolism that we have in the form of its modern form.
It just permeates Shakespeare, and it's Freemasons who say that.
There's essays all over the internet on...
On all the Freemasonry in Shakespeare.
So the guy who wrote Shakespeare must have been a Freemason.
Right, because presumably, officially, modern Freemasonry post-dates the Elizabethan-Jacobean era.
Yes.
I mean, we're talking 18th century, aren't we?
Yes, 1717, St. John's Day.
St. John is very important to Freemasons.
That's basically the summer solstice, June 24th.
It's a coded reference to the summer solstice, and they announced on 1717, that's a magic number, in London, four lodges announced that they exist.
And so those lodges already had their ceremonies and their rituals.
And there's just...
What I'm going to present in my next essay is the evidence for Bacon, which is quite...
A lot of it has to do with symbolism that you see in his book covers.
Some of it slightly later.
But complete Masonic symbolism from the checkerboard floor to the two columns to the sun and the moon to the Masonic handshake.
It's all over the place once you know to look for it.
It's quite extraordinary, really.
And again, that's not me.
I'm not the first person to say it.
I'm just going to pull it all into one place so it's more easily seen.
There's a man named Alfred Dodd, who was a Freemason, who wrote nine books on Francis Bacon.
He's identified some of the symbolism in Shakespeare, and other people have too, and other people have found little details, and I've been finding new stuff.
So the evidence is there, and it will be forthcoming.
All the stuff about this master builder, Hiram Abeth.
Yeah.
Does he appear in Bacon's writings at all?
Well, that's...
It's funny that you said that, because that really will be the clincher.
Some people think that the murder of Banquo, a Freemason, it's on my website, If you go to thehiddenlifeisbest.com, there's an essay by a Freemason who suggests that Banquo's murder in Macbeth is a recreation of the murder of Hiram Abiff.
And he's got his reasons for that.
He says Macbeth is steeped in Freemasonry.
It's steeped in Gnosticism.
My analysis of it just found incredible amounts of Gnosticism.
And that would be episode 4, which is available at patreon.com.
And he's finding enormous amounts of Freemasonry in Macbeth, and that murder of Banquo is similar to Hiram Abiff.
And Hiram Abiff is also partly a human sacrifice, where they used to sacrifice people.
They were called foundation sacrifices when they built a new building.
And there's a lot of reference to human sacrifice in the murder of Hiram Abiff, who's also then...
Symbolically raised back up.
So there's a dying and rising God, which is also tied to the old religions, especially, you know, Venus and Adonis and Tammuz and Astart.
There's links to the old religion, modernized, and then you actually become that God.
So that whole idea of becoming God, you are made that dying and rising God.
And Freemasons talk about where I was raised.
At which lodge I was raised in, because you die.
You participate in theater, participatory theater.
You become Hiram Abiff, you get murdered, you get found, the symbolism of the temple, Solomon, and you get raised up again.
The whole myth, Hiram Abiff stays dead, but you're killed and raised back up again, and it has a...
Very powerful effect that's probably what happened in the old mystery religions that cemented people's identity to, I don't know, different things.
There's all these different mystery religions.
I'm actually quite fond of the Eleusinian mystery religion.
I don't think it was all bad and created, you know, the...
The flowering of Greek culture and democracy.
So the Romans had Mithras and the Greeks had the Eleusinian mysteries.
The Romans still had the Eleusinian, but I have found evidence that it was corrupted by the Mithrasm, which used it for mind control, where the Eleusinians elevated your mind.
Feminine, it was earth-centered, and people felt liberated and joyful.
I think they were put through some sort of fear-death experiences and then relieved from it, but it was very positive and group.
You only did it once and you did it as a group, whereas Mithra and Freemasonry, you're constantly going back and constantly doing more initiations and sheltered in the dark with just a few men.
They're very, very different religions, which are still based on an initiation experience.
Yeah.
I think he picked up this...
It's all about initiation and that very profound...
I was thinking, apropos of everything we've been talking about, that were it not for the uncomfortable details, like you have to...
Torture and murder children.
And you have to, you're going to burn an eternal hellfire.
It's actually quite attractive, the old mystery religions and the old religion and being part of this exclusive club.
Because we all kind of want to be in an exclusive club, don't we?
We want to kind of look down on people who aren't in the know.
It's sort of, unfortunately, it's a natural human instinct.
100%.
And Bacon knew that, and he built that into Freemasonry.
And of course, you don't have to do any dirty things.
There's a subgroup within Freemasonry.
There's the group within the group.
There's the inner group that you'll get pulled into, is my theory.
But the outer realm are perfectly decent people, and that's also the brilliance of Freemasonry.
You're veiled.
The dirty deeds are veiled.
First of all, you can't talk about anything that happens in the lodge.
But there are plenty of really decent people.
Oh, totally.
I've got relatives.
Close relatives.
My grandfather, I remember on my 18th, 21st birthday, it was his dearest wish that the time had come for me to join him in the lodge.
Grandmaster.
He was the loveliest man.
I mean, really, really sweet and God-fearing and honest.
I can see at the lower levels, they do good work, they're nice people, they don't know.
They don't know what's going on.
And I've heard, because this is quite an interesting subject, one hears that They have sort of talent spotters and you're promoted according to your willingness to sail close to the wind and push things further.
They're looking for psychopaths, basically.
They're selecting for people who are prepared to do bad things, showing themselves worthy of elevation to the higher degrees.
I think that's probably true.
I think if you look...
If you're good or you fit the bill, they'll invite you to some other level where something bad happens and you're in.
I don't know how it works, but I think you're right.
That's what I think, too.
I've got this parallel experience at the moment, Robert.
When I was at university, I...
It was very much my ambition to join the establishment.
And I was so nearly there, you know, I was at the right university with the right kind of people.
And if I'd kept my nose clean and done the right things that you're required to do, I could have, I mean, basically selling yourself, I could have joined the establishment.
And I've reached that stage in life where lots of my mates, lots of my old mates, people I used to hang around with and used to go drinking with and my closest friends.
They're now in the House of Lords.
They're all lords.
Wow.
And I'm...
Incredible.
I'm thinking...
Why didn't I do it?
I so don't want to be in your rather shabby...
your shabby restaurants with these sort of slightly grudgingly polite staff.
Giving you Dover soul and steak with these not quite good enough chips and hanging out with people who are going to pay a terrible price for what they've done.
Yeah.
Because they've joined this system.
Yeah.
And it's not by being good people.
Right.
And they can appear good to the outside world and smile.
Cut a ribbon at a hospital.
And meanwhile, they'll send hundreds of thousands of people to their death.
It's extraordinary.
It really is.
I know someone who was in Skull and Bones from Yale.
He was actually here for dinner one night.
He was a really lovely guy.
And I don't think he has any...
He was very genuine.
Like, yeah, it was just a club.
But there's a movie called Brotherhood of the Bell.
It's the only movie I've ever seen that gets at how this works.
And it's about a guy who joined a club in college, never thought about it again, but occasionally would show up to reunions.
And then he gets a call.
He's about 50 years old.
He's doing well in life.
Gets a phone call and they want him to corrupt a judge or something.
They want him to do something immoral that he doesn't want to do.
And they just put the screws to him, and he's shocked that everyone around him seems to be in the club.
It's a horror movie, but it's a very mild one.
And he goes to the FBI to tell them, oh, what's going on?
And it turns out the FBI guy is in the club.
That, by the way, is a common trope of horror films, that you slowly discover that everyone else is in on it, even the people you thought you could trust.
And it's true that the Masons put themselves in the police departments.
Oh, especially the police departments.
Police departments, big judges, judgeships, the law, you know, of course we know entertainment, but yeah, if you try to go get help, you won't be able to get help, and I think that's how they've covered up so many of these, you know, pedophilia scandals,
is that the judges is at some of these parties.
Which is, again, that's how you do it when you're dark Machiavelli.
Did you have an elite education, by the way, Robert?
I've never asked you.
No, I did not.
I went to a state school and studied art.
But the streets of New York have been my education, James.
It used to be quite a lively place with a strong exchange of ideas and a...
Culture of reading and books and intellectuality.
It's, of course, gone very woke and it's different now.
But I was invited to a book club the other night.
All these young people, really smart, reading The Republic and reading great poetry.
It's here, and I think that was my education.
Also, just a really strong curiosity.
I've always been very curious.
And, you know, if you want to learn, the books are there.
And now with YouTube, I mean, you can listen to college lectures on YouTube.
You don't even need...
And it's amazing what I can find here.
I'll hear about a book.
So now I decided to jump into the weird world of Shakespeare scholarship.
And I'll read an essay and they'll reference a book.
And I said, well, I've got to look at that book now because I have a slight amount of OCD, which is dangerous in Shakespeare's scholarship world.
It could take you years.
That's a horror movie, right?
You dig into one book and you've got 50 books to read and you never finish.
You just die in a pile of books.
But I can get that book!
You know, you can search around and these books are online and a minute or two later, there it is on my computer.
I didn't even have to go to the library to get it.
It's extraordinary.
Can you read stuff on screens?
I can't do that.
I don't like it.
I don't like it.
But you can also do word searches so you don't have to read the whole thing and you can find things.
So if you can't get the book, it's pretty amazing.
So you can make progress.
you can make serious progress as a scholar as an amateur scholar I should say
that you couldn't do even 10 years ago probably because all this stuff wasn't online and certainly not 50 years ago you'd have to go to the library
It's a great time to be alive, James.
Is it?
I'm glad you said that.
I'm relieved and somewhat surprised to hear you say that.
Well, I think it's always been like this, that there is nothing new under the sun, as the great book says, and you've always been confronted with darkness.
And studying Tudor London has given me this information, like we think we're under surveillance now.
It was the same back then.
I mean, ten loose words in the wrong pub.
Any pub, probably.
You know, you'd be surrounded by armed men the next day.
Yeah, and I suppose you could be hung, drawn, and quartered, couldn't you?
Oh my God.
I didn't want to describe that.
It's incredible.
And so that is this sacrifice.
That was a form of human sacrifice.
I suppose it was, wasn't it?
That hadn't occurred to me before.
Do you want to enlarge on that?
That idea of, well, this famous philosopher René Girard made a living out of this.
It's the mimetic desire.
But he also said that, and this is in Romeo and Juliet at the Pharmacos, where they would put the sins of the city onto one person and kill that person, or torture them and throw them out in the wilderness.
Later it became a goat.
Later it just became symbolic.
Or you would torture prisoners to death in public, and that would expiate the communal anxiety and create a bonding ritual to the community at large with this horrible torture, which eventually they had to stop doing because we are progressing as a society,
and that's no longer acceptable.
You can't do that.
In fact, I heard that the gunpowder plot where they caught all those Catholics trying to blow up Parliament, I think they hung, drawn, and quartered all of them.
And that was the last time they really did it because it was just too gross.
They went too far.
Well, also, it was probably a false flag anyway.
I mean...
It was.
It was.
Absolutely.
They set those guys up.
They set those guys up.
And those people going around with the anonymous mask, because that's Guy Fawkes.
That's like wearing a Lee Harvey Oswald mask.
He was a patsy.
He was completely set up.
And his cause was ruined, and he got hung, drawn, and quartered.
Why would you wear that mask?
He was completely played for a fool, and he was a fool.
They let him do it right up to the last minute.
He thinks he's going to buy gunpowder, dig a tunnel, and row across the Thames and do this whole thing undetected.
He completely knew what he was doing.
See how powerful the PSYOP is that we still have, you know, November the 5th?
This is fireworks.
Yeah.
Bonfire night.
And MI5 and MI6 are, you know, laughing Scotch out their noses every time.
But it was, so the Elizabethan era was quite a period because you had, so you had John Dee taking care of kind of with his scrying glass and his sort of necromancy and his occultism and his gematria and stuff.
And then you had Bacon inventing...
Freemasonry, and by your account, creating the Bard, creating this national poet, and forging the Empire.
And then you had the spies, didn't you?
You had Elizabeth, the spies, Walsingham, and Cecil.
There were a couple more.
They elevated spying to a great art, the Tudors, because they were so paranoid, because they had to protect themselves, because they were so smart.
I don't know if anyone's really smarter than a top-level spy.
At least back then.
I think they've lost it.
I think the mad genius is gone.
It's just madness.
But they're so smart.
And to play these games and to create these plots and to fool people and to act while they're doing it.
That's why theater is so great.
For espionage, because nobody's a better actor than a spy.
He's on stage 24-7.
So they linked these things together, and they fed each other.
And the acting troops were spies, and actors have historically been spies because they're on tour, and they just come back with information.
And to be a spy doesn't mean you had to always be, you know, you could just be an asset.
So they had assets everywhere who were always reporting back.
And they had little clumps of assets, like the Earl of Essex was part of military intelligence for the Tudors.
And he had his own spy network, who Francis Bacon was part of that.
Anthony Bacon, Francis' brother, was an actual paid spy, professional spy, his whole life.
Francis Bacon was involved in intelligence his entire life, and it took on so many permutations, Observing and reporting back, but actually creating these plots, creating these false flags.
Christopher Marlowe, he was a spy, wasn't he?
Who?
Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe was a spy.
Yeah.
Pretty much, if you left the country, you had to go talk to Walsingham and get a job to do.
You couldn't leave the country without permission.
Pretty much everyone was fine with it.
Like now, almost.
Probably.
Like the world they're planning for us.
Exactly.
That's why it's not so bad.
It was always thus.
And they just got really, really good at it because there was such a pressure cooker.
London in particular, because the number of kings that had lost their head had been deposed over the centuries is enormous.
Rebellions put down.
The number of people that had to be killed is enormous.
Then you had the Catholic-Protestant split.
You had Spain trying to come in.
And so everyone was always watching and spying.
And the Brits, to this day, are the greatest spies of all time.
And that's one reason.
And Francis Bacon was there too.
He was a spy since he was 15 years old.
In fact, he invented a system of cryptography, or ciphering, when he was 15. Bragged about it when he was an older man.
And it's an extraordinary system that people think he used in the first folio.
And that's one reason he told everyone about it.
And they think he used it when he had the typeset for the first folio with Ben Johnson.
And that's known that Ben Johnson was with Francis Bacon 17 years after Devere was dead, doing the first folio.
Is this the code where you have a book and if you know what the book is, then you can know the code.
But if you don't have the book, there's no way you can guess it because you don't know what the book is.
It's very simple.
It's called a bilateral cipher.
It involves two fonts.
That you can barely tell apart.
But if you know to look for those fonts, every group of five letters, depending on which of those fonts it has, like maybe three of font A and two of font B, that stands for a letter.
Just like modern computer code.
So all you need to know is to look for the fonts and know the alphabet.
There's only 26 permutations of five different possibilities.
Like on and off, ones and zeros in computer code.
This would be font A and font B or font 0 and font 1. And he invented that as a 15-year-old.
They also hid things in drawings.
They also used symbols to transmit information.
And also, Bacon was known as having a tremendous memory.
And he was sent back home from France, I think, just because he could hold stuff in his head.
And here's where it gets really crazy.
There's evidence that Bacon knew about hypnotism.
They think that came out of the mystery schools.
He even says it in The Tempest.
To be standing there yet asleep.
To be perfectly functioning yet asleep.
Prospero puts his daughter to sleep exactly as a...
Handshake Induction does today, where great hypnotists can instantly put you to sleep if you're a certain type of personality.
And Bacon uses that over and over, and it's in Midsummer Night's Dream again, where Oberon seems to hypnotize people and completely change their minds.
Midsummer Night's Dream has a lot of mind control in it, and Bacon knew that.
It's just clear from his notes.
From the plays, again, in the Shakespeare plays, but also the nature of spying and his confidence.
But I'm getting a little off track.
What was your question?
I can't remember.
I'm thinking, we'll have to do another podcast.
But what I wanted to ask you, my sort of last question-ish, is, okay, so Bacon, your big picture theory.
It's that a lot of the bad stuff that's happening in the world today was really the creation of Francis Bacon, of these sort of embedded occult practices in secret societies and the creation of the British Empire,
which sort of morphed into things like the City of London.
Behind the scenes, the people running the world, Oh, a huge debt to Bacon, yeah?
Absolutely.
But the thing that is why I do the podcast is because Bacon made three religions.
Shakespeare became a religion.
Freemasonry is a religion.
And science.
He's known, his daylight, known to be, his daylight identity is as the...
As the father of modern science.
Which is scientism, isn't it, really?
Which is scientism, which is really what you're talking about when you talk about 24-7 surveillance.
It's scientism.
They have, first of all, the power to do that, because Bacon said knowledge is power.
But also that they can convince you to take an experimental gene therapy because a scientist told you to do it and that you'll do it because you trust the scientist.
And it's so powerful, isn't it?
It's so powerful and people don't know they're in the religion.
They don't know.
And you try to even talk to them about it and they're like, what are you talking about?
What do you mean science is a religion?
I don't think science is a religion.
I don't have faith in...
You're like, you just stuck a thing in your arm because a scientist...
And it's really hard.
I'll give you a good example of this from my own experience.
You may or may not be aware.
I sort of spent 10 years, at least, fighting in the climate trenches.
And I mean, for a period, global warming was my, as Francis Bacon is to you, so global warming was to me.
And one of the things I noticed, The scientists, whatever you want to call them.
These fake scientists who are involved in fake studies like environmental sciences or climate science or whatever.
They're always brandished as a brand of integrity.
Peer review.
They'd ask questions like, has it been peer reviewed?
In other words, Have a bunch of our cronies cast an eye over this and given their corrupt endorsement to our junk science, because that's how it works.
And yet, normies have been persuaded that, like, peer review, it's like a badge of honour.
It's a guarantor that this stuff is true because it's been certified by teams of actual scientists.
Once you see through this, you understand how corrupt.
It is a process of illusion.
It's as much propaganda of brainwashing as Shakespeare's history plays are.
Oh, 100%.
And he predicted it.
Francis Bacon prophesied it.
He predicted the modern world because he created it.
And I'm convinced these three religions, their end goal was scientism.
The end goal was a world run by scientists.
It's in the New Atlantis.
I encourage everyone to read the New Atlantis with that in mind.
They literally carry scientists around.
How readable is the New Atlantis, Robert?
It's very short.
It's quite readable.
It's a fable.
You know, it's boring, but it's only about 70 pages.
Okay.
And it's kind of an adventure story.
And you'll see that everything is about science.
And the scientists are king.
They supposedly have a king, but you don't see the king.
They're inconsequential.
They have a religion, but the scientists tell you if a miracle is real or not.
Is that a real miracle?
We have to ask the scientists.
The scientists are completely in control of the island.
It's incredible.
And the inhabitants of the island are very docile.
I have a couple of books of people that have really dug into this fable because, again, he veils it.
On the surface, it seems like a fun adventure story about a utopia.
These English sailors saw a utopia and came back home.
And also, very handily, science kills...
It kills Christianity.
Absolutely.
So many of the arguments used to kind of justify rejection of Christianity, it's kind of not modern.
Completely.
It's a superstition.
It's not scientific.
Right, exactly.
And Bacon's day, he had to wear a Christian veil.
And in fact, New Atlantis wasn't released while he was alive.
And he had to sort of make a pitch for Christianity in pretty much everything he did, more or less, as the Rosicrucians were.
But Freemasonry has almost no Christianity in it.
And that's why they had to wait for Freemasonry to come above ground, because it's not Christian at all.
And yes, the science is eventually going to destroy religion because religion will be science.
And that same faith gets transferred to the scientist that was for the priest or the deacon or whoever, or the holy book.
And science has its relics, it has its saints, it has its holy works.
Yes, since Charles Darwin.
Darwin.
Darwin is so not even science.
How do you do an experiment on Darwin?
It's not even science, but they got everyone to believe it.
I remember a few years back going to look around a boarding school, a public school, potentially as a place to send my son.
And one of my good friends went there, Christopher Booker, who was a wonderful, skeptical journalist.
And I remember being shown around the school, and the thing that the school was proudest of, this is a school called Shrewsbury, in a very pretty market town on this hill surrounded by a river.
Their pride and joy was the fact that Charles Darwin had been educated at their school.
He is a...
I mean...
People think Darwin.
It's just like you mention his name and you've almost got a bow in reverence.
Oh, you do.
And this was a 33rd degree Freemason, a complete charlatan.
Even in his own book, he knew that he was talking bollocks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a great English writer about him, Patrick Harper, History and Imagination.
He's great.
There's a great mathematician who just destroys Darwin.
Oh, really?
That sounds funny.
Yeah, he destroys him in books, but there's a great video, a half-hour video of him where he just rips Darwin apart.
What's his name?
Tell me his name again.
Berlinski.
B-E-R-L-I-N-S-K-I.
Right.
I'm not sure.
Eric Berlinski.
It's on YouTube.
Berlinski destroys Darwin.
He's brilliant.
And he talks about how all the mathematicians and all the scientists mocked Darwin.
Back in the 60s and 70s.
Just as all the contemporaries for the 200 years after Shakespeare, all those people in the know mocked the notion that this man from Stratford was small Latin and less Greek.
They all knew.
All the insiders knew in the Tudor times.
This was a big project.
It was a state secret.
And I realize that the more you bring in, actually the easier it is to control because why would you betray?
Such an operation.
And what would you gain by betraying it?
And it's such a fun operation, and it's for the good of the country.
Yeah.
You are making art, and you actually are having fun doing the plays.
I mean, it was win, win, win, win, win.
And to this day, I don't know who really knows.
The Freemasons know.
Because there's all this evidence that they know.
I can't recite chapter and verse, but for instance, The obelisk in Central Park, which is the sister obelisk of Cleopatra's Needle on the Thames, is up here by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
They buried the complete works of Shakespeare in the base of this obelisk.
And Freemasons put it up.
Like, why would they do that?
Because they know.
They do know.
And here's one last theory.
I think that's one reason Shakespeare took off, is because they can see the Masonic symbolism in the plays.
And then they're bound by a blood oath to help a brother.
And so they put on the plays, they review the plays, they talk about the plays, because they see the Masonic symbolism in it.
And I think that was a key method that Bacon saw, again, because he saw it all, to generate interest in the plays.
And then it just self-generates, because you do want to, like...
What's going on in this play?
Oh, that's what you think?
I think this.
No, I think that.
Plus they're funny.
Plus they have all these new words and incredible poetry.
And he created a fascination for the plays and poems that he knew was going to happen because he said it in the sonnets that these sonnets will outlive everything.
And he said, look, I'm reading a book from an empire that's vanished, but I've got every single letter that was written in this book in my hand.
Empire is gone.
He saw that Shakespeare was going to become that, and he saw that the sonnets were going to become that.
It's incredible, the level of his genius.
And then he pulled it off while hiding.
And if anyone knew that he was Shakespeare, the plays would never have gotten this mystery and fascination because you would have analyzed them from a person who had power, wrote them, instead of a nobody from the hinterlands, from a market town.
This mysterious genius.
Have you been to Stratford?
I have not.
I've only been to England three times and I've just got to get up there.
I don't know.
Well, actually, it's lucky nobody knows your face, Robert, because I suspect there'll be a few owners of Stratford cafes which would have a thing to say to you about you and your pesky theories.
Now, tell us...
I don't want to miss this nice weather.
I'm going to go and walk the dog now.
Where can we find you?
Where can we find your stuff?
So thehiddenlifeisbest.com is a good place to go.
Pretty much everything is there and links to the podcast.
The first three podcasts are totally free.
I only put a paywall of $5 a month for all the ones where I go into the plays in detail.
Macbeth.
And the Tempest is key because it's actually a mystery school initiation.
I didn't discover that.
Someone else did.
Right up through Hamlet, Richard II, Othello is fascinating.
And also Patreon.com is a good place to go to get updates.
I'm doing these new things I call shorties, like quick little videos, because I've never done videos.
I didn't want to teach myself a new program.
But I figured one out, and so we're doing some short videos on Patreon.
And Substack for essays and updates too, which eventually all the podcasts will get over to Substack.
So there's Substack, The Hidden Life is Best, Patreon, The Hidden Life is Best, and TheHiddenLifeIsBest.com for all my stuff.
And thanks so much, James.
It's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you, Robert.
We will definitely do another one.
And dear viewers and listeners, if you've enjoyed this podcast, Obviously.
Obviously you have.
I hope you'll consider supporting me on Substack or on Locals, on Patreon.
You can also support my sponsors.
That's always a good idea.
Because they're good.
And if you don't want to do that, you can buy me a coffee.
I really appreciate your support.
It does make a difference.
It's the only way I can earn a living.
So if you want me to starve, don't.
Don't.
Don't support me.
Maybe you hate me.
Thank you again, Robert.
I've really enjoyed this chat and I heartily recommend your podcast with your fascinating research.
