Premium Episode 171: The Veiled Prophet Cult feat Devin Thomas O'Shea(Sample)
The Ku Klux Klan, debutantes, Monsanto Chemical and an orientalist poem about a veiled villain. Let's take a look at the creepy "veiled prophet" cult based in Saint Louis, Missouri. It's a men's club of rich and powerful locals dedicated to crushing labor movements and parading their daughters in front of each other. Ellie Kemper (Erin from NBC sitcom The Office) was crowned their "Queen of Love and Beauty" in 1999. But activists played a role in revealing their racist past. Saint Louis journalist Devin Thomas O'Shea guest writes the episode.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Check out Devin Thomas O'Shea: https://twitter.com/devintoshea / https://proteanmag.com/2022/05/06/the-cult-of-the-veiled-prophet / https://devinoshea.wordpress.com/veiled-prophet/
Episode music by Pontus Berghe, Nick Sena, Doom Chakra Tapes. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 171 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Veiled Prophet cult episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Devin Thomas O'Shea, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Before the page was removed around 2015, there used to be a mission statement on VeiledProphet.org, the organization's website.
The Mysterious Order of the Veiled Prophet is a 135-year-old civic and philanthropic organization founded in 1878 to promote the city of St.
Louis and enrich the quality of life for its citizens.
Its members, who choose to remain anonymous, provide financial support And leadership for various civic projects and not-for-profit agencies produce the annual Fair St.
Louis, celebrate St.
Louis Summer Concerts, and the Veiled Prophet Parade, and honor young college-age women for their civic involvement at the annual Veiled Prophet Ball.
So this week we're hanging out with Devin, a journalist based out of St.
Louis in Missouri, of course, who's written an episode for us about this Veiled Prophet organization.
I'm sure he's going to be corroborating their mission statement and not revealing a mystical racist cult of powerful men obsessed with debutantes whose main goal was to destroy the local labor movement.
The Veiled Prophet.
Every December in St.
Louis, Missouri, a secret society dedicated to the Veiled Prophet of Khorasan hosts a debutante ball.
Daughters of the rich are paraded forth on the arms of their father's friends and business colleagues.
On stage, the ladies bow before an anonymous figure seated on a golden throne, hiding his face with a veil.
At the end of the night, one lucky daughter is crowned the Veiled Prophet's Queen of Love and Beauty.
She takes her seat on a throne beside the Faceless Man.
In 1999, famously, that queen was Ellie Kemper, Erin from The Office.
The photo, you know, I mean, by 99, they had already kind of cleaned up a little bit.
Let's put it that way.
She doesn't look like she's about to fight a Dark Souls boss as much as her predecessors, at least in the shots that ended up in the press.
Well, and it's strange because just going by, you know, her character and her persona on The Office, you know, Eren kind of seems like the last person that would be, you know, sitting beside an Elden Ring boss on a throne at a weird cult ball.
Just goes to show you, you know, Hollywood isn't always what it seems.
In 2021, pictures of Kemper resurfaced and spread online with the headline, Kimmy Schmidt is a KKK princess.
That's partially true.
The veiled prophet is a creation of the 1870s Klan.
The big question is how a Klansman character has skated through 150 years of American history without much question, and the answer comes down to how old and segregated St.
Louis is.
The city is much older than the United States, originally French, and for much of St.
Louis' history, it has sat at the edge of the western frontier.
At the turn of the century, the city was the fourth largest in the nation, but has been in economic decline for the last hundred years.
The elites in charge of that hundred year decline are some of the members of the Veiled Prophet Society who deny the accusation that the VP is a clansman.
Instead, they say their godhead is inspired by the poetry of Thomas More, but no one seems to have checked in on that poem in a very long time because it's boring and kind of long and hard to read.
If you make it through the sing-song couplets, you'll find the story of a deranged Middle Eastern death cult leader who sends the young men of his kingdom out to die in endless conquest wars, and then the VP tricks the women left behind into joining his harem.
And by the way, VP is like the only way they reference it now on the website.
You cannot find the words failed profit on failedprofit.org.
Right.
This is very confusing because somebody like myself would look at that, they would read the copy on the website, and they would go, oh, the vice president, clearly.
That's what I thought it was growing up.
I was like, oh, this is the vice president's parade.
And I think another great trick was to rename the ball entirely.
Just rename the parade.
Rename it all to like weird shit like the American Hot Dog Hour.
Why do all these fucked up things have acronyms that rhyme with CP?
What?
Wait, wait.
That is such a stretch, dude.
Holy shit.
Even for you, Jake.
What?
What?
That's an astute observation?
Come on.
Yeah, dude.
You are really pointing out the vile pornography stuff inherent here.
Yeah, that's what I do.
That's why I'm here.
I point out the obvious.
Makes people feel comfortable, you know?
You're just a guy who sees child pornography anywhere he looks.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's not it.
That's what you're trying to say?
The Veiled Prophet as a character originally comes from the Islamic Zoroastrian legend of Al-Muqanna, a person supposed to have lived around 700 A.D.
in northern Afghanistan.
The legend says that Al Meccano was a chemist and a victim of a lab accident.
An explosion burned and scarred part of his face, hence the veil.
Wait, they just picked, like, a villain!
You know, the Joker?
The Joker!
They're like, we like Batman, Batman's cool, he's got some cool tricks, but, you know, the real leader is Two-Face.
I mean, Jake, in the late 1800s, I'm gonna tell you that Batman wasn't yet around, but yes, they would have definitely chosen the Joker if this was the modern version.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Already their logo looks a bit like Willy Wonka, like it's like purple and kind of like droopy and stuff, the VP logo.
Yeah, it's very carnival-esque and garish, like the color combinations are meant to like unsettle you also.
I would pay almost anything to watch Johnny Depp play the Veiled Prophet.
You might.
In a documentary.
We have to get Ellie Kemper to play the debutante savior of the story.
Redeemer.
Exactly.
You know, I think her quote might be too high right now.
I don't know if we could get her.
Dang.
We might have to get one of the lesser characters.
How cool would it be if we could have her in a revenge fantasy where she kills everybody in that giant ballroom?
This myth could be a parable about man's intrusion on God's domain through science, or just some local lore.
The story ends with Almacanna disappearing into his mountain palace, possibly vanishing in a bath of liquid mercury.
1100 years later, Almacanna's story was picked up by the Irish poet Thomas More.
In the 1810s, Lord Byron advised his friend to get out of a creative rut by experimenting in a hot new genre of lyric poetry, racist depictions of the Middle East.
Moore decided to mobilize Orientalist tropes to make some barely disguised critiques of the English Empire, Which was pretty far down the line in colonizing and immiserating Moore's home country of Ireland.
The English Crown's censors would have only permitted so much dissent to enter public discourse, but if Moore set his story in the faraway land of Coruscant, then the King might not read between the lines.
So his whole thing was to give the British fictional blackface?
Absolutely.
Yeah, and set it on like a Star Wars planet.
Right.
Where magic is real.
They got this veiled prophet looking like Queen Amidala up in here.
Okay.
Spitting.
That would be cool.
I mean, kind of cooler than some of the dresses at the actual debutante ball.
Yeah, it's gonna be really fucked up when we find out that George Lucas based a lot of his characters and mythos on the Veiled Prophet.
Oh yeah, the Jabba the Hutt Princess Leia scene?
That's clearly the exact thing that happens at these balls.
Al Mokana became the Great Mokana and played the villain in a poem book called Lala Rook.
Khorasan is a real Iranian province, but in referring to Moore's setting, we have to speak of quote-unquote Khorasan with an asterisk.
Moore's Khorasan is a product of the poet's armchair speculation about the Orient, which is distorted through the lens of Moore having never set foot outside of Northern Europe.
Orientalism is a genre where artists and thinkers derive their understanding of the Middle East from books penned often by other white European authors.
The setting of Coruscant is like a painted stage background on a Hollywood set, which evokes a dreamland where Christian European fantasies of the other can run wild.
In Moore's poem titled, The Veiled Prophet of Khorasan, the Great Mokana is a Persian leader wearing a silver veil over his dazzling brow.
Allah had appeared in physical form to Mokana and blessed him with miraculous powers.
Lifting the veil, the Veiled Prophet told everyone, could result in a Raiders of the Lost Ark face-melting situation.
Sweet.
Moore's Veiled Prophet is depicted as a warrior sultan in constant battle with his surrounding territories.
Luckily, Coruscant is home to a young and handsome hero named Azeem.
Azeem has a hot girlfriend, Zellika, who he loves about as much as he loves throwing spears.
And Azeem loves to throw a spear.
You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous.
We don't run any advertising on the show, and we'd like to keep it that way.
For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this episode, a new one each week, and our entire library of premium episodes.
So head on over to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe.
