Episode 216: 1600s QAnon, the Reformation & Rosicrucianism feat Matt Christman & Chris Wade
The birth of the printing press, the Lutheran movement and the secrets of the learned Rosicrucians. We explore conspiracy theories, secret societies and witch panics at a time when technological advancements were bending the human brain in unexpected ways. Our guests are Matt Christman and Chris Wade of Chapo Trap House and the new limited series Hell On Earth about the 30 year war.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Hell On Earth Episode 1 + Atlas: https://hellonearth.chapotraphouse.com
Further episodes of Hell On Earth: https://patreon.com/chapotraphouse
Matt Christman: https://twitter.com/cushbomb
Chris Wade: https://twitter.com/saywhatagain
Merch: http://merch.qanonanonymous.com
Music by Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 216 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the 1600s QAnon episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we're going back in time to the 1600s to explore conspiracy theories in the advent of the printing press, a new and exciting form of mass media that ended up bending human brains in unexpected ways.
We'll be talking about Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, and the Thirty Year War.
To delve into the topic, we're joined by Chris Wade and Matt Chrisman of the Chopper Trap House podcast and their newly launched series, Hell on Earth.
Welcome, fellas.
Hey, thanks for having us.
What's up, guys?
So before we get too esoteric, like into Rosicrucianism and the like, I thought it might be useful to just paint a little picture of a guy in history, this guy being Martin Luther.
I think we say in the show that he is history's first poster in the modern sense, in that he arrived at the same time that print media was transforming the social landscape of Europe and, unlike anyone before, was able to intuit exactly what a mass audience wanted to hear and how they wanted to hear it.
And then he just started posting like a madman.
So hard that he broke the entire continent in half.
Yeah, Martin Luther started off life as the son of a miner, a copper miner with a small concern in kind of the Saxony region of Germany.
And he was going to become a lawyer to improve his family's status, but then he almost got struck by lightning on the road to school one day and decided that if God would spare his life from a lightning strike, he would become a monk, which he did.
He got into an Augustine monastery, and from there started reading the Bible, and from there started saying, hey, a lot of stuff that's going on in the Catholic Church doesn't really seem to be found anywhere in the Bible.
And he was a bit of an academic, a bigot of a nerd, and he was trying to get some people to debate him, bro.
By putting out these calls for academic disputation, and one of them was a packet of 95 small doctrinal quibbles on the practice of selling indulgences in central Germany.
And his quibbles got out into the public, and suddenly a lot of people wanted to read them very quickly.
And they became an immediate printing sensation, and from there, my man just did not stop writing in the most argumentative fashion possible in his age.
And from there, basically split the church in two, just from the power of his pamphlet writing.
And his first attempt to get a disputation going was on abstract questions of scholastic theology, and works justifying faith.
And that was a snooze.
No one really cared.
It was when he started talking about indulgences and talking about popular practices that had monetary relationship to people that folks in the cities of Germany started really paying attention.
So I guess the equivalent is like a poster who gets obsessed with a game that's pay to win and he's like these indulgences people are basically paying and they just get into heaven?
That doesn't make any sense and he's pointing out these hypocrisies?
Meanwhile I spent 400 hours leveling my Leveling my character up to faithful.
Well, you should have bought the heaven gems.
I spent all of my dollars to go to the nearest church pilgrimage and look at St.
Eustace's shinbone.
That got my grandpa off 19 million years at purgatory.
That doesn't mean anything now?
So he's pointing out contradictions in this big institution.
Is the Catholic Church basically the only representative of Christendom that has any real influence in that region, or are there other competing interests?
And how do Martin Luther's ideas kind of change the paradigm?
I mean the closest thing to any challenge to the Catholic authority in that part of Europe was the Ultraquist Church in Bohemia where they had fought a sort of a proto-reformation like a century earlier behind a guy named Jan Hus, which means goose, and they invited him to a church conclave with a promise of safe passage and then burned his ass.
The goose was literally cooked.
But his followers staged a decades-long military conflict against papal authorities and were able to carve out a special dispensation for their own church, which was basically Catholicism plus the Czech language plus getting bread and wine at communion instead of just the bread, which has been one of the big things that they had fought over.
But other than that, the Catholic Church was hegemonic.
But yeah, and the real thing is that there'd been periodic movements to try to win these concessions, to try to reform the Church from within, but one of the things that prevented it from actually going anywhere was the lack of mass media, the lack of a printing technology, the lack of communication.
So basically, the only people that you could get on your side We're the people that you could go from town to town and actually tell about your ideas.
And if you're just one guy doing that, and the Catholic Church is a massive infrastructure of control and enforcement, it becomes pretty hard to get a mass movement of reform going.
And what makes Luther, you know, able to do this is both his combative and prolific personality coming at right the same time when there is enough of a printing infrastructure available to spread his word far and wide beyond his own initiative.
Right, because I imagine at the time, you know, it's not the best look in the world if you're a crazy guy on a box yelling in a town square.
You know, you might have a handful of people around, but, you know, it's much different when somebody is reading something, you know?
Well, you would say that because the crazy guy, the last cool crazy guy out of town square, you guys killed.
You Jewish people, you took care of Jesus.
Well, hold on, wait a minute.
All right.
Let's not bring it up old shit, okay?
You know, I'm interested in this idea that this network of printing presses is essentially like an early internet.
Like, how did it spread and who controlled it and how did things kind of propagate across them?
Like, how would you go and read the boards?
Well, so there was a well-established printing economy in Germany at the time.
Probably the most well-established in Europe at that point.
But there was not a mass audience for printed material for the most part.
Most printers made their nut on government documents and things like indulgences.
The economic proposition of publishing a new book was incredibly risky.
Because you were essentially betting that you could sell X number of books, and then if you didn't, you were ruined.
So printing was a growing and viable economy, but it was also very, very risky, and there was a reticence to put too much investment in.
Gutenberg, the guy who invented the thing, went fucking bankrupt.
It was very risky to publish new books because no one knew what people wanted to read.
And what Luther's call did of saying, hey, the church is lying to you, your soul is not saved by buying an indulgence or looking at a twig from the burning bush in some guy's cathedral.
The Bible is, the Word is your only salvation.
In a time when religion made up popular culture, they were totally inextricable.
It created a market for the first time, a huge market for printed material, and the printers of Germany met that moment and started putting out anything that Luther published, and it all sold.
And so that created demand, not just for more stuff from Luther, who was happy to provide it because he was a writing machine, But also people who came in Luther's wake and were trying to extend and continue the critique that he'd started.
And also people disputing Luther.
I mean, it was public flame wars.
People writing against his tracks, people writing for him.
I mean, we're very much overtly making all these internet analogies because we're trying to make this moment relevant now.
But it is very recognizable in the same type of things that people like to And the Catholic authorities at the time were always noting to each other in chagrin that the Catholic responses to Luther just got wiped out in the book stalls.
arguing with them. Except this is about something that people actually believed
in which is the fate of their immortal souls.
And the Catholic authorities at the time were always noting to each other in
chagrin that the Catholic responses to Luther just got wiped out in the
bookstalls. Nobody was buying them relative to the to the Protestant stuff.
It's just like the mark what people wanted to hear was the criticism.
What they wanted to hear was this alternate idea of, what a shock, you know, to an illiterate audience telling them, you don't need to do all this expensive, for one thing, stuff.
You can read a book.
You can read the Bible, which Luther, when he was imprisoned, quote-unquote, by Frederick the Wise for his own protection, he started writing a German translation of the Bible almost immediately, and that became one of his big projects.
And so people took to it.
And funnily, Wittenberg, the town he was from, only had one printing press, and it was essentially a vanity project of the elector.
And when Luther starts writing, there isn't any way that they can meet the demand.
And so Luther's stuff starts getting printed in other cities in Germany.
And in those cities where those books are published, they create this cycle of capital formation where books get sold, The profits are put back into publishing, which means more books get sold, which means the publishing economy grows.
And you have entire cities that become based on publishing as their economic engine.
And so you have, you know, I guess like the general population more and more discussing these ideas and going, well, I agree with Luther, well, I don't, or whatever.
And how does that conversation develop and as well alongside the technology?
Because if I understand it correctly, eventually they had like portable printing presses.
Yeah, I mean the portable, at least what I've read, the portable printing presses were usually used on campaigns as basically propaganda, military campaigns as basically propaganda tools.
It's like you would, you know, if you were an elector or duke or something, you were going out in the field, you would bring along a portable printing press so as soon as you won, you could get the news of your victory out into the market and hopefully, you know, affect the willingness of people to fight either for you Or against you.
But, you know, even as this technology is developing, you know, people are diversifying it.
And so within, you know, a generation of Luthers starting to write, you have enough of an appetite.
You've trained people to want a continual flow of information of printed materials enough that it becomes sustainable to do, let's say, weekly broadsheets that describe current events and news of your locality.
You know, Your immediate locality, a kind of newspaper, you know?
So it's training.
His work and the passion put around his theological writings trains an audience to desire printed materials of other kinds of information that spurs on this information revolution in the 17th century.
And creates an entirely new subjectivity.
Who an individual is in relation to other people goes from being largely a concrete network of personal relationships to these abstracted communities who you only know about through The printed material you're reading, but who become as real to you as the people that you see every day.
So why does Martin Luther, like, essentially win this flame war, or at least, you know, I mean, it seems like the only message board was just, it just said, God, that was the topic.
And so like, how does he become like, you know, top dog, top poster and start to really shift things?
Well, I would say that the first board topic is God, and then the second board created is electoral politics.
And one of the things that really takes it to the next level is, because of the specific context of his writing, the Holy Roman Empire, which is, you know, We can't even really get into it, but this absolutely Byzantine collection of tiny polities, ranging from little more than just a guy's house with a wall around it to vast, vast swaths of kingdoms, basically.
And they're all ruled by different people of different noble levels.
And overall, it's ruled by the Catholic Holy Roman Empire in the personage of the Habsburgs.
But all of these little electors, these princes, these dukes, they want more power, they want more autonomy, and suddenly there's this new ideology present that can get you a little independence from your Catholic emperor, and that is this Protestant faith, this Lutheranism.
And so pretty quickly, the Lutheran ideology is adopted by these kind of middle-scale nobles
to advance their own personal and political interests and independence and gaining more
privilege against the emperor.
And he is brought on as basically a princely project that is used to advance Lutheranism,
which is one of the main ways that it survives through its initial first generation of the
movement.
And the thing that makes it viable until they start deciding to make the shift is that as
until they start deciding to make this shift is that as soon as these things start getting published
soon as these things start getting published and put out, the educated, literal people
and put out, the educated, literal people in the towns of Germany, northern Germany,
in the towns of Germany, northern Germany, start - Yeah, and the thing that makes it viable
start spontaneously trying to reform the churches on their own.
They read it and they're like, this is true, and so they start pushing against Catholicism
at the town level, and that becomes something that no sovereign can really control,
and even the princes who might be wary of rocking the boat end up kind of going along in order to not come
into too direct conflict with their own subjects, because once this gets out, and the printing technology
is what allows that to happen, once it breaks the containment of academic dispute,
it becomes essentially like a wildfire, In the specific context of the Holy Roman Empire, you have these princes who are willing to let the fire burn because it means more power and influence for them.
It means more money for them because all that money to indulgences is draining out of their principalities.
It's all going to Rome, yeah.
and going into the coffers of the local appointed bishops.
This gets them...and for the townspeople, this means no more having to tithe, no more having to spend
all this money on masses for your dead uncle. It's a promise of a cheaper church too. I
mean, that has that material motivation also. And these forces, like, they bring
together the towns and the princes in seeing the value of challenging the emperor and the pope on
it. And the Holy Roman Emperor simply does not have the state capacity to enforce his will
on electors and princes who don't want to have it enforced on them.
I wanted to talk a little bit about how most people, when thinking about Protestantism, especially in the modern context, they don't really associate that with secularism.
But this was kind of a form of secular movement that formed a whole new version of Christianity.
Can you explain how that works?
Well, I mean, first you're breaking—Lutheranism, like, breaks the universal church.
It says that there is no one religious authority.
The highest religious authority is now the local sovereign.
And Luther sees in the local sovereign the repository of justice.
He didn't trust or like most princes, but he felt they were necessary to maintain the order that could allow the good word to spread and to allow people to have that transformative relationship That moment of reckoning that he had on the toilet where he realized that grace is all and that God's grace is, you know, ineffable.
But it was really the people who came later and to the west of him, the Swiss reformers like Zwingli and then Calvin, whose conception of reformed Christianity created a permanent split Between the secular authorities and religious, because they said, unlike Luther, no, the head of the church should not be the local sovereign.
The head of the church should be the members of the church.
Pastors and church officials should not be appointed by a prince.
They should be elected and chosen by the laity themselves.
And that is where modern secularism starts, is in that conception that was not coincidentally forged in a place where there really weren't any princes, because at this time the Swiss Confederation had for hundreds of years had de facto independent, they were technically part of the Holy Roman Empire at this point, But they had had hundreds of years of de facto independence because they were up in the mountains.
What are you going to do?
And they really knew how to use a hailberd.
They were really good at hailberding.
And so they got to do what they wanted.
And by the time of the Reformation, most of the cities in Switzerland were essentially independent city states or had recently gained their independence.
Like Geneva had recently thrown off the rule of the Dukes of Savoy.
And so to them, The idea of a fully laity-controlled church made much more sense, and that's the conception of Protestantism that sort of metastasizes across Western Europe, whereas Lutheranism really does kind of stick into northern Germany and Scandinavia.
that, where does Calvinism immediately spread to? The Dutch Republic, which is similarly a place
that had long divorced itself from kind of a princely rule that was much more of a merchant
confederation. And it's not a coincidence that these are the two places where this church
divorced from secular authority develops. And it also, for the Dutch, gives them the social
fuel to overthrow what they do have, which is overlordship by the Spanish. And they start
an 80 years war to gain independence from Spain from these powerful merchant cities like Amsterdam.
Yeah, that's really, that's really interesting.
I wanted to go back a little bit to Martin Luther as a man, as a poster.
You know, obviously when you post and, you know, you go big, you want to have certain quirks, right?
And like, in his case, it's, he was an ass man.
He was obsessed with the anus and was shitting.
So you said, you know, he had his epiphany on the toilet.
I mean, what, you know, what do you, what do you make of that?
Can you tell us a bit more about that aspect of him?
That aspect of him.
He loved himself a crap-based metaphor.
He talked about making the devil smell his shit a lot.
When he was an older man and he felt like he was on his last legs, he said, I am a stool and the world is a giant anus trying to pass me.
Yeah, I mean, it is, I think it does speak to his, what would be, what would be attractive to him is that there was a very human quality to his writing.
And it wasn't these magisterial proclamations from a, uh, you know, a princely representative of God in Rome.
It was a guy who was recognizable in his words and style as just another guy you might meet on the streets in Germany.
Yeah, who was surrounded by shit, as everyone was in early modern city.
Yeah, because Luther put his own torment on the page and his own humanity out there because he was deeply, he had a deeply fraught relationship with his faith.
He never felt saved.
He knew his own heart well enough.
To doubt whether God could ever accept him.
And that's one of the reasons that he was made so anxious and upset by the pretensions of the Catholic Church is because he could not imagine that just going through these motions could possibly be enough to save a wretch like him.
And so that's why he ended up only being able to square that with his embrace of grace.
But even that was filled with contradictions.
His way of dealing with his own anxiety and neuroses was to constantly work through the contradictions in his thought.
It was what soothed his mania, but it also erupted in constant anger, constant violent interpretations of anyone who disagreed with him, and lots of scat and shit metaphors.
I mean, he spent his entire life basically trying to pass an idea through the anus of his mind.
Yeah.
He was also debilitating, actually like debilitatingly constipated for basically his entire adult life.
So that definitely had, that's the reason it was on his mind.
His brain was on his bowels for a lot of his life.
That gives you a lot more time to like write, you know?
You don't have to sit there like an idiot and shit.
So, okay, so like obviously, you know, that's his panache was the ass stuff, but But you know, like any good guy arguing stuff online, you have to come up with some bad guys, and you have to come up with a couple of little spicy conspiracy theories just to add a little pizzazz.
So like, what, you know, who were the bad guys?
Who were, like, what was this, the idea of a crypto-Catholic?
And, you know, like, how did this kind of belief system, I guess, like, around him develop?
During Luther's life it was mostly just the Catholics, although it's mostly like a generation later after Protestantism had been a going concern in places that were reformed, where the church had been reformed and split away, where this often paranoid, sometimes justified idea of Crypto-Catholicism came up.
And one of the places that you see it most fervently is in England, where after the church is reformed, especially after the brief moment where Mary comes to the throne in the 1650s and tries to recatholicize England and then only reigns for what, like five years or something like that?
And then Elizabeth comes on and basically seals the deal on the English Reformation.
They enter what is essentially a century of a kind of Red Scare-like Panic that anywhere lurking behind any door was a network of secret Catholics who would at any given moment possibly emerge en masse to encircle the delicate flowering of Protestantism in the island and, you know, do great violence to restore Catholicism.
And this goes on, you know, up through the middle of the 17th century.
And it's really an animating factor of Fear, paranoia, and motivation for a lot of the reformers to move even further into the more radical edges of their reform and the idea of we need to do it first before they do it to us.
Yeah, and there is a structure to it.
It's not just You know, it's the Church itself, and it's the Pope who becomes Antichrist in the conceptions of the Protestants.
Like, Luther starts off thinking that he can reason with the Pope, and then once the Pope doesn't agree with him, he's like, oh, Antichrist!
That was Luther's general attitude.
He was always assuming that if you read the Bible, and you read what he wrote about it, that you would come to the same conclusions as him.
And then when that failed to happen, Then it meant that you were a dupe, or a liar, or a demon, or the devil.
Yes.
You see that with his relationship with Jews.
In his first early writings about Jews, he's actually pretty sympathetic.
He says, of course they're not Christians.
Why would you leave your traditional faith and your community's faith for this corrupt whore of Babylon's church?
But when Jews persisted in continuing to be Jewish, now that they had the option of being Protestant, he starts writing really terrifyingly, hair-raisingly, anti-Semitic screeds about how they need to be, that they're, you know, a danger in the midst of Christendom and that they need to be wiped out.
Yeah, I guess that when the Jews, like, you know, didn't subscribe for five bucks a month or whatever, he was like, you know, that's... Well, he's like, well, fuck you then!
But in Europe, in Germany specifically, where the Reformation becomes this Cold War, where you have these porous borders between the places where Protestantism has been established and places where the Catholic Church still runs, you have this process once of counter-Reformation, once the Church sort of gets its act together, To sort of push back against the Reformation.
And like in the Habsburg lands in southern Germany and Austria, places that had been Protestantized over the first generations of the Reformation, were targeted for counter-Reformation and for recatholization.
And the people who did it were the Jesuits of the Society of Jesus, which had been essentially created by Ignatius Loyola as a way to purify the Church and bring together laity towards its advancement, but then was instrumentalized
by the papacy as an instrument of papal authority. And you saw Jesuits coming
into towns that had been Lutheran and bring back all the old parades and
festivals and feast days that had been wiped off the books. And that process did
give, in the minds of a lot of German Protestants, the idea that the Jesuits were
this secret organization that was working day and night to undermine
true religion wherever it could be found.
And so, you know, before we jump into the kind of QAnon aspect of all this and, like, the secret pamphlets and anonymous posters, I just wanted to talk a little bit about the topic of your podcast series, Hell on Earth, which is the 30-year war, right?
Like, that's what it refers to, the hell on earth.
That's pretty helly.
Yes.
It's a lot of hell going on.
It's what we're building to.
I mean, a little preview for people who are listening.
We're not actually going to get to the war itself until episode four, but you got to lay a lot of groundwork.
But in those middle chunks of the thing, that's what we're really focusing on is this 30 year really apocalyptic conflict that spreads over Central Europe in the middle of the 17th century.
Well, yeah, people are going to have to go check out the podcast for that.
I know the first episode's out.
It's really good.
And yeah, recommend it and we'll plug it again at the end.
So, all right.
Tell us a bit about Rosicrucianism and this 1614 mysterious pamphlet titled Discovery of the Fraternity of the Most Noble Order of the Rosy Cross.
So the thing to know is that this is about a hundred years after the Reformation starts, and by this point you've had a bunch of conflict occur.
Religious wars of one type or another have roiled the entire continent.
The Holy Roman Emperors fought the German princes in Germany, To a draw, basically.
The French are having a horrifyingly violent civil war between French Protestants and the ultra-Catholics.
The Dutch are in revolt against Spanish Catholic Habsburgs.
But in Germany itself, by this point, there has been this sort of exhausted status quo because there was a series of wars in the middle of the 16th century between the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the Protestant princes that ended in an agreement that whoever at that point is
with any religion, their domain will have that religion. Queus regio, queus religio,
I can never say it right.
Yes, queus regio, it's a Latin phrase. But so the places that had been
Lutheran were Lutheran, their churches were Lutheran, they appointed their
bishops and stuff, and places that were Catholic were Catholic, and
And Lutheranism was acknowledged as a state religion.
But in one key area of the Holy Roman Empire, which was on the western part of Germany by
the Rhine River, right by France and closer to Switzerland, which had been much more influenced
by the Calvinist strain of the Reformation than Lutheranism, there was a Calvinist prince,
the Elector of the Palatinate.
Because there were seven princes among all these princes of the Holy Roman Empire who had the right to elect the Holy Roman Emperor.
And one of them was the Elector of the Palatinate in the Rhineland.
at that time it was a young man named Frederick V who was surrounded by a
court full of very fervent Calvinists who were very much convinced that he was
the key to breaking open the remaining tyranny of the Catholic Church and
ushering in a new era. And just as this consensus is building, this anonymous
pamphlet is released in the German state of Kessel, which is north of the
Palatinate, that has no named author and is in vernacular German and is a
essentially a coming-out announcement by this organization called the Fraternity
of the Holy Cross of learned churchmen and men of reason who lived in a
city of light while also secretly living amongst the citizens of the Empire
who understood medical science, who could heal the sick, who could banish illness
and who were working towards The full illumination of Christendom and the overthrow of Catholic backwardness and that they were seeking a paladin, a knight to lead them.
And they explicitly tell the people in the pamphlet, don't come looking for us.
Right now we're still hidden, but we will come forward and we will lend our energies to this fight.
And then a year later, another pamphlet comes out called The Confession of the Laudable Fraternity of the Most Honorable Order of the Holy Cross, written by all the learned of Europe.
All of them?
All of them.
And that one gets more into condemning the Church and also sketching out this group of people who have the interest in ushering in the Second Coming, which is what all politics really is centered on at this point. Everything is good to the degree
that it's going to bring about Christ's return, and that's what these Rosicrucians promised to bring about.
And the pamphlets cause a huge stir all across Germany, and people start their own
like little Rosicrucian groups.
Like, they figure, well, if we can't go seeking them, then maybe if we act like them, they will get into contact with us.
And what's crucial is that all of this stuff is happening also in the court of Frederick V. Like, people in his court are reading this stuff.
We still don't know how much the court might have been involved in writing this stuff, either.
It could have been a propaganda Operation by the Palatine Court itself.
But one way or another, within three years, when the Bohemians throw their imperial representatives out the window at the defenestration of Prague, and deny the Holy Roman Emperor the kingdom of Bohemia, and vacate the throne, and start looking for someone else to take the throne, Frederick is there to accept it, which is what kicks off 30 years of horrifying bloodshed in Germany.
And so, Rosicrucianism, I mean, did they ever figure it out?
Who was behind it, and did they continue to put stuff out?
I mean, like, yeah, I want to know more about, like, the secret society, essentially, which seems almost more tangible than what Q is proposing.
Well, there's no real proof that there was any kind of society.
There are some plausible Suspects for who wrote it.
I think there are a couple of Lutheran churchmen who are the likely writers of it, but it was not to anyone's understanding of it.
There's no evidence that it was describing any actual group.
It was these people, the guys who wrote it, were doing it with, I think, with the hope of instigating something, of pushing people in a direction by giving them hope that their efforts would be met, you know, that there were people who could support them.
Or it was a joke.
Or a prank.
That's another theory.
That the whole thing was a goof.
And that they were doing it as a bit.
They were just bored and looking for a good time.
There is one more pamphlet that came out after this called The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosentroits.
And that is, it's just a description, a heavily allegorical description of a guy being led on a boat to this fantasy city of light where he has a wedding ceremony and the whole thing is, it's essentially in code.
And with the assumption that the learned mind would be able to find what the symbolism represents and then use it to further unlock the key to revelation.
That one could decipher the drop.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
You could bake it up.
You would think this stuff, you know, wouldn't have that much influence.
But I mean, I've we've covered the, you know, Order of the Solar Temple.
There were still, you know, kind of murder cults springing up in Europe in like the as late as the 90s and probably up until this day that have, you know, weird connections with the Rosicrucians and and their various kind of offshoots that that are like they're very much still there and like were kind of brought back into view in the 70s during the New Age like resurgence.
Well, that's what's so interesting to me about the idea that this idea of a Rosicrucian group could potentially have just been a propaganda effort by people surrounding, you know, a Protestant princely movement in the middle of the 17th century because it then becomes this tautological thing whereby inventing the idea of a secret society of learned men that are attempting to bring about essentially the storm Yeah.
That then for 400 years since, you have had people inspired by that idea essentially trying to do it themselves.
You know, and this even will dovetail into, you know, maybe not directly, but this kind of thinking dovetails into things like Masonic traditions a century later, and various other secret societies that have, you know, been a part of European and then New World American culture.
Uh, ever since, but you know, it is all sprinting out of this movement to push this 17th century, uh, European culture into what everybody assumed was happening, which was, which was, that was going to happen imminently, the end of days, some kind of final confrontation that, you know, this, this idea that the old world will be destroyed and a new perfected world will be created.
Imminently.
In people's lifetimes.
And perhaps all people needed was a little push.
And it is wild.
If Rosicrucianism did not really exist before the pamphlets, and there really is no evidence that it did, it definitely did afterwards.
You can trace a line from the people who were inspired by the Rosicrucian pamphlets to the scientific revolution.
The people who established the Royal Society in England that does a lot of the work of codifying our understanding of scientific process were people who were somewhere or another connected to Rosicrucian and occult groups that sprung up after the publication of the pamphlets.
So you have real magic here, like a real conjuring into existence something that did not exist beforehand.
And the instrument of it, the real magical crucible, is the printing press because You are engaging now with a population who can see in a printed material a reality and to take on faith the reality of what they're reading just as much as they would do with the things they see every day around them.
And that leads them to act in a way that brings into existence things that would otherwise be impossible to conceive of.
This is the birth of pilling.
I'm trying to imagine what a totally sleepless addict to the pamphlets would be like.
Would he be up at dawn waiting for the print house to open on the day he knows a new pamphlet's about to drop?
I mean, another element of this that we talk about in the series is The interplay between, you know, it's a little adjacent or tangential to it, but I think it's an interesting element here is the role of kind of alchemists and occult philosophers in the courts of Europe at this time.
And as Matt was saying, it's like at this moment, you know, the Scientific inquiry and occult inquiry are basically the same thing.
And a lot of the people you see working these kinds of inquiries, searching for things like the Philosopher's Stone, are also very plugged into this idea of, like the whole idea of the Philosopher's Stone and alchemy.
It's all also wrapped up in immunitizing this end of days like revelatory moment and in the process of doing these investigations of trying to turn base metals into gold and stuff like that as part of a larger religious program of creating a you know helping to to create or reify I mean, it is very much, you know, a recognizable impulse that we would see in the same thing as, you know, deciphering drops or whatever.
deciphering these tomes or Kabbalistic texts, trying to read the Bible backwards and upside down
to find the mathematical principle that will prove the existence of the Philosopher's Stone
and stuff like that.
I mean, it is very much a recognizable impulse that we would see in the same thing as,
you know, deciphering drops or whatever.
But also at the same time, they're making genuine scientific advancements.
They're figuring out new ways of smelting copper that will be used for hundreds of years.
They're making genuine advancements in pyrotechnic technology and stuff like that.
In 1669, this guy Henning Brandt discovered phosphorus by boiling a giant flask of urine for months on end.
Now, he wouldn't have done that if he didn't think that he was going to Create the Philosopher's Stone.
He wasn't gonna meet, like, angels who were gonna suck him off and tell him that he was a good guy.
There's no other reason to boil the giant flask of piss.
But he did it, and then one day it started glowing in the dark!
And that, that is magic.
And that's one of the funny things about, you know, to go all the way back to Luther, one of the things about Luther's life and works that's so kind of ironically funny is that, you know, so Luther's main thing is like looking at the structures of the millennia built up structures and rituals of the Catholic Church and then reading the Bible and saying, these two things don't match.
And I can read the Bible, And I can make my own interpretation of the Bible, and through reading the Bible and making my own interpretation, I've come up with this truth that I now present to you, the public, to free you from this.
And this idea that he gives out is, you can read the Bible and come to your own conclusions.
And then immediately, a bunch of other people start reading the Bible and coming to their own conclusions and, you know, further reforming the church, and Luther's like, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, stop.
You can't do that.
I already did it.
I did the reading and reinterpretation of the Bible and came to the correct conclusion.
Yeah.
There's no further way to go.
In that respect, Luther did not understand something that many of the Catholic theologians and leaders did, because they said, they were explicit, people should not be reading the Bible.
This is dangerous.
It is dangerous to give common people this book because they're going to start coming
to their own conclusions and they're going to be their own conclusions.
What Luther was very confident, "No, once people hear my interpretation, which it resonates
with me and therefore is true, that it's going to become universalized."
And that was instantly disproven and it just opened this, yes, this Pandora's box of
interpretation.
And all of a sudden you've got peasants in southern Germany who've been getting completely
screwed over by the reimposition of feudal power in an attempt to wring more from them
in an era of declining agriculture who decide, "Actually, all this stuff means that we don't
have to listen to any of these motherfuckers."
And you see Luther sort of helping inspire this peasant war that starts in 1525 that
spreads throughout a huge chunk of Germany and which Luther writes a screed in condemnation
of where he says, "Against the looting, murdering horde of peasants."
And he calls for the rightful authorities of the empire to crush them.
And that ends up costing him a lot of his popular base.
After he publishes that book, he actually gets rocks thrown at him at one public appearance.
But he of course writes to his friend, "You know what?
I think I did the right thing.
And if they don't agree, then that's because they don't know.
And I do.
And suck it.
The way you describe Martin Luther, he seems like a kind of a naive, obnoxious, logic and reason guy.
Where he just believes if he lays out his argument and he cites the text and he cites his sources, then clearly people will all fall in line behind him because he has presented an airtight case and no one with a functioning mind who is morally good could possibly deviate from his conclusions.
Yes, but of course, as with all these people, that logical progression is based on an absolute volcano of personal emotion.
He is wildly emotionally attached.
His relationship to God is this constant struggle of alienation and fear and love, and the formula that he creates is how he negotiates those emotions.
But those are his emotions, you know?
And it is his naivete, I guess you'd put it, to assume that that would translate to other people who've had other experiences.
He does that colloquy, is it with Zwingli?
Yeah, Zwingli.
On the re-Eucharist.
Yeah, where they're debating the Eucharist because, you know, part of his bit is that these seven sacraments that are prescribed by the Church don't really have... certain ones of them don't have certain biblical justifications that we should do away with them, and then that's immediately taken forward by the Calvinist Reformers, or even further Reformers like Zwingli, to be like, well, the Eucharist shouldn't exist either.
There's no Biblical justification for that.
And Luther has this colloquy with it where he's arguing in favor of it, even though all of his other arguments based on logic say that these things shouldn't exist.
And Zwingli's like, so wait, wait, wait, wait.
All of your logic holds except your one argument of because you feel it's true, it should still exist.
And Martin Luther has to admit, yeah, basically, because I feel it to be true.
In my heart, it should still be around.
But still, I'm right.
I'm right about everything else.
I feel a true presence in the Eucharist.
Like, he did not believe in the full transubstantiation of the Catholic Church, but he believed that there was a real presence in the Eucharist.
And the Zwingliites and then the later Calvinists, they might hold on to it, but their insistence was, this is just bread, this is just wine, it has no... Because otherwise, you're shitting God, and they can't have that.
They take the logic thing to the next level of logic.
That's Kelvin's deal is to drain emotion from the entire process.
or at least to create a fully, like, logically structured relationship with God that can
replace that, the subjective religious experience that previous generations have held.
And so they insisted on there's no presence of anything in the Eucharist.
But Luther, even though at this time the whole project depended on unity and splitting with
the Swiss, only undermined their greater interest in resisting Catholicism, he just couldn't
He could not bring himself to deny the real presence that he felt in the Eucharist.
And I think that that is kind of an, it is right Travis, like an eternal archetype of very often that beneath these, uh, the kind of hardcore facts and logics guys, you can really, you can really pull out this very palpable sense of a quivering Like an emotional figure on an edge, and I'm thinking of somebody here, like maybe a Jordan B. Peterson type, where his presentation is, these are real truths that can be arrived at through only the power of the mind and logic, but you can feel beneath it the fervent, quivering, emotional tempest that generates that need to put it all into a logical lattice, a logical framework at every moment.
I mean, I think he's recreated, at the very least, the constipation just from benzos and meat.
Yes, well, there is a similar... The amount of not shitting.
I mean, that was key to a lot of medieval and early modern politics, is that at the higher social levels here, these people are never shitting.
Because peasant diets during this period are largely grain-based.
They're basically eating grain, a little bit of vegetables and fruit.
But one of the marks of high status is that you're basically eating meat for every meal.
So these guys were never shitting.
Wait, the guys at the top were never shitting?
Yeah, yeah.
So they, yeah, so they didn't have to, you know, figure out whatever the equivalent of wiping was.
They didn't have to deal with that.
They didn't have to deal with the storage of lots of shit.
I'm thinking back to- I mean, if you're at the top, someone, you're going into the shitting room and you're probably just shitting on the carpet and someone else has to come in and clean it.
Look, my understanding of shitting at this time is basically, basically traced back to, uh, uh, Stephen Beastley's, uh, Incredible Cross Sections.
Okay.
Where, where they have the pictures of the castles and me and my little brother would always be like, oh, and that's where all the shit is.
They would have it illustrated.
Yeah.
Nobody else read these?
Okay.
This is way before our time period, but there is a great moment in German history where a... Oh, the Erfurt latrine disaster.
I think this is in the 1100s or 1200s.
1200s, yeah.
Where a German prince assembles all of his nobles.
It's the electors.
It was the meeting of the top princes of the Holy Roman Empire.
They met at Erfurt, Germany.
And they meet in the big meeting room, which is an old wooden floor, and they all get in there, and the floor collapses directly into the latrine, and 50 of them drown to death in liquid shit.
Oh my god!
Yeah, that's cool.
That's the first sliming, dude.
That's some Nickelodeon fun.
Oh my goodness, this set us on the course that we're on now!
The thing is, back forward, every top leader that you read about in this period, they're basically all beset by debilitating hemorrhoids.
To the point where multiple Holy Roman Empires need to be mostly carried around, emperors need to be carried around on litters because they can't walk right because of their hemorrhoids.
They got hemorrhoids, they got gout, and this is all from eating nothing but meat.
Yes.
It's a big deal among the noble class of the period.
That's amazing.
And the modern masculinity influencers.
So we've come full circle.
Yes, exactly.
They're trying to recreate that noble tradition in all the wrong ways.
I mean, that is pretty explicitly what they're fantasizing about.
That's the return that they want to do is to the promise of universal aristocracy that America originally dangled in front of immigrants.
I believe that we will one day not shit at all.
But didn't Liver King say that because of his diet he shits so cleanly that he doesn't have to wipe?
He doesn't have to wipe, which is a lie because he doesn't shit.
He said he doesn't do steroids either.
I mean, I don't know if I buy any Liver King is selling.
Yeah, I guess that's true.
He was caught, man.
He was caught.
He had to admit it.
He did like a mea culpa.
What if he also in that press release had to be like, and yes, my shits are messy.
I gotta use half a roll.
So, you know, you spoke there briefly of Germany, but during the 30-year war, you mentioned there were some witch panics as well, so some proper, like, satanic panic stuff.
Was that, like, the Catholics saying there's a Protestant witch, or was this, like, a third group of women that were neither, you know, of these kind of religious persuasions fighting each other in the war?
Well, it happened in both Protestant and Catholic areas, although most of the most intense witch panics happened in places that had been Protestant and that were being re-Catholicized.
And that's because, well you had grassroots witch panics all throughout this area because
it's the end of the world.
I mean as you were saying, this is a nightmare descending on the world and someone has to
take the blame.
And of course there's no political mechanism to point the blame upward so it can only be
a search for scapegoats within the community.
And it's not cloaked in confessional language.
It's not like, "Oh, you're secretly a Protestant."
You're in league with the devil.
Forget all the religious bullshit.
You are just direct in contact with Satan.
You signed his book.
You're doing Congress with him.
You're doing rituals to make men's dicks not work.
Those kinds of accusations were flying everywhere.
The places where they led to large-scale persecutions and burnings and torture Is where local authorities took them seriously.
And that tended to be places where local authorities had an interest in using the witch panics, using the procedures of them to undermine resistance to their imposition of rule.
So it was instrumentalized by power wherever power saw it as useful in places where local authorities felt secure and were threatened by this.
There is always a risk when you start taking seriously these accusations that somebody important is going to get accused.
And so it's always a danger of undermining existing authority.
So in a lot of spots, the local authorities would put a lid on it and say, no, we're not doing that.
So the confessional relationship did shape it, but it was largely It's extent was determined by the response of the local elites.
And it was also something that was spurred by the printing press.
Because by this time, the Malice Maleficarium, the Hammer of Witches, had been through dozens of printings and had been around for generations.
And it was considered by many literate people in Germany to be the manual for understanding what witchcraft was, how to identify it, and then how to prosecute it.
And it was the product of this Catholic priest named Kramer who was kicked out of town for being too fervid of a witch accuser at a time when witch trials were relatively rare.
And then he said, well, I'll prove I'll show you.
And he wrote this book, which was never accepted by the Catholic Church, but which became sort of a de facto manual in a lot of the courts of the time and in a lot of
the secular courts. And so, you know, it creates this body of pseudo-knowledge that
becomes what people refer to when horror comes to their community and they need to make sense of it.
And during the Thirty Years' War, in one specific region in southern Germany, I forget the exact
town right now, in the late 1620s where this really kicks up, and it basically becomes
one of these things where, again, it's a recently re-catholicized area.
Um, and.
And it is supported by the local authorities and it becomes one of these things that once you start taking it seriously at a local authority level, it becomes kind of an exponential process.
And especially once you accept that anyone in the community can be targeted.
So the places that it really sprung up, they accepted that all up and down the social ladder from literally like, you know, the fattest, the wealthiest.
I was looking through some of the records of the burnings and it would be like the fattest man in town, the wealthiest man in town's wife.
Some people we don't know that we found on the street outside town.
It's like literally everyone from like beggars to the top.
And the way that they would go through these investigations is you basically get accused of being a witch, they bring you in to the specially built witch prison that they made in this town, they torture you until you admitted of being a witch, and then tortured you until you led them through town and pointed out the five other people you knew were witches.
And so in that way, it became this exponential panic that each person that got accused led inevitably
Oh.
through torture to five more people getting accused who then themselves led to five more people getting accused.
And it basically became, yeah, a panic in a place that burned for a period of time
until even higher authorities, I believe the emperor had to come in and shut it down,
you know, said that we can't let this go on any longer.
But yeah, it is this ramification of this crisis coming to town or being beset on these areas without any individual recourse in any political way.
So shifting for a moment from Germany to England, who are the fifth monarchists?
So, that's another Q-esque group.
I think of them in similar ways.
So, the English Civil War happens around—it's concomitant with the Thirty Years' War.
It starts with the Bishop's Wars as the Thirty Years' War is in the middle of its third century, or third decade, and it continues until after the Treaty of Westphalia, and it results in the establishment of this commonwealth led by Oliver Cromwell.
And the Parliament that carried it out were largely Puritans, which was what they called the strictest Calvinists in England.
And they were, of course, all seeking the end of days like every other good Christian was.
And this one segment of them, which included people who were highly placed in the army and in Parliament, decided that They were bringing about the fifth monarchy, because in the book of Daniel, which is one of the apocalyptic prophecy books, it describes how four empires must rise and fall before Christ's return.
And the fourth monarchy was Rome.
And of course they were talking about, you know, Rome, Rome.
But in the 1650s, they looked at their Bible and they decided, oh, when we executed Charles, because they beheaded the king of England, Charles I, when we executed Charles, we ended the fourth monarchy, which means we are Initiating the fifth monarchy and that we are bringing about Christ's return.
And a lot of them looked at Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell, who was not a fifth monarchist, but was super sympathetic to them to a degree.
I mean, because they thought he was Moses.
They thought he was going to bring them to the promised land.
But then when his government failed over and over again to create any sort of stable legislative machinery, They became disillusioned with Cromwell, and some of their leaders eventually staged an abortive revolt against him, which was pretty easily repressed.
And then the last gasp was another revolt that happened after the return of the Stuarts.
But yeah, they were the most apocalyptic-minded of that revolutionary generation.
And they also had a couple of failed low-level coups.
Yeah, failed insurrections, yeah.
But it is interesting, like the Rosicrucians, you know, who would have been, you know, 30 years before, that you find in many of these courts highly, you know, these leaders, Cromwell, Frederick V, who may not themselves be a party to these thoughts, but find themselves surrounded by people all pushing in a direction that is heavily heavily influenced by a thought process of apocalyptic
restoration.
That they will, that they the leaders are being influenced by people who are
convinced that their sovereign is going to be the one to usher in the end of
days and the restoration of a new heavenly kingdom on earth.
Geotis.
Yeah, everybody just wants to be standing in the circle when the sky opens up.
I'm down.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, what's the alternative?
You just die alone?
That sucks.
Yeah, that's no fun.
Yeah.
Yeah, before the printed word, it was even more grim.
At least you could read, like, I don't know, some diss track by Martin Luther around this period, you know?
Yeah, what else were you doing at the time?
Like, talking about, like, how bad it smelled and, like, if you were gonna, like, eat enough?
Yeah, pretty much.
So, guys, yeah, tell us a little bit about what led you to creating Hell on Earth and what people could expect from the series.
The show is my suggestion and at the top level why I thought about it is because it's cool and fun and the board itself has a lot of cool wacky characters in it and a bunch of gnarly battles and it's really complicated and there's a lot to dig into just like figuring out how to tell The story of it.
But then as, you know, we started conceiving of that, we looked into it and found all the stuff that we're talking about now, all these resonances with a current moment.
And that goes from all of the stuff that we're here on your show to talk about all this, the ideas that we find resonant with, you know, your topic matter of this new communication medium.
Causing a revolution in the way that people conceive of themselves, conceive of information, conceive of their ability to find and process new information in a way that makes them consider themselves to be the smartest people that the earth has ever produced.
But then also, you know, it is all of this social ferment is in the aftermath of One of the worst plagues that the world has ever seen.
There is a climate factor to this.
This entire period, or the 30 Years War, takes place during and immediately after a climate event known as the Little Ice Age, in which the world got noticeably colder.
For a period.
And this comes from a variety of factors, including a measured diminishing of sunspots at the time, like adding to the apocalyptic fervor of the moment, the sun literally got dimmer.
And then there's also, it is theorized that the Little Ice Age could have an anthropogenic cause in the idea that new world contact had just been made, and suddenly, because of disease, Yeah, like 50 million hectares of cultivated land in the New World's return to wilderness, which could have created a carbon sink of types, affecting global climate.
But basically, because of this, the winter got much longer in Northern Europe, and It caused massive agricultural failures, which led to this moment of increased social dislocation.
And then on top of this all, you have these across Europe, these sovereigns and political entities that are engaged in this critical crisis of gridlock and authority, that the previous structure of feudalism was no longer a workable social and economic project in Europe.
And maybe Matt can talk about that element for a second.
Yeah, because you have an acute crisis hitting a totally stagnant political world.
They only knew how to sustain their social world through the practice of feudal expropriation at a time when the agricultural underpinnings of that were dissolving in front of their faces.
So, they reacted really the only way they could, which was by trying to jockey for power and position amongst themselves and to wage war.
And in the process of waging that war, they were building these structures of social and economic power that end up totally overthrowing the power that they were trying to protect, but without anybody in power explicitly seeking that outcome.
And I think that that's what really resonates for me about the current moment and the way that it relates is that they created a world that we're now living at the end of in the sense that we have reached, like the capitalism that was unleashed by that process has reached now global totality and global hegemony and now is entering into a similar exogenous crisis generated by it and is similarly incapable of self-correction.
But they thought they were living through the end of the world, and they were, but they were living through the end of one world.
And I think that we get fixated on the apocalypse, but the world's always ending, and a new world is always being built.
And I think that's what I think is most interesting about studying this, is just watching how while people were trying to bring about the actual end of days, they were building an entirely new world that their descendants would live in, and which would be Fully alien to them, but which is still part of the human pageant.
We're locked in that same process as well.
Plus, Archibuses, Halberds, Gustavus Adolphus, you know.
Cool army stuff.
Three weapons.
It's cool because the military action in the 30 Years War is wild because it still has a lot of remnants of high medieval warfare.
Guys are still wearing the full suits of armor.
They've got maces and flails and warhammers, but they've also got muskets.
They've also got cannons.
It's this hybrid beast, this transitional fossil of military science.
And watching people try to come to terms with it is fascinating.
And one of the guys who does the most with that is this fucking Swedish dude, Gustavus Adolphus, who just comes roaring across the Baltic and just owning everyone for over a year during this period that Saw Sweden as one of the great powers of Europe, with its own colonies in the United States.
So that's, you know, a lot of stuff there.
But the main point is, there's a lot of stuff going on in this series that we're hoping to, you know, kind of, you know, hook people in with the, you know, the sword and sorcery kind of Game of Thrones stuff.
But really, what we're trying to get across is that this world and our world, they're not so different.
Indeed.
Absolutely.
And where can people find the series and where should they go?
The first episode of Hell on Earth is now out for free on the Chappo Trap House free feed.
Free, ad-free, available to everyone.
You can listen to it right now at SoundCloud.com slash Chappo Trap House.
We also have a great little mini site that our wonderful designer John White put together if you want to find all the information about it, including the first episode linked right there on the site.
And an interactive atlas because goddamn describing How the Holy Roman Empire works is almost impossible over audio medium, so we have a map right there that you can click on, find out all about where things were and who was associated with which realm, and find the podcast and find out about our credits.
That's hellonearth.chapotraphouse.com.
That's probably where I should direct people to.
All subsequent episodes of the show, which will be nine more narrative episodes where we, in a kind of scripted way, lay out the rest of the story we wanted to tell, and then we're going to do a few interview episodes afterwards that dig into specific themes with some experts in the field.
All of those will be exclusively for subscribers to Chapo Trap House on our Patreon, patreon.com slash chapotraphouse.
So subscribe today if you want to listen to the rest of the series.
It's going to be great.
Can you do, like, Google Street View on the map to see the hemorrhoids?
You know, they tend to read those out of the court portraits that they paint of these guys.
Yeah, Cromwell famously asked for his portrait to be made worse than all, but he did not specify anal ones.
The website's great, the series is really well put together, and I look forward to following it as it progresses across the ten episodes, right?
Mm-hmm.
All right, fellas, thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you.
Thank you, guys.
Hell on Earth comes out every Wednesday, and you can go check it out at patreon.com slash choppotraphouse.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
And when you sub, you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent.
For everything else, we've got a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the Halibird, uh, through Julian's skull, bless you and keep you.
It's not like Haley Berry, it's like Halbert, I think.
Halbert?
Okay, hold on.
No, too late, I'm putting this in.
Listener, until next week, uh, may the Iron Greatsword of Eternal Flame, uh, through Julian's skull, bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto QQ.
Very few people understand the truth about who founded the world's western secret societies and why.
Google will try to tell you that they're just a bunch of glorified fraternities, nothing to worry about.
Some conspiracy theorists say they began as a way to enslave the world with black magic.
Here's what really happened.
For thousands of years, sacred knowledge of the universe was carefully preserved in ancient mystery schools.
Until egomaniac rulers, kings, despots, popes, emperors, realized that the best way to gain and maintain power was to capture or erase that knowledge.
In order to preserve and protect ancient traditions, mystics and wise men were forced into hiding under the cover of some of these organizations, like the Knights Templar or the Rosicrucians.
