Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Helena Blavatsky: the woman who inspired the Nazis, and Gwyneth Paltrow

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

In part four of this series, Robert concludes his conversation with Jamie Loftus about Helena Blavatsky.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Oh, welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where I brag about how much better the weather is right now where I am than where Jamie is. Somehow this podcast has gotten 500 episodes. What an incredible thing for a friend to do. You know, actually, I do think that all of my friends regularly do brag about the superiority of their climate, and I don't appreciate it. Well, everyone used to say that and brag about how nice it was in Southern California, but then we killed the planet. Yeah, I missed that era of Southern California. I've only lived in the dystopian one. Remember June Gloom? Oh, that was the time. What is June Gloom?

That's when you would get like a little bit like a week or two of cool weather in June. It would be like, no, it'd be like almost the whole month of June. It would be gray, and it would be like in the 60s. It was lovely. It was like my entire life until you know, the planet couple of years ago. Yeah. When I when I moved to LA, it was in like June, and I had I left Texas where it was like hot. I drove through Phoenix where it was unlivable for human beings. God. And then I get to Los Angeles and in Culver City, it was like the first three weeks I was there was like 68 at the height of every day and like partly cloudy, which is perfect. But then we killed the planet. And you know,

specifically who killed the planet, Jamie Loftus. Oh, we're going to we're going to pit this on each blots full stop. Helena Blavatsky is responsible for the oil and gas industry. Yeah. Hellblot. That's my new suggestion. Hellblot. Yeah. She's not, but she is responsible for World War Two. And that's today's story. So in 1878, she leaves New York for bomb, eventually Bombay India, right? They stop in England along the way. They set up some some theosophical offices. Everyone's going to yell at me about how I say yeah, like migrates from the US to the UK. But she's the only one that continues east from there. So I'm interested in what happens. Yeah. So she winds up in Bombay,

and she eventually moves on from from there a little bit. But yeah, Blavatsky and Olcott bring basically like kind of frame it as like we are returning like traditional Hindu and Buddhist beliefs to India by like setting up the theosophical society here. So eventually she, yeah, they land in Bombay and they partner with an organization, an organization called the Arya Samaj movement, which had been founded a few years earlier by a guy named Swami Saraswati, who was a Hindu holy man who was really angry about the Christianization of his country because the British bring in missionaries, right, who are trying to like recruit people to be Christians. So there is a lot of there's actually a lot of folks in India who like what Blavatsky's saying

and doing, even though like one of the things I think that is worth understanding about Hinduism is that it is not it is not a religion with the kind of strict doctrine that you get in a lot of like Christian religions where it's like, no, this is like, I having spent a lot of time in India, one of the fun experiences you have there is when you like are eating with with Indian folks and like just asking them about like Rama and Sita and all these like different gods and goddesses and mythical stories and stuff. Every time you like if different groups of people are telling you the same story, it's a little bit different every time, right, because there's all these different like variations. And that's one of the things that's like so neat about talking to people

in that part of the world about religion. And so there's not there's not as much of a you would expect maybe kind of a backlash, but instead, it's more people happy that like, Oh, these Westerners actually like our religion. And like, yeah, they they're interpreting it in weird ways. And I hadn't heard that or that, but like, even in the app that there is like interest. Yeah, they're coming here to engage with our religion rather than to convert us to theirs, which is like people like that, right? Like, of course, they like that, you know, it's not sure. It's a perfectly understandable thing. And this guy, Saraswati, he wants to push his people back to their like traditional spiritual beliefs and not the shit the British were peddling. And Blavatsky and Ocott,

they're basically trying to de-Christianize the West and bring the Vedas there. So yeah, this is actually pretty popular. Like it, not that like a lot of Indians don't become theosophists, but like there's there's people like in the country who are like, Oh, this is a nice trend to see. Um, so the society does grow around the world. There's something like 130 offices around the world by the time she dies. Like it spreads in a manner that's not why again, there's a lot of similarities between theosophy and Scientology, not in terms of the belief system, because number one, much less of a toxic thing, like in she is a less toxic person than Elron Hubbard, I will give her credit for that. Amazing yardstick. Yeah, incredible yardstick. But the theosophical

theosophy in general is not like it is not like Scientology. It is not based entirely around abuse and like secrets and violence. But it does the way that it spreads. There's a lot of similarities between how science because because Hubbard is looking at Blavatsky and her example when he's setting up his secret society, religion thing. It is kind of wild to see that like ripple effect of like Blavatsky is essentially asking like, can I do spiritualism but worse? And then Elron Hubbard's like, can I do theosophy amongst other things but worse? And then you just spiral out from there. Yeah. So that's cool. Blavatsky and Olcott launched a journal, The Theosophist, and she continues to orchestrate control over the movement by having her masters send letters to

Olcott and others, particularly there will be like high ranking Indian way in terms of like their their position in society, like Indian folks, people with money and like high ranking British colonial administrators who will like come by and like be interested in what she's talking about and she'll have her masters reach out to them. Sometimes when she's feeling lazy and in an argument with someone, she'll just claim that they've contacted her telepathically directly to like in an argument like, ah, no, could who me just like DM to me, man. And like, you're wrong. You got to stop saying this. It's pretty funny. Stawazinski continues quote, the master soon began exchange and correspondence through Blavatsky, of course,

with an Englishman living in India named Alfred Percy Sinit. Sinit was a writer and editor-in-chief of The Pioneer, an English daily newspaper. Soon after Blavatsky's arrival in India, he became an avid theosophist. In 1882, he published a book consisting of his correspondence with master Kuthumi. Soon after the books released, a gentleman named Richard Kittle publicly accused master Kuthumi of plagiarism. Kittle insisted that the great Mahatma for copied large parts of his book published a few years earlier. In response, madam Blavatsky released a letter written by the master in which Kuthumi helped to explain the misunderstanding. It was not an act of deliberate plagiarism, wrote Mahatma, but a result of overlapping astral planes. One day Kuthumi was

reading the Chronicle of the Universe, which contains all of the information that ever existed. The master came across Kittle's text there among billions of others and failed to identify it. Now, this is the same argument Elon Musk makes when he steals people's memes on Twitter. So we've been recording this episode for 500 hours and you just really wanted to say that, didn't you? I did. It is really funny because the Mahatma papers, we'll talk a little more about them later, the Mahatma paper is like a huge moment in Theosophy where like they release these, it's basically kind of like the Silmarillion of Theosophy, but it's a huge amount of it is plagiarized by Richard Kittle because she's a play, like all she's doing is taking other people's

stuff and rewriting it and she gets kind of lazy. And then when she gets called on, it's like, oh, this is Kuthumi's fault. He fucked up because he was just like all of the books that have ever existed or will ever exist are like stored on the astral plane. And he was just like reading it and like failed to, he didn't see like the name on the side when he was like sending it to me. It's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. That's fucking wild. Wow. Yeah, he did, he did, he did the occult equivalent of like copy pasting a Wikipedia page to like turn an essay in, like the great Kuthumi. And got away, well, I mean, I guess it was accused of plagiarism. Does that go anywhere? Yes, it does. We will talk about that a bit. But initially, the rapid growth of the faith and the

constant flood of attention, yeah, like this is, these are like the big cracks that start to form, right? So as quickly as things go well for them, shit starts to go badly, because she is, I think she's fundamentally kind of lazy, right? Like this is a lazy fuckup. I mean, it does sound like, it's funny. I do feel like this is like a very interesting personality type that has existed in various forms, but like someone who has endless energy to self promote, but no energy for original thought, which is like, why? And it's interesting because we have talked about all of the tricks that she does. We're not going to get into now, we're going to talk about how she did them. And it's also really lazy. Like, it's much, much like less effortful than you might guess initially.

And that's what, like part of what I find fascinating, like whatever, like societal shit aside about the like physical mediums is like the amount of effort people would like the Katie King thing, like for the, it took a lot of work. It was a lot of work to make shit like that happen. Yeah, but it doesn't sound, but she was not putting in hours. No, other people are though. So. Oh, okay. She's outsourcing. Yeah. So in India, her two most again, she's like basically in order to trick people with these, you know, they're dropping the letter, they're doing all these other tricks. She has followers who are helping her carry them out. And in India, the two people who are doing this the most are a couple who we've talked about briefly, Emma and Alex Colum,

like C-O-U-L-O-M-B. They're married and coffee. Yeah, like the coffee. She had met them back in Cairo in 1871. If you remember, she had that like failed spiritual society back then. So she gets to know them then and they kind of stay in contact for years. And by the time she moves to India and sets up shop, they'd gotten themselves stranded in Sri Lanka and Blavatsky paid them to like paid to bring them to Bombay and she gives them jobs in the society. And at first they're like kind of her indentured servants to like work off this debt, they're cooking and they're cleaning. And because they owe her and like don't really have many other options, she starts enlisting them to help her carry out tricks on people to raise more money for the society. A contemporary source.

Literally like carnival tactics. Oh, yes, yes. A contemporary source who like eventually gets this information because like the Columns break from her. We'll talk about that in a bit. Reverend George Patterson writes, quote, readers of the occult world, which was a popular magazine at the time, are familiar with phenomena in which Madame Blavatsky's cigarettes and cigarette papers play an important part. In the presence of the inquiring company, a cigarette or a cigarette paper is peculiarly marked or torn across so as to be recognizable again. It is then dispatched by the agency of occult forces to some distant place. And the inquires are told will they will find it. Telegraphic communication renders the verification of the exploit easy. So she will like be sitting

in a room full of people to like, Hey, I'm going to prove to you the shit's real. I'm going to telepathically send this cigarette to England, right? So she'll market or something. And then she'll she'll like disappear it. A little sleight of hand thing. And then she'll telegraph like whoever it is in England, who is like in on the the mark with her and be like, Hey, did you what did you like look behind the the look right look behind the bust of this philosopher in your library? And they'll be like, Oh, I found a cigarette that's ripped in this way. And everyone will be like, Oh, my God, she teleported the cigarette, you know. Okay, okay. Yeah. I mean, that is not an effortless, you know, that's that's not effortless. But it's also she is not the primary source of effort on

that, right? Right. There's a lot of delegating. Yeah, that is interesting, though. That's, I mean, there's a lot of shit that you're like, yeah, she's, she's, she's making like all of the really successful occult gurus, she's making the most of like cutting edge technology at the time. Now, thanks to letters later revealed between Blavatsky and the columns, we know exactly how this trick was achieved. In one letter, she complains that a half cigarette that had been left behind to be found by a theosophist named Captain Maitland in India had been like cleaned up by a servant or something. And so when he was telegrammed to like, when they telegram to tell him like where to find it, it wasn't there because one of his servants had cleaned it up. And Blavatsky

was enraged. She wrote back to the Colombs quote, I am sorry for it for Captain Maitland as a theosophist and spent money over it. They want to tear the cigarette paper in two and keep one half. And I will choose the same pieces with the exception of the Prince's statue for our enemies might watch and see the cigarette fall and destroy it. I enclose an envelope with a cigarette paper in it. I will drop another half of a cigarette behind the Queen's head where I dropped my hair the same day or Saturday. And yes, she would also drop bits of her hair behind like things to be like, look, the hair was like it was teleported by by me or my masters to like show favor to you so you can give us money. Yeah, those little physical confirmations that you're a powerful spiritual

being is always kind of like a freaky thing. Yeah, this is unrelated. But every time, do you ever think about how Rasputin filled his walls with hair? What? No, I didn't know that. It's something I don't actually I mean, it may not be true. It's a fact that I learned in high school in a class that I took that was that like a house that Rasputin had lived in at some point at like the height of his power after he had died. They were like demolishing the house and the walls were full of humid hair. You mean Rasputin, Ra Ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen. Yeah, lover of the Russian Queen. That one. Yeah, okay. Wow. That cat who really was gone. Who really liked filling his walls with hair. I have not heard that. I hope it's true though. I hope it's

true too. Because I do the same thing. Well, it's like, yeah, anytime I hear, you know, anytime I hear about a hair related occult thing, I'm like, oh, like the Rasputin's hair walls. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Whomst among us doesn't stuff human hair into our walls as a hobby. Well, me for one. But that's a young, keeps me young. So yeah, exactly. It's like jogging. So another one of her cons was to have a letter materialized and the air above a mark and again, it'll be like set up in like a ceiling fan or something. So it like falls from the sky. And of course, these would be we've talked about this a lot filled with instructions from Koot, Hume or Master Moria. In another letter, she wrote to the Colombs ahead of a visit with two wealthy

Theosophists. She told them, quote, my dear friends, in the name of heaven, do not think that I have forgotten you. I have not even time to breathe. That is all. We are in the greatest crisis and I must not lose my head. I cannot and dare not write anything to you. But you must understand that it is absolutely necessary that something should happen in Bombay while I am here. These two, the two, well, like rich Marx must see one of the brothers and receive a visit from him. The brothers being her master and Koot, Hume. And if possible, the first must receive a letter which I shall send. But to see them, the brothers is still more necessary. The letter must fall on his head like the first. And I am begging Koot, Hume to send it to him. We must strike while the

iron is hot act independently of me, but in the habits and customs of the brothers. If something should happen in Bombay that would make all the world talk, it would be grand. But what? The brothers are inexorable. Oh, dear Mr. Colombs, save the situation and do what they ask you. So, yeah, I mean, that's pretty like clear what she's doing, right? Yeah, no, I mean, that's and it is, I mean, it does sound like pretty durational too. I think it's like part of what makes it impressive is like the same people are coming back and back and back and, you know, they have to keep them interested to keep the money going. You got to, you got to keep giving them these bits of personal connection with Master Moria and Koot, Hume. That's what they want. That's what they're paying for.

Yeah. And also, I feel like it's what because like shit like this was like formed in like, or at least with spirituals have formed in like out of a distaste for like the amount of like shame and rejection that comes with Christian religion. So that so much of this kind of shit is built around like confirmation and affirming things you already believe. Yes. Yes. But that creates this whole pressure of like, because I am claiming my religion is backed by science, I have to have things go and go and go in increasingly big and impressive ways in a way that is just like completely unsustainable. So that's that's that's fascinating to hear that she's using such elaborate tactics to kind of keep that up. It is also funny. The first like

line, two lines of that sound just like a Democratic Party fundraising letter. We are in the greatest crisis. I haven't had time to breathe. I must not lose my head. Nancy Pelosi, I'm shitting myself. Please open email. So other letters she sent during her travels in India make it clear exactly how these summonings were handled logistically. Everyone here is madly anxious to see something. I shall write you from Amritsar or Lahore. My hair will do well in the old Tower of Sion, but you should put it in an envelope, a sachet of some peculiar kind and hang it while you where you hide it. Or even in Bombay, select a good spot and write to me at Amritsar and then after the first month

to Lahore. So she's like, be saying ahead of me, go set up tricks and tell me where they are so I can like go into some guy's house and be like, you check behind the bureau. There's a thing for you from it's a lock of my own hair, you know, I teleported it to you. That's like, I mean, I guess she's kind of doing her own thing at this point. She's definitely doing her own thing. Yeah. Yeah, like the hair stuff. This is not like, this is her legitimate innovation. Hair stuff from across an ocean is not should I have encountered before. But she's doing it. I mean, this is closer to just like elaborate magic tricks. Yes, she is doing elaborate magic tricks. Yes. Well, and again, she is an occultist. She's not a spiritualist, right? Like the spiritualists

didn't really do stuff like this. So one of Blavatsky's favorite tricks involved a shrine to Koothoomi in the Theosophical Society's headquarters. It had locking doors and it was like against a wall. So on a regular basis, they'd open the shrine, people could like pray to the master, burn incense, give them their requests in the form of letters, which would be like teleported to him in Tibet. But the shrine had a secret back door built into it so that when it was locked, a society member could like add things to the case. So periodically when they were guests, they would like have tea and someone would break a saucer or a teacup or even a kettle, right? And then they would take the pieces as a demonstration of Koothoomi's power. They'd put

them in the shrine and they'd lock it and when they'd open it, a brand new one would be sitting. Yeah, it would be repaired magically, right? Yeah. Sent from Tibet. Yes. Yeah, that's a good use of... That's like what I love about some of this stuff. It was so easy back there. What a good use of someone's energy and time to fix a plate, to make a point. Yeah. Again, they're never using these magical powers to like stop genocide in the Congo that's going on in this period or like, yeah, solve any of these mass, like any problems. It's just like, I fixed a saucer. If you have a chipped teacup, look. Koothoomi's got that shit. Yeah, Koothoomi can... The civil war going on in China that's killing tens of millions of people. Koothoomi does not

have that shit, but like Koothoomi's got this saucer. He's going to fix the fuck out of that stuff. But one fictional character. That's right. Solve that sort of systemic issue. So in one of her letters to the Colombs planning this con, the saucer con, Blavatsky made it clear what she thought about people that she was con. I've been to saucer con and I cosplay there. I mean, Jamie, on a somewhat related note, we should do something in Roswell at some point. But oh, there's a podcast there. There's just going to be a day where you can text me, meet me at Roswell and then I'll be like, all right, it's the day and everything is canceled and I'm getting on a bus. Yeah. Yeah. Sophie, turn off the podcasts. Jamie and I got to go to Roswell.

Can I come? Yes. Yes, of course. I'm down. It's a group text. All right. We'll make this happen. Yeah. So in one of her letters to the Colombs, Blavatsky made it clear what she thought about these people who, again, these are supposed to be her followers that she's inducting into the Mysteries. She wrote, try if you think that it is going to be a success to have a larger audience than our domestic imbeciles only. It is well worth the trouble. She's literally talking about this saucer con. If you think that you can pull this off, try to get more people in there than just like the normal idiots that we have around. Right. I mean, that is, she does have a good way of laser focusing on like how to make things appear more credible. Yeah. Yeah. That's, wow. She's

like, my followers, let's not talk about their intelligence level. It's low. Now, obviously, this was a boring time, right? Like, there's not much going on in the world. That's a big part of why spiritualism is a success and occultism is a success. People don't have a whole lot to fill their days. They hadn't invented Twitter yet, unfortunately, tragically. I mean, they're, I can't lightly disagree, but that's fine. People, it's easier to impress people with shit. But even so, it all gets old after a while, right? You can only do these con so many times. You're like, oh, another lock of your hair in my house. Hooray. So they've got to like, she's got to try new things on a pretty regular basis. And the sheer volume of letters that

her master sent out eventually made some folks ask, can I like, can I like see Koothoomi? Can he like come over? Can I like see Master Moria? The physical manifestation. This is what always, always happens. Yeah. We are in Bombay. Tibet's not that far compared to how far Tibet normally is from our assets, right? Like, can we not? And they can, they can teleport. Like, they're supposedly teleporting around and handing letters to people. Can I not like, I've given you so much money. Can I like see these guys? Pretty normal request. And we're going to talk about how Helena Blavatsky fulfilled that request. But first, Jamie, you know what fulfills you and me and Sophie and everyone else. Products and services? Only the products and services

that advertise on this podcast. Everything else leaves us feeling as if our mouths are filled with ashes. But these products and services fill the yearning void at the center of our souls that has been, that has been rinsed open by the pry bar of capitalism and, and, and, and fills our broken, it heals the broken spaces in our souls. That's what these products do. And if you don't, and if you don't like them, tweet at I write okay on Twitter. Wow. Wow. Brave. I don't check Twitter anymore. I won't, I won't, I won't see you. That's why I told them to go to you, Robert. That was, that was the inside joke that you spoiled. Yeah. Well, spoil these ads.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do

we just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union,

is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking about how Blavatsky, you know, people who start asking that, can we see these fucking masters that are always giving us orders and stuff? This is a very typical trajectory. But I think she really fucks herself over by implying that he's not local, but not far away. But not all that far away, right? I mean, Tibet is, you know, far from Bombay, but not compared to how far, right? Spiritless will normally

play it, I think, much smarter and say that their guides are dead. They cannot, they cannot come through. That is definitely a downside to what she's doing. Yeah. Yes. So in order to, like, trick people, Emma Cologne claims would later claim that Blavatsky had her construct a puppet. Quote, later, in one of her good moods, Madame Blavatsky called me up and told me, see if you can make a head of human size and place it on the divan, pointing to a sofa in her room, and merely put a sheet around it. It would have a magic effect by moonlight. What can this mean? I wondered. But knowing how disagreeable she could make herself if she was stroked on the wrong side, I complied with her wish. She cut a paper pattern of the face I was

to make, which I still have. On this, I cut the precious liniments of the beloved master. But to my shame, I must say that after all my trouble of cutting, sewing, and stuffing, Madame said that it looked like an old Jew. I suppose she meant Shiloh, which is like a racist caricature of Jewish people. Madame, with a graceful touch here and there of her painting brush, gave it a little better appearance. So they make this fake head to be Master Koot Hoomey. Yeah. Yeah. I see that. My question, are there photographs of this? Because there are a lot of fun pictures from the second wave of spiritualism of things like you're describing like paper

mache, like, but if they're backlit and picked pitch dark, looks enough like a human silhouette that people would would really be convinced by them. But then you see a flash photograph taken of them and you're like, oh, dear, that is a pile of still wet paper mache. Let's see, can we find there's definitely like portraits of him that some German guy did, which he looks like Jesus. Okay. Again, he's he's he's supposed to be like a Tibetan ancient mystic, but also he's like kind of still looks like. Well, I think he's kind of supposed to be like a member of I'm not a Koot Hoomey expert, a koot homologist, they call them. But I think he's supposed to be like, you know, one of these master race type people. And so obviously he looks like a white dude.

But yeah, I have not found this head. But yeah, next, Shia, Emma explains like the purpose the doll played in their their little con quote, the doll plays the greatest part in these apparitions. And as I've already explained, it is carried on somebody's head. But at times it is placed on the top of a long bamboo and raised to show that it is an astral body. But when the doll has not been at hand, even a white cloth wrapped around the person who was to perform the Mahatma was at times used and answered the purpose. And then we do this to like have him deposit letters and like he'd like kind of wave basically at people, like you give you a second of like seeing Koot Hoomey before he disappears. So it doesn't have to be much, right? You do it at night,

you do it from a distance, you know, he drops off a thing and he goes and then someone's like, no, I saw Koot Hoomey. He like graced us with his presence. He's real. Now, obviously, the fact that I'm reading all of this to you, Jamie, I'm not inducted into the mysteries of Theosophy. No, it means that it got out, which means that the Coulombs decided to tell everybody, which gets us to one of the more infamous moments in Theosophist history. Oh, I'm very sorry. What year are we in right now? This is like 1870, 1880, somewhere around that period. Yeah, I've got a date in there a little later. But yeah, this is so this this moment in Theosophy's history is called the Coulomb Affair. The gist of it is that eventually the

Coulombs had a falling out with Blavatsky. They threatened to blackmail her and she had them kicked out of the religion and their positions. And in the drama that followed, they took all these letters that she'd been said they'd been sending back and forth that out laid out all of the cons they were pulling. And they gave them to some local Christians who had beef with Theosophy. So Theosophists will always be like, well, they were colluding with the Christians. You can't trust the Coulombs. And like, these these Christians had like a reason to want to damage the church. But it's like, it also it all adds up. And they had a lot of letters that were definitely from Blavatsky. And other people talk about variations of these cons. Like,

it's just it's very clear what happened, right? Sure. Oh, man, that is that is always that's one of my that's always a fun source of dramatic tension when the when the assistant goes rogue. Yes. Yes. And and and that I mean, it happens because she's mean, like she's shitty to work with. That's the thing. And that's always why it happens. It's like, because either you're not being compensated or treated well. So and when I'm a cult leader, I promise, when we're living on a cult compound, fighting the FDA, I'm never gonna be rude to my followers. I may ask you to die for me in a holy war against the Food and Drug Administration, but in a nice way, politely, but in a but in a like a friendly kind of way. Yeah. Like in that documentary,

Wild, Wild Country, those people seem nice. I don't think they did anything wrong. Yeah. No, I it's been a couple years. I've only seen I've seen about 500 cult documentaries since then. So I'll agree with your characterization of that. Why not? It seemed fine. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just move right past that and assume everyone on Reddit will have no issue with what I've just said. That's always putting us in compromising positions. Look, if okay, let who okay, show hands who has not poisoned a bunch of people in Antelope, Oregon. Come on. Okay. I don't see any hands. I know you are the most not any hands in the air. That's right. We all do it. It's fine. It's like lying to, you know, a trap. Where are you going with this? I'm going to Antelope, Oregon to poison up a face.

How about you go back to your script? Calm down. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I just get Blavatsky gets me excited about this stuff. Fussy. Fussy on a Friday afternoon. There's this all of this info comes out and these Christians start writing a bunch of articles with like publishing the letters and it's a big embarrassment, right? A big deal for the Theosophist community does a lot of damage to them, especially in India. And one of the upsides of this whole weird affair is that a Blavatsky's room at the headquarters is inspected by other Theosophists and they find hidden doors and passages built into her room to allow her to like sneak around and leave shit and like do her spirit stuff, right? That's okay. Yeah. That's okay. So yeah,

that's like, yeah. So the room has been specifically like rigged for this sort of thing. That is always so interesting to hear about. Yeah, that rocks. That's pretty cool. That's funny to me. I was interested in like whether, I don't know, I feel like there's all these cases of like even when the big public figure is exposed, like with Scientology or with Spiritualism at different times, that there are so many believers at this point that no one even cares and they're like, there's an excuse, but people take it seriously here. Yeah, they do. And you know what I take seriously, Jamie? No, just reading this next paragraph. So the reveal of her private letters led to a precipitous decline in the fortunes of the Theosophical Society. But what

finally forced Blavatsky out of India was a controversy over the release of the Mahatma letters. And these are those series of letters of Koothoomi and Moria that they'd sent to this English author, A.P. Sinnott, that turned out to be totally plagiarized by another dude, right? Cool. Yeah. And they were not only where they're plagiary, but like these are again, these are like mystic, supposed to be mystical revelations of the cosmos by Undying Gurus. And the parts that aren't... And she controls, she controls Vita that's so... And the parts that aren't ripped off are just like the specifically like throwing shade at specific people in the real world that Blavatsky disliked. Like it's this like mix of stolen mysticism and like fuck this guy I

have an argument with, like the spirit say fuck this guy. To be fair, how many best-selling books could you describe as essentially a mix of plagiarism and airing personal grievances? I would argue probably a lot. Jamie... My hot dog book, for example. What have I said about coming on here and slandering Michael Crichton? Like, the man's dead. Let's have some respite. Michael. Did a lot of damage on the way out, didn't you? So this all blew up enough that a British organization, the Society for Psychical Research, and again, this is not like a crackpot nowadays. Anything with that name would be kind of crackpot. But again, this is like people are trying to see if this is real science and it is like legitimately, yeah, you would want to like

study this to some extent. So this is like, yeah, you would want to like try to see can we prove whether or not this stuff is real. So they send a fucking dude to India to analyze the letters and this investigator Richard Hodson writes a huge report which concludes that Blavatsky is quote, one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history. Now, Theosophists, you can read if you want to spend days reading Theosophists tearing this report apart for its supposed shortcomings and stuff. There's a lot. Oh, it's a ton of it, Jamie. Oh, I know. That's why I was like, I'm not covering this. I'm going to bed. Yeah, exactly. It is not worth it. No, you don't need to. Nobody needs to. I'm sure there's a

Theosophist listening who's going to be like, Blav, you're not doing the proper like, I don't care. It's fine. If you want to be a Theosophist, be a Theosophist. It's not, I don't think there's anything particularly toxic about it in 2022, but like, chill out, man. She was a con woman. Chill out, I do. That's Robert today. I do kind of like those kind of quotes where it was like, yeah, you know, this person was objectively full of shit, but you kind of got to hand it to her, right? Yeah, she was pretty good at being full of shit, right? Yeah. Well, that's how I feel about LRH, you know? By the way, so I'll run Hubbard. Everyone calls LRH. I was like, wow, look at you on a little cutesy, cutesy nickname basis with him. No, it's what Scientologists

actually do call him. It's like the thing that you like LRH tech and stuff is like a big way they'll refer to like Scientology, like, you know, teachings and shit. But I kind of think that was also Hubbard ripping off Blavatsky, because everyone calls her HBP. And in all like Theosophist literature and shit, she's always called HBP. It's very, I tried to watch, I did watch with a couple of friends at the compound, a documentary about her, and they kept calling her HPB. And it sounds like HPV when you have like a bunch of people saying it quickly. No, that's my department and I don't have it anymore. Okay. Good for you. Thank you. I didn't know that you could, sometimes it just goes away, kind of. Yeah, good for that. Yeah, just like HPP eventually went away

by dying. I had a very toxic thought when you said that. Do you remember how there used to be those god-awful shirts instead of the notorious RBG? Oh, God, yes. Do you think that Theosophist had shirts like that around her? Are they that kind of? Jamie, I think we figured out how you and I are going to make a million fucking dollars. Yeah, notorious HPP where she's got a blunt in her hand because some people think she smoked a lot of weed, although Lockman says that that's a dirty lie, but Lockman's also kind of a convict. We've got to move products. She smoked weed. She smoked hella herb. Hella herb. I really don't like that I had that thought, but now it's gone. I've released it. Thank you. You released it into the universe back to the Akashic library.

Yeah, it's a gigantic volume sitting in the Akashic records. God, what a nightmare concept. What a hoot. So the fact that the report happens, a lot of the folks who were like, again, the people who make Theosophy profitable, which are people who are kind of into it, but haven't lost their minds, maybe they just want something neat, right? Like it's boring being a British person in India all the time or whatever, boring being a British person in Britain or whatever. So maybe a lot of them were just folks who wanted a little bit of spice. And when this letter comes out, a lot of that kind of support, which is where a lot of the money comes from, starts to evaporate. And again, the same way she had in New York, whenever people start getting wise to her,

like any good con artist, she moves on. And Bovatsky leaves India. She returns to Europe in March of 1885. She left in 1878. So she's in India about seven years, something like that. She lands in Naples. She travels around a bit and she spends most of the next three years living off of a society pension, which I think was quite comfortable. And working on her last book, her very last book, The Secret Doctrine. And that Jamie Loftus, Sophie Lichterman brings us all the way back around to our old friend from episode one, Jean-Salvain Bailey, the astronomer who crafted the theory of a hyperborean Atlantis. Now, Bailey effectively orientalized Atlantis, right? Taking the mythical super civilization of European lore that had been like a focus of

occultists and stuff for millennia and shifting it to Asia. When we talked about this earlier, I quoted from Dan Edelstein's hyperborean Atlantis. Here's him explaining what Bovatsky actually wrote out in her last book, a series of lengthy glosses and commentaries of an alleged ancient book consulted by clairvoyance, no less, the stanzas of Disney Ann, I don't know, D-Z-Y-A-N. Bovatsky's text is an anti-Darwinian descentive man that tells the rise and fall of seven root races. We are currently on number five going on six. Each root race is divided into seven sub races and is associated with a different continent. Although with continental drift and the disappearance of certain continents, these do not correspond with the ones we know. Unsurprisingly, one of these

lost continents is Atlantis. Although writing shortly after Ignatius Donnelly, whose Atlantis, the anti-Darwinian world, launched the Atlantis craze, Bovatsky did not place Atlantis in between Europe and America, as Donnelly had, but rather in the far north, near the North Pole. Indeed, in Bovatsky, Bailey had finally found a supporter. She quotes his works extensively, no less than 22 times, and credits him with having discovered the truth, or at least part of it, about Atlantis. So, the entire cosmology of Bovatsky's last book is based in large part on a mix of Bailey's work and that novel, The Coming Race, by Edward Bollwer-Lytton. Now, where he'd envisioned this underground master race as being like potential conquerors, she sees them as benevolent spirit

guides. Again, Koothoomi and Master Moria, they're living underground, right? There's this network of tunnels, there's this super race underground, and she saw Bollwer-Lytton's concept of real as basically being, again, kind of a cult electricity. And as she always did, Bovatsky just rewrote a couple of other people and like mashed it together with half understood Eastern religion, and like that's the esophagus. To confirm what she's been trying to write down for most of her life, that's wild. Now, unfortunately for everybody on earth, one thing that Helena chose to focus on heavily when she was taking shit from Bovwer-Lytton, or Lytton, Bovwer-Lytton, was the whole race science aspect of his book. Now, this had always been a part of diffusionist thinking. There's always

been some weird like uncomfortable race shit with diffusionism, because if you're claiming there's a single source of all invention and creativity, and people today are degenerate imitations of past splendor, well, some people are going to be more degenerate than others, right? Some people are going to be closer to the master race than others. So there's obviously, this has always been a problematic attitude. I see where that's headed. Yeah. Edelstein continues, quote, Bovatsky also develops to its fullest the racial germ present in Bailey's thesis. Hyperborean Atlantis was home to the Atlanteans, but also saw the emergence of another race, the Aryans. From Bovatsky, the Aryan race was born and developed in the far north, though after the sinking of the continent of

Atlantis, its tribes immigrated further south into Asia. For a long time, the remaining Atlanteans and the Aryans lived together. They brought civilization to India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and are the ancestors of the current Europeans. The Atlanteans transmitted to the Aryans all the known sciences and even highly sophisticated technologies such as aeronautics, knowledge of flying in air vehicles, as Bovatsky put it. But over time, the Aryan root race also subdivided. One of the more unfortunate results of this division, Bovatsky writes, was the creation of the Semitic subrace, an artificial Aryan race. The Semites were but one of the Aryan subraces, but she draws strong distinctions between them and the others. Quote,

With the ancient Aryans, the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime, and poetical. However, much the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim. With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of spirit into matter, and the fall and degradation were hypothesized by him with the result of dragging deity down to the level of man. So the Semites destroyed godliness in Europe. That's why Europeans aren't magic anymore, basically, was the Jews. This is stuff that I have read the gist of what she's saying, but never a direct quote. And holy shit. Defenders of Bovatsky will say, well, no, she was anti-racist because one of the things she's arguing is that

Europeans, white people, have lost the ability to do magic, which is a thing that Indians have never lost, right? And like people in Tibet, like there's all these, the parts of the world and indigenous Americans, people are still connected to magic and white people are not, and that makes them better than white people in a lot of ways. But also, so I would say she's not a white supremacist, but it is very racist thinking and especially anti-Semitic thinking. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, yeah, the fact that she's not just saying that white people are the master race doesn't mean that it's not very racist thinking. Right. But no, it's extremely, and it's also like that it's classically racist to

attribute magical powers to not white people. It's racist in many, yeah. It's racist in many, it's very like, the arguments people make to try to make her seem like an anti-racist icon are extremely funny. Funny in the sense that like, really, man, really. Like, seventh graders know that, okay. Yeah. You're going to bat for the, the Simites destroyed magic lady? Like, that's where you're, that's where you're taking the swing, huh? Interesting take, folks. You know who did destroy magic, Jamie? Who? The product and services that support this podcast. Besides my amazing friend's drawing of Alfred Molina. Yes, magic has returned to the world. That's the new great awakening.

It's, it starts with this. This is my Jesus in the toast. Yeah. So go engage with the returning spiritual occult powers in our new sixth world by purchasing whatever product comes on next. It will give you powers or not. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost

experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads from my heart podcast and school of humans? This is let's start a coup. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass. And you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard

some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system

today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and I hope you all used your better help or promo codes and now have the ability to summon your own erotic drawings of Alfred Molina suckling different

furry creatures at his more or you're getting therapy for the effect that it had on you for what it did to you. Yes. Yeah. Just remember that the Alfred Molina is with the suckling kittens is not real and cannot hurt you. It can hurt you. It can only bring you spiritual peace. Yeah. So Blavatsky winds up concluding that there is quote an immense chasm between Aryan and Semitic religious thought. They belong to quote two opposite poles, sincerity, sincerity and concealment. Who can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind, right? This is again, she gets whitewashed all this is really racist. This is quite racist. This is funny because it's like even critical interpretations of her work still make it sound like, well, a lot of what

she said was taken out of context. But this is sounds pretty in the text. Yes. Tell me what context makes who can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind, not racist. What context could make that not racist? She further degrades Judaism by describing it as a sex obsessed and selfish cult. Judaism built solely on phallic worship has become one of the latest creeds in Asia and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside themselves. Meanwhile, she writes true Aryans are the most metaphysical and spiritual people on earth. Okay. Yep. And now obviously, I feel like I don't need to belabor how this is adjacent to Nazi thinking, right? Like, that's not yeah, we could talk about it for hours. But again,

it's like, I don't think that there's really anything to tease apart here. It's just like overtly racist. Yeah, it is. And obviously, like, you know, she's growing up in Russia during a period in which like a lot there, the state is incredibly anti Semitic. There are like pogroms when she's a kid that are celebrated and stuff. She's not by being anti Semitic. She's not out of the norm. But the way she's anti Semitic is completely new. She is inventing new kinds of anti Semitism. And like cooking that anti Semitism into like religious texts. Yeah, into religious texts that she's trying to spread as like a pop philosophy. And in the sacred doctrine, she places Jewish people as the opponents of the preordained progress of the races. Quote,

this Aryan non Aryan and specifically Semitic opposition would become the great historical paradigm of the racist right, replacing the Marxist historiography of historiographic law of class struggle. Blavatsky also raised the specter of a new race to be chosen from among the most select members of the Aryan root race. This next race would have even greater powers than the present one and would truly produce the Uber mention of the future. Now, Helena dies in 1891, but her ideas continue to spread. Just as she had first tweaked and updated the work of others, occultists came along to add to her ideas. The first was fascist Austrian occultist Jareg Lanz von Liebenfels, who gave the birthplace of the Aryans as a lost arctic hyperborea.

Hermann Verth, a German ethnologist, followed. He named the mystical Aryan homeland Tula, or it's it's spelled thul, and it's usually said thul, I think it's actually supposed to be pronounced tula. But like, this is also the name of like a popular brand of like top racks that people put on their Subarus. It's the word had other meanings before. Yeah. It's also the name of my dad's best friend. She's from Greece. It's a Greek name. Is it spelled thule? No. Yeah. Yeah. There's others. There's like tuli and stuff. Like, yeah, I think there's there's a number of other kind of similar names. This is thule. I'll call it thul, just because that's usually in hellboy, they say thul. So that's what we're going to go with here. Okay. Well, that is, yeah, that is

my Mike McNola was never wrong. Yeah. In July of 1918, as Germany reeled from starvation and disaster on the Western front, the thul myth would be adopted by German Theosophist Baron Rudolph von Sabotendorf. He founded a Bavarian right wing nationalist club and called it the thul society. This name set it apart from other more militant far right organizations and its cover as an antiquarian historical society discussing the myths built by Blavatsky helped Sabotendorf and his followers avoid police scrutiny. Quote, during the rapid succession of socialist and Soviet revolutionary governments and post World War One Munich, the thul society was at the center of the white or reactionary counter offensive. Its antiquarian cover may have facilitated this role

while authorities cracked down on more visible nationalist groups. The thul society's headquarters at the fancy, I'm not going to try and pronounce the name of this hotel became a haven for the resistance throughout the turbulent period between 1918 and 1920. Yeah, the holiday and the society of us. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's an umbrella group for a bunch of different far right paramilitary organizations known as the free core, right? Like these are like using the thul society as cover. Now one of the far right groups that came under the sway of the thul society was the German Workers Party or DAP soon to become the NSDAP under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. Now the precise connections between the DAP and the thul society are debated somewhat. This is

often vastly over kind of emphasized as like the Nazi started as this occult organ. And it's like, no, it's just more that a lot of early Nazis had occult leadings. And this was a good cover for being a fascist in a period when that was more dangerous. And so of course, like they have, they're related to one another, right? Subotendorf would always affirm that the Nazi party was created by thul society members. Reginald Phelps is class DAT cast out on these claims. And it's worth noting though that like, you again, there's a lot of debate about like, to what degree was this like an administrative thing? Was it planned? But what's actually true. And Ian Kershaw notes this is that the thul society had a shitload of like members who later became massively influential

Nazis. One of these guys was Alfred Rosenberg. Now Rosenberg would want to be the Nazi parties. Yeah, he's, he sucks. No, not Alfred Molina. Rosenberg is like the basically kind of like the chief ideologue of the Nazi party next to Hitler. Like the guy making up the most kind of Nazi canon next to Hitler. Another thul society member was Hans Frank, who became future governor of Poland and would be executed. I believe he's one of the guys executed in Nuremberg. A lot of war crimes, Hans Frank, he's running Poland for the Nazis, right? That's the kind of war crimes Hans Frank winds up committing. Another thul society member was Anton Drexler. Drexler is the actual founder of the Nazi party. Hitler doesn't found it, right? Hitler's like

comes in kind of a little bit later and sort of eventually does take over, but Drexler is the guy who founds it. And before he founds the Nazi party and while he's starting the Nazi party, he's a regular attendee at the thul society meetings. Hitler was never a member and he was definitely not a theosophist. But Rudolph Hess, his one time best friend and the guy who actually wrote Mein Kampf with him, like when they're in prison, Hess is the guy who's like taking dictation from Hitler. He later kind of loses his mind and flies a plane to England at the start of the war to try to get the king to ally with Hitler. It doesn't work. He dies in prison. He was also a thul society member and Hess is super influential to Hitler. Hess is early on

because once they start to get power, Hess kind of gets marginalized because he's very into the occult. He's a little bit of a crackpot, but he is like, he is like Hitler's emotional support animal. Like when Hitler's like in the early days of the Nazi party, Hitler probably kills himself without Hess there. Very important guy. Now, Blavatsky herself obviously was not a Nazi. She could, she dies in 1891, right? She's, there's no way she even could have been. Yeah. But her ideas run through Nazi history. Alfred Rosenberg's book, The Myth of the 20th Century, which he publishes in 1930, is the second best selling book in Nazi Germany under Mein Kampf, right? That's what I mean when I say this guy's like the number two ideologue of the Nazis.

And his whole book is a plagiarism of the secret doctrine. Like he's basically taken the secret doctrine and doing what Blavatsky did with the coming race. He opens the book by restating the myth of a hyperborean Atlantis and it's assisting that the existence of a quote prehistoric Nordic cultural center was the basis of all Nazi race science. Edelstein calls this belief in an Aryan Atlantis the quote foundational myth of Nazism. Blavatsky's ideas about the inevitable progression of races also played into Nazi theory. This gets forgotten a lot amongst all the horror, but genocide was only like part of the Nazi quest to secure a future for the Aryan race. They were not just trying, obviously one part of this is we want to kill a whole shitload of

people to stop them from breeding with Aryans and, you know, watering down their blood. But like, they didn't believe German people were good enough either, right? They didn't believe that there were like Aryans in the way that they're needed to be. Another huge part of Nazism is creating a master race through science and breeding, right? Which is like, again, is tied in with Blavatsky's ideas of like, we're on the fifth race, but we're becoming the sixth race and like, you know, we can we are creating this like new race that can be like a new kind of master race, but it's going to take, you know, in her mind, it was more like a thing of spiritual kind of progression. But yeah, but yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter whether Hitler was a theosophist or not,

I feel like there's no just from the handful of paragraphs you've read, it's extremely obvious why it would be an influential text for Nazis, because it's just confirms stuff that they already believe. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it also more than that, it like sets up a lot of the things they believe, right? Like, because this has not been people have been racist and have been anti-Semitic and stuff. But like this specific stuff, the Aryan shit, that was not in the fucking in anybody's radar until Helena Blavatsky. I'm going to quote again, this is about like how she influences their quest to build a master race. Indeed, the horrors of the Holocaust may lead us to overlook the fact that the extermination of the Jews was part of a vaster racial project whose ultimate

goal was the creation of a new superior race. The other half of the Nazi racial fantasy expressed itself with particular cruelty and the eugenic experiments performed in SS laboratories, but was also relevant and the high evidence in the highest level of the Nazi party. Certain SS officers apparently mutilated themselves in order to achieve biological transfiguration, which is cool. Oh, thank you for adding that at the end, because I was. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's it's. Yeah, I mean, you're welcome. Yeah. When you when you hear that someone has written down, we are on the fifth of seven races, you know, that's headed towards eugenics. There's just simply no doubt about it. Yep. And phrenology and you know, God knows what else. Yep. Now,

well, nightmare. Okay. Today, of course, Blavatsky's rants about the progression of races, the conflict between Aryan and Semitic peoples and Vril are primarily the purview of the weirdest chunks of the right wing. Fascism has, by and large, moved beyond this stuff, right? There are some weird Vril Nazis out there. One of them has a I think it's on YouTube. I don't know. He has, he dresses like a robot. And that's weird. One of but her influence is still deeply felt in the New Age and occult communities. And as a result, aspects of her theology are still making it into new fascist movements today. The Akashic records are supposedly in a Cyric library that contains records of everything that ever has never will happen, right? It's the affinity library. Yeah.

Ever heard of it? It's space Wikipedia that Koot, you whom he uses to do plagiarism. Now, she gets the Blavatsky gets the name, the Akashic records, because she doesn't speak Sanskrit well. And in Sanskrit, the word Akasha means space facilitating sound kind of, right? There's not a direct translation, but that's basically what it means. Blavatsky doesn't speak good Sanskrit and mistakenly believed it meant life principle. So she described the Akashic record as quote, indestructible tablets of astral life, or of astral light, a cosmic like wax stamp. Basically, yeah, buff. Yeah, infinity library. It's, it's okay. First of all, my dad has wiped out so hard. Excellent. There was a medium I spoke with in Casadega who brought up the Akashic records like

as a term. And I was like, what does that mean? I've never heard of that. And they could not tell me. So it's interesting. Like, it's like still a term that floats around, but it's more used to describe like theory and philosophy. They're like, well, yeah, all theory, it's just like a theory or philosophy. It ties in with diffusionism, right? Because for one thing, what you say with the Akashic records is there's a single source of truth, right? But the other thing it does, if you're a con person, or just like you don't like being questioned too much in your beliefs, you can say that like, well, I know this is true because I channeled this from the Akashic records. And it's like written in some space encyclopedia or whatever. Right, right.

Which is like, yeah, yeah, definitely a concept that has been increasingly vagified. That's why she invents it because it makes it easier to con people. But over the, it's been more than a century now, the idea has mutated consistently. This segment from an article by Matthew Rinsky of Conspiratuality does a good job of summarizing where we are now. The amount of information now stored in computer memory and crossing the internet highway daily is literally unfathomable, writes Kevin Tedeschi in Edgar case on the Akashic records. And yet this vast complex of computer systems and collective databases cannot begin to come close to the power, the memory or the omniscient recording capacity of the Akashic records.

Hindu's nationalist spiritual influencer, Saguru agrees, equating the records to the internet. It's all there, he told a gathering in 2010. Whatever you want, you can access it. It is all there right now. Goop's resident Akashic reader is Ashley Wood, who dubs the intuitive process of Google search for the soul and teaches a line activation meditation that promises to illuminate the fiber optic connection between the body and the Pleiades, where she says the Akashic records are stored. From there, the believer can learn to access the records through a simple banal incantation called the pathway prayer. No special training required. In anti-vax COVID denialism circles, the Akashic records are now being consulted for advice on how to dispel

mental programming and negative agendas promoting the gene therapy of the COVID vaccine. This life coach and medical hypnotherapist suggests in the following sermon that connecting with the profound truths of the Akashic records can provide a soothing, long view perspective on the medical apartheid of public health COVID protections. She says the records had put her in touch with angels, Jesus and Mother Mary, and she can teach you how to connect this way as well. Based on that, the Akashic records truly is whatever you need it to mean to reinforce your ideology. So it can be something as simple as like, I'm a girl boss that wants you to pay me $300 to spew some random shit at you to this is why we're anti-vax and Jesus agrees.

Yeah, exactly. And it's like, it's kind of like, for as much of a selfish person as she was, the solid that Blavatsky does for the rest of the occult movement is like, oh, here's this thing everyone can use forever to justify whatever bullshit you're trying to cash in on. Right. I mean, because you can be coming from, I mean, it sounds like you can be coming from literally any vantage point politically and you leverage this to your advantage because, well, then that's like what happens all the time is like, oh, I've I'm channeling this spirit. Like the way that my favorite way that this was like leveraged at like the height of like 1800 spiritualism would be like the Fox sisters would channel like dead senators who had voted to uphold slavery

and would channel them and say, I changed my mind. I was wrong. I shouldn't have said that. It can be like this theology can be used in like all these different ways, but some of them are like so that's disturbing. But also, it's not surprising. It's too vague a concept to not be used for evil. And also, I, you know, well, Robert, I'm, you know, I feel like this is how every, well, I'm upset. Good. I'm glad you're upset. That's all that's all I ever want is to make you upset. That's why we do stuff. Yeah, we want you upset and to, you know, plug your plugables right here. Upset and plugging. That's the way to live. Well, you can listen to my new limited series Ghost Church. It's on cool zone media. Ever heard of it? It's a history of American

spiritualism. Yeah, I thought you guys, I mean, I think you guys would like some of the content they're putting out, you know, good shit. Exciting. The advertisers are kind of all over the place, but other than that, I think it's like pretty fucking cool. And once again, issues with that, I'd write okay on Twitter. Yeah. Hit Sophie Lichterman up at whatever Sophie Lichterman's Twitter is. I don't remember how you write your handle. Trust me, they are. Yeah, I know. Don't worry about it. Listen to Ghost Church. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter if you're so inclined, but I'm just really just kind of talking about minions over there right now, because I need to find my inner peace. You know who's got a whole fucking room in the

Akashic records? The minions. Word. And you know what? I'm going to announce this now, Jamie, we've been planning to wait a little bit. If you want to win an original song sung by me and Jamie Loftis about the subject of your choosing, get a full face tattoo of a minion on your own face. That's all it takes. If you do that, we'll write you a song. Absolutely. And look, I'm not going to be picky about the minion that you get full tattoo on your face. No, any minion. Any minion. The one-eyed minion that complicates things? What would the general vibe of the face? I would recommend going with a Kevin. I feel like I have the face shape for Kevin, but that's just me. If you need guidance on what minion full face tattoo is best for your

face shape, I'm happy to consult. Yeah, Jamie will consult. I'm rooting for you. I will tell you right now that the song we write is just going to be American Pie, but we'll change the lyrics. But look, what do you want? It's not going to age well. No, it will not age well. Really, it will get us canceled in like three months. Yeah. Yeah, because you won't quite know what we're talking about, but then three months, you're going to be like, what the fuck? Oh, no, absolutely not. Yeah. Yeah. And so forth. And on that note, bye. Go with Toot-Hoo-Me. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,

hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story

about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.