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

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Helena Blavatsky.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys 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, man. It's Behind the Bastards, the podcast about people who aren't good by people who are good. This week, our person who are good is Jamie Loftus. How are you doing? I'm doing good. It's real hot. I'm excited for the episode.

It is hot, but you know what a random lady told me once in Georgia? What? When you feel the sun on your back, that's just Jesus smiling at you. Wow. That's a good positive spin for global warming. It is a good spin for global warming. There's a good chance that lady didn't believe in global warming. So she was a white lady in rural Georgia, so there's not a lot of ways that story is going to end super happy. You know what a white lady in rural Georgia told me once when I tried to special order a hot dog?

What was that? She said, this isn't Burger King. You don't get it your way. Fuck off. See, I love that lady. I love her too. And then she gave me a gnarly hot dog. She gave me a really gnarly hot dog. It was wet. That's what you get for bringing your goddamn big city bullshit to her wholesome small town hot dog, whatever it was.

I came in too hot. I was swinging my dick around at a diner. Exactly. You're swinging your dick around at a hot dog shop, which is basically full of dicks already, so nobody's impressed. Yeah. It was disrespectful of me, and I was right to be told that. You go swing in your dick around at a Euro place. Well, that's pretty much perfect because a Euro is basically a pocket. It's easy to start having sex with the hero. It's incredibly easy. A hero or a hero, both of them very easy to fuck. Oh, both very fuckable. Yeah, although you have more opportunity to get some hip working with the Euro because the hero, it's just going to come out the sides.

Wait, I'm trying to visualize this. It's going to come out the sides. As long as you're fine with penetrating the Giro, pushing through that back layer. We have a very long script. Then it'll stay in okay, especially if you hold the edges up. Whereas the hero, it's just kind of because it's an open-sided sandwich, right? Okay, the open-sidedness of it all. You're not going to punch your dick through the bread of the hero, though, because you can just fuck straight through and they're usually longer than anybody. I hope somebody clips this out for TikTok.

That's all I'm saying. The guy who was really... Wilt Chamberlain. Unless you're Wilt Chamberlain, then you might... Get off of Wilt! What the fuck? I learned who Wilt Chamberlain was through a Cartoon Network cartoon. Same. Yeah, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. I learned about him from an episode of...

He was a guest on Scooby-Doo, right? Wilt Chamberlain. Yes, he was. Yeah, it was the mystery of the man with the enormous cock. Okay. The script. Okay. Once again, the script is really long.

It is almost 16,000 words, yes. Just one more thing. I'm down to fuck a hero sandwich with a strap on. Sure. For sure. Absolutely. Without doubt. Absolutely.

And I think it's just about finding the right chop and the right hero. And the right hero, you know? You don't want to be pressured if you're not feeling it in the moment. Maybe somebody puts like... Like jalapenos, but not like the pickled kind that go really good with lettuce. And you're like, well, I don't really want just a straight-up jalapeno on this. I want that texture change you get when they're pickled, you know? And there's just some food you don't want on your crotch.

It's like, have you ever accidentally... Sure, horse radish. Oh, my God. Right. Yeah. Have you ever accidentally put Dr. Braun or soap on your privates? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Oh, my God. After shaving for a party once, horrible. No one told me? No. Bad decision. The bottle famously has too many words. I'm not going to read that. No.

But there are a couple of very important words. Don't put them directly onto your vagina. That peppermint shit, it burns like the gut. Yeah. It's like fucking napalm in your junk. I stopped listening when Jamie said it was wet. Mm-hmm. I was showering with someone, Robert, and I did that, and then I had to play it off.

Oh, no. It was humiliating. Oh, man. And then it's like, he absolutely, he saw what I had done, but I couldn't admit my mistake. I was too bad. No, this feels good. It feels like a- I want to stay here.

Mm-hmm. Let's have breakfast. Yeah. It was- I enjoy the feeling of my junk getting burned by a schizophrenic man's soap. I- Horrifying. Once again, if any-

I'm glad- It just feels nice just to say it out loud. I've never said it out loud before. I'm glad we're having this five minute long conversation before I introduce the topic of the episode. But before you get to that, I just want to say that somebody please clip this out for TikTok. For me. Yeah, let's go come TikTok stars. Jamie.

Yeah. How do you- Speaking of burning genitalia, do you think about Goop often? I- Yes, I've been thinking about Goop quite a bit lately. Yeah. Not the Gwyneth- No.

Not of the Gwyneth flavor. I was speaking of the Gwyneth one. But yeah, Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's like- Like Snake Oil brand. Or you think about- You were thinking about QAnon a lot. Q just came back on right after the repeal of Roe V. Wade started posting. That's not great.

Yeah. Is that on your mind a little bit? No, a little alarming. And literal Nazis, those are probably on your mind occasionally, right? They're on my mind far more than I'd like to admit. What if I were to tell you that the ideas behind all of these groups have a single origin point? And in fact, an origin point in a single woman. They can all trace their lineage back to one broad.

What if I were to tell you that, Jamie? I would say I know exactly who that broad is and I can't wait for you to tell me about her. Yeah, yeah. We are talking today about Helena Blavatsky. A woman so influential that the only way to start her episode was by spending five minutes talking about burning ginitalia as a result of a variety of mistakes and fucking sandwiches. And I honestly don't know where she would fall on any of those issues, to be perfectly honest. Well, that's interesting. We're going to get into this, but she would claim most of her life as a prominent figure that she was utterly celibate.

But her biographer, at least one of her biographers claim, she was just like, as the kids say, she was balls deep in that Euro, you know? Okay. Okay. So she was in the hero. Okay. I'm excited for this because she has, I mean, I know we're going to talk about it, but she has a jumping off point that directly intersects with the show I was just working on. Yes. She started with some spiritualism stuff.

Oh, yes. And then she really took it to an 11 in the least pleasant way. What's interesting, so, because your show is about spiritual, specifically American spiritualism, because there's different strains of it. She was kind of, you know what a magpie is, that bird that like lays its eggs in another bird's nest. She was that for spiritualism. She was never a spiritualist. She just snuck in there to sell her own thing. It's a very cool story.

I'm very, very excited because I started researching her for the show and then it just quickly became apparent that not only, is there at least a 16,000 word script to be had about it. I could have gone longer. Yeah. And also that like you're saying, like she wasn't actually, she was just interested in the eyes and ears that spiritualism had. Yeah. And it's one of those things, the religion she creates, theosophy. I'm sure there's going to be some theosophists that are just going to be livid with us at the things we leave out.

I read two biographies about this woman. Both of them were very long. Both of them have so much detail. No one would ever need unless you're interested in specific arguments that weirdo occult people were having in 1885. Like, and it's like pages and pages. I am kind of interested in that. And of course you all know who this guy is. He wrote that like, I'm trying to boil most of that out.

It's also worth noting both of the biographers I read are like believers. So no, there are no credible sources for most of this. There are a few facts that we can say for certain. And then it's like, here's one story. Here's another story because she's like, she's an Elrond Hubbard figure. She never told the same story about her background twice, basically. So we're going to do our best here. But first we're going to start well before the birth of Helena Blavatsky by talking about the concept of Orientalism.

Now today, Oxford Languages describes Orientalism as quote, the representation of Asia, especially the Middle East in a stereotyped way that is regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude. I think today when people use the word, they're mainly thinking of like specifically China. But this includes a lot of colonialist attitudes towards India and obviously towards like the Middle East towards Northern Africa. And this is a bad thing. If somebody accuses you of being an Orientalist, they're accusing you of a very specific kind of white supremacy, right? But back in the 1600s, Orientalism was still a thing, but it wasn't necessarily white supremacist. You could definitely say it was racist, although even that's a little off to me. Basically, it was based on stereotypes of Asia, many of which were wrong, but the stereotypes weren't based in hate as much as the fact that it was the 1600s.

And it was kind of hard to get good information about India if you were like living in France, right? So like people just like believed things and didn't really have any way to confirm them. Now, specifically Orientalism in the 1600s would have actually centered more around Cairo and Egypt than it would have, because that was the East, right? That was the kind of old world to people in that period of time, this Enlightenment period. And it was the center of historic knowledge, right? Cairo had had had the Library of Alexandria, this kind of mythic, I mean, it did exist in some form, but this like also very mythical library that's supposed to contain all of the knowledge, human beings. It's this place where you go to find the secret truths of the ancients.

Hey, I misspoke here and said Cairo had the Library of Alexandria. I meant to say Egypt had it, obviously, the Library of Alexandria was in Alexandria. It is so fascinating, like whenever you look at texts from that time, like I know that we're absolutely skull-flucked when it comes to the proliferation of false info now, but just like people in the West, their perception of Egypt would have been formed by only just like a couple of random Western people, and it's all just so incredibly vague and entitled, and it's just wild. It's also, I mean, one of the things that's interesting, so again, in the 1600s, Egypt is kind of like the occult center of Western conceptions of like magic and stuff.

The same is kind of true for the ancient Romans. That's the idea of like for how fucking old Egyptian civilization is. 2000 years ago in like Caesar's day, like hip Romans are going to Alexandria, Cairo, to like do some of the same shit because they're like interested in this like ancient mystical tradition and stuff. They're like multiple gods? Yeah. I can't believe it. Yeah, I mean, they had multiple gods too, but yeah.

Not even the Romans did, but I'm talking about once we get to just one big guy. Yeah, it remains this kind of, there's always been this fascination with Cairo and with Egypt in particular as this kind of like center of occult traditions. And it's also worth noting that in the 1600s, like shit like the pyramids, like legitimately they couldn't imagine how they could have been constructed. They address that in the first scene of Despicable Me. Oh, good. I'm glad.

Yeah, it was the minions, right? It's inflatable. No, it was inflatable. Oh, okay. Okay. And then the minions went to sleep. And it was the minions. The minions put it there.

They used all their little minion breath to inflate it. And then they went to sleep while Hitler was doing his thing, huh? You know, it's fun. They never account for like the other massacres like we're the minions during Rwanda. Like were they helping out with that shit? Were the minions aiding Slobodan Milosevic in the massacre at Srebrenica? Well, canonically, the minions serve the most evil person. I want to recut that documentary, The Act of Killing,

for when that like Indonesian fascist is talking about how he would strangle people. There's like an elderly minion behind him with the wire. You are not putting minions in the act of killing. Absolutely. Someone needs to, Jamie Loftus. So the way in which Europeans during the enlightenment treat Egypt is not very different from how a lot of new age truth seekers treat India today, right? Right down to the fact that like people from Europe would move there to like get,

do fancy spiritual stuff. They do the Steve Jobs. Now, obviously it is kind of like India's kind of the spot for that today, right? Particularly there's a couple of cities like Rishikesh where like white people love to go to like learn different sort of like eastern spiritual traditions and whatnot. Yeah, a lot of white spiritualists do that. Yeah, and Cairo is not so much, right? You don't hear of a lot of westerners going to Cairo to like get involved in spiritual stuff today.

And the reason why that switch happened, why kind of the capital of, I guess what you'd call western eastern spiritualism, moves from Egypt to India has a lot to do with a dude you've probably heard of named Voltaire. Yeah. And Voltaire is real into this idea that there are sacred truths in like kind of eastern and Asian religion and mythology that westerners have forgotten. And specifically in a way that like he thinks gives them kind of moral superiority over westerners. In Candide, he gives kind of the final word in the book to a Turkish dervish.

In The Princess of Babylon, he depicts a golden age civilization on the banks of the Ganges. Voltaire was probably classic Voltaire. I know so much about him. Like I know every word. Yeah, you've famously got Voltaire's face tattooed across your lower back. Voltaire is not mainly something I associate with one line in The Princess Diaries one. Definitely not. So he was probably the best known influence and most influential orientalist of his day,

which was like most of the 1700s. This guy lived for fucking ever. He was born in 1694 and died in 1778. Pretty good run for that period in time. Yeah. I think he had a lot of syphilis by the end there, but who didn't, right? I was like, did he not go outside? How do you achieve that light?

He did all right for the day. I mean, that's pretty doing pretty good for now. So one of the things that he wrote during his very long life was an essay on the spirit of nations, which listed China and India. He was kind of going through in a list what he views as like the oldest civilizations, and he lists China and India as the very oldest of civilizations. Now, Voltaire was not making any kind of archaeological argument here. Certainly not in the sense that you or I would talk about today.

He was instead arguing in favor of a concept in vogue at the time called diffusionism. Now, today we map cultural inventions like, say, the Phoenician alphabet back to specific origin points, right? At some point, a person or persons in Phoenicia made an alphabet and it became popular, right? In the same way that like at some point, some motherfuckers made an iPhone and it became popular. But diffusionists didn't think that that's how inventing stuff worked. They believed that there had been some great civilization in the past in which all great cultural inventions came from, right? There was some golden age, yeah. Like an ideological Pangea situation?

That's exactly what they think. That's an interesting idea. I think diffusionists believed there had been kind of like a couple of civilizations in the past that everything came from. Radical diffusionists believed that all human culture and technology had like a single origin point. Now, one of the things that was cool about Voltaire was that he argued, and this is what he was doing by listing China and India, because basically, if you believe this, the older a civilization is, the closer it is to like the human original ideal civilization, you know? Like the further back you go.

So by arguing that India and China were older than like any of kind of the Judeo-Christian civilizations, he was arguing against the primacy of Judeo-Christian beliefs and the broad sweep of human history, which is a pretty cool thing to be doing at the time. So when he listed India and China as coming before Judaism in his essay, he was making the claim that Christianity and Judaism were kind of copying or descending from older belief systems. Now, a thing that doesn't rock about this is that Voltaire also described the Jews as basically stealing their culture from other people. Right, I was like, that does seem... Exactly.

It's good that like, okay, on the 1600s, probably Christian people needed a little bit of like, hey, you're not the center of human development, right? They don't like hearing that wrong. They hate that shit. And the bad part is that Voltaire focuses a lot on the Jews and specifically them as stealing their culture from older cultures and not inventing anything of their own, which is a central pillar of anti-Semitism, particularly Nazi ideology, focuses a lot on like Jewish cultural theft. It's like a huge thing the Nazis are, which for a bunch of Christians is very funny, but anyway, whatever. I mean, outside of like just like bald-faced anti-Semitism, is there a reason that he does not accuse Christians of the same thing?

I think he kind of does, but he really just focuses on Jewish people. I'm not an expert on Voltaire, but he does spend... I think most people will agree he was a bit anti-Semitic. Now, anti-Semitic for the time, that's probably too much to say because it was everyone... There's regular pogroms and shit in this period, you know? So he's pretty in line with a lot of Europeans in this moment. I want to quote now from a fascinating write-up by Dan Edelstein titled Hyperborean Atlantis. The Jews, as well as every other people that succeeded the Ur civilization, which is like the golden age civilization everything comes from,

merely perpetuated a complete cultural system, which they inherited from the primogenitors of human society. At a time when polygenetic theories about the origin of human races were rampant, radical diffusionism was further bolstered by the notion that only certain select peoples would have had the requisite qualities for inventing culture. According to Voltaire, these primogenitors of all human knowledge were Indian. This hypothesis was particularly seductive, as it could be extended to the most sophisticated aspects of human culture, namely the sciences. The belief in the super sophistication of Brahmanic culture grew stronger after Sir William Jones' discovery of Sanskrit grammar. But even before the Asiatic researchers saw the day, Brahmanism was being hailed as the original science. And you'll see bits of this today.

If you listen to people talk about the Bhagavad Gita, there's a lot of focus, particularly in the West, on passages that could be talking about witnessing a nuclear weapon and stuff. This even goes both ways, because famously was Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita when he sets off the first atomic bomb. Now I am become death such and such, destroyer of worlds, yadda yadda. You can find a lot of conspiracies about these things from the Vedas or whatnot, or these bits of Indian art, kind of look like they could be a spaceship or something. Maybe these ancient Hindu texts are talking about some prehistoric war with an advanced human civilization that tore itself apart and we're all living in there. It's a thing people talk about today, right? That's not a particularly common Hindu belief, but it's a thing particularly Westerners will talk about today.

So that's kind of my big question so far, is like when Voltaire and the Voltaire-adjacents talk about India and Egypt, are they talking about the Western perception of Egypt? Is anything they're saying based in actual facts? Yeah, there's usually 10 or 15% actual fact, because you'll get like... Oh, you know, that's a higher rate than a lot of people. A lot of it is like for the Egyptian stuff, some Roman or some Greek like spent time in Egypt and like wrote about religious. And half of what they're writing is like maybe they saw some like worship and half of it is like some dude at a bar told them about a ritual. And that all kind of gets like mashed together into like Herodotus writing about like what the Egyptians believed.

And then a couple of thousand years later, some like European in fucking Paris or London reads that and like, you know, off to the race as we go. You know, I'm hanging out at the wrong bars. The bar I went to last week said that overturning Roe v. Wade was good for me. I just didn't know it yet. Oh, well, that sounds like a bar in Florida. Or Orange County or parts of San Bernardino. He was at Water Village. Shout out at Water Village for having some anti-abortion old men continue.

That sounds right. So speaking of old men, Voltaire argued strongly that India, not Egypt, should be considered the font of civilization. So he's saying like even the Egyptians are just kind of like copying off of this great original Indian civilization. And as you've probably has occurred to a couple of people listening right now, the things that he's arguing about. And that other are like writers in the same vein are arguing about. Mesh is pretty well with like the most popular myth in Western mythological canon, Atlantis. Right? Okay.

Yes. There's like this perfect golden age civilization with advanced technology that's like somehow got destroyed and we're all descended from them. Like that's not that far off from how a lot of people interpreted Atlantis. Now, the original myth of Atlantis comes from like Plato as written by some other dude. Right? Like it's not like a play. It's not from the Michael J. Fox movie. Yeah.

No. This is like when Plato got played by Ewan McGregor 20 years later. Or when Salvador Dali got played by Robert Pattinson. I feel like people are talking about that. Oh my God. That did happen. What a bad shit thing to do. Especially since.

Absolutely unhinged. If you are casting Dali, fucking Pedro Pascal is right there. And he has proven his willingness to grow a mustache. Oh, and he can actually do it. You know who did do it for the role? Robert Pattinson. Robert Pattinson, baby. It's all that.

And remember me, iconically bad Robert Pattinson joints. Incredible shit. Absolutely outstanding shit. Good movie night vibe. Anyways, continue. According to Plato as written by some other dude, Atlantis was the home of a very advanced people. Modern writers always take that to mean like spaceships and free energy. In Plato's day, an advanced civilization meant like their aqueducts worked better, right?

Like that's what he was not imagining starships. He was like, yeah, and they're really good at making water move. The road took his money. Incredible at? Aqueduct shit. In time, Atlantis mutated as a myth into a pre-Egyptian globe spanning civilization that had colonized the world in a manner similar to how Europeans have started to colonize it in the 1600s, right? The Atlantis myth kind of transforms to ape what Europeans are doing at the same time, right?

Europeans see themselves conquering the entire world and colonizing it. And because these myths, like they kind of adapt the Atlantis myth in media res to be, oh, this happened before. Just confirmation bias. Loving when people manufacture their own confirmation bias myths. Galaxy brain shit. There's a lot of guys who are like super hard for this or a good example. Sir Francis Bacon gets his like, like he's just coming constantly over fucking Atlantis in the early 1600s.

And yeah, in the late 1700s near the end of Voltaire's life, an astronomer named Jean Sylvain Bailey decides to find Atlantis, right? This like, because it's all, it's this, they've decided there's, because of folks like Voltaire, they don't really believe that Atlantis is this like Greek island anymore. And in fact, a lot of people are like placing it in the East, but nobody knows where it was. So they all very much believe in this place that kind of its existence, especially if you imagine that you're going to find some artifacts that like, maybe have some writing and stuff that looks Latin or something in there,

its existence could kind of justify what you're doing in colonizing the world, right? If some previous civilization had ruled the world and you're kind of descended from them, you know, that's how what a lot of people are thinking, right? Right. It's so funny to me, it's like the fact that there were people looking for Atlantis back in the day and people, like they are just like the big foot hunters of their time, basically. And people act like it's the most uncivilizing in the world. I just like, dude, this used to be a thriving industry.

It's a dying industry. If I were at the point I am in my career now, in like the early 1990s, which was famously a period in which there were no problems, I would be doing nothing but looking for Atlantis in big foot. Like, yeah, the thing is, it's not the silliest thing you could do. I don't like when it's treated that way. No, the silliest thing you could do is write a book about how history has come to an end. That's right, Fukuyama, go look for Atlantis, motherfucker.

So Jean-Sylvain Bailey decides I'm going to find Atlantis and because history is actually not as cool as fiction, he does not put together a badass steampunk expedition with hot air balloons and shit, which is devastating, Jamie. What a bummer. Absolutely devastating. So he's not doing the steampunk cartoon movie that I used to love? No, no, no.

What a shame. It wrenches my soul in twain, but he writes a bunch of really boring books trying to use math and logic to like figure out where it would have been. Fucking yawn. Fuck you, Jean-Sylvain Bailey. I didn't ask for homework after it's been fucked. I want to go to Atlantis, bitch.

Anyway, whatever. In Bailey, we see the synthesis of the diffusionist trend with a new 18th century appreciation for the value of myths. Previously rejected as being the beliefs of pre-rational civilizations, which is a fucked up term, but that's what they're talking about, right? They view earlier civilizations as pre-rational. I believe that's the case because you can't survive as a hunter-gatherer if you're not pretty rational, but whatever.

Scholars in this period are even arguing that the West was rational at this time. Exactly, exactly. There's a lot that's wrong with that. This is how they were talking about it. Scholars in this period, though this is actually kind of, kind of in some ways a positive trend, where like a lot of scholars are going against this attitude that earlier civilizations had been like just fundamentally irrational

and there's nothing to learn about their mythology. Scholars start to argue that like, well, no, there's actually a lot of truth in certain myths. That's why like they spread. And the good, the aspect of this is healthy is, and so we should like study and appreciate the different mythologies and whatnot that human beings have embraced over time because they can teach us a lot about ourselves.

Instead, a lot of scholars decide like, well, this must mean that all of these myths are like branches of some great historic truth that has been corrupted over time. And if we can figure out like a secret set of codes that allow us to like peel away the parts of the myths that have gotten corrupted over time, you could unlock a sacred discourse that reveals the truth about history. So that's not so much. I did think you said a sacred discord for a second.

That was a very funny, there is a special discord board. That's people are doing, there is now. Sorry. So Dan Edelstein writes, quote, Hercules' 12th and last labor in the traditional sequence led him beneath ground to capture Cerberus just as Persephone and other solar figure had disappeared underground for half the year. These episodes and others, Bailey surmised,

symbolized the complete disappearance of the sun. The inventors of the myth must therefore have lived at a latitude where the sun periodically vanished from the sky. Dismissing earlier theories about the location of Atlantis, Bailey thus reached the surprising conclusion that Atlantis lay near the North Pole, roughly where the Noviah Zimliah Archipelago is situated. So you see what he's doing there. He's being like, number one, he's saying that like,

well, because all of these myths have a common origin point and it's much older, it can't be like Greece. Like it has to be older. The Hercules myths can't have just been some things some Greek dudes came up with when they were drunk with Shinra on a campfire. It has to originate from somewhere. So let's pinpoint within the story. Ah, they're talking about an eclipse,

which must mean that they live near the North Pole. In some ways, you got a hand. It's very funny. It's very funny the way the logic works. Seriously, my dude? Africa is also here. There's other places we can explore and trace the myth. I mean, not explore, but yeah.

Again, it is funny that like, this is one of those cases where the people earlier and who were generally wrong about a lot of things were right about the origin of civilization or writer when they like proposed that it was in Egypt. Because like, yeah, it did start in like North Africa. Like that's more or less North Africa and like bits in the Middle East. But it's like only Egypt that is worth exploring. So they go to the Hercules myth, too.

Yeah, they go, I mean, Hercules clearly grew up in the North Pole, Jamie. I don't know if you've read Hercules. Look, would I watch that movie? A million percent I would watch that movie. I like to think, I was like, what would be the like popular current myth that people could, that once society collapses, that future cryptids can assume is based on truth. I'm like, is it Aragon?

Yeah, let's have it be the ripoff of J.R. or a token. Let's have it be Aragon. Or my favorite vampire story, Cirque du Freak. Let's have it be Cirque du Freak. There you go, Jamie. Yeah, it'll be Cirque du Freak. That's our foundational myth. Also, I think that Santa Claus should start traveling around with Hercules.

Oh, 100%. But specifically, young Arnold Schwarzenegger Hercules, where he can't really talk like in English. He's just like pronouncing words phonetically because he doesn't know what he's saying. I want that Hercules hanging out with Santa Claus, just hucking people into the East Bay. North Pole Hercules is a strong idea for a franchise. Free IP folks, go nuts. All right, come on, Disney.

Money on the table. You know what else is money on the table, Jamie Loftus? Tell me what? The products and services that support this podcast. Money we're taking, which is why you're about to hear these ads. I hope they're about to try it. I hope Gwynny's about to try to sell you a J-Dig. Wouldn't that be amazing?

Fingers crossed. Wow, other things crossed. For most 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 offending 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. We're back! Have you ever seen a jade egg, Robert? I've seen jade eggs. I haven't seen anyone... The kind that you stick in your... I've seen some people put some things inside them. I'll tell you that much.

I got this friend who can put one of those metal coke straws all the way up anyway. I used to use one as a stage prop where I did a show where at the end, like I would have the jade egg in, I would put it in at the beginning of the show and then people would totally forget I had done that. And they would also assume I never actually did it.

And then at the end, they would watch me pull it out and people hated it, Robert. They did not like it. But I had a great time. I was a kid. I had great parties that only happened because somebody was able to hide a bag full of pills inside themselves in a similar way

and drive across Dallas when they were about to check point set up. That's a good comrade. That's a good buddy. So we're talking about Bailey and his conclusion that Atlantis lays near the North Pole, right? And this is what brings us the concept that is called today like hyperborian Atlantis.

Hyperboria is this like mythical, in some myths, it's like a whole like pangea style continent way back in the day. But the hyperborians are like this mythical people who had supposedly existed somewhere in the far north of Greece and worshiped Apollo. And these kind of hyperborians kind of,

that hyperboria becomes kind of the word for the civilization, the great civilization that everything had originated from. It's also the civilization that Conan the Barbarian comes from in the Robert Howard novels. But that's because Howard is specifically a fan of this like mythology. He's like growing up.

This is all still very like when Robert Howard, the guy who creates Conan the Barbarian, is like writing the stories. This mythology is incredibly common because of Helena Blavatsky. But yeah, so hyperborian Atlantis is the concept that kind of comes up out as a result of Bailey's work.

And Bailey argues that the hyperborians had been real and that they'd lived up near the Arctic back when the world was warmer. And again, it's face value. That's just another silly myth theory. There's a bunch of different myths about early human beings that are all very fun

but not literally true. Literally true. I mean, for example, the opening of the movie Minions offers some really interesting ideas about how Minions came to be. Well, you know, and Jamie actually, that's based heavily on Catholic doctrine that's been buried beneath the Vatican

for centuries. Well, but Minions do believe in dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are a thing for Minions. Well, and for Catholics. Yeah, really? Yeah, Catholicism, they've always been shitty about abortion,

but like they've been good about evolution for a long time. Okay, well, that's good to know. There you go. You know what they're bad about is child molestation, which the Minions probably helped with. You have to assume, right?

No, they didn't, Robert. Jamie, they're helping all of the villains. What's more of a villain than the Catholic Church in Ireland in like the last 150 years? Well, the English in Ireland over the last 150. You do see them, I believe, reading who they were.

You see them help at the beginning of the movie. You see them help with T-Rex. You see them help the meanest caveman. Wait, why is it T-Rex a bad guy? It's just an animal. I hate the Minions. Fuck this fucking show. You see them help Napoleon Bonaparte.

Oh, Napoleon was not a bad guy. He was the only hero in European history. Look, this is what happens in the movie. And then they find Gru who is Steve Carell. And he's Hitler?

Yeah, I'm going to take that as given. So, Jamie... He is Hitler. Yeah, again, at face value, this idea of like a hyper-boring Atlantis just sounds like another silly myth. But as Edelstein continues, the impact of Bailey's conclusions here

was significant. He created Atlantis from the Atlanteans, the place from the people. He thus mobilized the myth, tracing its progress from the North Pole through Asia via Mongolia down to India and from there from east to west. Atlantis became a floating signifier,

an indicator of cultural superiority and originality that could be affixed to any place in people with whom the migrant Atlanteans might have come into contact. By situating their original homeland of polar ice sheets, he turned the Atlanteans into what would soon become the 19th century myth par excellence,

the myth of race, and more specifically the white of the white races peregrin... peregrin... I don't know how to say that word. I don't know what it is. Let me tell you. The Atlanteans came from this area

near the North Pole, which is now under ice. You can't find it, so there's no documentation of it. It's just great calamity. The Atlanteans migrated down through China and then into India and then through the Middle East and then eventually to Europe.

Number one, there's elements of actual history that gels with. You have the Indo-Aryans, we're not coming from the North Pole, but you have these different groups of people primarily defined by their language that do migrate from vast swaths

of the globe over periods of time. There's bits and pieces of evidence that shows these people here originally came from or at least people migrated down from this area. You can see evidence of that, which when you just have bits of it

seems to confirm, there's this migrating race that's bringing civilization in its way. A lot of white supremacists will eventually evolve into the Aryan myth. There's this ancient Aryan race that brought civilization to Europe and it's being corrupted now,

but there is this original pure race that you can trace and the Nazis do trace them back to India. They always get back around to that. Again, there's bits of actual because there is an Indo-Aryan people that travel up from India

and eventually make it into Eastern Europe and stuff, but it's not what the Nazis are talking about. But the Nazis send researchers to India to talk with people that they believed are like the ancestors of the Aryans.

When are they doing that? In the 30s, 20s and 30s, there's an SS, well in the 30s, particularly once the Nazis gained power, there's an SS division called the Anan Air Bay, which is like the SS kind of occult history division.

A lot of historians and researchers are funded by the Nazis to go over into India and the Aryans because the Nazis believe so strongly in this idea that there's this Ur culture that are our ancestors that traveled through the world

and they've just been kind of like corrupted by mistakenly breeding and like the Jews come into this at a certain point. So you just have to like send someone to find a scrap of information to create your confirmation bias myth. Yeah, I'm going to continue that quote now. We can now fully fathom the political thrust

of Bailey's gesture when he realized Atlantis, which is what Voltaire had done, he had lanticized the Orient making a snow-white northern European people, the hyperborians, responsible for the cultural achievements and splendors of the East.

He did not deny oriental achievements. On the contrary, he'd been over backwards to concur with Voltaire that Asian civilizations were truly awe-inspiring. But a hyperborian Atlantis allowed him to credit a European stock with the foundation of these ancient cultures. We in Europe are not so fancy

and we shouldn't be as proud of ourselves. Look at how much like grander these civilizations in the East were. And Bailey comes along and he's like, yes, and it's because these white hyperborian Atlanteans brought them civilization before they brought it here when their civilization was like closer to peer

and that's why they had all these achievements. But it's still like white people, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so Bailey's ideas did not gain tremendous ground in his time. Jules Verne actually mocks it. The whole book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

is Jules Verne making fun of this guy pretty much. It's one of those things you don't catch now because like it's this argument between dudes who've been dead for 100 feet. Yeah, but Verne is kind of like mocking Bailey specifically in that book. I always enjoy something like that where you're like, yeah, you can read the,

like when do you find out the Wizard of Oz is an allegory for something that you're like, well, I didn't know about these agrarians. This is not relevant to me, but at the time people were like, oh, he got their asses. Well, and that is the mark to me of like great, like, you know, shitty political, shitty fiction.

It's very obvious that like, ah, this is just some like stupid political rant. And if it's really good fiction, you know there's probably some dumb political rant there because all authors do that kind of shit, but you don't notice it. It's like, Tolkien was actually extremely angry about,

about Tory fiscal policy. And that's really what he's talking about when he discusses the delineation of the different orcish peoples from the elves. It's all, it's all, that was, I don't know enough about Tory economic policy to continue this joke.

That was a lie. I've not found the patience in this lifetime to dive into Tolkien lore. I don't think it's going to happen for me. Oh, it's funny. He really hated the idea that anybody would read anything into his books, but like, but the elves are the worst.

The man lives through a battle of the Somme in which thousands of his comrades are like sucked into mud and drown in it like while he watches and then he like writes in his book about this battle where thousands of corpses are like trapped forever in a bog. And people are like, was this about like,

were you like writing about World War One at all and he like hits them in the face with a beer bottle? Like fuck you for assuming. Exhausting. What a king. So, Jaime. Yeah. This somewhat meandering discussion.

You know, Bailey. I think it's been very on topic. Yeah, thank you. So Bailey is kind of ignored in this time, mocked by guys like Jules Verne, but about 60 years after he publishes his work, a woman is going to be born who will take his ideas, expand them and carry them

forward into a new and bloodier age. Her name is Helena Petrovna von Hahn. And she's born on August 12th, 1831 in a Katerinoslav. Now, Denis Provets in Ukraine. She's a Leo. So of course she's going to be a little bit showy, Robert.

And her whole childhood is in Ukraine, specifically it's in like a lot of the parts of Ukraine that her people are fighting and dying over right now. Her hometown in Katerinoslav was a very modern city by the standards of the Russian Empire. It had been built just a century

before and it specifically was like a city they had established in like honor of Catherine the Great who is the ruler of Russia for quite a while. Very interesting lady. Also a good friend of Voltaire, just interesting note. Now you may have noticed

that she is, there's a von in her name, right? She's Helena Petrovna von Hahn. This means that she's nobility, but you also might notice that like von is German, right? Yeah, von is like a marker that you're a member of like the nobility

in German culture. Wow, Robert. I feel like I should have known that. Does everybody know that? Yeah, I think like the guy who assassinated Hitler close von Stauffenberg was Prussian nobility, right? I didn't know that. Yeah, it's why a lot of grifters

put von in their name and like the 1800s, 1900s, it's because they're like pretending to be European nobles. And obviously von Hahn is a German name. She's German, but she's Russian because a huge chunk of the Russian aristocracy are actually German. This is going to cause serious

problems for some of them in about a century. But at the time everybody's fine about it because like there's serfs and they don't have any choice but to be fine about it. So anyway, she's German, but she's Russian and she lives in Ukraine. This is the Russian Empire, not weird at the time. The first great event of her

childhood would have been a cholera epidemic which killed so many people that coffins piled up in the streets of her hometown unburied. Now, her mother was 17 when she had her, which we're going to be talking about that quite a bit. Her mama's also named Helena and she is

not in particularly good health. She and her new baby both catch cholera and nearly die. And in fact, young Helena, the baby was so sick that her god parents and household called for a priest to baptize her immediately as a newborn infant because

they thought she was going to die. And according to family legends, Helena's aunt who was also a child at the time accidentally set the priest's robes on fire during the baptism which is a pretty cool thing to have happen at your baptism. That's pretty funny. You have to

hand it. There is something about a near death experience as a baby that will just like set you on the most bizarre life paths. And unfortunately I am thinking about Elvis Presley and how his

twin died. And now they're like, you have to live the life of two men and then like you just, if something happens, if you almost died as a baby, you're going to have a very fucked up life due to the baggage that you're like constantly reminded of. Yeah, that's

why we should hollow out the center of the country and make it a giant child prison. But that's the story for another day. So Jamie despite the old tidings, Halina and her mom both survived the epidemic. You may notice that I have not mentioned her father yet. This is because he was

a captain with Russia's horse artillery, some fancy royal unit, and he was generally not at home. He first meets his daughter when she's six months old. And this is going to be like the pattern for her life. He is away all the time. Now her dad's name is

Horse Artillery is like an elite military unit in this period. Like you're dragging like it allows you to like drag cannons around and move them into position quickly. And Peter von Hahn is kind of like an elite military commander for Zar Nicholas I. He wins awards for helping

to suppress a bunch of different uprisings. He is a shock trooper for the Empire. And Nicholas I who is like the czar at the time is one of the most brutal and effective czars in the history of the Russian Empire. So while Peter's daughter is struggling with her 17

year old mom to survive cholera, he is helping to crack down on an uprising in Poland and they kill thousands of people like stopping this uprising. It is blood running through the streets. Now the primary impact that all this has on young Helena's life is that they move

constantly. Also her dad is 34 and her mom is 17 which is not cool. That's another Elvis parallel. Not at all uncommon for the aristocracy at the time. This would have been kind of weird I think for like normal people but for

aristocrats not uncommon. Were they vaguely related? Do we know? I mean probably right but I don't specifically know. I'm not going to we could get into their genealogy I'm sure a lot more if we wanted to but who's got that kind of time. So the

primary impact, again they move constantly and they're generally because he's like a military officer whose job is to help put down rebellions. They're not saying in the good cities in Russia right? They're in backwaters you know? They're far from famous art like from the art and cultural scene in Russia

and this is a problem for Helena's mother who's again also Helena because she becomes a celebrated novelist. She's a really interesting lady actually. Again she's she marries her husband when he's like she's a child but as a young adult she starts writing novels

that become actually very popular in Russia and they're all about women who are in unhappy marriages to brutes This is like a part of her history that I was like this is very cool. It is dope. Her mom is a really interesting person I want to

quote a passage from one of her books titled The World's Judgment which I found exerted in a Gary Lachman's biography of Madame Blavatsky The fine sharp and fast mind of my husband as a rule accompanied by a cutting irony smashed every day one of my brightest most innocent

and pure aspirations and feelings all that was sacred to my heart was either laughed at or was shown to me in the pitiless and cynical light of his cold and cruel reasoning ooh so I think you can grasp a lot

about their relationship from that passage I love I just always I don't know my favorite areas of history are women with no rights finding the way to subtweet their oppressors into fucking oblivion like that is

so fun and not to draw another Minions parallel Robert but the man who is at least the co-creator one could argue the creator of the Minions co-director of the Despicable Me franchise Pierre Coffin

raised by a very famous Indonesian feminist who wrote novels when she was still working as a flight attendant that became very famous very influential she marries a French guy they have a you know a little Pierre Coffin and what does he

do to thank her creates the Minions an entire two great works of art from two generations of a family or you can interpret it as all the Minions are men they're all men doing evil things

and you're like where is he going with this does he realize it's all connected in the way that I do when I go on my long walks you know we don't know we don't know so Jamie that's a that's pretty and I think we can assume from that passage

also sex probably wasn't great like no probably not very good probably probably I'm gonna guess Peter worse at sex than say a foot a foot long subway sandwich

one of the ones on the that herbs and spices bread the herbs and spice well that's the best bread to fuck if you're gonna fuck some bread you want to be fucking that herbs and spices you know that's the best bread but I feel like it might have a doctor Bronner's kind of effect

on yeah it's it's gonna be a little peppery that's why you have a mad extra mayo yeah you really need to wash right away yeah and wash with mayo right it's like washing your eyes out with milk if you get mad don't do that if you get to your guest I'm sorry I don't even want to spread that

funny though right so anyway Helena the mom was never in because again they're both named Helena was never in good health so she doesn't ever fully get better from getting horribly sick and they move constantly which is bad for her health they live in army housing

which isn't good either although she and her baby still have like again they're rich they have a small army of servants at their beck and call so it's like hard but not hard compared to how most people in Russia would be living at the time

when she was two when Helena the baby our Helena was two her mom also Helena has another baby named Sasha who dies immediately which was tradition for roughly half of babies at the time and you know who else kills babies roughly half the time

is it the people who sponsored this show on their special child hunting island off the coast of indonesia that's been leaving a chicken with its throat slit on my front porch every week for six years

I can't pay them to stop that's right Jamie you know why they're doing that so you keep your mouth shut about the child hunting island off the coast of indonesia you're right and here we are it's never gonna end 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 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 we're back after making Sophie Mark a bunch of places in the episode to bleep out

the name of cool I like how you keep calling her Helena the baby it does make her sound like a tiktok rapper it does it does make her sound like a tiktok rapper

she would have, oh my god I have to say of all of the bastards we've talked about on the show easily would have had the best tiktok I do see what you're saying unfortunately if you go get to that she would have demolished tiktok

now Saddam Hussein that's a twitter head that's a twitter guy you get Saddam on twitter ain't nothing else happening on twitter oh no man that would have been a good time he would be making

he would be using the threat emoji often oh my god it would have been incredible so after this her family moved briefly to St. Petersburg they get like stationed there for a year or two which thrills mom Helena because St. Petersburg is like the cultural center

of Russia this is when her literary career is starting to take off and she's able to like go to art galleries and fancy parties and sit at salons with other adults who aren't like drunken soldiers this is like her dream life

she finally gets to live for like the only two years or a year or whatever that she will actually get to when she goes to happy when baby Helena is six Peter tells them that they're going to have to move again to the middle of nowhere to brutalize people and this time mom Helena says no she refuses to move

with her husband and like go with the army basically so she stays in St. Petersburg a while and then her father comes to her and asks if she and her daughter want to go on an adventure now Helena's maternal grandfather father had been made a trustee

for the Kalmuk which was a wandering tribe of horse riding warriors who like part of the area that they lived in they had like a moving city and stuff that they took with them and like part of the area that they live in is in Russia I think they go

to a number of places but like they live like within kind of the bounds of the Russian Empire because it's big and there's different kind of rules for tribal peoples and one of the things is you've got like this guy who's appointed by the government to be the intermediary of the tribe and the Russian government

and Helena's maternal grandmother gets that job for this group of like horse riding warrior nomads who are also Buddhist right so again, Russia's very fucking big so he takes his daughter and his granddaughter on a journey to a city called Ostrakhan

in the very distant steps where the Kalmuk are like camping out and young Helena as like seven something eight years old gets to spend time in direct contact with Buddhists this is her first experience with eastern religion and this legitimately happens Gary Lachman writes quote

here the young Helena Blavatsky was exposed to the Mongolian Lamaic system and had her first taste of Tibetan Buddhism her mother too was inspired by the meeting and later wrote a novel about Kalmuk life which was translated into French the prince spent his days in prayer in a Buddhist temple he had built himself

the colors, the images, the incense the strange words, murmured in an unfamiliar tongue must have made a deep impression on the six year old I guess she was six who had already led a remarkably adventurous life Blavatsky would later say that her interest in Tibet began at that time so

and again Tibet is this kind of mythical place it is a real place but like you can't go to Tibet if you're like a westerner it's pretty, it's closed but you know this guy Tibet's you know obviously like kind of one of the centers of Buddhism and so this like

horse nomad prince is like talking to this little girl about Tibet and she kind of falls in love with you know eastern religion and mysticism and after this period of time which legitimately sounds like a pretty rad experience to have

as a six year old the family all wind up back together with Peter in Odessa mainly because Helena the mom is really sick again and Odessa has these maternal baths that are thought to be good for her health I love old school

rich people it's like you just go sit in some salt water you'll be fine it'll be good, you'll just do rich people shit people are idiots back then so they just go sit in baths when they could take simple prescription medicine any of us could get from a pharmacy today

like go to Walgreens dumbasses I'm sorry did you not consider going to CVS walkers, loser your death's on you I don't even care like it takes 10 minutes we're about to get cancelled yeah we are

so she probably had what's the thing it was like consumption I think is generally like what people assume she had they just kind of describe her as sickly so she had some sort of like chronic lung illness that eventually kills her that again you could probably knock out in like 10 minutes

today anyway she dies in 1842 her baby Helena now the only Helena was 11 at the time her mother was 28 years old when she died wow yeah so that's has her kid at 17

she got her novel she got her novels done before that's impressive shit that's impressive shit and probably what killed her ultimately was the fact that her doctors kept taking all of her blood because again medicine's not great

in 1842 she dies in her mother's arms which is one of the saddest ways a 28 year old can die yeah that's not great her mother who's probably like 48 so Helena

was presumably like you know the daughter Helena was presumably pretty devastated life goes on though and soon she and her siblings she has two siblings now are all sent to live with her grandparents because army guy like army dad's not going to take care of him he's not going to be a single

army dad like no they're going to go live with grandma and grandpa who is he grew from to speak with me in fairness these are all rich people so they're staying with their grandparents at like basically a castle you know like they're living in like a mansion type palace deal

you know in in kind of like the Easter knee not east for Russia but east for Europe part of Russia Gary Lachman writes quote she was according to her sister Vera the strangest girl one has ever seen with a distinct dual nature

one side of her was mischievous combative and obstinate while another was mystical and metaphysically inclined characteristics that those who got to know the mature Helena Blavatsky would agree on her aunt Nadia just a few years older than her tells us that from an early age she was sympathetic

to the lower classes and preferred to play with the servants children rather than those of her own class and often made friends with ragged street boys this solidarity with her social inferiors wasn't uniform and she once had to apologize to an elderly servant whom she had slapped and again Lachman likes

Blavatsky and defends her so it's very funny that he's like she loved the poor she did slap that guy she loved the poor well I also like how it's included in text that well she apologized so you know she must have just been having a bad day Jesus

Christ yeah I mean she was made to well he does say she had to apologize right so we're not oh okay so also she didn't mean so also she did not mean that I mean again this is why the servants are a bad thing to have because any kid who has a chance

to slap an adult and get away with it's going to try you know that's just being a child I mean that is true yeah so uh yeah um again Lachman claims a lot that she like deeply loves the poor and the lower class I don't see any actual

documented evidence of that at all and the fact that even he is like yeah she would slap around the servants makes me wonder maybe she wasn't playing with the servant kids just because they had to do what she told them because she's the noble girl I don't know I do appreciate that he

that he left it in anyways even though it directly undermines his point I'm like okay not the worst journalism but I mean the logical thing to do would be to just simply omit that but yeah I mean like all of these biot people who write about

Blavatsky he's like enthralled by her but there's a there's so much shady shit she does like he can't keep it out so there's these moments where you can tell like he just he has to include something negative about her even though it hurts him anyway it's very funny all of these

books about Blavatsky are a little like that so there is some ample evidence so that she was kind of a pretty what I would call a fun kid the most detailed stories about her makes her sound like the proto Wednesday Adams right like she she's constantly hearing spirits

and ghosts the family manner like that she grows up on there's this subterranean basement system that she spends her time exploring she's often found down there by man servants like sleepwalking or talking to invisible companions so like servants will find her wandering the catacombs talking to ghosts

yeah that's dope that's a cool kid this is the shit I like that is she frequently played with beings no one else could see who she called the hunchbacks and sometimes she would threaten other kids to like sick her invisible friends on them if they didn't do what she said

and I bet they totally believed ah man witchy kids are so funny she does sound pretty cool yeah that's a great use of child ghost power that fucking rocks absolutely her sister

later recalled quote Halina used to dream allowed and tell us of her visions evidently clear vivid and as palpable as life to her it was her delight to gather around herself a party of us younger children at twilight and after taking us into the large dark museum to hold us there spellbound with her weird stories then

she narrated to us the most inconceivable tales about herself the most unheard of adventures of which she was the heroine every night as she explained so she's like telling them lies about going on adventures with her I was in the I got taken by like a spirit to this place and like I had to do this and you know fought this

other spirit or whatever like she's you know what you know what Halina Blavatsky really would have thrived with this is some friends to play D&D with when she was like 11 it does it does it just yeah it's a big imagination kid thing and it just sounds like she didn't have anyone matching that

level of imagination around her which just means that you'll be a weirdo. When she finally gets it it's going to be with adults but like also this is a period in which if you're into that there's not like a fictional outlet like today a lot of the bad stuff maybe wouldn't have happened maybe she would have gotten really into

fanfiction and eventually started writing around shit and stuff like well I think it's interesting because her mom was a novelist so you would think that there would have been that like baseline of like hey write some of this shit down you know there's bits of that happening here but especially like it's this I mean

again we're kind of like in the period where like Mary Shelley is going to invent the concept of science fiction so there's not a lot of there's not a ton of role models in terms of like taking your weird dreams about ghosts and spirits and turning it into a mythology this is a little early for that

learning that Mary Shelley lost her virginity against her mother's own grave was really just like I think maybe the highlight of my 2022 so far we'll do Mary Shelley and behind the ladies who rocked

behind the behind the unimpeachable women god so she's that's the fucking coolest thing ever making up stories about spirits and ghosts hanging out in the catacombs, scaring kids

pretty dope so while she's living with her grandparents this is in a town on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan she she claims now we're getting to the things that I don't think happened she claims during this period she discovered her great grandfather's massive occult library

now I want to read you how one reasonably credible account written for an unpronounceable Polish magazine by Tomasz Stawisinski describes it quote there she found hundreds of decaying books by the 16th and 17th century masters of alchemy in her medic philosophy such as Paracelsus

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Heinrich Kunrath Halina's great grandfather a high ranked Freemason who in the 1770s was initiated into the Rosa Crucian mysteries selected the books for his collection with meticulous we're talking about that selected the books for his

yes we'll talk about it selected the books for his collection with meticulous care Halina devoured them with passion and it wasn't long until she became an expert in the field of occultism the only other person she could tell about her spiritual adventures was Prince Alexander Golitsyn a colorful character

and a frequent guest at Halina's grandparents house. Golitsyn was a Freemason and a practicing mage who's search for ancient occult secrets had led him to travel to Greece, Iran, India, Egypt and numerous other places we don't know much about his relationship with Halina but without doubt it is Golitsyn who instilled the yearning

for faraway travels in her Halina wanted to seek out the unknown the magical, the mysterious now there is a lot going on in this paragraph so that is yes she's hanging out with her as like a 15 year old girl

her best friend is a prince wizard the wizard prince Golitsyn which is pretty cool that's again very cool there is it I know that Bolvatsky goes in a wildly different direction but it's like I don't know just imagine it of kids

going on to create controversial religions that was also how spiritualism started with like two sisters playing a prank because they were fucking bored but like so Golitsyn is a legitimately interesting guy he was in the circle of a lot

of major Masonic and spiritual proto gurus in the day one of his good friends was a Christian mystic named Karl von Eckerthausen who was like one of the major dudes who inspired Alistair Crowley again Crowley is like a generation later

basically so that's the set that Helena is hanging out with as like a teenage girl these weirdo occultists who are like a generation back from Crowley now Golitsyn's circle of dudes are all just super obsessed with secret societies Eckerthausen wrote about a secret

interior church and they were all very into the Rosicrucians now you had a reaction to that you probably you don't know who the Rosicrucians are right I don't know who the Rosicrucians are but I need to know about them is that they didn't exist probably didn't exist so when she claims

her great grandfather was one that's her myth making right but I'm going to quote again from Stalazinski about the Rosicrucians in 1612 in the German city of castle an anonymous brochure was published it was a manifesto of the Rosicrucian order an organization nobody had ever heard of before

the manifesto claimed that medieval occultist Christian Rosencroy had founded an order that gave its members access to the universal mystical truth about human nature and the ways of the world two years later another manifesto was released called the chemical wedding of Christian Rosencroy Rosencroy it's

kruz rosenkruz I don't know r-o-s-e-n-k-r-e-u-t-z I don't know Rosicroy Rosencroy yeah Rosicroy the hero of the story is presented as Hermes Trimegistus a god of Hellenic and Egyptian origin Hermes

this is getting heady Robert this is getting pretty heady so this fucking Hermes is the alleged author of the Emerald Tablet which is like a European alchemical text and definitely like a central mystic document of the Renaissance era and both of those books had been written by a guy named Johan Andre

who was a writer, a mathematician, a theologist and a cabalist so the history of the Rosicrucian order and its founder were like books written by this by Johan Andre this like mystic theologist and cabalist who like invents this guy Rosencroy

who isn't real and a mysterious order it's like it's not it's a I don't know if it's a prank because I don't know the degree to which this guy doesn't believe and he writes a fake manifesto that he credits to a guy who doesn't exist

who's based in part of like Hellenic and Egyptian mythological figures it's a little too it's a little bit too calculated to be classified as a prank yeah so basically in 1612 this like Rosicrucian manifesto

gets like posted up in Germany and again there's not real Rosicrucians as far as anyone's ever been able to prove but because this thing it gets goes kind of viral this like manifesto being published they become like a conspiracy theory right like people are like oh the Rosicrucians are behind this or that

they're the secret order and they have all this influence here and this influence here and is this like a popular belief or is it kind of a little yes the Rosa dudes are fucking writing conspiracy theories about the Rosicrucians into the 21st century it goes very viral so Helena is

hanging out with dudes who are super into the idea of the Rosicrucians in this period with occultists and she has another entry point into weird occult conspiracy theories from the 17th century anyway so she has another entry point into kind of like

occult conspiracy culture which are the books of her favorite author Edward Bulwer-Lytton now this guy her mom had translated a number of this dudes books into Russia this is like one of her mom's side jobs Bulwer-Lytton publishes a very

famous book in 1871 titled The Coming Race now it's about an underground master race the coming race baby the coming race I've watched that one it's like

the great American Bake Off but less horny so The Coming Race is about an underground master race who have a secret energy called Vril that they used to like it's their kind of occult electricity almost and yeah

this book Bulwer-Lytton obviously this is published in 1871 not a Nazi I don't even think he's particularly a white supremacist but his book has kind of become extremely influential to the weirdest kind of Nazis Nazis love talking about Vril today and secret underground Nazi bases

and the Artec all of that has its origin point in Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race so Bulwer is a Edward Bulwer-Lytton is a very popular author his books have been translated again Halina's mom translate them when she's a little girl and one of the books that Halina

would have grown up loving from this guy is Zononi which is about a secret power of Rosa Crucians who had psychic powers and lived forever this is probably why Halina later claimed that her great grandfather had been a Rosa Crucian because she loves these books as a kid and she wants to like tie herself and her family

to them so that she can claim to have some connection with these like Rosa Crucians from her favorite book that become part of her like conspiratorial belief system about the world right it's like it's she's making her own occult superhero origin story right by tying herself and like

grandfather was with the Rosa Crucians and like you know these these fiction books by Bulwer-Lytton aren't fiction they're him telling the real story but he has to keep it secret because it's like a conspiracy you know God I mean this is such fantasy

kid behavior yeah still still I mean it's like there's variants of this this basic art like the a lot of secret knowledge conspiracy grifters in the modern era have similar stories Bill Cooper who's the father of modern conspiracy theories the first

Alex Jones his whole back story is that like he when he was working at the pentagon he snuck into his boss's file cabinet and he like saw evidence of all the conspiracies he would spend the rest of his life talking about Keith Ranieri claimed that he had like interviewed all of this most successful people in the world and had like synthesized

the secret information about how to have success from their backgrounds and stuff right this is like well trod guru grifter ground the idea that like at some point as a younger person you came across like the font of all secret knowledge and so you got it directly from the source

and you can't show anyone else for like whatever reason right you don't have it anymore but you remember it all and that's why they should listen to you okay so that that brings up an interesting point too which is like it's not yeah it's not just like fantasy fan behavior because most fantasy

fans don't have the access and like wealth to take it as far as what you just described and like what Blavatsky would have had access to it's like oh yeah you can like try to attempt to make it happen because you have more influence

and power and money and all that shit and this brings us to the last well-documented part of her early life her marriage at age 17 just like her mom to a middle-aged ass man named Nika for Blavatsky he was the vice governor of Aravon in modern day and also within day Armenia

like I think today it's the capital of Armenia so he's like the second guy in command of basically that of Russian like Russia controlled Armenia in the period of their marriage Lachman writes one story is that she did so

despite her governess who said that no man would have so unruly, ill tempered and unpredictable a woman for a wife not even the old gentleman she had recently taunted and laughed at so much faced with such a challenge the teenage Blavatsky cast her spell and her plumeless raven was quickly netted

another story is that hearing of the plan to run away with Prince Golitsyn the family felt duty bound to protect her honor and its own and hastily shanghide the old by their standards Nika for into making an honest woman of her a third possibility is that she married Nika for out of anger at her father who had recently remarried

to a countess von Lang yet Blavatsky herself tells a different story Prince Golitsyn it seems wasn't the only one who took her mystical passion seriously in the letter to her friend Prince Alexander I'm not going to try to pronounce that last name mentioned earlier she wrote do you know why I married an old

Blavatsky because whereas all the young men laughed at my magical superstitions he believed in them she explained that her suitor had so often talked to me about the sorcerers of Erevan or the mysterious science of the Kurds and the Persians that I took him in order to use him as a latch key to the ladder right so number

one there's a myth that like or some people argue she and Prince Golitsyn had like a thing which by the way would have been him molesting her because she would have been like 16 but whatever I was just saying yeah that's very statutory marries her off to another middle-aged man in order to get her away

from this this this prince she claims that no I took advantage of this guy I married him because I wanted to get over to like these these Armenian and these Kurdish and Persian mystics and he was a powerful man in that area and I knew he would like open the door to me getting into there

I actually think she's probably telling the truth about that she has this guy kind of wrapped around her finger for most of the time that he's alive I don't have trouble believing that she this was a calculated move on her back she's a he's good at that and obviously you're a

fucking 17 year old Russian noble girl in this period of time you don't want to grow up like your mom did married to some like miserable ass fucking soldier dude if you want to take some autonomy in your life you have to scheme a bit right so maybe that's what she does now Madame Blavatsky as she

becomes known later would claim for the rest of her life that quote I never was his wife by which she means that the marriage was never consummated they did not fuck this is a topic of heavy debate which I see no reason to wait into the two biographers that I yeah hey I mean of course

the biographies who are followers and fans of hers are going to want to heavily speculate about who and when she was fucking exhausting it is we will talk about it more because it is relevant because a big part of the religion she makes is like aestheticism and a lot of it involves

sex denial and there's right credible allegations that like well she was fucking the whole time and obviously that does matter if you're like right because there was the celibacy thing right yes anyway this is a topic of debate Gary Lachman just takes it as like takes her word for it is like

no she was celibate she might even have been Lachman kind of described as possibly even asexual meanwhile the other biographer I use for this Marion Mead who is both way more into Wu she describes herself as like a Sai practitioner with Sai powers but also a much more

critical biographer of Lovatsky interesting we'll note that she has at least two husbands at one point she has two husbands at the same time I should say she has numerous lovers she may have had some kids and that basically

she fucks and one of the fun things is that like later again later in her life when she's a guru sorry to skip ahead a little bit but she gets like a doctors to examine her her bits and the doctors like it doesn't look like you've had a kid and she takes

that little bit and she strong arms him into writing a note that says quote I hereby certify that Madame Blavatsky has never been pregnant for with a child and so consequently can never have had a child and then she uses this note to claim that also she's a virgin even though that's not really what the doctor says

but she like gets a doctor to write something and then like uses that as part of her evidence that she's exactly that is kind of funny that is kind of funny I do I mean it's like any any like information about how doctors treated vaginas at this time is just like so

hysterically wrong like this was entirely possible that like she had that doctor looking at her foot and he was like this seems like a vagina to me I'm a man in the 1870s men in the 1870s you could be like okay like you can examine me but the lights

have to be off like and then you're like okay ghosts are coming out of my vagina and if you don't believe me you hate women it's the best it's the best I love it it's a good time to be a doctor or a vagina so for her part Blavatsky claimed quote never

physically speaking has there ever existed a girl or woman colder than I had a volcano in constant constant eruption in my brain and a glacier at the foot of the mountain okay that's kind of a sexual icon Helena Blavatsky I've had I've had ex-boyfriends

who have said similar things about me yeah so again the two the two arguments here either she was basically asexual or she was fucking constantly I don't know the truth but there's a lot of fun stories so

she was about to hit the world like a goddamn bomb right she's basically an adult she's wants to get out there and travel to all the different mystical centers of the world but she has to do one thing first Jamie and that's get away from her dork ass nerd of a husband right yes can't have

that dude hanging around so she claims that like she warned her husband she was making a big mistake before the wedding and begged him to stop she escaped before the wedding briefly and then got caught and after they were married she escaped a couple more

times what a fun indication of things to come when you try to flee the seat of your own wedding yeah right before their honeymoon your husband into not doing it yeah yeah right before their honeymoon she like bribes some Kurdish warriors to smuggle her out and she gets caught I think she might have made it to

Iran I hate that she was like put in this position but I love her tactics to not do it it's pretty fun it's pretty she's like she's like bribing these like nomadic warriors to like help her escape and like getting caught and it's this it's this whole she's dealing

she's like dealing with misogyny with a real dramatic flair it's pretty wild stuff so she gets caught again for a while she's under constant guard in her husband's palace but Halina keeps her focus and she eventually yeah she escapes to Tiflis

in Georgia where she gets caught again and her husband sends her back to her family so that they can send her and her servants to St. Petersburg to try to like keep a lock on her while they figure out what to do about her so like she's basically

supposed to be traveling with her servants to St. Petersburg to be like locked up somewhere until they can break her spirit but while she's on her way back home she bribes the captain of an English boat to help her and with the help of an escape kayak she kayaks to safety evading her servants

and like gets on this boat and gets taken to Constantinople and frees herself I know in that dope that's a pretty cool story this is cool god damn and it's like I know where the story is going but I didn't know these details and they're all cool

and that's dope as hell and that's what we're going to in for today Alina Blavatsky has escaped on a kayak to Constantinople which is pretty cool I mean she kayaks to a boat and that takes her to Constantinople but still pretty cool pretty impressive all right Jamie

have you ever had to kayak away from a bad marriage no I've kayaked towards a bad relationship yeah baby it is the ultimate have you ever had to paddle away I have had I've had some adventures while

kayaking that involved a sunken kayak and I've definitely had some some strenuous arguments while kayaking with a partner I don't like kayaking I'm going to be honest with you not a big fan sorry I got so upset about your kayaking anecdote that I left

yeah you have a tattoo of a kayak on your bicep that says forever yeah it says do not tread on me right before you came in this morning you were drilling holes in canoes because kayakers hate canoeists

yeah I mean you don't feel like you're in a safe womb-like space in a canoe I like to feel like I'm being born when I get out of the little boat okay that's right that's right like Jim Carrey in the second Ace Ventura movie

I was like where is this going yes exactly do you want to plug your shit yeah I guess that the best plug for this is listen to ghost church it's the limited series I just finished that is Blavatsky adjacent which I think will become

clearer in the next episode but it's about American spiritualism and a bunch of time I spent with some psychics and mediums in central Florida Robert's in it, Paul Leftkamp Kenz is in it, Sophie produced it Ian edited it, it's just

a cool zone jamboree and it's all every episode is out now so you can listen to all of it and then follow me on Twitter and Instagram if you want if you don't listen to ghost church it personally hurts my feelings

yeah if you don't listen to ghost church I will find you and I will put your children on the blue apron island where they'll be hunted by Elon Musk for food yeah it's Elon Musk and all of his kids go somebody's listening with his kids

their kids right now and I want you to know children that was a threat your parents better listen to ghost church I feel look it's high octane shit I still cut and check

Apple podcast reviews sometimes and I checked them and I had one that said I liked the whole show but I'm gonna stop listening now because Jamie wants the supreme court to be abolished but they still

gave me four stars I just lost one star I mean that's right though incredibly based I think look yeah I was like you know that's pretty fair and balanced yeah I have to give credit where it's due look they understand that this isn't the content

for them but they're not going to punish your show for it they're like look I enjoyed the whole show but we have a personal disagreement and I have to doc you a star I'm like alright you know what fair look you know what good for you

good for them alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protest it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse

and inside his hearse we look like a lot of guns but are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app apple podcast did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut?

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