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

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus to continue to discuss 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

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you get your podcasts. Jamie, Jamie Loftus, queen of the podcast frontier. Wow. Did you get what that was a reference to? Yes, Davey Crockett. Davey Crockett. I never know what you Yankees grow up with. Look, we don't really grow up with Davey Crockett, but we grow up with Disney movies at age poorly. So I've heard it. Well, if you're a Texan, that also makes you think of Rusty Wallace, who is a prominent Honda dealer in North Texas when I was a kid and had a song about his Honda dealership that was done to the same tune. Really? Yeah, there you go. Four people who grew up in North Texas at the same time that I did. There is nothing more. You all remember those ads? There are so few things in this world that can bond two people as quickly as knowing the same

local ad. It is like a rare. It's the truest bond. It's the truest bond that exists. Marriage means nothing next to having both seen, listened to Jim Adler, the Texas Hammer ads before he killed himself. I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm engaged. It's a bleak story, Jamie. You don't want to hear about the Texas Hammer and what went down. Very sad. The New England ad landscape was pretty bleak as well. I'm going to guess less cowboy ads. Not none. Probably not none. Wherever there are people. Where are you smoking? I'm not. Oh, don't gaslight me. He just blew. Robert, that was peak asshole. Peak asshole. Blowing smoke into the camera on your computer as Jamie asks you a question. I can smell it, first of all.

And another thing. I'm smoking minfalls because I hate me some Joe Biden. You know who else hated Joe Biden, Jamie Loftus? Who? Helena Blavatsky. She became aware of him decades before his birth in her Perusal of the Apostic Library. Yeah, exactly. She read about him in the ethereal library system that exists in her theology. One of the esoteric terms I kept coming. The Akashic records. The Akashic records, yes. We'll talk about them more much later because she invents them. A man of a diner in Florida was trying to unpack the Akashic records for me and I was like, what are these? Can you describe? And he's like, I don't, I don't really know. You know how we started talking about Cairo and Alexandria

and the library of Alexandria and the Akashic records are the ethereal equivalent of the library of Alexandria and Helena Blavatsky invents them. So we're going to be talking about that later. Don't worry. I have found that people will attribute whatever vague thing that they'll just be like, yeah, it's in the Akashic records. That's what the Akashic records exists for. It's a vague projection text. Well, I read about it in the Akashic records. There's a future book about it or something. And you're like, how many, how many topics are covered in the Akashic records? Because it's all over the place. It's everything that's ever been written. So it's a library outside of time. So like, you can read about the future by just like reading some history books

somebody wrote. Helena Blavatsky was aware of the fact that Donald Trump in the future would attempt to strangle a secret service agent to take control of the limousine away from him. Yeah, because that's got to be in there somewhere. So anyway, when we left off, Helena had kayaked her way to freedom and escaped from her. I don't know if evil husband's really the right thing to say because spoilers, he spends the rest of his life like sending her money whenever she asks for her husband. She does not love or definitely her husband. She does not see as someone she wants to be around. And he did lock her in a castle. So whatever. That's reason enough to not marry someone. Sure. But he does keep sending her money. So I

don't know. You can think about it however you want. Good. Findom, Findom. Yeah, definitely some Findom energy going off here also throughout her entire life. So I mean, she was a scammer. She was kind of Findom in the world. For about 20 years, she is in the wind, right? There are stories in very detailed stories in both of her biographies about everything she was doing during this period of time. We have no way of knowing if any of them are true. We definitely know a lot of them are false. There's a bunch of wild shit in here. She's in like two different boat crashes that kill almost everybody on the boat. This is the area of her life I'm more familiar with. It's like the wild stories that are unverifiable. Yeah, absolutely unverifiable. And there's a bunch

of stories. There's one when she's a little girl, there's a story that she like partly falls off a horse and like should have died, but the spirit saved her. And it's like, man, I had like I had a horse bolt on me when I was a kid. A lot of kids have a slightly scary experience with a horse or a car or something else that moves faster than things should move. It's not the ghosts, but whatever. Did the spirit save you though? No, the horse got back to like ran back to where it lived and then didn't want to run anymore. It was just scary because I wasn't in control. I don't know that I like it's just a horse that decided to run back home. It didn't want to listen to me. It happens with horses, I assume. I never rode a horse again. Well, fair enough. Well, not for

any particular reason. It's not a lot of opportunities to ride horses. My cousin was riding a horse once at the Jesus horse camp. We used to get scholarships to go to when we were kids and it died while she was riding it. Jesus Christ. It just kind of, it just kind of sat down. It just kind of sat down. It just gave up. She sat on a horse and it decided life was done. That's honestly so scarring. That's extremely funny. The horse just committed suicide. I have secondhand trauma. It was really old. It was at a camp in the middle of New Hampshire. Because it'd be pretty fucked up if it was young. So, wow, they definitely worked that horse to death. That's sad. That's actually depressing. That camp was so formative for me where I don't

remember any of the Jesus stuff, but I do remember that when my cousin sat on the horse and it died and I remember that for some reason they like, because you would just be doing Jesus stuff, horse stuff, Jesus stuff, horse stuff, occasional arts and crafts, dinner, no contact with the outside world. But there was one time where we had to watch a horse dental procedure and I remember being like, I don't want to, can I leave? Why is that useful? Because I- No. It's one thing if you're like, you need to watch, here's how we shoe a horse or like, but like, you don't, as a horse rider, you're never going to need to learn how to do dentistry on your horse. That's not your job. That's why you go to a horse dentist. I don't know. I'm not a horse guy.

Nor is a Christian nine-year-old. Do you need to watch a horse get a dental procedure? I bet they taught you more about that than they did about sex, though. Oh, for sure. No sex sex, but I did see a horse get a fucking canal. All they needed to do to teach you about sex was slam a big fat subway footlong down on the table and walk out of that room. There we go. That's how you teach kids about sex. I know we have to talk about Helena Blavatsky, but I do, I've seen this opinion circulating more and it really brings me pleasure to see that people are finally, you know, kind of coming around to this. The best food at Subway are the cookies. The cookies at Subway. Major,

are you kidding me? White macadamia, white chocolate macadamia nut? Hard to agree, Jamie Loftus. No opinion about Subway. But I do have some opinions about the life of Helena Blavatsky and over the next 20 years after escaping, she goes all over the place. She starts a spiritual society in Cairo, which like falls apart in like two weeks. What span of years are we talking? This is like 1849 to like 1870 or like 1850, something like that, to 1871 or 72. Pre-her encountering spiritualism or like... No, no. I mean, she encounters it as a kid, according to her, right? She's talking to Prince Golitsyn. She's reading her grandpa's occult library. She hung out with those horse nomads.

Right. Well, it's like, because American spiritualism starts in 1848. So I'm just trying to figure out when she connects with them. And she is, so when she starts a spiritualism society in Cairo the first time, that's right after she starts her visit, they're doing seances. They're doing medium shit. Spiritualism starts in America, gets over to Europe, and then eventually further south later. And they're doing that sort of shit in Cairo. She's doing the Fox sister shit. Okay. Yeah. Again, we'll talk about them a bit later. But it is unclear. It's pretty clear that she attempts and fails to start a spiritual society, mainly because the other medians start like grifting people and turning it into a cash thing

and it falls apart. That's her claim. That's the whole first way of spiritualism, baby. Might be more accurate to say that the grift just got away from her and she wasn't able to prop. But anyway, she goes to Paris, where according to her own recollections, she astonished a group of Freemasons with her depth of occult knowledge. There's no evidence of this. We do know that in 1858, after she's been nearly at, it's like 1849, something like that, that she starts her journey in like 1858, after nearly 10 years, because she comes back home a couple of times for money and stuff. She tells her sister that she'd spent the last decade as a prostitute. Now, her sister is also kind of a grifter, so we don't really know. They have a falling out at some point.

It is entirely possible that she spends as her year, that that's how she finances her travel. We don't really know how she pays for it. Okay, because I was kind of wondering, I was like, is she using sex work as a metaphor there or does she mean it in the literal sense? It might be literal. She may have just gotten the money from her husband, who she also visits occasionally during this period and who apparently sends her money. She comes from a rich family. She probably gets some money there. But what is certain is that she travels widely throughout Europe, throughout the Middle East and throughout Southeast Asia, and that she semi-regularly receives money from someone. And there's a couple of, it's probably a couple of different people,

like her family. Some patrons. She gets some amount of money. And yeah, she's in her claim is that she's having a series of wide-ranging mystical adventures. That kind of the inciting incident for her spiritual journey in this period, according to her claim of things, is that in 1851, she meets a teleporting Hindu mystic named Master Moria in London. Now she claims she recognizes this guy when she sees him in London, because she'd seen him in her dreams and visions, which she'd been having. Again, as a little girl, she's talking about these dreams and visions. She claims she's been seeing this guy for decades in her dreams and visions. And then she meets him at a hotel lobby in London. And I'm going to quote from Stawazinski

again. The man told Blavatsky he'd been waiting for her. It was planned long ago, he explained. They kept talking. Master Moria, for that was how he introduced himself to Helena, explained he had a special mission for her. Madame Blavatsky had to go to a secret school in Tibet that Moria ran together with his friend, Master Kuthumi. After he said that, he literally vanished into thin air. Now, Blavatsky later claimed that this inspired a series of attempts to try and make her way to the isolated kingdom of Tibet. At this point, Tibet was independent of China and anyone else. And in the West, it was basically mythic as almost no Westerners had ever been there. The kingdom was geographically isolated and bandits and border guards were either kill

or turn back people who tried to enter. The first European woman on record to see Tibet was Alexandra David Neal in 1932. Blavatsky claimed that in the 1860s, she made her way into the country and lived there for several years studying with Kuthumi and Moria. Now, this did not happen. Again, Tibet is a closed society to the West at this point. It is occasionally like European diplomatic officials and stuff will go to Tibet, but you really don't get in easily and it's very dangerous to do so. There is, however, like weirdly enticing evidence that she might have gotten close to Tibet a couple of times. She claims she tried and failed to get in twice. Lockman traces a couple of enticing leads. There's a couple of European officials in India who later will say that they

met a woman matching her description near Kashmir and sat and had tea with her and hung out for a while and hosted her for a while. We know those Buddhist tribesmen that she met as a girl. She meets again in this period in the Gobi Desert, not wildly far from the Tibetan border. Again, this definitely didn't happen, but like any good lifter, she gets close enough. Because of her backstory, it's not impotent. Of the women in this period, she's maybe one of the only ones who realistically might have been able to get to Tibet. She did have some connections, right? But so much of her philosophy depends on this lie being true. Yes, all of it, 100% of it. Yeah, right. She claims that during her years in Tibet, she stays with her Kuthumi and Master

Moria in their occult compound. She learns all these ancient mystic secrets and the secret history of the world. This is a very important period of journey for her that she's getting this occult schooling. It's also like in the real Hinduism and Buddhism, right? This stuff that is not actually, she's inventing when she later brings knowledge of Eastern religions to a lot of Americans. A lot of it shit she invented, but she'll claim, we'll talk about this more later, that like, well, no, the Hindus in India don't know the truth, but I got it directly from Master Moria or from Kuthumi who know the real shit. With stuff like this, it's just like, I mean, there's certainly another big name that comes to mind with this shit, but you're just like,

just like, be a novelist like your mom. Like, what exactly? Exactly. Write a cool novel about this shit. It's fine. Probably would have been a little racist, but it was the 1850s or whatever. No one's gonna do much better than you. It's like L Ron Hubbard shit. You're like, just stick to that. Come on. Yeah. No, it doesn't have to be a religion. She does not. So, you know, this is a big part of her story. During that like 20 years, she also will claim frequently later that she fights alongside Italian revolutionary, I think, Giuseppe Garibaldi and gets like shot several times. She has some scars on her body that she'll show people the rest of her life and be like, this is where I got shot fighting, you know, with Garibaldi in this in this failed revolution against like the

Catholics and the King or the Catholics and like, yeah, basically it was this like revolution to try to gain into Italy some independence from fucking Catholicism or whatever. She, yeah, claims that she learned secrets from mystics all over the world in the Middle East and in Tibet. She goes to the United States. Obviously, she hangs out with indigenous people and learns their mystical traditions and stuff, right? Yeah. And then rebrand it as her own, I'm sure. We don't like who knows the degree to which all of this is true. I tend to think it's about 15%. Yeah. Most likely bullshit. And that like, yeah, she probably like went to a fucking the equivalent of a truck stop and like was briefly like shook hands with a Navajo person and then wrote lurid

stories about how like she was instructed in their traditions and whatnot. Like that's the kind of person she is, you know? It's like, if that, I mean, if she, if it wasn't someone in fucking a San Francisco bar who had been to Arizona told her a story and like, yeah. Well, it's like also if she was like, yeah, if she was fraternizing with like white spiritualists in the 19th century, they were just making shit up about indigenous people while they were mass occurring them. And so it's just possible that she like talked to them and was like, okay, let's just take this at face value, even though there's like almost everything spiritualist said at that time was like totally wrong. Yes. And one, so one of the very few solid

things we can kind of grasp on during this period is that she takes, she moves to Cairo a second time. She attempts to create, this is years later, a second spiritual society. And this is again, an attempt, this is when the spiritualist craze is kind of at its height. So she's, she's continually trying to cash in on the spiritualist craze in Cairo because there's a lot of like rich dilettante white people in living in Cairo, right? Because it's, you know, colonizer types. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And she basically seems to have put together a group of mediums and set them to the task of bilking rubes for cash. Blavatsky was said to have used a long glove stuffed with cotton as a spirit hand, basically puppeting it to like do things and trick people into thinking she summoned a ghost

that was like, I mean, that was manipulating physical objects. That's some of the best of like both of the waves of spiritualism. That's like some of the greatest stuff because it's like, well, yeah, it can be a terrific grift. The physical mediumship phase, it's just fucking wild. She loves, she was big into having a physical dimension. We're going to talk about this a lot over the course of these episodes. Yeah, that is no longer the case because it was proven false, like just so many times that most people don't bother. And at this point, I have to note the long glove stuffed with cotton as a ghost hand was not a good grift trick. It does not seem to have worked on many people. Now, Lachman claims the woman who like says this of Blavatsky that

she tried to con people with a big fake cotton hand was a liar herself. And again, everyone who was arguing on the negative side of Blavatsky's life is also a con artist, spiritual grifter. So it is, it is, everyone is questionable who says anything about this woman. The most physical mediumship have been disproved. But okay, the best of what I know, because there were, there's like all this, I don't know, like there's all this lore of like, there were a few spiritual, like physical mediums who were never disproven. And then you can like sort of find examples to the case that like, they may have been disproven and then paid someone off or like situations like that. But the most convincing spirit hands, which is covered in, I think we

talked about in your, the episode of Ghost Church, you're in, if you're using like animal guts, people will start, they can't just be a cotton hand surgery and wet. And because first for whatever reason, I, people were more likely to believe that physical mediumship was real if it was wet. And there was like this common belief that like, if you went beyond the veil and reached through to like our dimension, you'd be goopy. And so women would would. Yeah. Oh, there was a lot to do with like, yeah, as you talk about in your show, like vaginal discharge and like ectoplasm and all this stuff, like it's a whole history. Yeah. And it became this, like this, I'm curious of like what Blavatsky did specifically,

but if she's using a bone dry cotton hand, people don't, that's not a show people are interested in going to. And that's where she is. She's a dry ass medium at this point. But I mean, yeah, she's not gooping it up. She's going to figure out how to get America very wet, but she doesn't know yet. Also, she's in Cairo. So here's here's Lachman writing about the kind of the claims of Blavatsky's time in her second spiritualist society. Quote, Blavatsky's own account has it that although she was against the idea of contacting the dead, she would allow mediums to perform. Emma Colombe was apparently one of these and then explained to the audience the truth behind the phenomena. What Blavatsky wanted to show was the difference between a passive medium

that is someone who is merely the means by which phenomena could occur and what she called an active doer, someone who could produce and control the phenomena and not as with mediums be controlled by them. In other words, a magician. That is in essence what she learned in Tibet or wherever she was. Yet Halina Blavatsky claimed to be a poor judge of character, at least at this time. Or perhaps her generous nature was taken advantage of something that will prove to be the case down the line. In any case, while she was away, the mediums amateurs, according to her account, decided to try to fleece the members of the society by staging fake seances. They also drank a great deal, something Halina was decidedly against. When she returned and discovered what had happened,

she closed the society down. Not, however, before a Greek madman who had been present at the only two public seances we held, she wrote, tried to shoot her. She thought he must have been possessed by some vile spook. Although the society lasted only two weeks, the attempt on her life, if it was not an exaggeration. Two weeks? Yeah, two weeks. A fortnight? She goes from starting a spiritual society to a guy trying to assassinate her in a bunch of mediums like creating a con artist ring in two weeks. It's amazing. This is, I mean, this does all kind of track that she, I mean, and not to say that the spiritualist mediums were like actually pulling shit off. Statistically, they were not. But there was like, it felt to me when I was doing, and again, I didn't get really

far in theosophy research, but that it was so, because there was like such a huge controversy around spiritualism and people, like it was just, it's like the easiest thing to use as like, well, this is fake. What I'm doing is real because it just had such a bad reputation. And that's what we're building towards here, because she will later claim that this experience and Lachman, one of her biographers will claim that this experience is what helps her to realize that spiritualism is wrong. Specifically, this assassination attempt, which she believes is like caused by this guy being possessed by a vile spook. Is there proof that the assassination attempt happened? Absolutely not, Jamie. I was like, okay, just checking. But this is what

Lachman says proves her point, quote, what her mediums were contacting were not the souls of the deer departed, but a species of astral hobo psychic tramps with nothing better to do than hover near the borderland between the living and the dead looking for some mischief. It was the insight that would lead to a lifelong feud between Helena Blavatsky and the major spiritualists of her time. And I got to say astral hobo fucking good band name, right? Oh, huge in the 90s, huge in the 90s, mostly forgotten now, but really, because it had sex at one time. They had that concert where 14 people burned to death, but yes, really good band. Okay, let's let's ease off Rhode Island for a second. Okay, because some people were really

sad when they learned about that when they were 10 or whatever. I don't know. Yeah, it was sad. Anyway, very sad. But yeah, it makes it there, especially at this time, getting as far away from spiritualism as popular was how a lot of movements started. Yes, exactly. And that's that is how Blavatsky claims it happens. And she went on to make something way worse. So she does a bunch of other shit. Like again, this there's this whole period you can read both in Lachman's and Meade's biographies, you can read many pages about what she supposedly did in this period. I'm not going to get into detail on it because it's almost certainly mostly nonsense, although she definitely went places and did stuff. And it was probably pretty

interesting. I'm going to guess the actual biography of Helena Blavatsky is also quite interesting, just not very flattering. So she, you know, we know she like bumps around Europe about her precise moments are unclear. But when she comes up on the historic next definitive of the historic record next definitively, it's in the United States. So we were pretty sure because there's, you know, government docs and shit that Helena Blavatsky lands in New York on July 7 1873. I definitely heard some people say it was 1872. I assume Lachman's not wrong here because it's such a documented basic fact. She's 42 years old. Now this is not her first time in the United States. According to her, I don't actually know that there's documentation that she

visited before, but it wouldn't have been weird if she had gone through the US on her way to India because of how travel worked at the time. Right. Yeah. She claims that she was supposed to ride there on a first class ticket, but gave it up to help a poor family afford the journey. There is no evidence this is true. Mead seems to say this is clearly a lie. Lachman takes it because again, he's he's very invested in her being a hero to the poor. So she says she arrives with only a few dollars to her name, plus a massive fortune in cash that Master Maurya gave her, but that she wasn't allowed to spend. Right. She couldn't use it at all. She had to give it to a random guy in Buffalo. There's God. Cool. Because again, she's getting messages,

these spiritual, they told her to go to Tibet. Now they keep giving her commands all through her life. So she she gets like told where to find this package of money and she has to take it to Buffalo. Again, zero evidence. And again, again, it's like that's there's like huge spiritualist like overlap there because it was all like almost exclusively in upstate New York was like where it was popular. Yes. Yeah. Now, next, Lachman claims that she basically lives the life of like a stereotypical immigrant to the United States. Quote, her adventures in the next few years are a kind of American success story in which a penniless foreigner arrives in the new world and through courage, persistence and determination makes good. Now, this is nonsense in part because she gets

a bunch of family money at some point, but she is she does seem to hire time. Well, no, she seems to have been poor for a while. There were like issues with her getting her money. And like if you have like an issue getting money mailed to you, that could be years. Sure. So she is like living in a working class house, both Mead and Lachman claims she becomes like the din mother for this like bunch of immigrants making a hard scrabble living in the late 1800s in New York City. Now Mead notes that and one of the worries in which her story differs from Lachman's, Mead notes that Belvatsky got the idea to go to the United States during while she was in Paris in the spring of 1873. And someone tells her about spiritualism and that it's taken over the United

States. This is probably not true because she would have done like it's weird. I don't know. It's a weird claim to make, but she probably something should be 25 years later. I think maybe the the germ of truth in there is that she probably goes there because somebody in fucking Paris is like, you know, where people are making a shitload of money, pulling off the grifts that you failed to pull off in Cairo is fucking New York City. That's where that shit will work. So we should probably talk about spiritualism. There's some stuff you've been alluding to Jamie that maybe our listeners who haven't listened to Ghost Church because they're cooks don't know. Legally they are. Yes. Sophie, what?

It's I'm for an ad break, but you're on a roll. Oh, thank you. You know who's not cooked. Wow. Okay. Oh, you cannot verify that. Wow. You're right. You're right. Hard to prove. And honestly, fine. Either way, it's all good. It's all good in this hood discriminate here. Yeah. Get cucked. Get not cucked. Be the cuckold. Be in the magpie fetishism. I'm not sure what that is, but figure out a way. Someone's going to get into whatever the fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Surgically implant an egg into another person. Actually, now that you say that, that definitely exists. That's got to be a fetish, right? That has to be a fetish. Absolutely has to be a fetish. Yeah. I mean, there are, there is specifically a sex toy that like you can pump eggs into somebody

with. They're made out of like a gelatin. That's nasty. That's nasty. I don't like it. Well, that's a thing that people can do if they want to go to an ad break. My God, man. Yeah. Here's some 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. We're back and we're talking about the sex toy that lets you squirt eggs up in your partner. It's called the ovipositor. You make the eggs out of some gelatin thing. It's a whole, it's a thing. You can look it up. The name like makes

up for how horrible this entire thing is. It's good shit. It's good shit. Like, I can't even be mad. I object. I object, but like, I'm not mad. I had a physical response to Jamie. Jamie literally backed off. Wow. Oh, but that's that's a gnarly name. Okay. Well, that's good. Dope. Dope. Can you do it with the script? Let's move on. So what's going on, Robert? Okay. So after she invents the ovipositor, no, okay. Like most great movements in American intellectual history, spiritualism started with the lies of a child, two children, actually. 15 year old. I'm looking at the picture of this of the ovipositor. I don't like it. Well, Jamie, thank you. The Hive will make it illegal soon. The names are kind of funny. The Hive Queen, the dragon ovipositor,

ice serpent, Aquarius the Kelpie, the tentacle ovipositor, the dragon dildo, Cthulhu the sea beast. Come back. Come back. He's about to talk about my girls. This is the stuff you like. Yeah. Yeah. My Foxy ladies. So these two liars who start spiritualism are 15. Okay. Relax. Calm that down real quick. 15 year old Maggie Fox and her 11 year old sister, Katie. The Fox family lived outside of Newark and that blighted hellscape some fools call New York State. Rochester adjacent. Yeah, they're Rochester adjacent, one assumes. Like most children, they were little shits and they decided they wanted to scare their mom by creating weird sounds that would echo in their drafty farmhouse. They started by tying strings to apples and then

dropping them on the stairs repeatedly to simulate the footsteps of a sort of ghost, which is pretty creative. You got to give them credit. For sure. Maggie and Katie graduated to popping and thumping sounds often by popping their knuckles or snapping their toes together. They could snap their toes. And dislocating their knees. Yeah, it's like fucked up shit. And they would do it with like even their shoes and socks on and it was still loud enough that it would like wake their parents up and they could do it barely moving, which is fucking wild over time. Again, I have a feeling I'm going to object to a few of your your broader characterizations of the foxes, but I will say this of the foxes. If systematic mass

of discrimination of women didn't exist, they would have been huge in early Hollywood. We'll see. I totally agree with you. Or at least in the radio, maybe because it's more sound based, but whatever. There's what there's one fox sister that I think is primarily at fault here. We'll get there. Yeah, I think the only fox that I would not blame for this is Fox Mulder. He's just trying to find the truth. Anyway, I'm going to quote now from a write up on history net. Maggie later claimed that she and Katie planned a final performance for their mother in which they would talk to the ghost after the rapping sounds had begun in the evening of March 31st, 1848. Miss Fox Rose lit a candle and began searching the house.

When she reached her daughter's bed, Katie peered into the darkness and boldly addressed the ghost. Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do, she said, snapping her fingers in the cadence of the earlier noises. The appropriate raps followed. Maggie then clapped her hands four times and commanded the ghost to wrap back. Four knocks followed. As if on cue, Katie responded by making soundless finger snapping gestures that in turn were answered with raps. Taking pity upon her terrified mother, Katie then offered a hint of explanation for the sounds. Oh, mother, I know what it is. Tomorrow is April Fool Day, and it's somebody trying to fool us. See, she began. But Miss Fox apparently refused to consider the suggestion of a prank. The ghost she believed

was real and terrified those she was, she decided to test it herself. Initially, she asked the ghost to count to 10. After it responded appropriately, she asked other questions. Among them, the number of children she had born. Seven raps came back. How many were still living? Six raps. Their ages. Each was wrapped out correctly. As Miss Fox later recalled, she then demanded if it was an injured spirit, make two raps. Promptly, two knocks were returned. Mrs. Fox then wanted to know who the ghost was in life. Maggie and Katie quickly concocted an answer. The spirit, they claimed, was a 31-year-old married man, dead for two years and the father of five. Will you continue to rap if I call in the neighbors? Their mother asked that they may hear

it too. So that's the start of all this, right? That is the start, yeah. And then the whole neighborhood gets in on it and it very quickly gets out of the control of these two kids. Yeah, very immediately. And again, like their kids trying to fuck with an adult and then the adult just doesn't seem to get it even when they pull the April Fools thing. And it very quickly becomes something like, well, if you tell the truth now, like... Right. Well, it got out of their heads really quickly. And it's also like at this time in this area, there were a lot of, like this was like, I mean, this specific thing happening was unique, but there were a lot of similar cases reported. So it was like, I feel like it's really often characterized like they were

just fucking idiots. But it was like this had been reported as news before. So there was some precedent for it. And then it's when their older sister becomes involved that it really becomes an issue. Because I always, I don't know, I feel bad because I'm like, they were fucking kids. They're fucking kids. I call them liars jokingly. I think they're children who had like, were fucking around and the adults around them, like all adults are like idiots who are easily led in fanatic directions. And what are you going to do? Yeah, exactly. They're religious. It's like, it's like the kind of the opposite of a satanic panic because I guess people weren't, well, I mean, that does happen too. That does happen too. There's like a backlash

from the church in their town as well. It's a fascinating story. They're children. Obviously, it's not their fault that the adults, it's almost, I don't, I haven't watched South Park in a long time. But you know, a lot of old South Park episodes, like the plot would basically be all of the adults get into some like, like it do something like get onto some insane bandwagon. And it causes problems. And like the kids are just kind of caught in the middle of it. It's kind of like that story. Like all of the adults in this town are just like immediately lose their minds and the girls just have to keep going along with it. It's very funny. Yeah. And then when their sister gets involved, because they have a sister who's in her like 30s

who comes over, she's a single mom who's like kind of barely making ends meet and like basically sees an opportunity with what they're doing and like realizes that this is something that she can monetize. So there's like so many different, I don't know, like the story as it's later told was that like the older sister was able to convince the girls that what they were doing was real and like to establish like, oh, well, this, it's not morally wrong what we're doing. You're just, you're just passing along messages. And then the older sister would mostly profit from it and was always in control of the money and the tour schedule and all this stuff. Yeah. Actually, Jamie, there's a place I might suggest our listeners go if they want to know

more about this. You actually might really benefit from listening to this podcast. It's called Ghost Church. And it really has a lot of fascinating stuff about American spiritualism in it. A friend of mine made it. You wouldn't know her. I don't like podcasts. So it's hard for me to listen to, especially if it's a woman talking. It really bothers me. Their voices are so hard to listen to. Get one of those like mafia voice changers so that it goes like it makes her sound like a man. I just hope it doesn't get political because I just don't like when podcasts get political. Jamie, you may be a great candidate for my new device, the Jaco Willick podcast voice changer. If you want to listen to a podcast by a woman, but you don't want it to be woke,

you just turn this on and it sounds like that Navy Seal guy who started the grift of Navy Seals writing books and making millions of dollars and now has a podcast. Look, whoever you want, the lady from Serial, one of the NPR ladies, you can make any lady sound like Jaco Willick and thus not woke. Wow. Okay, cool. I'm in. We also have a reverse device that makes Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sound like Kamala Harris. So like whatever you like. What? Sorry, I'm just, I am trying to imagine some Jordan Peterson aphorisms spoken in her voice. It's pretty fun, right? Very funny. Yeah, exactly. Oh boy. Making it good for whether you're an insufferable right-winger or an insufferable left-winger. If you want to listen

to podcasts that you shouldn't be listening to based on the things you say on Facebook, buy our voice changing devices. God, what a long, pointless bit. I'm so sorry. We got there. Right, we got there. So yeah, it's the Fox sisters get themselves in a little bit of trouble. The neighbors come over and one of the visitors suggests like trying to create a code for the ghost that can wrap all the letters of the alphabet and this really expands the number of things you can do in a seance. There's a funny moment where like the girls are pretending to be a murdered peddler buried in the basement so the adults try to excavate the basement, but then it rains just in time to like flood the basement so they can't

continue the excavation. So like the rumors keep spreading and soon the Fox girls are traveling all around, I say the United States, like the east, but that was most of the United States at this point. It's why I mean it like it does get them access to like all these like educational like shit they've never would have gotten access to. There's a Katie Foxley. What else are you gonna do if you're a girl in 1848? Like this is your best bet. Katie Fox lived with Horace Greeley for a while. Like it's like all this fucking wild stuff like they yeah. Their older sister gets involved at one point and like. Well, that's what I'm saying. The older sister is the one that's running the business. Yeah, she turns it into like a solid grift. And she becomes a medium as well and like

now it's a whole production. Yeah. And it's a the claim that Lea makes who is their older sister like in her version of events, which is her like claiming that this is all legitimate. Her memoir is wild. Yeah. Seeing what her sisters were doing made her think about the work of a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis, who was a bestselling author at the time. And Andrew Jackson Davis wrote The Divine Principles of Nature. His work itself was based on the writings of an 18th century European mystic, a theologian and scientist named Emanuel Swedenborg, who again, that prince that Blavatsky was hanging his big Swedenborg guy to. Now Swedenborg wrote that all human experience was a fraction of a spirit larger spiritual universe. In 1847, David Davis had like written his book, which kind

of made Swedenborg's theories popular. And this is the first time we get this. It's kind of like the early version of the the universe, the world is a simulation thing. Like his idea Swedenborg's idea is that the material world is like a shadow of the spiritual universe. And this is how the dead are able to be in regular contact with the living, like the dead are constantly interacting with us, even if we don't realize it, because we can't see the larger spiritual universe. And he had Davis had predicted that the truth was eventually going to like become present in the form of a living demonstration, right? Eventually, there's going to be physical proof of the spiritual world and of the communication that happens between those two worlds. So that's

what Davis writes in this book that becomes very popular. And it's worth noting, Davis himself is a pretty good grifter. He claims to have psychic powers that make him a human x-ray machine. So he would have. This was, I mean, yeah, it's like Davis, Swedenborg and like Anton Mesmer, like all, all their stuff. We're not getting into Mesmer enough. But yeah, he's a big part of this too. Yeah, those are like the guys. And they're, they're still, I mean, Davis in particular still like hugely like mentioned in spirit, like the place that I took a table, like a spiritualist, like demonstration. It's like the Andrew Jackson Davis building, like it's still super, super present. And his whole thing was like, he could see through your body and tell which organs were

sick and could diagnose health problems. And he would also, he would have seance conversations with dead medical experts. This is exactly the grift that John of God executes in Brazil. Direct line of descendant ideologically between Andrew Davis and John of God, who's this Brazilian grifter who is having seances with dead doctors who give him advice on how to cure people. And then he does like psychic surgeries on them, right? Everyone after these guys is just taking apart pieces of the shit they say and making new grifts out of them up to the present moment, right? Very little has been invented in like spiritualism in this like kind of wooey side of it that is new in the last 150 years. It's just different mix ups. It's kind of like,

I don't know, if I knew more about hip hop, I'd probably be able to make a good hip hop joke here, but I'm not. It is a lot of like recycled ideas or repackaged ideas as new technologies become available because there's very few like practicing spiritualists now, but it's more migrated to a new age movement. Yeah, exactly. New age is modern spiritualism. In a way, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's like, I don't know. It's like the Protestantism of spiritualism or something, whatever. And I'm into a lot of it. Theosophy is probably more like the Catholicism of, I don't know, it's useless to try to make these comparisons, but whatever. Everything that like we're dealing with today and like the weird new age woo movement,

the pieces of it are being invented by these guys now. And so Leia decides, and I think, again, as a grifter, Leia is like, OK, this book is a bestseller. That's what we need to like angle this as is like, we're the physical manifestation of the spiritual reality of the universe that Davis predicted was coming. And the fact that all of this starts to go viral in local news stories just sort of causes an eruption of this very shallow, liberate desire for supernatural communication. And again, people always wish that they could talk with their dead loved ones, right? That's probably as long as there have been humans, there has been a desire to like communicate with people who are gone. Yeah, versions of seances had been happening

for absolutely. Yeah, this. And so once this people very quickly and obviously there is a kind of conservative religious backlash against this, we're not going to get into that a lot because that's not the story we're telling today. But most regular people are pretty happy to like buy into this, at least for a little while. And the idea takes off like fucking gangbusters. Maggie and her sisters visit New York City in 1850. And in short order, they were fetid and appeared in front of some of the most prominent people in the city doing their medium stick, including James Fenimore Cooper. They raised his sister for a postmortem conversation. And Cooper walks away very impressed. So suddenly spiritualism is everywhere.

Magazines and newspapers launched, the mediums set up or mediums set up shop in every state, people immediately start copying the Fox sisters. And most of them are teenage girls and young women. Yeah, yeah, which is which is like a cool. That's part of like, and that happens in the second revival of spiritualism, too, is like it's a way for like one of the only ways in America for like a woman to be a spiritual leader. And it's like the shakers were kind of one of the only other movements where that was possible, though it was like a woman's like in this period, there's a degree to which the Southern Baptists are doing some of that. But, but, you know, we talked about that this week, like that was one of the things that had made them controversial

more in like the 1600s. But yeah, like, and so this is there's a there's an ability to like gain social mobility as a young woman by doing this, some control over your own life, some money. And also it's justified in like their quote unquote theology, the idea is that young women and girls have pure souls, if they're virgins, which you have to assume like you're always going to claim you are. And that makes them easy conduits for the spirit world is that they're right, they're pure, which also like it like, you know, blows back in the expected way where it's like, as spiritualism goes on, women are mediums, but like men write the theory and the history and all that stuff. So they're it's they're still disenfranchised. And that's one of the

things that makes Plovotsky different. But yes, exactly. She controlled the narrative. Yeah. Now by 1854, spiritualists claimed there were between one and two million spiritualists in the United States. So obviously, that's fake. That's sure. But a lot, certainly hundreds of thousands. A lot. And it depends on how you like not necessarily spiritualists and that this was the center of their theology, because most people don't become spiritualists and that they discard everything else. But it's like, well, I'm still like a Baptist or a Catholic, but I also believe this person can talk to the dead, you know, that fits in with my Catholicism or whatever. Yeah, which is still kind of how it functions today. Like it's most religionist and credit for

most people. My mom, I don't think ever knew a goddamn thing about Hinduism and was just kind of more or less Christian all her life, but believed very strongly in reincarnation. She's like, people do this, right? This is just how human beings are. You take bits and pieces of what other people tell you and you incorporate it into your and that's fine. There's a lot of spiritualism stuff that I'm like, yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah, it's whatever. I don't care. But yeah, a lot of people are into spiritual. And again, it's probably useless to say they're spiritualists, but I wouldn't be surprised if one to two million Americans became convinced that like you could talk to ghosts

through mediums. Right. And a lot of this also had to do with the fact that it's like, I don't know, I feel like that also gets like lost in the discussion sometimes of like, this was a science or sorry, this was a religion that was presented itself and still presents itself as like, yes, well, we're backed by science. And like this was a time where like, yeah, it was, yeah, which I know Blavatsky, you know, goes nuts on as well. Like, oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah, they, which I think is why so many people who are willing to buy into it was because there was so much science shit they never would have believed was possible being proven. So they're like, well, why not this? Yeah, we'll be getting to that. But that is a huge like the fact that

this is a time in which for the first time in history, people are like starting to invent things that like you can't imagine some guys zapping into the world out of like a lightning bolt, like a sword or whatever, like you can imagine some sort of, but like once you have like automotives and electric lights, it does seem a bit different. Right. You're like, okay, yeah, sure, we can talk to ghosts. Why fucking not? Yeah, I can imagine some fucking ancient giant building this big statue or whatever. But like, yeah, now, now things are gonna anyway, whatever. So yeah, by the time Blavatsky makes it to the United States in 1873, spiritualism has passed its first great wave. And a lot of folks probably figured it was dying out. Helena Blavatsky may

in fact- Because of the Civil War. That was why a lot of people peaked in the Civil War and then declined. Yeah. And so it's declined. It's well past its height at this period. And this probably is probably why for the first year or so she's in the United States, Blavatsky doesn't really make any effort to establish herself as a guru, legitimately destitute who first her first move in the city. Now she is still a grifter. So she moves there and she immediately tries to like notify as the New York Sun that she has arrived in the city because she's a noble woman, right? Right. And there is a lot less happened in the world back then. So the Sun Sensor sends a reporter, Anna Ballard, to interview Blavatsky at the house where she

lived with several working class immigrant families. Blavatsky claims that she and a number of other aristocratic Russian women had been studying medicine in Zurich to become actual doctors, which is not a thing that a lot of women can do in this time. When suddenly the emperor of Russia changed his mind and forbade women from learning men's trades. And she was like, and so all of these women who had learned science, we all had to flee to the four corners of the world to not go back to Russia. So I was like, that's the first, like, I don't know what her grift plan for this was. There must have been one. She wouldn't reach out to the Sun for nothing. Right. This isn't going nowhere. But where is this going?

It doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't work. The Sun runs this as front page news on July 28th, but they don't mention her name. They end the story with the words, quote, these accomplished women, polyglots, travelers, scientists, nearly moneyless, are able to do much and want something to do. But like, it's just a human interest story, and they don't name her. So she doesn't actually, there's no, oh, interesting. She doesn't get shit from this. So she had been hoping this would kind of work as a want ad, and like, she would be able to get some sort of a job or some sort of attention she could turn into money from it, but it doesn't. So she languishes for a while. She uses her mystique

as a Russian countess to like, she's able to convince people she is a Russian countess. And she's able to convince people to like, she gets a job writing advertising cards and stuff. Like she gets a couple of weird gigs because people are impressed by her background, but she can't really hack it with any more substantial work. She like, tries to be a leather worker at one point and just is no good at it. So frustrated, she lapses into her girlhood habit of telling stories about the supernatural. Her biographer Meade writes, quote, apart from spooky stories, Helena amably dispensed information about people's pasts to anyone who asked. Ms. Parker for one was greatly startled

to hear about incidents in her own life that were she thought only known to herself. When she asked to be put in touch with her dead mother, Helena refused. Her mother progressed beyond reach, involved herself in higher matters now. Since Madame continually claimed to be under the authority of unseen powers, Elizabeth and the others at two to two Madison assumed she must be speaking of her spirit guides and naturally concluded that she was a spiritualist. So she's doing cold reading on these people, right? Like whenever someone's like, oh, they knew things about me, it's probably goes, okay, did they start by asking a series of questions that they then turned into like a revelation, you know? Right. Like leading

questions. And then if they start to ask for things that are too specific and you don't know anything about them, you say, oh, they're you redirect or they're concerned with higher matters. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So that sounds like a classic. Like I didn't know anything about you before you entered the room kind of thing. Now they assume she's a spiritualist because of what she's doing. And again, cold reading, this is like the period in which it's invented. She's one of the first people doing this, at least in an organized way. Well, yeah, I mean, spiritualists, if you were a medium that didn't get busted, you were really good at doing that. Now, the voices that she claimed to hear were not in her mind, the dead or spirits of any kind.

She insisted that they were real living men. Her master, Moria and Koothoomi, who's I guess also her master, but he's always called Koothoomi. And the other one's usually just called the master. Now, she insisted, again, that these are real ass dudes who live in Tibet, that she had like met and stuff. They just are keeping up the conversation via psychic phone calls. So Blavatsky, again, it's she's assumed to be a spiritualist by the first people who like meet her doing mystic stuff, but that's not really what she's doing. Right. And for more than a year, she just kind of runs through friends, fails at a couple of businesses. She nearly burns down her apartment building because she smokes a pound a day of tobacco. Like that's that's

probably true, like literally a pound a day of tobacco. It's fucking dope. That's rad as hell. That's just cool. That's just hot girl shit. That's just a hot girl shit. That is hot girl shit. Jamie, we need to go back to the drying. We need to go back to the drying board on what hot girl shit is and is not. Now, you know, it'll make you a hot girl. I'm so disappointed. If you start huffing jewel flavored vaporizer pods, Jewel pods, they're like cigarettes, but more convenient. You can smoke them anywhere in an airplane bathroom in your cousin's basement on the top of a mountain. Jewels catch the addiction. You're you're you're you're fire. So the rubber. I'm sorry. You're fired. I'm not. Do you not? Do you not like the delicious taste

of Jewel tobacco? Everything you said. The delicious illegal taste. A pound of jewels. I would have. Okay. If it was a pound of Jewel pods, that would be pretty interesting little plastics rectangles underneath their feet. That would be a lot. I don't know why that's a more pleasurable image. Just fucking burning through them. Like like like fucking influence him. Do not. Okay. But if someone wants to do. I'm just imagine her being like like a pound of Jewel pods with his guns like all the way. Like like like that's Helena Blavatsky, but just with like jewels switching out doing like cool moves to pop out the cartridges and put a new one. Can we unfire Robert? That's funny. I mean temporarily, but I can't. Okay. Well, here's here's some more

ads for our primary sponsor, the tobacco industry. 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 Bollett 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 in 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. Oh, we're back. You know, Jamie, what I like most about tobacco and tobacco products is their absolute lack of any health consequences. Tobacco. It's like medicine. Anyway, back to Helena Blavatsky. Ask that hunk of my dad's lung that's no longer a bear about that. Well, maybe he didn't need that lung. Maybe it was slowing him down. You think about that, Jamie? You think about that? He's so much stronger now.

Just like Helena Blavatsky was. Actually, she's in terrible health her entire life. Yeah. That is one of the wildest facts about it because she does so many, like a lot of it is lies, but she does genuinely go a lot of places and do a lot of things. And I'm like, but she was like in pain the whole time. Yeah. She's like nearly losing a limb from getting green and she, yeah, she smokes a pound of tobacco a day. So her lungs are just whole. Just stay home and be a novelist. My God. That's not what she's gonna do. No, that's not what she's gonna do. Anyway, she gets an inheritance from her family at one point. Some sources say she spends a bunch of time living in like a hotel, a fancy hotel.

Okay. That's hot girl shit. She apparently like wastes a lot of it on a farm scam. She gets like conned into investing into a farm that can't make money. Oh, that's fun. Whatever. She does a bunch of shit. Obviously, there's different stories about like her habits. Lockman says she was a teetotaler. Obviously, she smoked a lot of cigarettes, but she didn't, she wouldn't drink, didn't do anything else. Me claims that she's like they don't drink because they are always accused of being alcoholics and that's why they have vision. So they're like, no, we're sober. So I will say, probably true that she didn't drink, but Mead claims she was heavily addicted to both

hashish and opium during this period. Yes. Yeah. And it's one of those things. Actually, she becomes in like the seventies and stuff, like kind of a pot icon, like a hundred years like after her death. But like because she's supposedly smoking hash during this, like Madame Blavatsky is like gets involved in like she doesn't get involved, but like her image gets involved in kind of the early marijuana. And now as of today, she's a she's a jewel icon as well. She's a jewel. That's right. She would have loved jewels because everyone does agree. She was a chain smoker with the kind of dedication that today you only see in Serbia. Now in 1874, she was interviewed by another journalist and it's noted by Mead that she was scantily clad

on the floor of an apartment when this reporter, Hannah Wolfe, starts to talk to her. And Wolfe, I think, right, works for the post and gets like fascinated by her, follows her around. She like Blavatsky tells her about fighting with Garibaldi and like shows her her scars. Wolfe claims that Blavatsky tells her about the benefits of opium and hash for inciting the imagination. Not inaccurate. Yeah. She she charms this reporter who's a reasonably well connected person and through this reporter, she meets a friend of Hannah's named Mr. W, who the two get in the subject of spiritualism and Mr. W is into seances and Blavatsky claims I don't know anything about spiritualism. What does the W stand for? We don't know. In her biographies, there's a shitload

of like Mr. X and Y in random letters, like it's very frustrating. Mr. X. Y. She is one of the most annoying people to read about because like every third page is a five page digression about people from 150 years ago and you never want to know about. Yeah. Having unfair and having unverifiable arguments that are central to the point being made by the biographer, but also completely impossible to back up. If you don't want to like raise eyebrows, don't name people Mr. W. Like what though? Well, I think don't think that's his Christian name. So Mr. W is a fan of spiritualism and Blavatsky probably, she must be lying because even if, even though she's certainly full of shit about a bunch of stuff, she's very well educated on the occult and on religion. There's no way that

in 1874, she didn't know what spiritualism is, but she claims like, oh, I've never heard of spiritualism. Yes. Okay. What do you call it? A seance? Yes. Let's go to this seance and that sounds very exciting. Well, that just sounds like she's going to go and then all of a sudden perform very well there. Oh, really? Interesting, Jamie. So is that exactly what happens? Yeah, I'm going to quote from Mead again here. Soon after that, she met Hannah and Mr. W on the street and animatedly informed them that as a result of the medium's lecture, she had began to develop occult powers. Having placed some photographs in a bureau, she found to her astonishment that spirits had tinted them like watercolor paintings. She invited Hannah and Mr. W back to the cheap apartment she shared

with three journalists. Her roommates were two men and a woman, a decidedly bohemian arrangement for the 1870s. But at least she had a small bedroom of her own off the dining room. When Hannah and Mr. W stopped in to see the spirit art, Helena led them to a sideboard in the dining room, pulled out some colored pictures and explained that the coloring seemed chiefly to be done in the night and when nature was in her negative mood. Hannah did not believe this for a minute. Speaking privately to the other residents of the apartment, she learned that they too had been skeptical of Madame's occult powers and had laid weight for the spirit who worked in the night watches and had discovered it materialized in the form of Madame Levotsky. At this stage, again,

she's not good enough to trick her friends. She probably lives with journalists in part because journalists are like bohemian weirdos and more into the living in that kind of an arrangement. But also she's desperately trying to get attention for something. That's why all of the first people she starts talking to in the U.S. are press. She really wants to get her name out there. She gets that. No press is bad press. So Hannah Wolf kind of quickly, well, not all that quickly, but eventually does realize this lady's maybe full of shit and I don't need to be hanging out with her too much. But Levotsky sends her a manuscript, which she claims is a satire of American politics. The way Levotsky describes it,

she's basically written Confederacy of Dunces. Hannah Wolf starts reading it and is like, this is number one, this is very bad. But number two, this seems really weird. None of it reads properly. She's hanging out with some mutual friends who are also friends of Levotsky and shows it to them. A couple of weeks ago, we gave this lady a Russian book and she just translated it into English and replaced Tsar with president. That's what she's claiming is a satire of American politics. That's a good one. She got their asses. That is so weird. Yeah. It's funny because it's like there's a lot of the way you're describing a lot of her behavior. It's like, okay, what's the end game? Like it sounds like she's trying to like piggyback onto

the adjacent movements to what she was trying to do in other locations. But like, what's the end game? What is the end game? We know what the end game for us is, Jamie. What? When the FDA comes after us for the vast racketeering scheme that I've put together. Speaking of racketeering. We are allowed to talk to that. Uncle Robert's Ghost Potion makes you a ghost. I'm selling ectoplasm that stores well in your crevices and releases on demand. Yep. So by our ghost potions and crevice goo. I don't know. We're taking this shit on the road. This isn't time for an ad, you know? Anyway. So she moves after this, you know, things with Hannah fall apart and with those friends. This

happens a couple of times early on is like, she's moving around New York City. Yeah, she's moving around New York City because she's a con artist. She does at this point grow her hair out into what Mead describes as a blonde Afro, which I desperately want to see a picture of. There do not appear to be extant ones, but that sounds incredible. Based on how she looked as an, I can't imagine it. Neither can I. I don't know what the fuck that doesn't seem like it's possible with her hair texture. No, no. If you look up pictures of Helena Blavatsky and try to imagine her in a blonde Afro, someone will get one of those AIs on it. Oh, God, it's very funny to think about. And yeah, so this is again, summer of 1874. She sets a new motto for herself. Try, right? Don't

doesn't matter what you're trying, just try. Quote, to be sure she had been trying all along, but efforts had been confined to the realm of the impractical. Perhaps it was time to attempt something different. Laying aside her gimmicks, she found a way of meeting the much advised admired Andrew Jackson Davis, the first important figure in American spiritualism and a man whose writings were respected throughout the world. Even though the Pukipsi seer knew nothing about Helena, he accurately gauged her true worth and extended a generous welcome. So she somehow managed to like, manages to like kind of get this guy on her side, right? Like, and she's something that she's, she's a very charismatic person. She's good at reading people

and manipulating them. And yeah, charismatic. Yeah. For a while that she's going to plagiarize the hell out of him later. But for a while, the two are friends. She visits him daily. He takes pity on him, her money troubles, and he gets her a job writing articles for a magazine called Psychic Studies. Blavatsky's articles were interesting because she seems to view she views very much the seance and medium stuff as not important and is primarily writing about it to make the case for a larger occult worldview where like speaking to the dead is more, more like a piece of a mosaic that's she's kind of cribbed together from bits of half remembered, heavily manipulated Buddhist and Hindu mythology. And it was around this time, running out of money

and people who'd listened to her just say shit that Helena Blavatsky came across an article in The Sun by a fellow named Colonel Henry Steele Olcott. Oh, sorry, I didn't have any other. And that was the end of my reaction. That was that was just that. Yeah, that was a dun dun dun moment. Anyway, so Olcott is an interesting guy. He was a Colonel because he had like done some shit during the Civil War, mainly like organizational shit. He was like a legitimately like really talented organizer. He's a lawyer. But he's also this guy. He like abandons his wife after he gets bored. He's like he's searching for something in his life beyond like being an upper middle class Victorian gentleman, which is why he abandons

his wife and family. And he cons a newspaper into paying for him to visit a farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont, where a spiritual manifestation had reportedly occurred. Now, he writes about this, these guys, the Eddie brothers who claim their Scottish great great great grandmother had been a witch and like their family had the ability to summon phantoms. So they would like claim they would do seances where they would claim to to raise the ghosts of dead indigenous people and talk to them. And like is one of the most sinister shitty fucking things of that spiritualists do is live on indigenous land, know nothing about it and then claim to be it's just and then literally steal their ghosts, steal their ghosts and make up history that serves

their narrative. Just and it's also they're kind of doing their contribution to the grift is they're kind of doing a puppet show like a shadow puppet thing is what it sounds like because they have this like closed cabinet that's like their altar and the like summon these spirits and you can watch them like fight duels with swords and stuff like again, I think they're basically doing shadow puppets and claiming that they're like summoning spirits. Yeah. The spirit cabinet became like a really popular manifestation thing because it's easy to do kind of like magic tricks because it there was a or those early spiritualists the Davenport brothers that would do a similar thing and then Houdini like talked to one of them towards the end of his his life and he was like,

yeah, it was a really good magic trick that we figured out how to fucking we realized we were good at puppets and decided to make some money. Right. Yeah. So Olcott, he just seems to be one of these guys. He's modest, moderately successful and is very talented on like an organizational level. But I think is also bored of like, again, it's pretty boring to just like be a dude who works as a lawyer in the 1870s. So he's searching for something else and it kind of seems like he finds it in the old cuts like he's a little he's a pretty credulous guy. So he buys this. He gets very much on board and he writes these incredibly enthusiastic articles for a couple of different moderately large newspapers about this puppet show out in fucking Crittenden

and Helena Blavatsky sees these articles and she decides like, well, and I think what her decision I think her thinking on the matter is, OK, this is the first spiritualism related thing that's gone viral in a while. This is the first thing that's getting some real attention in the media. So if I get down there and I can get in if I can get face to face with this journalist who for whatever reason has gotten people to care about spiritualism again, I can there's probably some way for me to make this work out for Helena, you know. And then he becomes her Mr. President down there. He sure does. He sure does. That is absolutely the way this story goes. So she travels to Chittenden. She shows up dressed like absolutely no one else on earth as Lachman describes,

quote. The first thing he noticed was her red guirabaldi shirt, a military tunic and blazing scarlet that had been the height of hout couture for a season or two and was not yet out of fashion. Amid the sober dress of Vermont farmers, it must have been a sight as must have been the Mongolian features that may have helped her in her Tibetan forays. Lachman's a little racist. After the shirt, Ocott next noticed her hair, a thick blonde mop that stood out from her head, silk and soft and crinkled to the roots like the fleece of a cutswalled you, then the massive cow muck face full of power, culture, imperiousness that contrasted sharply with the dour looks of the other guests. This caught his eye as must the fur tobacco pouch, the mini rings that adorned her

delicate fingers. So old timey writing is so goofy. Oh my God, say less. It does say a lot about Blavatsky that Lachman, this guy writing about her much later is like clearly taken in by her spell. But that's how a lot of like women were written about who were a part of like women who had magic attributed to them, which is kind of wild because look at this time, there were still witch laws. But this was like a unique moment in history where people were like willing to kind of forgo the witch laws for certain women. Lachman writes this in 2012. And like one of his the reason he talks about her Mongolian features there is that's one of the reasons he tries to convince us he probably she would have made it to Tibet is that will she looked

Mongolian? No one would have noticed. That's pretty fucking racist, dude. Yeah. Like that's what a what a crock. He also says that her face has like Kalmak features because she spent so much time with them, which is also like, anyway, those are like the horse. That's some spiritualist shit is like, oh, a person imprinted on me. So now exactly. It's something else. Simply not how that works. But clearly like Blavatsky has been all over the place and her dress is very eclectic. She's got stuff on her from all around the world. No, you're not going to run into anyone else who looks like Helena Blavatsky in like 1874. That's for damn sure. Yeah. So this journalist guy, Olcott, who started to get kind of piled on spiritism and stuff is like sees her and is like,

well, there's probably something going on there. Being the guy I am, I'm going to hang around this lady and Blavatsky, she knows she basically sees through the core of this man immediately and just takes him apart as a human being and and like weaves herself into every aspect of his being. Henry himself later recalled her matter was gracious and captivating her criticisms upon men and things original and witty. She was particularly interested in drawing me out as to my own ideas about spiritual things and expressed pleasure in finding that I had instinctively thought along the occult lines which she herself had pursued. It was not as an eastern mystic, but rather as a refined spiritualist that she talked. For my part, I knew nothing then or

next to nothing about Eastern philosophy. And at first, she kept silent on the subject. So she lets him, what do you believe about spiritualism now? What are you thinking? What does this make you think? Oh, she's cold reading him. She's like these mystic ideas too. And what you're thinking is based upon these things that I read in my grandfather's and yada, yada, yada. You know, she makes him feel like he's somehow tapped into some secret like, oh, I know you're just getting into this, but you're really advanced in your understanding of the spiritual world, right? Right, because she needs something from him and he needs something from her. It's so wild. Like how, yeah, I mean, her story and a lot of people, it's like she, I feel like specifically

just really took advantage of how little people knew about anywhere that was not the West and just sort of invented shit. And the fact that like new age leaders still do that shit to this day. Yeah, it's pretty fun. Even though the information is now accessible, like it's just wild. Now, and it's interesting when you look at like what Henry started writing about her in his articles about her, one of the compliments he pays her is like the highest compliment a man could give a woman in the 19th century, which is that he considered her androgynous rather than female. Oh, so that's his way of saying it. And I take what she says seriously. It's also, there's more than that, because there's also because these two become business

partners, there's this like series of rumors that they're fucking for years. And so part of he emphasizes that like, I don't even see her as a woman, you know? So there's a lot wrapped in there. So that first night when they, so by the time she gets to the Eddie Brothers house in Crittenden, you know, Olcott's been there a while and it's the medium shtick they're doing has started to wear a little thin for him. But it changes significantly once she arrives. This night for the first time, they've been summoning different spirits. For the first time, they channel the spirit of a Georgian musician. And Blavatsky, excitingly is like, I knew the man back in Europe when he was alive. And she has him sing some songs for her. And he answers questions and stuff about

the afterlife. And Olcott finds this, this is the first time that someone has come from far away and been like, no, they're channeling someone I knew. I've never met these people before. This must be real because I've never met them before. Now, obviously, Blavatsky sat down with these dudes and was like, Hey, you want to really get this mark roped in? Like, let me tell you what to do. Like you just say these things, sing the song and like, I'll tell them it's this. Yeah, anyway. But Olcott falls for it entirely. He becomes convinced it must be real because Halina is, quote, a lady of such social position as to be incapable of entering into a vulgar conspiracy with any pair of tricksters. Yeah, that that logic has never gone gone left. Yeah. Now,

this was all incredibly staged. And the piece to resistance was when the spirit or spirits managed to summon a metal into Halina's hand, which she claimed had been a military metal that had been buried with her dead father that's like the spirits had brought back for her and stuff. The reality was that again, it's just a simple sleight of hand trick in a dark room. But Olcott, being the most credulous man in history, bought it all, writing, was there ever a manifestation more wonderful than this, a token drug by unknown means from a father's grave and laid in his daughter's hand 5000 miles away across an ocean, a jewel from the breast of a warrior sleeping his last sleep in Russian ground, sparkling in the candlelight in a gloomy apartment of a Vermont

farmhouse, a precious pet present from the tomb of her nearest and best beloved of kin to be kept as a perpetual proof that death can neither extinguish the ties of blood nor long divide those who are once united and desire reunion with one another. Woohoo. Love that for them. Perfect mark. Perfect mark. And Jamie. Yes. You know who else is a perfect mark? Who? Our listeners for your content. Wow. Oh, that's where we're leaving today. You want to plug it? Yeah. We are. All right. So I would plug, especially for this episode, if you want to know more about the Fox sisters and the history of American spiritualism in the 19th century that is contained in my new podcast, Ghost Church. It's nine episodes. We just finished

it. Robert's in it. So if you produced it and there's, I have a, I have a very, I have a soft spot for a lot of spiritualists, especially women improving their social station through, through, through tricks and goofs. And there's a lot of talk about modern spiritualists as well and sort of what they're up to now. So check that out. Yeah. Check it out. Check out spiritualism. Go find a ghost. You know what? Find a ghost. I truly am like, if you want to talk to ghosts, like that's your business. Just don't hurt other people with it, you know? I don't know. You know what? It's 2022. Just hurt the right people with it, you know? There you go. Yes. Yes. Like if you've got a good mark, then go fucking nuts. I'm just,

I don't know. People get so mad about stuff like this. And sometimes with good reason and other times with like. There are, there, there are theosophists like foaming at the mouth right now about, about this takedown of Helena Blavatsky. I don't know enough about theosophy to have an opinion on it. I'm learning in real time from you. Spiritualists, I, you know, live your life. I don't know. Yeah. Go live your life. Talk to ghosts. Go create ghosts. Commit murder in a field, you know? I will literally pay you to watch and I have and I probably will again. Wow. Wow. Jamie just offered to pay you to murder someone while she watches. So. Yeah, that's exactly what he said. Yeah. Become a murderer. That's the message of this episode of Buying the Bastards.

Become a murderer. And the message of Ghost Church. And the message of Ghost Church. Sure. 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. 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.