Camp Gagnon - Freemasons, Crowley & the Occult Founding of America

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Today, with Mitch Horowitz, we dive into the occult origins of America and the hidden influence of secret societies throughout history. From the alchemical pursuits of Isaac Newton and Abraham Lincoln’s White House seances to the psychic phenomenon of telepathy and the multiverse of quantum computing, we explore how ancient traditions and ritual magic continue to shape our modern world. Welcome to Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: MUDWTR, Plaud, Ekster and GLD -Use Code: GAGNON For 10% OFF When You Visit http://plaud.ai/gagnon -Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your  MUDWTR  with code 'CAMP' at https://mudwtr.com/CAMP ! #mudwtrpod -New Customers get 40% OFF With Promo-Code: "CAMP" When They Visit: https://GLD.com -Get Up To 40% Off Through August 17th AND Use Code 'GAGNON20' To Get An Extra 20% Off When You Visit http://partner.ekster.com/campgagnon #ad Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com 0:00 Welcome to CAMP 1:10 Occult Founding of America 4:31 Meaning of “Occult” 6:38 Agrippa’s Sigil Magic + Evolution of Occultism 9:01 Why Ancient Traditions Survive 14:00 Newton's Occultism + Abe Lincoln's Seance’s 19:53 Occult Aspect of Physics 23:34 Proof of Astrology 26:14 Full Moon Births + ‘Lunatic’ Effect 30:00 Freud’s Telepathy + Psychic Phenomenon 35:02 Why Science Rejects Occultism 45:29 Multiverse of Quantum Computing 50:05 Uri Geller’s Psychic Abilities 57:16 Freemasonry’s Lost Knowledge 1:08:09 Secret Societies + Bohemian Grove 1:12:46 Power Behind Rituals 1:16:19 Aleister Crowley’s Occult Influence 1:19:36 Did Crowley Contact REAL Entities? 1:21:21 Dangers of Occultism 1:24:53 Occult Blood Sacrifice #occult #dark #magick #magic #ritual #rituals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Was America founded by occultists? And is there real evidence that astrology, telepathy, and ritual magic actually work? The pseudo-rationalists, of course, howl when I talk this way? And they're wrong. And they don't know they're wrong because Wikipedia won't tell them that they're wrong. So it falls to me the occult guy to call them out on their own shortcomings. Today, occult historian Mitch Horowitz uncovers the hidden beliefs that shaped America.

from the Freemasonry of the Founding Fathers to Abraham Lincoln's seances inside the White House and Isaac Newton's secret obsession with alchemy. We investigate the CIA's experiments with remote viewing, alleged laboratory evidence for ESP, and why Mitch believes modern skeptics refused to confront certain unexplained findings. We also enter the secretive world of Freemasonry Bohemian Grove before examining the life of Alistair Crowley, the magician that Mitch believes had a 90 percent chance of contacting something beyond ordinary reality. But if channeling and ritual magic can open a door to unseen forces, is there any guarantee that what comes through that door is good? I personally am kind of against the occult and the use of witchcraft and magic,

and I actually chatted with Mitch about the harm that can come with using this. And his answers are, let me just say, very interesting. This is the hidden history, evidence, and potential danger of the occult. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. Mitch Horowitz. How are you? Good to be here, man. I'm very glad that you're here. This has been a long time coming, to be honest with you. I am fascinated by the occult. I've been fascinated since I was very young. I grew up Catholic, and my mother is extremely Catholic. And so most of my exposure to occult thinking and esoteric philosophy has come kind of couched in a Catholic reservation where my mom is like, hey, this stuff is interesting, but don't get lost in it. Don't this, you got to be carefully. You got to know what's going

on. You got to know who these practitioners are, the Alistair Crowley's, but don't, don't jump in. And this has basically been my attempt to try to understand what's going on. And ultimately, the things that are undergirding all of this is like, is it real? Are the people we talk about historically actually occult practitioners? Are these just conspiracy theories? And you wrote a book a few years ago, Occult America, that really tackles the undergirding of American society and the founding of America as well as the current psyche of the American people and how it relates to the occult and occult thinking. So I guess my first question that I will ask you, was America founded by occultists? I think I can give a reasonable yes to that question. And I opt to say yes,

rather than to hedge or to hesitate because the American colonies were a extraordinary springboard for everything in alternative spirituality. It's so ironic because concurrent with slavery, concurrent with the destruction of the Native American culture, the colonies very early on developed a reputation for protecting the individual search for meaning. And different occult groups and outlying religious figures who were suffering persecution in the old world across the Atlantic, those who survived, which included the shakers, which included mystical colonies throughout Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, in particular. They were old world mystics, occultists, esotericists, and they were coming to the colonies to escape harassment and persecution. This included

some of the wealthier people who were among the American founders, an outsized number of whom were Freemasons, an order of ritual initiation into esotericism and ethics, a real vouchsafe of occult Renaissance ideals. Freemasons among our founders included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Paul Revere, an outsized number of the framers of the Constitution, outsized number of the signers of the Declaration, of Washington's generals. They were, in some cases, fleeing an old world order that had sought to suppress some of the occult ideals that were springing up during the Renaissance. So I couldn't say exclusively America was founded by occultists. That's only in my dreams. But I could say affirm yes to it because that,

thread of thought and that religious heterodoxy was a foundational part of a founding. William Penn's like, hey, I'm going to make a colony where anyone can believe whatever they want. For damn sure. And that's going to bring over Amish and that's going to bring over Protestants. And that's also going to bring over people that believe in more niche, maybe occult, religious. Without question. Penn was a Quaker who suffered persecution in England who actually spent some time in the Tower of London for heresy. His family knew persecution. They were also very wealthy. The Crown owed debts

to the Penn family, and they forgave those debts in exchange for a land grant. And part of Penn's dream was to found Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, which in the mid to late 1700s was a cluster of about five, six hundred houses, but which developed a reputation that attracted some of the very people you're describing, including mystical, monastic figures from Central Europe who were fleeing the 30 years' war, who came to the colonies and established little groups and communes. And amazingly, word trickled back. And this is what built religious freedom in America. The Constitution was a culminating event. But that religious freedom, it was flawed, but it was also real, had already been some 200 years in the making. Right. Now, before we jump into,

to Freemasonry or, you know, specific occult philosophies. Can you just define what it even means to be an occult thinker or to be an occultist? Sure. During the Renaissance, clerics and translators and scholars were rediscovering the religious philosophies of the ancient world, Egypt, Persia, North Africa, Greece, Rome. And these were the temple orders and the nature-based traditions. polytheistic traditions with a thousand different local deities, spellcasting, astrology, alchemy, cabala.

They had no way of classifying this antique material or late antique material in some cases. And so they opted for the Latin word occultists or secret. And it was accurate in the sense that it was not so much secret as it was unknown, neglected, unseen. After hundreds of years of the dark ages, this material had all gone way underground. The temple orders had vanished. There was no thought leadership around this material. It was this anarchic collection of what was. But these were the traditions by which humanity abided for millennia. And they were all but wiped out, at least above ground. And so the term, the English term, a cult, secret or hidden, that came to connote all these ideas. And that term has endured into the 21st century.

It's really a project of reconstructing the old polytheistic traditions. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion camp, history camp, and camp Gagnon. Now let's get back to it. And who are the figures that have brought this occult tradition or this polytheistic tradition into the fray through the round Renaissance even into the modern day. Well, there was a Renaissance occultist Cornelius Agrippa who wrote a three-volume book called the occult philosophy, which appeared in full in 1530. And a lot of what we draw up on today, the signs, the sigils, the symbols, from the pentagram to different concentric circles of reality, the names of different angels and spiritual messengers that people try to evoke, that comes from Agrippa's work.

And a lot of that is late ancient occultism that was preserved in Greek Egyptian writings. So it existed in Greek. Sometimes it existed in Arabic. It got translated into Latin. The fact is, just following the reign of Cleopatra, Greek-speaking Egyptians in the city of Alexandria began to write down some of the old ways. And this became called the Hermetic literature for, the Greek god of writing Hermes or Hermes Trismogistus, as he was sometimes called.

That was a name of tribute to Egypt's god of writing, Thoth, who the Greeks considered three times as great as their own Hermes or later Mercury. Anyway, Greek-speaking, Egyptian scribes in the city of Alexandria began to write down threads and fragments of the esoteric material. and this is what reemerged during the Renaissance that gave us our conception of the occult today. It's not the oldest of the old, but as I think we've learned, really ancient oral tradition and ancient symbolical tradition underscores a lot of our more modern expressions. So the hermetic literature is just a priceless time capsule, and it's only fragments,

but it's what we have. And it's our understanding of what the ancient Egyptians were thinking about in terms of their esoteric philosophy. Right. And it got preserved in Greek, which is a language, an expository language that we Westerners can understand. So it's very precious. And it was through that so-called hermetic writing rediscovered during the Renaissance that we came to know ourselves. And why harkening back to these traditions, right? There's so many different, you know, we can call them pagan or.

polytheistic traditions that we kind of have just left as a culture, right? Like, you can think of, like, perhaps the Greek pantheon. And most people look at it as pure mythos, or they're like, this is obviously not true. Like, these gods battling and dueling, this is, no offense, Christos. These things are completely fictional. Yeah. And then there are religious traditions that people are much less, you know, eager to call fictional, whatever it may be. They're like, you know, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, these things kind of exist in the fray of religiosity that is legitimate. and accepted. So why in the Renaissance are they pulling back these old Egyptian gods and these old traditions from these different philosophies around the world and pulling them back into practice?

I would say because there are and remain workable traditions emanating from ancient occultism. Astrology, for example, is the oldest religious retention on Earth. It goes back to the third century. I'm at a big of pardon, the third millennia, B.C. in Mesopotamia, in terms of some rudimentary form of the Western version of astrology we have today. And, of course, I'll get calls from journalists, and I'll have conversations with sociologists who want to ponder, what is astrology still popular today? And the answers that they're begging from me are always the same. Economic insecurity, you know, the lack of religiosity.

Lack of religiosity. Poor education. You know, they know what the answer is that they're seeking. And they never like the answer that I give them. And that is because it's pretty damned accurate. That's why. Now we're talking. Now we're talking.

There are a lot of things from antiquity, early antiquity, that we do not retain. We don't bleed ourselves with leeches anymore. We don't stone to death, depending on where you live. violators of certain crimes and so forth. And there are a lot of religious retentions that have died out. Astrology is a retention that not only has survived, but I'd warrant you couldn't meet anyone in the Western world who doesn't know his or her son sign and couldn't tell you something about it and so on and so forth. And the pseudo-rationalists, of course, how when I talk this way, but not only have they not studied astrology, and I don't expect them to, like

is busy. But what they don't realize is that the experts they're counting on who supposedly have done that studying and come back with the explanation that it's all bullshit and there's no methodological replication, i.e. science behind this, those experts haven't studied it either. And they're wrong, and they don't know they're wrong because Wikipedia won't tell them that they're wrong. And the fact is astrology is a remarkable source of insight that is methodologically replicable. And groups of skeptics have done studies and suppressed their own data when it comes up as methodologically replicable. Is that true? Yeah, there was a group called Cycop, which was founded by the ignoble James Randy and some of his pseudo-sceptical followers.

The great Randini. Yeah. This was in the 1970s, 1980s. They attempted to replicate some studies of astrology that were done by a French astronomer, astrology, named, um, Michelle Goughlin. And Michelle Goughlin made the case that the planet Mars shows it very commonly and prominently in the lives of championship athletes. So if you're an Olympian or if you're whatever, whatever nation you're from, if you're ranked among the champions, Gokleen's research showed that Mars fits very prominently into your chart. So this group of pseudosceptics re-ran his research and it worked. And they suppressed it. And it split the organization. and two. This is just one example of how pseudo-rationalists misunderstand rationalism as outcome versus method.

And I work with method. They work with outcome. And so it falls to me, the occult guy, to call them out on their own shortcomings in terms of authentic rationalism, authentic skepticism. Should someone go out and buy a lottery ticket based on their astrological reading? Well, maybe I'd be very careful. We live under many different laws and forces. I don't believe there's any single super law that governs the individual's life. But is astrology a useful tool? Yeah, I stand by that. Its retention doesn't come from human gullibility. Its retention comes from utility. Really? And it seems like astrology shows up a lot in history, right? There's so many very famous world leaders, people you'd read about in history books that were also tapped in with having astrologers and getting their signs read and things like that. Absolutely. Are there specific examples of famous people historically that are big into

astrology? Well, one of the most famous was Sir Isaac Newton, the father of rationalism, and justly considered the father of rationalism. Isaac Newton actually performed one of the very first English translations of a valuable piece of hermetic literature, this ancient Greek Egyptian literature, called the Emerald Tablet. You can't make this up. His papers, which were just moldering somewhere in a dusty archive were acquired by the economist John Maynard Keynes just before World War II. And Keynes in acquiring Newton's private papers discovered a wild range of alchemical and occult interest. And he said, oh, my God, Isaac Newton was not the first of the rationalist. He was the last of the Magi. And I would say Isaac Newton was both. And that's his greatness. So you have

figures like Newton, without whom we wouldn't have conventional physics. And he nursed a great interest in all of this material. And this was well into what we called the Age of Enlightenment. And again and again, you'll find figures from deep into the Age of Enlightenment who abided occult practices in Occult America. I read about Abraham Lincoln holding Civil War era seances in the White House. To Lincoln, I think this was more of a novelty, but to his wife, Mary Todd, it was a deep dedication. And they were so unembarrassed by it that they allowed a reporter from the Boston Telegraph to be present. And it seems strange. Why would you be so disclosing? Why wouldn't you be worried about damage to your reputation? It's so happened that

during the Civil War, probably some, and I crunch the number as best as I can, in Occult America, probably about 10% of Americans participated in spiritualism in the Union and in the Confederacy. And sure enough, the Boston Telegraph report got reprinted in newspapers of the Confederacy. And to some people, it gives pause. And they think, well, maybe this guy's not so bad. You know, I agree with some of this stuff. It was a shrewd political move. I guess all I'm really trying to say is that you've got rationalist figures like I

Isaac Newton and then you've got more modern political figures like Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who in their different ways, doted upon occult ideas. Yeah, Isaac Newton is such an interesting one because he is touted as how he invents calculus. He's a, you know, the father of, you know, rationalism and physics. He's a great thinker, which is true. Yeah. But also deeply, deeply curious about theological and esoteric themes. I mean, I've heard it said that if you were to interview Isaac Newton and ask him what his job was,

he might tell you he's a theologian. Oh, that's interesting. Or he might tell you that he's a spiritualist or an occultist. He might tell you perhaps he's an alchemist, but a physicist would probably not be the first thing or a mathematician would probably be tertiary in his own personal description. I think that's a very interesting observation.

And his definition of science would probably encompass the extra physical. He had a lifelong interest in it. I find today that I have an easy, time, considerably so, talking to people in the hard sciences and medicine about these subjects than I do people in the social sciences or humanities or even in cognitive psychology. In cognitive psychology, researchers learn about how we fool ourselves, and that's valid. But it becomes a hammer-nail problem where because we have myriad ways of fooling ourselves, they see it everywhere.

And they suspend observation. They suspend analysis. And the truth is, in the hard sciences among physicists, chemists, and MDs, they have a realization of how truly bizarre the world gets as you go deeper and deeper. I was just touring the Fermi lab, a particle accelerator lab in Batavia, Illinois. And I can assure you, we had some far fucking out conversations. And people who run a particle lab are capable. It's theoretical, it's conceptual, but they're capable of talking to you about interdimensionality, about different intersections of time.

This lab experiments with a particle called the positron, which is one of the 17 building blocks of matter. The positron has been mathematically demonstrated to move backwards in time. The physicist Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in physics for this in 1966. What? Yeah. We haven't seen the positron move. backwards in time. That would take a lot of fucking doing to actually, I'm not sure how you would photograph something moving backwards in time, but mathematically find them demonstrated

in a 1949 paper that it moves backwards in time. So if one understands that, one can understand that conceptually it's not off the table to have a discussion about time travel. Now this is at the particle level, but the particle level has implications in our above ground world, which was fashioned and codified by none other than Isaac Newton. So you start to see where idea movements link up. But when they turn into ideologies and rationalism for a lot of people is in ideology versus a method, it becomes hard to exchange. But when I'm in a room full of physicists, when I'm in a room full of MDs, there might be a few frowns out there, but there is also a really fertile discussion.

That's so interesting. Now, when it comes to the efficacy of astrology, perhaps it is maintained its position within, you know, human behavior for so long because it's effective. And I actually think that, like, the religious perspective like my mother would have would probably say the same thing. She's like, no, it is effective, but you have to be careful with it because, you know, litany of reasons. But what do you think if you had to be, you know, the perfect, you know, skeptic, occult scientist person? what would you say is happening that would make astrology potentially an effective, just like an effective sort of holistic for determining like your life for your future?

Dig. It's a complex question because there's the whole correlation versus causation debate and that prevails today in the hard sciences, particularly physics. And our ancient ancestors had that same debate over astrology. Does it mirror actions on Earth? Does it cause actions? Is it akin to the planets affecting the flow of the tides, the open and closing of shellfish, a whole myriad range of bodily functions?

And even there, one could pose the question, is that causative, is that correlative? It's an unknown. I speak in general terms of causation. I think there's probably some natural. force, and we're comfortable in talking in terms of natural forces of magnetism, gravity, even though in the case of gravity, we don't know, fuck all what's going on. Mass seems to be attracted to itself. Even in the supposed vacuum of space, mass is attracted to itself, Isaac Newton would have

agreed. And the prevalence of unseen forces, including forces that come into play for, For example, in clinical lab study of ESP, telepathy, retrocausality, psychokinesis, which have been widely and accurately studied, juries, replicated, published on in mainstream journals. We as a modern Western society cannot sustain the crossover of forces from the extraphysical or spiritual world, whatever term one wants to use, into our world. So one can speak in terms of theology, myth, faith, and so forth. One cannot speak in terms of actual concrete forces entering into our daily above-ground experience like astrology.

And yet we have laboratory-based evidence for ESP that we could spend all afternoon discussing. It's replicable, it's impeccable, it's bulletproof, it's current. And yet we can't swallow it. We can't swallow it because the ultimate sin of Western society, not so much among the public, but within opinion-making institutions, mainstream journalism, mainstream academia, Wikipedia, the ultimate sin is speaking of extraphysical forces having some actual concrete impact on our world. It doesn't matter how much evidence one amasses. It doesn't matter how elegant a theory one has.

and theory is just concept, it can't be considered. And it gets us to the brink of absurdity because these things are as real in terms of evidence as the words I'm speaking, and yet no discussion can be sustained. Interesting. What would be the most compelling piece of astrological evidence? Like if you were trying to convince a pure skeptic,

like the guy that's watching this right now, if you wanted to be like, no, check out this study or check out this person's work. Who would you point them to? Well, I would say probably what we were discussing earlier, the so-called Mars effect that Michelle Goughlin studied. If you have a friend who has an expression, something only has to be a little bit true

in order to change everything. And that's why Goughlin's research was considered so dangerous. Because if you could demonstrate that there's some unmistakable correlation between Mars and the performance of champion athletes, athletes across thousands of cases, and this was shown again and again and again, the odds of that being an accident or random start to reach infinitesimally small levels, and you start having to twist yourself into pretzel to understand that as a sheer mistake.

Right. And so if you can demonstrate one wrinkle of near undeniable evidence-based reality around an occult philosophy, it's almost like the domino effect starts to come into play. And then, of course, there's all kinds of personal testimony. I've had extraordinary personal experiences with astrology. Now, I abide by Western astrology. The Vedic astrological system is different from ours. Critics like to point out that Western astrology doesn't actually track the sidereal activity in the sky, and they are correct, and that is true. And the Ancents understood that themselves.

They're dating their astrological analyses back to Mesopotamia. And because the earth wobbles on its axis, the night sky that we see is different from the night sky that our ancient ancestors saw. But Roman astrologers started to reason in maybe around 100, 150 AD that these were kind of windows on the cosmos that still held true. Whereas Vedic astrology, astrology that's practiced within Hinduism, that is sidereally accurate. They turn the wheel of the sky, so to speak, to track the stars. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and for some people, that's a really winning approach, and that's a correct approach. This was the subject of an ancient debate, and it remains so.

So there are glitches and imperfections depending upon your point of view. But for me, Western astrology stands up as an accurate typology. So interesting. Even just on a purely anecdotal level, my wife is a midwife. And this isn't pure astrology, but I think it has flavors to it. I'm curious where your perspective is. But there are certain things where she's like, this is not taught to us. She has a midwife degree, but as well as a nurse practitioner degree.

So she's gone through legitimate Western channels of medical education. And she says, like, almost as a joke, but it is so true that like when the full moon is coming, there will be more babies born. There's four women in the window that could have a baby in the next two weeks, but because it's a full moon this week, there's probably going to be two, maybe three that are born in the next 48 hours.

And so her actual staff will assemble more midwives because they know that there's going to be an insurgency of labors. And to my knowledge, this happens across, both in the midwifery circles, but as well as in more Western, like, you know, like hospitals and things like that. because they know that babies are born on the full moon.

And people have different theories. There's speculation. Maybe it's because the force of the moon causes water and amniotic fluid to change and that can, blah, blah, blah. But it's something that is verifiable, at least anecdotally, within this small sample set. Yeah. Likewise, the term lunatic is rooted in lunar because it was said in mental hospitals and so forth back in the Victorian era that the inmates, backed it up during periods of a full moon. Periods of a full moon within astrology are thought to coincide with intense emotions.

Right. That's the outlook, at least. And this is anecdotal, which is a tough dividing line for some people in the sciences, and understandably so. But the truth is, anecdote over time becomes record. Testimony becomes record. a lot of our therapeutic treatments are anecdotal for people who are taking SSRIs, SNRIs. We're not sure how they work.

The shrink says, how you're doing with this, adjusts it. If you're in the hospital, you'll get the frowny to smiley face scale to show how much pain you're in. Anecdote or testimony can count for a lot in terms of concrete experience. Yeah.

It just is one of those things where it's like there's something going on. And it doesn't have to be pseudoscientific. Yeah. It could just be a, science that we don't fully understand or that we haven't put the resources in understanding because it's already been labeled as pseudoscientific. Yeah. And I would also say that science is methodological replication. So there has to be some repeat pattern there. And I

honor that and I bow to that. Although something can occur without repeating, like someone who has this extraordinary crisis experience where they're thinking about a loved one at the instant of death and it's incontrovertibly real. They've related it to other people. They've written it down. They have something time stamped. And this happens all the time in people's experiences. It occurs. That doesn't necessarily mean it can repeat on demand. Right. Yeah. And I guess that creates an issue when it comes to, you know, the scientific method and creating, you know, producible, reliable results. Yeah. But it doesn't mean these things don't happen. It's true. And it creates an issue as well for psychics and I was just about to say this.

Because I met people that have that claim that they have psychic operations, but they don't control them. That these are things that come to them in their dreams. They have pre-cognitive dreams. They write them down. They're verified with their therapist. And they say, I wrote an email to my therapist three weeks before something happened. I had a detailed account. That thing happened.

I can't replicate it. I can't go into a scientific study and prove that this happened. But something strange happened to me. Yeah. One of the fathers of rationalism, Sigmund Freud himself, people think, think of Freud as being the materialist counterpart to Young, but Freud's interest in clairvoyant dreams, for example, was acute. He wrote whole papers on it. One of them is called dreams and telepathy. Yeah, some of the papers that Freud wrote on telepathy within the psychoanalytic

encounter were, get your tickets now for the dog stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Go! Out. A therapist. Kill or be killed. Jacob Allorty. There are people out there. They need her help.

Josh Bruland. Shoot first. Did inquire afterwards. Margaret Qualley. Okay, tough guy. And Guy Pearce. Arm up. The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott.

In The Theater's Friday. Get tickets now. Held back from publication until after his death because his supporters were worried they were compromising. But if you find yourself a collected addition, of the works of Sigmund Freud, you'll find probably at least five papers in there on dreams and telepathy or on psychoanalysis and telepathy. He believed that thought transference was very possible between the analyst and the patient, and he made a record himself of very well validated clairvoyant dreams that some of his patients reported, which gave fucking headaches to some of his

supporters because they thought, oh, God, the hair professor is going to get us all. in trouble we're trying to make this thing into a medical science and we left young behind but Freud actually was a member of both the British and the American societies for psychical research. He was very actively engaged and interested in this material. The danger zone as you were referencing is that something can happen and it can't be repeated and I have friends, I have colleagues, I have collaborators who identify as psychics or mediums or channelers. And I have witnessed some of them perform extraordinary acts of insight, even in one case that I can think of,

take on the very facial characteristics of the subject that I was talking to them about. And it was uncanny, and I don't collect experiences like that. Can you describe that detail? Oh, sure. I was speaking with a very erudite channeler. about someone I was having problems with at work. I spent about 27 years in corporate publishing. And there was a particular author

with whom I was having an intense problem. And it was really weighing on the whole office. And I spoke to him about it. And all I can tell you is he took on the facial characteristics of the person I was describing. I wouldn't say his face shape shifted, but I would say almost like a master actor would take on characteristics.

His eyebrow did the same thing. His lip kind of moved the same way. Exactly. He blinked into the same ferocity. Exactly. If you were to ask a master actor, show me Abraham Lincoln, whatever, that person might take on facial characteristics where you would say, my God, that's uncanny. It was like that.

I wouldn't quite describe it as shape-shifting. I would say it just came right up to the margin of that. Wow. Right up to the margin of that. He didn't know the figure. I didn't describe the figure in terms of identification. I felt it was uncanny. and the advice that he gave me saved my life.

It really served me. It really helped me. Other times, I had very different experiences with that same person. And this is general to the world of channeling, mediumship, psychical practice. There are cases of gifted individuals for whom it is real. Call it clairvoyance, telepathy, whatever you wish. There are cases where the experience occurs. There are other cases where the experience fails to disclose something real and veritable.

These things can't be turned on and off like a water faucet. And I admire people who study ESP in lab-based settings. And one of my true heroes is J.B. Rine, who ran the Parapsychology Lab at Duke University, starting in the early 1930s. It was the first academically based parapsychology lab here in America. And he had such integrity and he worked so hard to validate this material when it was warranted. By the mid-60s, he stopped working with psychics because he felt that their abilities, in some cases, were real, but they were not replicable. They were uneven. And he was interested in producing stats that,

showed replication. And one could say that's a flaw in his model, because there are things that go on out in the wild world that are much more impassioned and interesting and as easily documentable as things that go on in the lab. But I felt his misgivings were right because there's an inexactitude to this material. I think it was Heraclytus who said nature likes to hide. The the cult likes to hide. It's, it's intrinsic to it. Hey, dude, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about something. You know the entire premise of this show is basically me going way too deep on something. Like, I'll read two books, watch a documentary and then talk to someone for two hours.

And then three weeks later, I'm like, who is the CIA guy talking about mushrooms? And that's what I love about plot. The cool thing is I don't really think of it as a voice recorder. It's more like a searchable second brain for conversation. It looks just like this. It's tiny. I can use the plot, no pro, during a conversation or an interview. or a research session or even when I'm doing a stand-up comedy show.

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So you're going to get up to 40% off through August 17th. You go to partner.exter.com slash Camp Gagnon. It's linked in the description too and use the code Gagnon 20 to get an extra 20% off on top of that. Yes, it comes with extras 100 day money back guarantee. So there is literally zero risk. Upgrade that beat up wallet that you have that's falling apart. Get this wallet that is perfect Italian leather. It smells great. It has no plastic and it holds everything you need and more. You will thank me later. Now, let's get back to the show. So why did we shift so much, right? You talk about Freud and his interest in, you know, parapsychology or telepathy or ESP and, I mean, Abraham Lincoln to, you know, all the founding fathers involved in Freemasonry, which I still want to talk about. Why do we go from these, you know, periods throughout the current millennia where people are religious and they're thinking about, you know, the world and this sort of broad. religious framework and as well as an occult framework happening simultaneously. And then this massive spiritual revival in the 18, 1900s in America where people are impassioned by these new spiritual

movements. And then we get into an era of pure rationality, materialism and scienceism, perhaps, maybe as a pejorative, but that sort of thinking. Why does that shift? It's ironic because some of the founders of modern rationalism, Freud, Einstein, Darwin, harbored deeply felt extra physical or spiritual beliefs. It seems to me that there were modernist figures, Marx in particular, who felt that any analysis of the human crisis, of human frictions, of human strivings, that brought in the extraphysical was delusional. And he flipped metaphysics on their head, so to speak,

and reversed course from the perspective of his philosophical idol, G.W.F. Hagel, and determined that there aren't invisible causes. There are only economic ones. And that economics itself is a science that has inevitable. outcomes. And this was seen by many modernist figures as the pinnacle of rationalism, at least as far as politics, science, social governance were concerned. I see. The material creates the ideological. Yes. And so we start embracing terms like political science, anthropology, sociology,

economics as a science, which in some cases it is. But the quality of almost messianic inevitability that was harbored within the Abrahamic religions, traveled into science. It migrated into science. So Marxism, for example, which was very influential and in some ways remains so. It's a secular religion. It has its own notion that a change agent, the working class, will produce an inevitable outcome, and this inevitable outcome is a kind of revolution, or a rapture, kind of a millennial apocalyptic event, after which everything will be fine, or much better, at least. And that sense of Abrahamic messianism,

we're always waiting for the second coming, we're always waiting for the Messiah, that found its emotional home, cleansed of spiritual framing within Marxism. And this wasn't the only game in town, this certainly wasn't the only thought current going on. Darwin was codifying a rational biological order of development, not excluding religion. Einstein was codifying laws of time space, not excluding religion.

Freud was codifying neuroses as the source of adult trauma, not excluding the extra physical. But the exclusion sort of functioned as a shorthand methodological device. And it led to the casting out of everything that was classified as religious or extra physical to the point where that casting out became a characteristic of rationalism, which is a mistake. Again, rationalism is a method. It's not outcome. So it became very tough for scientists, including in the 21st century, to study questions of psychical ability. It was bound up with the old mode of viewing things. Although the new mode of viewing things, it took religious emotions and it just translated them into political analysis.

I see. With the same basic pattern of millennial arrival, messianic arrival, conflagration, clash of economics rather than a clash of some religious idea of good versus evil. And then the aftermath, supposedly, is a kind of, oh, I don't know, a nirvana or a heaven. or some sort of a posited divine age. Interesting. So you would say that the modern rationalist thinking still is incorporating elements of religiosity and faith to an extent. In the West, we can't get away from it. We are really good within the Abrahamic traditions at messianism.

You know, the Hebrews believed it. The early Christians believed it. different new religious movements, sometimes movements that are actually widely recognized, like Seventh-day Adventism, or even the millennialism of, say, the late ancient era, when the calendar turned to 1,000 AD, there were belief systems continually being born and continually populating the Abrahamic experience pointing toward Messianism. It's probably the most popular topic or among them online today. Any video that posits a sign of the apocalypse must have in excess of a million hits if it's any good. And it's a source of continual fascination. We Westerners think in messianic terms, and that travels into some of our politics. The end of the world is predicted with the same frequency as any sports betting ring predicting

you know, who's coming out on top. And I don't say that cynically. And I don't say that glibly. It's baked into our thinking. Right. Yeah, it's something that I've sort of cobbled with, because I believe, just on like a personal basis, by faith alone, virtually, that there is a creator god that is some type of united force.

Perhaps it is monotheistic is what I presume it to be. And perhaps it is a, you know, non-dualist. Perhaps it is more similar to like a Christian god or perhaps a Muslim god or a Jewish god where it's just sort of there outside of our time and space and it created existence. And my atheist friends would say, no, there was a big bang that created existence. But there's still some type of predicate on faith in their worldview as well. But sometimes I find that the purely rational believers don't acknowledge that there is a faith built into their philosophy.

Yeah. As much as mine. There's not only a faith built into it, but I would say they are too anxious to disassociate their rational views from something that we might call metaphysical or spiritual or extra physical. Look, all the big tech companies right now are rushing to come out with the greatest ever quantum computer, something that's faster than the fastest computer ever conceived. And they're all in a kind of race. and we as a public haven't been exposed to quantum computing yet, really. It's just a term that's out there for us. In December of 2024, engineers at Google released a statement that their quantum computing model named Willow had been submitted a math problem so complex that they estimated there literally wasn't enough time in the universe to solve this problem.

So what is time? It's really a measurement of time. We don't really know what time is. gravity. And they said it would take 10 septillion years to solve this problem by their estimate, which is older than the known age of the universe or its predicted demise. And Willow, according to these engineers, came back with an answer in less than five minutes. So they posited, and this is the language of the Google engineers, not my language. People can look it up. They posited that this might be evidence of interdimensionality or a multiverse. Because

there wasn't enough time in their computation to solve this problem. And yet, the answer came in less than five minutes. So they pondered whether Willow effectively plucked it from another dimension of time. Maybe the problem exists in solution form somewhere in some other intersection of time, some other dimension. And that's where Willow plucked it from. And the reason I love dealing with people in the hard sciences is because they're indifferent to questions of, metaphysics. They just want to create the world's fastest supercomputer, but they're reporting an observation. Now, one could say, look, there's some hype behind it. It's intended to grab headlines. All true. All true. But the statement was made. The statement was reported, and that's what

the engineers said happened. So someone who sees him or herself as a rationalist, which I applaud, doesn't have to divorce that from metaphysical or extra physical inquiry. If Google engineers are speculating in their own words, that the answer may have been plucked from some interdimensional place where it currently exists in infinity, which melds with the multiverse theory or the many world's theory of quantum physics, that we live in an infinitude of events all simultaneously playing out at once, and that linear time is just a necessary illusion for us, that in fact everything exists in this spherical spiral, let's say, spiral, and all events are concurrent and infinite. This is getting into high speculation. But that's where they went. Right. That's where they

And simultaneously, they have religious person or a spiritual person doesn't have to divorce themselves from the material sciences, right? Like, as someone that believes that God created the world, they could have been done through a Big Bang. Like, I don't see why these things would be at odds with each other. Right. And I guess I would encourage my friends that are perhaps a bit more rational that, hey, you can leave room for the unexplained, or you can leave room for things that we don't fully have a word for, and maybe science will put numbers and data to it later.

But for the time being, there's something going on. There's something going on. If we mathematically calculate that a particle can move backwards in time, one could say, well, look, that's a mathematical formula, and that's a good effort at explaining reality. But it's really violative of how things are supposed to work. We're supposed to live in a straight arrow of time.

an egg once broken can't be unbroken. And it makes me uncomfortable to think that you can unbreak an egg. Right. Because what does that mean for the reality that I exist in and for the observable world that I'm habitating every day? Exactly. And I think the average person, the ego gets in the way where they say, it's hard for me to give credence to things that I can't see, feel, or touch.

Not only is that true, but the worst disruptor of real inquiry is a feeling of contest like people will be writing in the comments fuck Horowitz and this astrology and this book and that's not what the Google engineers said and they believe that because there's a feeling of contest that when you grow up with a certain point of view and someone comes along and says consider this wrinkle we don't like hearing that uh i guess in buddhism it's called identification we identify with these points of view and i'm no better i'm no better and uh it gets the adrenaline flowing when someone comes along and suggests, you know, there actually are replicated experiments around telepathy and they're bulletproof. And here, let me show them to you.

And the CIA has invoked remote viewers to do different types of remote viewing intelligence. Of course it has. The Ingo Swans, the even Yuri Geller to an extent. Absolutely. You know, Yuri's standing up well to time. I mean, I'll tell you something. Ten years ago, people were ready to write Yuri off. I'll tell you a funny story. And I encourage people to check me on this. Go, go watch it for themselves. There is a kind of, oh, I don't know, I guess you call it cultural legend that in the early 1970s, Yuri went on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he flopped, and it was this horrible embarrassment. He was supposed to bend a spoon, and he failed. And this is supposed to be Yuri Geller's Waterloo. It's not fucking true. It's actually not fucking true. If you go look at the Johnny Carson

episode on YouTube, and I've done a little video on this where I show the episode, Yuri did bend the spoon. And Johnny, who was a skeptic, Johnny was also a stage magician and he did not like talk about psychical powers. Yuri is holding up the spoon. The camera zooms in on it and Johnny says, you know, you know, I actually do. I see a little bend in it. And this is not like Johnny because he really wanted to skewer Yuri.

He's not sympathetic, was not sympathetic in that direction. So there's this mythology that everyone knows that Yuri failed. Everyone knows that. It's actually not so. Pull it up. Could you, yeah, could you pull that video? Yeah. And maybe even Mr. Horowitz's explanation might be helpful too.

Would that, would that video that you have be? I, yeah, I have a video on YouTube. I can't remember the title of it, but it's maybe all of five minutes where I introduce the clip. I show the clip and I show Johnny conceding that the spoon has been in it. So then how...

How was it caught in pop culture that he's a failure? It must be, something like the, what people refer to as the mandala effect, we're certain of something. We're certain that in Snow White, the wicked queen says mirror mirror on the wall, but she says magic mirror on the wall. Luke, I'm your father. Exactly. The berenstain bears. The greatest danger to observation is everyone knows.

Everyone knows this to be so. And we've just all decided collectively that Erie fell at his face on Johnny Carson. How fucking embarrassing. It's not really true. And anyway, Yuri has, I wouldn't say he's won over skeptics, but he has stood up to skeptical scrutiny in ways that people will almost never learn on Wikipedia. And Wiki has become a really problematic resource for paranormal material. It's great for the Napoleonic Wars. But for the paranormal, a small group of activists, I would say pseudosceptics, right heard over Wiki.

And it's a very problematic place to learn about any of this material. You have to go deeper. Because you click on someone's page, like Edgar Casey, and they say, oh, you know, a pseudoscientist. Disproven pseudoscience. Yeah. Been shown to be problematic. Okay. So this is the clip from the Tonight Show.

Yeah. It's toward the end. there's Ricardo Montalbon. And you can see him here, his hand over the spoon. He's doing his thing. Johnny collaborated on this episode with the pseudo-skeptic James Randy,

and the whole idea was, we are going to cook this motherfucker. And that is what people remember, but that's not what actually occurred. And do you have audio on your... So I would love to know that moment where Johnny calls it out. And if you can find the video on YouTube,

that I did, it cuts straight to these moments, the audio right there. It was straight. I hope the camera can focus on this. Oh, it's usually depends more after it happens. And this is one of the thickest point of the scene. Well, you can definitely see and feel it. And you felt this?

Yes, I did. Okay, now, of course, this is a, this is not a big bend, John. Before the show, one of your video men both made, he, And I did it for him completely bent to, I'd say, he showed it to 14 degrees. But there, I'll put it here and it will keep going. Do we get away again and still come back here? Yeah. Interesting.

So you do see Johnny says, yes, it looks like there's a slight bend in it. Right. And that is not a concession that Johnny Carson, also a professional stage magician, wanted to make that night. Right. So was it the parting of the Red Sea? Not exactly. But it wasn't the failure that people touted it as. It wasn't the disaster that legend says.

Interesting. And so I'm curious like with this type of an effect, is it possible it's a stage trick? Oh, it's definitely possible. But I would say that there are a number of very public psychical figures of whom Geller is one that were never disproven in some kind of definitive way as, oh my God. know, we found the bottom of the hole in the hat where you pulled the rabbit out of. He's a complex figure, and I wouldn't say that his career is justly free of controversy, but Yuri has worked for many years with skeptics, a prominent one of whom has recently said, I've never been able to disprove him.

And this was written about in that Journal of Occult Passions, the New York Times. The Times, the Times recently, when I say recently, about three years ago, had a massive article about Yuri winning over one of his skeptical critics. And the New York Times, like Johnny Carson, is unsympathetic to this material. It just deserves attention. That's all. It just deserves attention. Right. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because if you know me, you know, I'm constantly trying to find the perfect level of stimulation. Yeah, I want enough energy at the beginning of the day to go to the gym, be a good dad, and then record a three-hour podcast. about like ancient civilizations or the Knights Templar or something like that. So, you know, I like a little caffeine, but if I do too much caffeine, I can start to hear my own heartbeat coming through my chest. And that is where mudwater comes in. Mudwater is a coffee alternative made with functional mushrooms and adaptogens with about like

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out the show. Now let's get back to it. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because it's summertime. And I got to tell you something, there's a specific point every summer where you realize that your entire personal style has just been like the same jacket or the same pair of shoes. And that's why I've been rocking with GLD. You see it on my neck. I wear it in every single episode. I wear it all the time. I mean, look at this. The first day I noticed when I picked it up is like the weight. It's genuinely substantial. It feels great. It has like an actual like a, like an actual texture to it. It's awesome. And the details look even better in person. I didn't expect it. The website it looks good, but when it's in my hand and around my neck, it actually is way better.

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what is going on with the Freemasons? I think at this point most people know that the founding fathers, in probably a disproportionate regard, were members of this secret society and a cult society, perhaps. I exist in two minds with this. On the one hand, I see it as a fraternity. I see it as a group of really powerful guys who were able to operate in behind closed doors,

free from government scrutiny, free from religious scrutiny, and able to share ideas and information and intelligence with each other. And it just so happened that the most powerful and influential men of the early colonies were all a part of this fraternity. Because if you were a young guy and you had some money and you had some class and some nobility and you also had some education, then you would want to be in the club, right? I was in a fraternity in college.

So it was the same reason for me. I was like, I want to hang with these guys, so let me join this fraternity. Now, there are, there is a school of thought as well amongst my friends who are Masons, as well as my friends who are Catholic that are vehemently anti-Mason, where they will say they are the holders of a secret ritual occult knowledge and that they've continued to pass down this knowledge and it's because of that knowledge that they were able to create this nation as we know it. What say you about the early Masons and how do you think about them?

I am not a Freemason, but I am a friend of Freemasonry. I regard Freemasonry as an institution that has historically protected the individual search for meaning. And deep into the Enlightenment, there were still witch burnings, the last of which was 1791 in Switzerland. There were all kinds of religious persecutions. the Vatican could still pronounce a death sentence on an accused heretic. And there were a coterie of people who, I would say, starting in the final decades of the Renaissance, assembled into Freemasonry as a means of exploration and esoteric fraternity, clandestine, private, and separate from monarchical forces that were still deeply hostile.

aisle to and reactive against the religious experiments of the Renaissance. Now, technically, and this has been reaffirmed by the Vatican as recently as 1983, Catholics are not supposed to be Freemasons, although there are many Catholic Freemasons. I've had, I have in-laws who are Catholic, who are Freemasons. And for some people, masonry is a civic and charitable association for a smaller number of people in the 21st century, masonry remains an esoteric path. I consider masonry an initiatory order that has, in influence, done a great deal to codify the protection of freedom of assembly, freedom of search, freedom of religion, freedom of speech within the confines of its organization. Masonry lost influence in this country starting in the 1820s.

There were rumors of Masonic conspiracies in the courts and law enforcement. There were anti-free masonry political parties that sprang up. President Andrew Jackson was elected to kind of clean house and get rid of corruption. In an irony that could only occur in America, he was a Freemason himself. But that's sort of the way we do things in this nation. And masonry has not had the same degree of influence. in public life since that time. The last American president, who was a bona fide Freemason, was the mysterious Gerald Ford. Bill Clinton had belonged to a Freemasonic youth organization, but never joined.

And the Bushes were skull and bones. The bushes were skull and bones. And they have their own occult history in this country that is we're weirder than anything we've yet talked about. But the truth is, masonry as an institution today, has declined precipitously in influence. but I think that historically masonry did function to vouchsafe some of the ideals of occult experimentation and the Renaissance. And I think that masonry probably in its current cryptic form, if I can put it that way, grew out of the fraternities of the cathedral builders starting in France in the 1100s. there wasn't an abundance of paper for blueprints and architectural drafts, symbolism at that time. So there was an art of memory. There was a use of mnemonic devices.

And anybody who joins masonry today will realize there's a great deal of recitation, memorization, liturgy, ritual. A pageantry, as well. The use of these mnemonic. devices in the veneration of symbolism probably, and we don't really know, but probably got its modern start among the early cathedral builders. There are some who will cite ties to Solomon's Temple and so forth. These are all mythical explanations that we can't verify. And in fact, masonry may be the one organization in modern life that doesn't even have a consensus

agreement as to its own roots. There is an authentic historical mystery there. But I view masonry as probably representing one of the first orders in modern life to espouse radical ecumenism, as long as you profess to believe in a creator. Ideally, you can come from any walk of religious life. Ideally, there's supposed to be civic equality within the lodges. There is a protection of meeting at a time when that couldn't be taken for granted in the old world. There are still many nations on earth today, including in the Middle East, where it's illegal to be a Freemason, which I think is a ridiculous carryover from earlier eras and centuries. I think masonry in our country, it's reduced.

We're no longer a nation of joiners, but it has survived. And among some of the younger masons, there is renewed interest in esotericism. Giant courage. Is there an efficacy to their rituals? Well, I would say their rituals are probably more oriented towards ethical development than anything else. Anybody who thinks there's any conjuring going on or people drinking blood out of skulls with dark robes on is going to be severely, severely disappointed. And of course, the rejoinder on the internet is, well, there's a secret inner circle. And, you know, that's sort of like saying the moon is made of cheese.

You know, I can either prove nor disprove that, but people can choose which sources to trust. There's no secret inner circle. What there is is a diffusion of people spread out across a very wide stretch of geography, some of whom are more dedicated to civics and charities, some of whom are more dedicated to esotericism. But chiefly, Masons themselves see their orders using symbolism as a key or code to ethical development. That's the way I've heard Mason's describe it, and as well as like many other secret societies. But I've also heard them talk about, you know, there is a transfer of knowledge that is kept amongst these groups of people that are initiated into the knowledge. And then with that knowledge, they are, you know, able to access some type of power or some type of understanding of reality that the average person doesn't have.

And these are the things that I wonder about, like with skull and bones, for example, is there, is it just an initiated order of really wealthy kids that go to, to Yale that are all able to help each other and put each other into positions of politics later? Or is there an actual transfer of knowledge that happens there or some type of ritual communication with a different power outside of our reality that then maybe aids and abets their happenings on earth? I would say it's the former. I would say it's a collection of the sons of influence who are using arcane symbolism because masonry at one time in this country was enormously popular. And different guilds and groups were created in the mold of freemasonry, the odd fellows, the Knights of Columbus,

which is a Catholic alternative to masonry, the Knights of Pythias, which was heavily Jewish when I was a kid. My father belonged to it. He never went to the meetings. We would get the newsletter at home, and I would ask, Dad, why do you belong to Knights of Pithias if you don't attend the meetings? And he said, So I have some place to be buried because they had burial rights. And fraternal organizations, mutual aid societies were once legion in this country. And a lot of them were using Freemasonry as their template. Hence, you find groups like Bohemian Grove, skull and bones, a few others bopping around out there. They sort of adopt that tone and tenor and symbol.

Most of the time, what's getting transferred is not esoterror. wisdom or knowledge or know-how. It's influence. It's just that simple. Right. And the fact is, some of these groups are long in the tooth. Knights of Pythias used to have a million members. Today, they have 50,000 members. You know, people are kind of hyped up on some of these fraternal orders. Bohemian Groves membership lists are secret. And we only know little threads of who was a member, who was rumored to be a member. Who attended. Yeah. But my God. I don't think Elon is spending weekends at Bohemian Grove. I don't think Zuckerberg is spending weekends there.

I don't think Sam Altman is spending weekends there. I don't think the guy who denies my health care claimant United Healthcare is spending weekends there. You know, these organizations have also gotten long in the tooth. But infamously, there have been major meetings of people at Bohemian Grove, for example, like the precursor to the Manhattan Project. It's true. The scientists that were basically the heads of creating that. I think out of the OSS at the time, they had met at Bohemian Grove to discuss this extremely covert project and kind of put the pieces together to then create the nuclear bomb.

The Grove sponsored some early meetings of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project. And then that obviously branched out into the thing itself. I don't know that that was the only place that such meetings were held, but there were scientists of considerable influence who were part of it. A guy like Oppenheimer, a Marxist Jew was on. unlikely to have been part of the grove. They wouldn't have wanted journalists or people with compromised pasts or anybody who didn't fit into the old boys mode hanging around the grove. But there was one prominent scientist connected to the early proto stages of the Manhattan

Project, who was a member. That's a fact. They also had associate members like William Randolph Hurst, the newspaper publisher was an associate member. So they might come out every now and then, but they weren't welcome as full members because they didn't want journalists sniffing around. And they didn't want people who were outside of a mode with which they were very comfortable. There were sexual dalliances and escapades at Bohemian Grove that really wouldn't surprise anybody who's ever attended a frat party. The men were older. The suits were made of tweed. But, these were fraternities of mutual interest and influence for the wealthy, much more than they were conveyors of occult knowledge.

Right. I'm always curious to why there's so much ritualism, right, of this, like, extremely rational group of people meeting at a place, and it could be Freemasonry or Bohemian Grove or any of these secret societies. There is a ritualism that goes into it, and I can't tell if it's just, like, fun for these people to kind of cosplay and do this cremation of care and have this giant owl. and, you know, this person that gets buried and it's an effigy, but it's supposed to represent.

Like, there's so much that goes into it. And I wonder if it's just like Burning Man today, where you have hyperrationalists going to Burning Man and they watch this giant guy burn, which has all sorts of symbolic meaning. But to the individual, they're just like, yeah, it's a bonfire. You know, in a lot of ways, occultism itself is a revival of ancient forms, including ancient pageantry. and the ceremony, the right, the ritual, the congregational experience, it's bonding, it's powerful. Look at people at a political rally or look at people at a concert. You know, sometimes you go to an arena concert and there'll be a point at which thousands of people are thrusting their fists into the air. And it is ritualistic and it is powerful and it fills you with energy and suddenly you have this light bodily sensation and hunger is gone and anxiety is gone and you're walking out,

like I can conquer the world today, and then the aperture closes and it fades. The congregational experience is very powerful. Yeah. No, that makes sense. That absolutely makes sense. I think that there's, and that perhaps that's just a feature of humanity, right? Like that when we get into large numbers and we all believe in the same idea,

there's something that happens on a material level amongst the group. We are social beings. And I would say, for example, back in the day, and this still goes on in some parts of the country, You had tent revival meetings where ministers would profess to perform some sort of faith healing. Well, sometimes something would happen. And we might call it the placebo effect, which we don't fully understand. But that might be what the spiritual appeal looks like in the body. There are certain diseases that are permeable, that have a therapeutic response to hopeful expectancy.

And this is true even extending to placebo. surgeries. There have been studies at, there was a study at the Houston Veterans Medical Center in 1980 of the efficacy of placebo surgery in place of spectroscopic knee surgery, which requires a lot of recovery time. The placebo resurgery had the same therapeutic outcome as did the actual surgery. It's hard to study these things because you're benevolently deceiving people. And it's ethically fraught. In the case of placebo surgeries on veterans' knees, a benign incision was made. And the placebo group demonstrated the same therapeutic response and outcome long-term as the group that, I suppose, the control group that got the actual surgery.

So extraordinary things can happen in the body, apropos of hopeful expectancy. So in the revival meeting, for example, I wouldn't discount that there are recoveries or we'd have to discount the placebo experience as a whole. We as human beings really respond to right ritual, liturgy, congregational experience. So I could understand these fraternities persisting in that. Now, when it comes to the historical implementation of spiritualism and occultism, there's all sorts of little like threads that I'm fascinated by, like Alastair Crow. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion.

Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash h-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. Being involved with British intelligence. Yeah.

There's people that will look at Crowley in his record and say, like, oh, he was just a drunk, sex addict, heathen that was just trying to find a justification and developed a religion around the worldview that he wanted to live. There's other people that would say, no, he was an actual practitioner of some type of extra physical abilities that was able to do things and know things that the average person cannot know. So in his case, how would you classify him and specifically his work with British intelligence? I'm cracking up because my wife, Shackling Kestell and I just a kayak to an island in the middle of the Hudson River where Crowley hunkered down for 40 days and 40 nights and translated the Dowday Chang.

And that's Crowley. That's Crowley. This was in, I think it was 1916, and there was no map to go by. And here was Crowley translating this ancient Chinese ethical work, living for 40 days and 40 nights on an island in the middle of the Hudson. That would be remarkable by today's standards. You couldn't find an isolated island in the middle of the Hudson today. But think how remarkable that was over a century ago. That was Crowley. I don't think he was as a. involved with British intelligence as he would have liked. I think he was a very self-important figure. He would have liked them to avail themselves more of his expertise, but at the time he appealed to them, they also had Rudolph Hess under lock and key. So they felt like, we can probably hear it straight from his mouth as to which, if any, occult orders are involved with Nazism, and Crowley was seen more as a showboat. But it's important to understand that Crowley, who I think was ethically very flawed, and I would not have wanted to be a student of, and I would not have wanted to associate with a lot of people around Crowley got hurt.

There was a cruelty to the man. He was also a genius. Artistically, he was extraordinary. We wouldn't recognize a lot of our culture today if it weren't for Alistair Crowley, the entire aesthetic of occultism and goth and metal to some greater or lesser degree was popularized by Crowley. It wasn't for nothing that the Beatles put him on the cover of Sergeant Peppers. Right. And that was at a time when most people didn't know the name, Alasher Crowley. He had died. Black Sabbath even. Exactly. He had, Ozzy calls him Crowley. The song,

Mr. Crowley. So the whole world says Crowley today, but it's Crowley. It rhymes better. Yeah. Right. As he used to point out, Crowley rhymes with Holy. Yeah. So we all say Crowley, but that's due to Hasi Crowley was a brilliant performance artist and he was a brilliant intellect and he lived ten lifetimes within the space of his one lifetime

he's very hard to pin down he'll never be fully grasped or understood because his influence has traveled in so many different directions but our world would look a lot different today without his influence and that's something that can be said about just a handful of 20th century artists.

Now, when he's communicating with these entities, as he claims, if you would have put a percentage likelihood on the idea that he was actually communicating with something outside of our reality, what percentage would you put that at? 90%. Really? That's how I feel. Having studied the record and having studied adjunct philosophies and ideas, including psychical research, Crowley produced a book in Egypt in the early.

20th century called the book of the law. It's probably the most famous thing he ever wrote. And that's from whence we derive the lines, love is the law, love under will. And do without will should be the whole of the law. Love is the law. Love under will. Crowley recorded that book over three consecutive, what we would call channeling sessions of about one hour each in Cairo in the early 20th century. Speaking for myself, it's a work of poetry as resplendent as T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. There are friends and colleagues of mine who think that's an untenable and ridiculous statement. Aesthetically, philosophically, spiritually, that's my point of view. The book of the law is a work of genius. And I think that Crowley was in touch with either some

extra physical force or some kind of intuitive faculty that goes beyond ordinary cognition and motor skill. I think he was a spiritual genius. He was a profoundly flawed figure, but he's among a small handful of spiritual geniuses that the Western world produced in modernity. Now, under the assumption that Crowley's magic was effective in some type of tangible way, that he was not just hallucinating, that this was an actual channeling. Is there any hazard that goes along with channeling these types of entities? And is it always good? There is hazard. I could never say that there's not hazard. Everything brings with it consequences. I would note the following. People who report episodes of demonic possession, I don't really like using the word demon in a pejorative sense,

because in its original Greek, it was a neutral term. Like, we might use a term. like Jeannie, for example. It's kind of a worker bee spirit, but we become conditioned to view it negatively. In episodes of reported demonic possession or satanic possession, those are usually among people who are not searching for mysteries at all, like me. Those are usually not among people who are, oh, playing with fire in terms of the spiritual sense. It's usually people who are, in entirely indifferent to occult spirituality who report being stricken in this way. That said, I could never sit here and say that there's no risk. In terms of my own search, I made a decision a long time ago that I was willing to dive into the deep end of the pool

and abide and respect the wish, rather the risk of the search. I made a decision to dive into the deep end of the pool with regard to the search because we have limited time in these physical forms that we occupy. I assume there's an invisible world, but I don't know as a matter of simple statement of fact, the way I know that physical demise is inevitable, physical decline is inevitable. And my feeling is if you're going to inquire, if you're going to experiment, then do so fully and do so completely. But it's up to the individual to shoulder the risks. And I've made peace with that personally. Has there been an example you could reference of someone that has died or sustained some type of grave injury from dabbling with this type of magic? Not that I've ever encountered.

There are people who make such claims. we human beings, we love our own creation stories, we love before and after stories. I was this, then I became this, you know, I was a Marxist, then I became a libertarian. Watch for those stories because people very often exaggerate out of a sense of personal drama. I was an occultist, and now I'm a born-again Christian or something like that. I have never encountered anyone I consider trustworthy who's told a polarized a creation story. I've never encountered anyone on the path who has gotten themselves in trouble from a spiritual perspective. I've encountered a lot of addictions. I've encountered a lot of selfishness. I've encountered a lot of stupidity of the kind

that you would recognize from any ordinary workplace. But in terms of those involved in the search, I have not encountered people who have suffered harm in a spiritual sense. What about things like blood sacrifice? Is that completely overstated or is that something that is legitimate and has happened within a cult or perhaps, I even know what the term would be, but some type of ritualistic circle? I would say it's wildly overstated. I can't discount that it occurs because you have errant individuals doing what they wish

from time to time, sometimes under the aegis of an occult banner or the banner of some belief system. And then you also have legitimate religious systems like Santa Ria, voodoo, a proper Afro-Caribbean religion, where there are sacrifices, sometimes of small animals, sometimes of goats. And you will find people who do these under very close and careful religious supervision with a hierarchy, a priesthood. and then you'll find some people who stray off of the margins and are doing things themselves. It's important to understand that within proper Afro-Caribbean and in some cases, Afro-Caribbean, South American religious systems, there are certain cases where sacrifices are

performed under hierarchical structures, and these are properly protected religions. You will find some errant individuals who are persuaded, that if they take a certain step, they will get a certain gain or beneficence from some deity. But by and large, and especially within organized systems, these things are extremely rare and wildly overstated. Could you conceive of an individual, knowing what you understand about ritual magic,

if someone were to do some type of blood sacrifice of a human being, is it possible they could ascertain some type of power or knowledge? I think the cost that they would pay for the blood sacrifice of another life would outweigh any conceivable benefit. I believe in reciprocity. One could call it karma. One could call it compensation. There's a pendulum swing in life and everything has to be paid for. We often shirk off debt. I sit every day writing in a nice apartment in Brooklyn with air conditioning and potable water and all these benefits that I didn't do anything to earn. I tried to be very cognizant of the fact that I'm lucky in terms of geography. I'm lucky in terms of my ancestors coming to this place. That's debt.

That's debt. And everything in life has to be paid for. And anyone who causes pain knowingly, willingly, with choice and agency in order to gain something, is going to suffer a debt that's going to outweigh whatever benefit they think they'll receive. Right. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I know people have criticized, you know, know, pagan or occult practices and sometimes try to kind of align it with like, you know,

Aztec human sacrifice, which perhaps those numbers have been, you know, exacerbated or inflated by the Jesuits that went there. But certainly it seems documented from everyone that I've spoken with. Like, ritual sacrifice was a thing that's gone on in many different cultures around the world. And it's always kind of pinned back to pagan belief systems about the gods and what the gods wish and how we can appease the gods. Do you think that that that that is completely at odds with your understanding of occultism. Was that a misaligned occultism, or was that just a extremely dangerous sort of unpractical version of occultism?

Well, we'll take the Aztecs in different Mesoamerican civilizations. There were periods of human sacrifice. There were periods where that was banned and considered verboten just as in ancient Egypt. There were periods that leaned in the direction of sun worship or monotheism. There were periods that leaned towards polytheism in ancient Judaism. You had sacrifices in the temple all the time. Once the temple was destroyed and Judaism became a kind of wandering nation, sacrifice was discontinued. It was considered sacrilege to venture sacrifice outside the temple system.

So we in the Abrahamic religions ourselves have animal sacrifice as rooted in earliest practice. But it dissipated and it's now considered to be verboten. Occultism is really a modern rediscovery of ancient religious forms. The term itself only came into English usage in the early 1500s. By that point, notions of even animal sacrifice had really been dispelled from occult practice. There was much greater concern with astrology and alchemy and spellcasting and prophecy and number symbolism. and, oh, different, the magical uses of different colors and metals and congruencies between Earth and the cosmos, there were really no texts widespread and translated that spoke of

sacrifice. So it's attractive to people because we get off on the grisly and the grotesque, but it's very limited and it has a very particular history historically. Yeah. Well, I want to talk to you about UFOs and your personal experience with these types of things. You've touched on a little bit today, but I want to know really concretely

what those things are. And in the other episode that we do, or that we have already done, depending on when people see this, I want to go deeper into like the tangible sort of like rituals and what sigil magic is and how that interfaces with potentially what people are calling disclosure and the phenomenon, broadly speaking. But I think there's a good place to stop for this one.

Thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it. And we'll do it again soon. Right on. Appreciate it. Hey, guys. If you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out Signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at Camp. It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows, and I choose the topics every single week. So check it out, subscribe, and start the dialogue in the comment section.