Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 579: Mitch Horowitz

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Mitch Horowitz, brilliant author, lecturer, philosopher, and overall cool person, re-joins the DTFH! Check out Mitch's latest book, Modern Occultism, available for pre-order everywhere you get your books! And come meet Mitch at his book signing, September 22 at the PRS Auditorium in Los Feliz, CA. And check out Mitch's other books! More information available at MitchHorowitz.com. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by:  AG1 - Visit DrinkAG1.com/Duncan for a FREE 1-year supply of vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase! This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self. Factor - Visit FactorMeals.com/Duncan50 for 50% Off your first order!

So worse told me you should give me a blowjob That you should give me a blowjob So stormy that you wanna blow me That you wanna put my blowstick to me That you wanna put my blowstick to me So stormy that you wanna put my blowstick to me So stormy that you wanna put my blowstick to me So stormy that you wanna put my blowstick to me So stormy that you wanna put my blowstick to me So stormy that you wanna put my blowstick to me Maybe she got the problem, she worked on her trauma She could have had a problem, she was what she was to stand me

Talk about she knew she could be where she left me Source wants me to be your new life coach That your right or new direction And it ain't gonna happen, I already bet I'm stupid And I'm a shudder with my homemade lotion Source told me I need another wife And my wife is home again for an image You're the source told me that I am a prophet

You should marry me Through this great happy night with your family You should get her a brush and the curb would have touched Sure me, you should tell your man We'll come up with a plan or a plan The universe and the purpose of the universe. Just for me to tell you what, what I'm gonna put in my breath, what I'm gonna put in my breath. Source says your husband should be eliminated. We must eliminate your husband.

God, I absolutely just love that track. I love the entire album, of course, that is Source by Lord Narayan Williams, the father of creation. I love the entire album, of course, that is SOURCE by Lord Narayan Williams, the father of creation. I actually met Lord Narayan at the Wellington festival in Berkershire, and he taught me so much at the time I was really lonely. He let me lay with seven of his wives. I think at the time he recorded this song, he only had four. And then after a

night of incredible pleasure, he liberated me from my partner who is now another of his wives. And I've never been more proud of something than that because Lord Narayan is a prophet, a teacher, an incredible human. He smells like dandelions and lavender and his mouth and just when he gives you the ceremonial kiss of approval, you can feel energy, leave his lips into your body. It blows your,

I don't know what he said, something about a snake. It blows the snake in your spine and shoots up your spine, opens up your third eye, and from that day forward, I have been free. So I definitely hope you will check out his new album, I am a prophet because it is a serious blaster. Speaking of serious blasters, we have a blaster today. Mitch Horowitz is here with us. But before we jump into it, I would like to invite you

to check out my Patreon. It's patreon.com-forthslash-dTFH. Lord Narayan gave me his blessing to create this Patreon. And we have a wonderful community. You'll get access to our Discord server, commercial free episodes of the DTFH. And once a week, we all hang out together for a few hours. And it's a blast.

Again, that's patreon.com, forward slash DTFH. I have some shows to announce. I hope you'll come see me at Zainey's in Rosemont, starting the 8th of September to coma starting the 21st of September. That's at the Tacoma Comedy Club San Francisco Cobb starting the 6th of October. Helium and Philadelphia starting the 12th of October. There's going to be more dates that you can find at Dunkertrustle.com. You can also just go directly to the website of the clubs I just mentioned and get tickets there. And I hope you'll get them in advance

because it fuels and feeds my desperate ego that likes for my shows to sell out long before I get there. It just pumps it up and flates it and makes it squirre. Today's guest is an amazing author. Got a new and coming out called Modern Occultism, History, Theory, and Practice. It covers all of my favorite topics. We talk about some of them during this episode, but we didn't have time We talk about some of them during this episode, but we didn't have time to talk about all of them, so I hope you'll pre-order that book. And if you enjoy Mitch, then why don't you go see him, give an in-person talk and book signing that is going to be at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz Los Angeles.

Go check them out, see them live. Now everybody, welcome to the DTFH Mitch Horowitz. It's the Duncan Tracer. Mr. Horowitz, welcome back to the DTFH. It's great to see you. You look glowy as ever radiating mystical energy. How are you doing? I'm great. I'm really glad to see you. Your shirt is is that a purple shirt? They violet shirt. It's a it's a it's somewhat violet, I guess you say. look like a mildly colorblind, but I like it. And it's great to see you. And I'm crying a myrful tears

because of a very funny, or a marquee made before we were not like. It's a bad thing. Thank you. I mean, I'm practically, I am standing in blood. We just had our third child. Right. So there is a very primordial standing in blood. We just had our third child. So there is a very primordial standing in blood

quality to that. You're not sleeping much. I gather. You know what? I feel somewhat guilty to say that I have been sleeping well. My wife has been doing the heavy lifting with the newborn because she wants to breastfeed and which means no bottles.

You know, and I'm yet to lactate. Thank you, God. So you're sleeping well? Yeah, and I go guilty about it. But Mitch, I gotta tell you, man, I love your writing. You know that. Thank you. But your book, it's coming out. I am so excited to read because it covers pretty much

everything that I'm interested in. Monodicultism, history, theory, and practice. Can you tell me the synopsis of this book and then let's dive in? Cause I have so many questions for you on this very big topic. It's a history of the occult from late antiquity up through the present. And my effort was to write a sweeping history

of occultism as a thought movement, literary, intellectual, spiritual, cultural. And I worked very, very hard on it. A lot of long days and nights unshaving underwear, coffee, no sleep. But it just filled me with euphoria because it's been something I've been wanting to read for a long time. And once the demand hit, I just went with it. And it's been a incredible journey, very arduous and very euphoric. I mean, it is, I understand why. Just based on my attempts at diving in to getting a little deeper than just what you might like see on the news or just something that might pop up on the internet, but getting

deeper into like some of the classic grimoires or trying to find out, you know, where did this stuff come from? I mean, that's what's so fascinating about it. With most other world religions, we can trace it back to this origin point, which usually is some profit teacher. But with this stuff, it's like, where is it coming from? It's so fragmented, it's so strange. Can we start there? Does it come from some single point? Where does this stuff emerge from?

It certainly is very fragmentary. And in a real sense, aultism is a revivalist movement. It adapts and seeks to piece together from the threads and fragments that have reached us. The pre-Christian religious philosophies of the Western world. So the religious ideas that swept through and persisted for millennia in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, North Africa, Europe, all these vacinations and vast peoples were united by polytheistic spiritual ideas which sometimes crisscross borders and got shared and intermingled and then over time were decisively wiped out from the mainline

cultural scene, first under Christianity, later under Islam. And as this material was rediscovered in bits and pieces during the Renaissance, Renaissance thinkers who first used the term occult to Latin term meaning hidden or secret. We're piecing together ideas very frequently that had been written down sometimes in Greek, sometimes in Arabic, sometimes in Latin, in late antiquity. That's when stuff started getting written down, things that had to want to initiatory traditions, mystery traditions, where encrypted en symbolism were part of oral tradition, things started getting written down, Greek Arabic maybe a little later on Latin, that represented forms, these expository literary forms, that we Westerners could wrap our minds around.

You know, we in the West, which is to say really the modern world in general, couldn't even read hieroglyphs until after 1880, when the Babylonian invaded Egypt and Syria in the late 1790s, the Syrians and the archaeologists and the draftsmen that he brought with him discovered what came to be called the Rosetta Stone and it cracked open hieroglyphs, at least in their most basic expository meeting, to Westerners to moderns for the first time. So all of this material was vastly wildly, completely out of reach, which is why the book itself begins in late antiquity, because that's really where the well-spring,

at least of those threads that we have, and they are just arid threads, begins. We in the modern world, we like to think that the ideas that were attached to, including all the mainstream fakes, are really old, really ancient. They really extend back. And that's thematically, but the Jewish liturgy, for example, goes to the middle ages. That's pretty old, and it's very beautiful, but that in antiquurgy, for example, goes to the Middle Ages. That's pretty old, and it's very beautiful, but that ain't antiquity. We've lost so much. So when we're drawing upon what we consider ancient ideas, usually these are ideas that got repressed and antiquity, in antiquity, a late antiquity, and that's the case for occultism. So we're talking the decades, you know, after the death of Christ.

Okay, let's talk about, there's a grimoire that I was exploring called, I think it's called, I just got into it just because the name sounds so cool. The picket tricks, if you heard of this, I think. Oh sure. Yeah, one of the most mysterious of grimoires. Yeah. Very interesting. And the back, the story in the picket tricks, as I recall, and I believe it was related to like Napoleon, like a soldier is wounded, gets taken into a pyramid or something, where some mysterious person transmits the picket tricks to him. And they all have these fascinating back source. Another Grimwar that I had, I can't recall the name, it was I think it was more of a collection of Grimwar's

or sort of philosophy, a magic, the forward, it said that one of the theories behind where all this stuff comes from, is that it's pre-flood technology, that what we have here, there was some kind of apocalypse that hit the planet, and this represents some former super-advanced civilization that had discovered all of these spiritual technologies

that then were hit by a number of apocalypse, is one of them being the whatever disastrous event occurred during the What's it called the when we had giant peavers? What's that period in time called? I can't remember the lesser dryest period and so the thing that wiped out the saber tooth tigers We still have giant peavers, but they're different now the point is I have one you Are you kidding me? I gotta get a shave, man. I'm not a pure real, yeah.

But, but the, the, the, what up? But, so, so then it's hit by this apocalypse and then, and please correct me if I'm wrong here because this is a foggy understanding. Then it's hit by a data apocalypse, which is that Christianity comes on the scene and they're like, no, fuck this shit.

We are burning down your shrines, burning down your temples, burning your teachers, burning your prophets and destroying all material related to this stuff, not just destroying it, even in a more sinister way, replacing it with Christian holidays. We are taking this thing and replacing it with something to make it that much more covered up. I mean, talk about a conspiracy man. This stuff was wiped from the board, which is why it's so intriguing to me.

Is that assessment correct, sort of, or are there different conceptualizations of origin points? No, it's, it's, it's, it's stuff like correct in terms of this vast religious tradition being wiped out. It wasn't wiped out altogether suddenly. These things tend to happen in a more fitful start and stop way. Right. But the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to a version of Christianity around 312, 313 AD. And that's very frequently seen as the historical tipping point.

That's fair enough, it's true. Although Constantine's Christianity was not the Christianity we would know today, he still... Really? ...binded. Yeah, he combined it with sun worship. He continued to worship Solan Victus, the sun god. And in fact, Christian Pilgrims to St. Peter's Basilica were still doing ceremonies to Solon Victus and to Jupiter on the steps of St. Peter's into the 5th century A.D. until the bishops said, hey gang, we're going to cut this out now. So, right, I had a couple of centuries of change over where somebody might say,

I'm a Christian, but still worshiped Jupiter or worshiped a local deity or bided the old seasonal festivals or Celtic festivals or would have you. But in time, of course, the old religions, the nature-based religions, the mystery traditions were largely wiped out. So it looked like picket tricks, for example.

We don't even know that picket tricks is a Latin title. It's a mangling. It's thought to be a mangling of the original Arabic title, which might have been the progress of the sage. But we don't even have so much as the original title anymore, much less a firmly agreed upon author, but it seems to have been produced in Arabic in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. There's a lot of astrological material in there that influenced the astrology, Western

astrology is a developed during the Renaissance. So it's an important book, but it just gives you a sense of the disadvantage that we're at historically. We don't know the title, we don't know the author, we think it was originally written in Arabic and that's leaving aside how arcane and difficult the book is to modern readers today. So we're really on our knees peaking through a keyhole and this is our past, this is our foundational past. I want to thank our newest sponsor, prize picks for supporting this episode of the D- T, F, H. If you're like me and fantasy football has always been sort of confusing for you, a little arcane.

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Yes, that's to me what's so incredible about it, is that it has this wonderful combination of things. The first being, these books are considered just for some people holding one, looking at one, much less opening and reading one is a pathway to demonic possession and insanity. Yeah, yeah. What's in, insanity. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, it's, so this of course for any teenager, that's how you get into it,

is because if your parents are Christian and they tell you not to read something, you're like, holy shit, I gotta read that. What is that? Then you begin to explore hoping for some kind of necronomicon experience. You want your dog to start floating. I don't know anything. And you realize, you might as well be looking at like blueprints for motherboards or something.

It is astoundingly confusing. Right. The rituals are often just a conduct one. It seems like you would need an undergraduate degree in like ancient alchemy or something like that. And you begin to realize that, yeah, you know, just it's not just that you recite whatever the particular translation of Arabic is in whatever particular book you stumble upon, but there are all these precursor things that you have to do that make zero sense. In

other words, completely confusing. So, is there a simple sort of through line that you have discovered that summarizes whatever this ancient religion, philosophy, culture, movement was? Is there anything they all have in common? Or is it just like a shotgun blast of data from prehistory? There is commonality. And I think that commonality can be found with in aspects of hermetic literature. Hermeticism was a, it's a modern term for philosophy that grew in Alexandria after the death of

Cleopatra, after the death of Christ. It's the point at which Greek scribes began writing down ancient Egyptian philosophies, symbolists and oral philosophies in the Greek language. And some of that material has survived. And that's our time capsule, that's our through way. The point of commonality that unites all these disparate and complex philosophies, I would say, is the hermetic dictum as above so below. It's the principle of correspondences, that everything that the individual experience corresponds

to something else in an unseen realm, corresponds to something else in an unseen realm, corresponds to some other experience that exists extraphysically, maybe in an extraphysical connection between two people, that sympathies are not just a question of emotions or physical proclivities, but there's actually hidden tendrils of connection between individuals, between the individual and nature, between the individual and cosmos, which for example will get expressed through astrology. There are hidden connections between different substances.

Everything exists as a polarity. So a core substance is in a senescence of fine substance if you can figure out how to perform the act of transformation. And this is also true of the psyche. This is also true of our emotions. So this idea of carousal condenses as above so below appears in her metasism, that's the through line. I would say that got expressed in Western scripture through the line and Genesis that God created man in his own image. That is our Western scriptural reprocessing, I believe, of the principle of correspondences as above so below. That's the heart. That's the heart. That's so cool. Wow, that's so cool. Yeah, that's the heart. That's the heart. That's the heart. Oh, that's so cool.

Oh, wow, that's so cool. Yeah, that's as above so below from a Christian perspective. Right, exactly. I think another sort of misperception regarding some of this stuff is that it's irrevolent, useless, antiquated, unscientific garbage. But did you explore any of the ways that modern science has evolved from some of these cult philosophies? There are myriad ways. Everything that we today would describe as scientific was joined to the spiritual and ancient world.

So the root of our own chemistry is alchemy. That's true etymologically, and it's also true philosophically. Alchemy gave way to chemistry. Astrology gave way to astronomy. All the sacred engineering, the symbolism, gave way to the engineering sciences, the architectural sciences. In other words, the construction of sacred sites from burial mounds eventually to temple complexes is what first involved humanity in the actual act of physical construction as above so below. And in our own era, I dedicate a whole chapter in the book

to parapsychology called Science of the Supernatural. And I survey the efforts that modern scientists have made in the West since the late 19th century to try to test for and statistically map out questions of extra physicality in human experience in the laboratory. Now, in terms of the connection between the occult and science, the very line that I've just used as above so below appears in different permutations, but its most famous point of origin is from a hermetic text called the Emerald Tablet, which again is one of these texts from very late antiquity.

The Emerald Tablet was translated for the very first time into English by Sir Isaac Newton. And this wasn't even discovered until the mid 20th century. It was found in Newton's papers after they were purchased. The economist John Maynard Keynes bought these moldering dusty papers from the Newton estate, goes through them and realizes, oh my god, this guy created the first translation of an alchemical text, which we refer to as the the Amrill tablet. So you wouldn't have the products of science without the foundation of the search. This is to me, the most mind blowing stuff about it is when you start finding out that we're talking about the mother of civilization here. This isn't just some shadowy nonsense that people who love D&D are doing.

This is this is the basis for Western civilization. You know, I remember finding out that Tesla right before his vision of alternating current was thinking about Gertot was thinking about Faust and a specific like, like what? Like, like, and then when you, and then, you know, that sent me down a wonderful rabbit, all examining, well, what is Faust? Where did that story come from? Right.

And then can you talk about that a little bit? That's why I have this undying love for you. Who else knows? Thank you. What other podcast or knows that Nicola Tesla was thinking about Beard's Faust before cracking open the AC current. Like who else knows that, but Duncan Dresselz.

And you're just fucking correct. And it's remarkable because Gertis version of Faust, first of all, the Faust myth has been around for a long time. And in simplest terms, man sells his soul to the devil and things go badly. But in Gertr's iteration of Faust, which I think is the greatest realization of that parable, Gertr's iteration, it ain't quite that simple. Faust and Mephistopolis are the intellectual equal of one another, and they sort of do a dance around one another, and they make a very peculiar bargain. It's far more complicated and subtle than just give me your soul and I'll give you all kinds of goodies. They trade off a lot of things with one another and

neither quite gets the better of the other. But the idea is that genius and this was an ancient Roman belief, genius comes from somewhere else. There is some physical being intellect that goes outside of the human form that bestows genius upon us. The term genius is from the Roman plural genius which means spirits and that's the term genius in Arabic. And so Tesla's thinking about all this stuff, and Tesla was very forthright about agreeing with the ancients that geniuses bestowed from spirits. The term demon itself, of course people use it negatively today, but in its Greek original,

it was a neutral term for spirits, just like gene eye. It was only later that that term took on these culturally conditioned connotations. So here's Tesla thinking about Gertricks' spouse, thinking about the nature of genius, thinking about the way that we are infused by inspiration and foam. This idea comes to him that revolutionizes scientific protocols in the modern world. And I think there's not an occult dimension to life. Well, there's some there.

There you go. There you go. We have this idea that science somehow has separated itself from superstition. We have this idea that science is this metaphysically clean, sterile sort of. But when you look at it, you realize, no, it is not. It's roots are in some of some very, very strange types of cultural earth that most people aren't even aware of.

And you do, said this state. Look at the names of computer code has embedded in daemons, you know, like you written into computer code is a cult language. It's not only is it still with us today, it is with us every time you turn on your computer, every time you turn on the lights, every time you do anything, all of that has its roots in the stuff that your book is about. And I think that this leads me to another topic in your book,

which I am so very curious about as so many people are secret societies. The idea that this stuff is, has, is a little bit, has been organized a little bit more than maybe as commonly available. There are groups of people who understand what this is and have found ways to use it strategically, but also they do this in secret. They do this outside of normal society. Is that a fair assessment of secret societies? No.

I dedicated chapter to secret societies in the book because it's such a hot topic for people today. And there's so much speculation and suspicion and drama and paranoia. The fact is the modern secret society arose in the wake of an occult backlash following the Renaissance. The occult experimentation of the Renaissance was very complicated. A lot of these occult writers, figures, alchemists during the Renaissance, they had to walk a very, very fine line. Cornelius Agrippa waited 20-some odd years before a publication

of his works of occult philosophy. He got the impromotor of a bishop, a lot of occultists who published during the Renaissance sought out the impromotor or the approval of the occultist who published during the Renaissance sought out the the impromotor or the approval of the approval. Thank you. Yeah. I don't know what an impromotor is. Oh, you know, at the front of the book, it basically it's a stamp of kosher. You know, Duncan is kosher.

You're okay. Have a good time. And they. It's the way people in this South say impinata. It was. You mean it? I want another impinata. It was. You mean it? I want another impanada. He's I'm sorry.

So they sought out impanadas and they got them, but it was complicated. And so eventually there was a backlash against the occult that along with other factors culminated in the 30 years war, which is a miserable fucking conflict that devastated Central Europe. And the secret society grew out of that firmen, bottom line. That's where you start to find risk of cruciatism. That's where you start to find free masonry. That's where you start to find the Illuminati, which existed for all of eight or nine years until the fucking Bavarian monarchy completely crushed them. And we have absolutely no expository evidence whatsoever of the Illuminati, a term that everybody loves to speculate over.

Existing past that point. But the secret society was a response to oppression that followed the occult experimentation of the Redis sauce. After Queen Elizabeth died, after the 30 years war broke out, it was not safe to be an occultist in Europe and to have a public career as a professor or clergy or whatever. And you had very few options other than to just retreat into your own life or if you wanted to fight a community, join a clandestine one, like the ones I've just mentioned. It's, you know, that's where it came out of, you know, if you hear or beats, that's the course you're gonna find. And those groups performed an important function.

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Use Coduncan to save an additional 10% off your order today. Thank you so much, Fume. Those groups performed an important function. They vouchsafed a lot of ideas that might have otherwise gotten lost or completely shunted. And to this day, you still find that level of oppression, only the way it's happening now is in scientific communities. There's this dogma against doing any kind of research into what you were talking about earlier. Yeah. And I would imagine that, you know, any true scientist, someone who just wants to find

the truth, someone who's just curious to get down to the bottom line of like, what is this? Is there telepathy? Is there remote viewing? They probably, and I'm only speculating, have found other like-minded scientists and found ways to conduct their own experiments that won't cut their funding off. Because as I've heard, if you're a scientist and people find out that you are interested in any kind of paranormal, anything,

then you're gonna get labeled as a quack. It can potentially wreck your career. So, it's completely, I mean, there are people with impeccable credentials in the scientific world, living people, the biologist, Robert Sheldrake, the clinical psychologist, Darryl Bamm, people affiliated with mainstream universities, I.N-E-S, who get the shit kicked out of them on Wikipedia, who get called pervaders of pseudo-science, even though their careers have been conducted impeccably because they cross that line when they looked for evidence of the extra physical and our physical world. And that's the ultimate violation in our mainstream society. The ultimate violation is you can talk about religion and mythology, you can have a school of theology on whatever campus you want, process these ideas through poetry. You can talk about psychedelic experiences. You can talk about the mind, body, benefits of meditation, but the very instant that you search for physically

empirical, empirical, replicable evidence in our world of telepathy, ESP, precognition. However, conservative your research, and however closely you follow the basic methods of science, and science, by the way, a term that gets used with this religiosity, but is nothing more than methodological replication. That's what it is, methodological replication. And if you seek evidence of ESP and you find it and it replicates, you will get branded a quack no matter how impeccable you are. And that's something I'm doing my very best to work on

and to bring out news of because it is impeding our capacity to search, at least at the university level. It's a problem. And it's a problem we're going to get passed, but we have a loss probably at least a generation of progress in ESP research because of these social pressures. What is that? You see a sort of, what is the Mark Twain quote, history doesn't repeat, but sometimes it echoes. And so here we have an echo. Whatever this stuff is, it is getting slammed now for thousands of years. And first, but the thing that's slamming it seems to be whatever the particular dogma

of the day is. First Christianity is trying to eliminate it. Now what we call science, which in many ways seems to be mirroring religion. It's a dogmatic way of passing the baton to people you consider to be authorities, even though you haven't looked into the papers, you haven't done your own research, you haven't studied anything. People will just say, trust the science. What does that even fucking mean?

Right, right. It's listening to the research. You know, the QAnon people say that. It doesn't mean shit because it's it's preferential reading. It's crowdsourcing. It's not research that it can trust unless it's coming from a source that I can trust. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, look, it's the human problem. We we formulate these ideas of what creates a safe world and then we cling to it emotionally. So there is a vast subculture of people in our nation, in journalism, in academia. More often found in the social sciences than the hard sciences, by the way, because I've had conversations with MDs and physicists, chemists, engineers

that are wonderful and very far out. It's more in the social sciences where there's opposition to this material. And the social sciences have their own set of problems because the replication of their data is in crisis. And yet, people feel afraid that if you introduce the prospect of the extra physical into the 20th and 21st centuries, you unleash, you open this vortex, and people are going to fall into it. And there'll be all this rationality spreading like wildfire across the country. And that's speculative, that's emotional, that's sentimental. What we need is excellence in our methodology. We can't release outcome. We need excellence in

methodology. We need excellence in how we treat one another. We need excellence in a standard of fucking diplomacy that should exist on campus. And that disappears as soon as an on-campus figure gets onto social media where he starts complaining in ways that make fucking Donald Trump sound like Ralph Bunch, you know, and this is for our flow. And people have these emotional sentimental attachments to materialism and they think they're being rationalistic. Why say materialism? I mean, the philosophy of the whole is that matter just creates itself. Everything is a definable chemical, biological process, and there's absolutely no metaphysical consideration that belongs in the mixture of when we're trying

to get to first causes of things. Nothing. And that point of view doesn't work. It simply doesn't work. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it I think it's going to take us another 30 years to actually catch up to that. And that's part of why the materialists are so angry and so caustic because I think there's a realization that they rule the roast in terms of media, in terms of reference sources with the PDN, in particular, in terms of academia, but they have lost intellectually. I'm wearing this weird position where the cultural victors are losers intellectually, not unlike the position that the church was in when it was suppressing Copernicus and then later Galileo. Yes. It'll work for a time, but it has an expiration date on it. Okay, I'm sorry to do this, but let me quote Vladimir Putin. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I only got to- I need to have too little standard there.

Only because I watched this documentary before the bullshit in Ukraine started where he was like having the most bizarro conversation with Steven Segal. It's just bizarro. You know what I mean? You're just saying what the world and my fucking living in right now? But he did make a pretty good point regarding American presidents. He said, the American president changes. American policy doesn't change. So who's really running the show? And I think as above so below, let's take that and apply it to what we're talking about here. think as above so below, let's take that and apply it to what we're talking about here. The face of like, who is controlling the data or who is populating consensus reality

with its particular symbol set has obviously changed. It is no longer the Pope saying, this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong, this is true, this is false. It is now a sort of like, I don't know, an ambiguous group of intellectuals who know the truth and then disperse the truth to, you know, people like us who don't understand what a fucking hypothesis is or how to actually conduct an experiment or what a control group is or what double blind me or any of that stuff. So let's take it, dumb it down and give it to you and you just trust this is the truth. But you're looking at the identical thing in the sense that both of these versions of

it are weirdly oppressive. They suppress information and they persecute people. They are, they shame people. They humiliate people who, yeah, maybe that, maybe lots of us did not take statistics. Maybe lots of us do not understand chemistry. Maybe lots of us do not understand chemistry. Maybe lots of us do not understand how a virus gets into the DNA of a cell or whatever it is, but the reaction to people who are legitimately curious about the universe and who are legitimately

questioning whatever anyone is saying, which I've always found to be a very scientific approach to things. Let's figure out if it's the truth or not, is aggressive, shaming. You're an idiot. What are you doing? Do your own research, dumbass or whatever. You know what I mean?

Yeah, go to your fucking research. You can't do research. You know, you peasant. Go back to your fucking job and do your fucking job and shut the fuck up. You know, and so you see this, I don't know what to call it, is it the demi-erge? You see this bizarre hierarchical archetype

that appears that does not want people to veer outside of what whatever the particular pre-classes that is appearing in whatever time period you're born into. So is there anything in the occult writing about what that is? Is there any identification of this as something? Or is this just part of what happens when power exists in the world? Is this just a byproduct of power? No, I think that's a perfect framing of it.

And it's very difficult to navigate because I'm one again, all of us are generalists. I don't know how to build a suspension bridge and I have no plans on learning, but I have to rest assured that somebody knows how to engineer a suspension bridge and somebody with a clipboard is going to walk over that bridge and certify that the thing is safe. My life depends on it, the lives of people I love depend on it. At the same time, when dealing with contentious issues in science, let's say, I believe in the jury model, in the sense that in our society, every man or woman can serve on a jury, can make judgment calls that might be life or death judgment calls. Can make judgment calls that make assessments over health claims, that make assessments over

violent crimes, that make assessments over liability. Things that are as grave and as serious as life gets. And we as a society rightly, rightly, entrusts juries of our peers when the system works the way it's supposed to work to make grieve and critical decisions. So no expert, no credentialed source, no no Demmerage, no arcan can come along and tell me or you or anybody else that tut tut. You can't talk about science because You don't do this. So go back to your sandbox and play with your fucking tarot cards or whatever it is you enjoy

doing and let the big boys get to work. And I reject that and our society does not function that way because the jury system is just a perfect intimate example of how we empower everyday people to make great fucking decisions. And my contention is that if you know what you're talking about, you should be able to explain how a nuclear reactor works to an intelligent 12-year-old, and I absolutely mean it, and I stick by that. We cannot all specialize in things. It's simply not possible.

But what we can do is expect authorities to be able to warrant ideas and explain themselves in ways that are very straightforward, just as I would expect a forensic specialist to be able to talk to a jury and say why he believes something happens the way it did. Yeah, beautiful. Well said, I've never considered that. Yes, we just take random people and throw them on a jury and allow them to determine the rest of somebody's life So that does show that we have some respect for just some basic human ability to parse Information and if you're out right from wrong true from false. That's a that's beautiful. I love that but You have to wonder. Oh my God, I'm doing a lot of bad quotes today. Here's another quote. I wish I could.

I said, no, I won't. A little Eve. Even worse, mate. I can't remember the member of the grateful dead, but he was talking. He was telling. It was actually Hitler. Hitler was a member of the grateful dead people don't know that. Yeah, the grateful dead's been around for much longer than people think. No, the, no, the, the, I can't remember, I

wish I could remember what it was, but it's a cool interview. They were just sort of talking about LSD. And in this beautiful sort of like, hip-a-fied San Francisco, if you want, talking about the man, he was talking about LSD. He's like, they didn't want us to go in that room. They don't want us to go in that room. Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, obviously the implication being that it's not just that the government is worried that people are gonna like, destroy their minds or something with some illicit chemical, but more that the insight it offers runs counter to most modern day power structures, particularly capitalism, particularly patriarchy, particularly hierarchy. And so, with the occult in these books, the claims that are being made in these books

are wild, man, the existence of hyperdimensional entities that you can contact, to get information, wealth, treasure, you know, solve problems in your life. The cosmology far outside of what most people throughout history probably had considered was the world we live in. So is there something, do you think there's something there, like in these rituals, in these methods? Do you think that there's something there more than just some fragmentary mythology,

but potentially an actual way of shifting into a very different world than most people are living in today? I do believe there is something there, and I do believe that we have to ask ourselves questions about whether that's something is available to us through the forms that it was expressed in in a grim war like picket tricks, for example. Like you've pointed out very rightly that if a person looks at a translation of a book like picket tricks, he or she will be blown away by how complex it really is. And the classical musicians, the classical magicians, like John D, for example, who lived in the Elizabethan age, the effort that these people put into their ceremonies

is very difficult for us as 21st century people to relate to. They invested so much time and effort and intellectual and physical expense in constructing these ceremonies. I don't know that those efforts are available to the psyches and the Constitution of 21st century people. I don't know they were culturally built that way at this moment. But I do believe, and I do take note, that literally, literally every civilization in human history, and I mean it from Polynesia to Siberia,

people that were separated by vast customs, differences in custom language, geography, time, they had a similar gambit. They all had a similar gambit for millennia that it was possible to form relationships to extra physical forces, very often personified forces, deified forces that people would represent with the traits of personhood as gods, and form petitioner relationships with these gods or spirits. And dig this, dig this, this is something I'll have to write about in the future.

Even our pre-human ancestors, Nandrathal beings, Nandrathal's pre-Homosapian ancestors, they had spirituality. We have statuettes, we have talismans that pre-homadid that Neanderthal man used to experience good luck on the hunt. He might use eagle talons or bear claws to experience fertility. We have there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of little statues, little figurines that were constructed by Nandrathal man that are called Venus figurines. They're basically fertility statues. They exist everywhere from the Maya to the Egyptian, every continent throughout

human history. So, Digit, in from the Nandrathal man continent throughout human history. So, Diggit, in the end of Fall Man, our pre-human ancestors, our most ancient, identifiable ancestors, had a spirituality that we can look at and identify in the forms of talismans and figurines. Be really, really slow. Be really, really slow, I would say, to the Sinek's to decide that that whole

vast ocean of human and even pre-human history on this planet should just be wiped away with words like, whoa, nonsense, a**, bullshit, it's like you fucking sure about that, are you fucking sure that a protocol that not only extends the deepest human antiquity, but free human antiquity, should be wiped away with the wave of the hand. Well, you might make a good Wikipedia contributor on some of the personal ecology pages, but I don't think we're going to assess with the assessor of the human situation.

Yeah, and you know, not to get like, minorly woke here, but I don't think people realize there is a strange element of racism in wiping off the table practices and what I would call technologies of indigenous cultures. You know, they're just full of shit. They didn't know anything compared to us. You know, that's why we went over there in the first place

and chopped their fucking hands off. Because they were cuckoo. You know, it's like, you know what I mean? Like, really? Really? You're just gonna like, not, you're just gonna obliviate the peak philosophy of indigenous cultures, because they don't line up with whatever the particular dogmatic

And the Jennifer did they know you know Pyramids fuck your pyramids think in the way now we can't build a fucking Hotel there God damn it and you're saying all that We fucking wouldn't be here. I mean presumably at some point, you know There was some cross section of mating and a long comes us. Yeah, I was Need the end of the film had to them, you know what the thing about like I just wanted to fuck you Neanderthal I don't want to hear about your stupid identities and your fucking teeth you wear on your neck I just wanted to bang you down

and teeth you wear on your neck. I just wanted to bang you down, reproduce. Right. It's ridiculous, man. But it's ridiculous. And I think that now we are witnessing one of what I find to be one of those entertaining moments in modern history, which is now we have these whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork and talking, David Grush specifically, talking about how he has evidence and of the US military having access to wreckage, to spaceship wreck or to what do they call them now, UAP wreckage to spaceship wreck or to what are they called them now? U.A.P. wreckage. But what to me, the most significant thing he keeps repeating is when people are like they're aliens, right? They're from space.

He says, no, non-human intelligence. And so what we're looking at here potentially is one or one of two things in both of them are equally bizarre. If you ask me, one, some, I hate to use the word, insane, siop, where they want us to think that they have wreckage for some unknown reason to distract from some bullshit, which is, I think is an insane idea. The other being, we have begun to quantify what was formerly

unquantifiable. We have found a way to quantify exactly what the people who wrote these books that you have written about were pointing towards non-human intelligence. What's an angel, non-human intelligence? Demon, non-human intelligence, genie, non-human intelligence. And now maybe our technology has gotten to the point where we can now pick these things up

that have been around for a long time. Do you have any thoughts on that? No, it's beautifully put. I mean, when you look at the best of the UFO UAP cases, the best, we've got three basic options facing us. What is some unknown super weapon? Okay. One is extra terrestrial and one is interdimensional. The thesis that I'm personally most interested in is the interdimensional for those minority of cases that are really extraordinary at evidentiary. Dig this, dig this. At this moment in history in the 21st century,

we actually have better models of inter-dimensionality than we do of extra-terrestriality, I would say, because the question of how craft could travel such extraordinary distances, I mean really unthinkable distances, is very, very tough to crack. I mean really unthinkable distances is very, very tough to crack. I mean, we talk of cosmic wormholes and time slips and such, but this is like very, very speculative theoretical, not illicit, not illicit, but we actually have better more finely worked through models such as string theory, still just a model, just conceptual, of interdimensionality, and we have better evidence for interdimensionality, then merging, say, from what is the so-called many-worlds theory in quantum

physics, which emerged in the 1950s, and which is very widely written about today, in mainstream physics journals and magazines like Scientific American. This stuff is on the agenda front and center of people who are involved in quantum particle and theoretical physics. We got better models of interdimensionality than we do of ET, and they're just still models. They're just consensual. But that's how I am the book. I talk about the question of convergence and conversations between people who are interested in the occult or metaphysics and people are interested in the UFO UAP question because these anomalies that we're witnessing and that we we have some evidence for now are you know possibly possibly we might be experiencing

slips intersections, visitations, winks from other Visitations, winks from other dimensions are intersections of time, and unless anyone think that sounds too far out, we know that linear time is an illusion. We know since Einstein that time bends in extreme conditions of extreme speed, conditions of extreme gravity, and even in our own era, and dig this, even in our own era. We actually know that our astronauts, although they're moving nowhere near the velocity of light speed, they do experience detectable physically minute reductions in the aging process, just as they're going really fast, one of the conditions under which time bends. So, less we say that's too far out. Horror

Woods is talking about other dimensions, I'm changing the channel. It is actually premised on some of the foundational ideas that exist in modern science, going back to the early 20th century. And you, and you, again, you see this pattern emerge, which is you have, like, you know, you trust, you want to trust a person who can build a suspension bridge. I want to trust the people flying jets above me that are breaking the sound barrier. I want to trust that their ability to see and hear and understand what technologically they're using and how to fly a plane is as good as it can get because I don't wanna think that there's like

coked up, air force, navy pilots, we're like, whoa, man, you see that thing? Looks like some kind of flying to, baby. Woo, I don't wanna think that. I wanna trust them. I wanna trust them. And when I hear one of them say, yeah, I've never seen anything like it in my life.

Or you just, you hear in their voice and they're recording from the Nimitz footage. You hear in their voice such awe at what they just witness. Such their minds are blown. And the reason their minds are blown, I've never been in a fighter plane. But I imagine whatever your experience is as a fighter pilot is very different from most people.

It's talking about speed. You're experiencing some alteration in what most people ever experience in their life, in the extreme, the speed, and also dimensionality of it. And so to hear someone who is used to that, as their job, have their mind blown, seeing a thing that is defying all of their understanding of the way things move through time space.

To me, there's a lot there. That's not fake. That's not a sigh up. That's not blue beam. That's somebody getting their mind blown by what they just saw and so then To see those people get shit on by These secularists or whatever you want to call them these people like no These pilots are high or not just I am the scam man, you know, I know a pilot. You snored PCP snored a PCP on my dick.

I you know, it's like, come on man. Like, yeah, while here it is again, here it's always there. The moment any of this stuff makes its way under the door of default reality, it, they treat it like a roach. They just try to stop it, burn it, get rid of it. That to me is one of the most interesting aspects of the damn thing. It's like, yeah, yeah.

That's the conspiracy to me. Why? Like, why don't we want this? I completely dig and this science as a... Science as a social edifice has always had difficulty understanding what to do with testimony. And the scientific culture in this country

has always played a kind of yes I will, yes I won't game with testimony. We abide testimony all the time. For example, we don't really know how psychopharmacological drugs work. I mean, yeah, we got some models and some decent ideas, but there's no absolutely certain to have how this shit works. By the way, that's my number one field of research. Sorry to cut you off. Go ahead. Personally, I my own test subject in the matter. I'm so excited. And I have no idea.

I still can't be here now, but I'm going to keep exploring. So for a psychopharmacology, for analgesics, pain reduction drugs, the person talks to the caregiver and says, yeah, I'm feeling a little better. Let's tweak it. Let's try this. Let's try that. We use testimony all the time, particularly in matters of psychopromic, logical care, pain management. When testimony deals with extra physical experiences or UFOs, then immediately we'll want to throw it out even when it comes to from sources,

people who are ordinarily trained in how to spot, judge, analyze coordinates. When it comes to those sources, a lot of the scientific edifice doesn't want to honor it. And yet, again, in terms of what succeeds culturally and what succeeds intellectually, the UFO question is now more public than it's ever been at any time, I think in modern history, there are things happening that I couldn't have conceived of six, seven years ago.

The discussion is on the public agenda, and if you wanna walk into a room of people who should disagree with one another politically and culturally, just bring up the UFO question and you'll find any eight out of 10 people from any background, any part of the country saying, yeah, that's some wild shit. We want to dedicate resources to that and find out what's going on. This is something that should be a brace. This is something it should be celebrated. Serious. This doesn't come from your topic. it comes from your method.

And I keep trying to explain that to the skeptics and the pseudo skeptics or very deeply attached to the idea of seriousness as something that emanates from subject as opposed to treatment. Seriousness comes from excellence. So let's bring excellence to the querid. Mitch, you are the best. I am so lucky to have you in my life. We are all so lucky to have you out there on the front lines. You are a wonderful bridge to connecting these ethereal,

misunderstood, I rolly subjects with a great methodology and with a great way of articulating them. And I am so excited for modern occultism. When does it come out? I see it's on pre-order right now. When can I get a copy of this thing? Oh, it's out September 19th in print, digital ad audio. Everybody, will you please pre-order this book?

It helps the author so much when you do the pre-orders. Obviously, it's gonna be incredible. If you've read any other thing by Mitch, you know he's a great writer. I really hope you all will collectively just dive into this thing. Don't pre-order video games. That's a bad move.

But definitely pre-order Mitch Horowitz books because he never disappoints. Thank you so much, Mitch, for coming on the shows. Is there anything else you need to plug? No, I'll just take you, my man. I'm so grateful. And thanks for creating this space where we can talk about all this. My pleasure. I can't wait for the next book, but hopefully we can podcast before it's coming

out. We love it. Sweet. Thank you. That was Mitch Horowitz. Don't forget, if you live in Los Angeles, to go see one of his talks, get the book signed, but definitely pre-order the book.

A big thank you to all of our sponsors, and thank you to all of you for listening. And as always, I wish you a glorious, perfect, wonderful joy-filled next 7,000 years before the great time of suffering when they come back and take us to the prison planet of Inazale. See you next week. Until then, God bless you. See you next week. Until then, God bless you.