Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 410: Madame Blavatsky Part I - There's Something Wrong With Jimmy

Episode Date: May 16, 2020

It's finally time for us to explore the life of one of the most famous occultists of all time: Madame Helena Blavatsky. Join us on this first part as we mostly cover the veiled years of Blavatsky's life, when she supposedly travelled the world and formed the knowledge base for what would prove to be the blueprints for 20th century occultism. 

There's no place to escape to this is the last Yeah, man, you can talk about how I messed up the countdown to the beginning of the podcast all you want Marcus But I'm gonna tell you what you know, I learned why readings this week. What's that? Y'all ain't fucking real Really, no one is real. That's what you want to tell them again. Unfortunately, dude I think and this just comes from reading a lot this week reading a lot and waiting for deliveries a lot this week Y'all ain't real. I made you up. I'm the only one that's real Interesting take on this Henry Zabrowski. Hey everyone welcome to the last podcast on the left

I am Ben staring at the very real Marcus Park. I am real and the man Henry Zabrowski over there in Los Angeles. I'm glad I'm making y'all say you're real It's nice to be a part of that I guess but there's something about like when you start reading into esoteric Buddhism I had a friend growing up my old my buddy Jeff Netsburg. Let's just the show was going on bro His father was a very intense Buddhist, but what I found out is that getting deep into esoteric Buddhism Just makes you not care about your son's art Absolutely, how can you be an intense Buddhist? I thought the whole point was lack of intensity Oh, you're about to find out my friend and then this next two weeks that Buddhism can actually be kind of weaponized

Whoa in a fun way. I don't mess with the monks. They'll kill your ass And please if you are out there tripping on acid right now, and you are wondering if you are indeed real You are So don't go run into traffic. Don't get naked and run around like you're one of the Kony 2020 guys Don't listen to that figment of you're in my collective imagination. He is not real You are in fact not real you are real go for it, buddy And you know you get put into Jorno in the oven and eat it. I created everything. That's good. That's bad I'm sorry for COVID. Um, but you're welcome for shamrock shakes

Wow, it all so I can't believe how creative I am. No, that's just brilliant All right Well, why the hell are we even talking about all this because this topic? I this is gonna be a doozy I guess it's gonna be a doozy. I can see in the eyes of Marcus He looks as if he just drove by a car crash that involved all of his friends and they're dead His eyes are shook. I can see the brain has been wobbly this week. We are talking madam Blavatsky Because I don't know how else to say your name because I'm from Wisconsin and madam Blavatsky is just the girl at the bar

That has sex with everyone That is Wisconsin logic. All right. This is not a Packers bar This is the beginning of Western occult thought-kissle and doesn't that make you just the most excited you've ever been? I'm getting fatter or just thinking about it. Oh, you're gonna love this man. It's a hell of an adventure. All right Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky or as she liked to be called HPB Again wear a condom if you're gonna have sex It's a dangerous world out there was she was a Russian mystic and philosopher whose ideas about the nature of the universe and the origins of Mankind have been among the most influential to the 20th century

Her two most well-known books isis unveiled and the secret doctrine are incomprehensible for the most part to folks such as you or I Sure But the best part about books is that when you read them you can make all the letters switch around a bunch of different places and make It say whatever the hell it is you want it to say. I just hate nerd confidence I can see it losing through the screen right now Henry. You are so cocky It's ridiculous. I'm confused But contained within those pages are the blueprints for modern occultism

You just have to read it like five or six different ways. You got to read it one way like it's all totally completely Fact you got to read it all again like it's all total to horseshit Then you got to read it again for all the symbolism Then you got to read again for all the colors that you like then you got to read it again to see if you find promo codes These occult things that could get you free merch, you know, I mean get you discounts to places like the soup plantation now Which is unfortunately closed. It's the only restaurant I could think of well soup plantation might be the worst name I've ever heard from a restaurant given the history of this country

No, I understand you have to watch it different in with different mindsets very similar to what you watch triple D diners Drivens and dyes you watch it hungry you focus on the food right you watch it full you focus on the jokes Actually, it's weirdly that's you're starting to understand it in a cult lens Yeah, actually, I think after like 10 years of doing this show over this episode and Jeff the Talking Mongoose man I think you're starting to get it. Hey, buddy. I'm definitely getting something Well, Blavatsky has a strong reputation for fraudulent behavior and at times that reputation is entirely deserved She was also an inspiration to thousands of occult thinkers some altruistic and some Absolutely evil

Over the years quite a few people including us at times have blamed Blavatsky for inspiring Nazi occult beliefs Mmm, particularly the idea of an Aryan race Admittedly looking back at old episode outlines. I don't think I ever mentioned Blavatsky's name without immediately mentioning Hitler Seconds afterwards. Well, I'm guilty It's fun to do in the wind especially in because it's an easy connection because you just see what they do They did uplift they took the term Aryan, which was connected to Moon-colored race and said that that was one of the root races that was gonna come and save all humankind It was gonna upload us to the next level what they didn't say is that first of all number one moon-colored actually means gray

And as we get in later on because then well, we know a lot about Nazis technically most of them pretty pink Yeah, that's very true later on you discover for really watch it all the gray people became all the different races because they were put under some form of magical Heating lamp. Yeah, I'm not joking you know people always say oh humans they must have Evolved from apes, but I say we evolved from pigs It's a pink people. It's uncorrect. It's fucking incorrect Well, the thing is is that Madame Blavatsky and the idea of an Aryan race

All that shit was cherry-picked from an entirely different occult thinker who took just the name Aryan and the word race and Twisted it to evil purpose and it was that guy who actually inspired the Nazis Well, in reality Blavatsky was one of the secret authors of the 20th century Inspiring the architects who helped build the modern cultural world people like Alistair Crowley David Bowie and any Westerner who's ever done yoga or transcendental meditation She was one of the main thrusts of bringing the east to the west people like her Alistair Crowley She is a part of that first wave that got us to understand because for a while we had the racist purview that their Cultures were primal and that they could not bring anything to western society didn't understand that they were living

Just as we were living just different circumstances at the same time These are the people that allow us to see a window into those worlds because a lot of times those those civilizations work more closed off To visitors than others and you could see what we're gonna go through is to go what madam Blavatsky? What HPB had to do in order to if she did get inside of these cultures to understand them It actually took quite a bit of huffin which is quite a bit for a lady of her exercise ability This is what I'm saying. That's why she's at the Packers bar boning all the guys after a big win You mentioned yoga does water aerobics count because my mom has been loving water aerobics at her retirement My mom does a thing too. She goes into the pool her big thing. She's like I do my kicks

She takes she grabs on to the pool and she kicks, but that's a great, you know, but I honestly I don't think I don't know If the Hindu masters had anything to do with my mom's floaty exercises Well Blavatsky is one of the founders of modern occultism and while you might not think that would have a large bearing on the average person's life The cultural influences of occultism on modern society are vast if subtle Now while I absolutely believe that madam Blavatsky did conduct herself in a fraudulent manner at certain points in history I also believe that she had extraordinary abilities that are difficult to explain away Okay, she like so many other people in the paranormal world had experiences and abilities that were unfortunately Subtle because as we know from our study of the supernatural true paranormal phenomena is rarely if ever

flamboyant half the time it's just your ability to suck air in through your pussy That is a subtle ability it is because you can't see it unless you're really up in there You can really see the air go in you make me throw some glitter up in there to see the air travel That's right. I We talk about this all time of the paranormal is a very personal thing and Especially people that are quote-unquote adepts or become masters through training their relationship with the Astral world this is what we're kind of involved with mostly in this story is It's quiet and it's

Introspective and it's very like the idea of moving a cup a couple inches or moving a ball, right? That's what they talk about with like telekinesis experiments all this type of shit, right? They move it a slight inch, and they're like absolutely fascinating Yeah, because it's difficult to get those shit like it's difficult to hem this down So HPB like all of these people she it she talked big talk saying I can do Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba to get people in the door, but then when people start showing up saying okay do it now Right it gets really really difficult to do maybe almost impossible and it seems like she's making it up Well, you can't demand a miracle from a god. They don't like that

Well Blavatsky in wanting her message heard and admittedly wanting recognition for it She juiced the phenomena and created non-existent bridges in order to reach conclusions that people could understand It's a jump to conclusions mat Unfortunately though in the process some of her followers got a little carried away with the narrative as Followers or want to do and she either would not or could not stop them until it was far too late As it always happens because ideas don't they just they travel everywhere They just are there they're free so she goes and she spouts these little seeds and then they grow sometimes into horrible things Sometimes into beautiful things and most often into misdirected things because you are not

So you're so far away from the source at this point wherever she got her knowledge from is now the fucking seventh degree To you and now you're gonna take it and do it in another way So then you're gonna corrupt it more Unfortunately, it seems how it goes with paranormal training. Well, it reminds me a little bit of ICP in the sense the juggalos They didn't create the juggalos the juggalos created themselves. Yeah, and it must have been it must have been a kind of a surprise The first few times they saw them actually the juggalos it is that is kind of an example of magical thinking They really did create something out of nothing and created a whole society that is now a Organism unto itself. It really is think about the power of the symbol of Malenko

The respect and intimidation that comes with it wearing the emblem of the house of Malenko It's like entirely true now out of the two books we used for this series one paints madam Blavatsky as a misunderstood genius Misunderstood in her time and misunderstood now, but nevertheless in possession of extraordinary gifts That book is madam Blavatsky the mother of modern spirituality by Gary Lachman Who is among the finest occult writers working today? Gary Lachman's great. He was in Blondie Yeah, he was the original basis of Blondie back when he was called Gary Valentine No kidding. Yeah, we tell you we talk about him getting in a fight with DD Ramon on no dogs in space awesome

And thank you so much for all the wonderful responses to no dogs from space. No dogs in space. Yes. Oh my The other book portrays Blavatsky as nothing more than a grumpy toad Depecker's lost The portrayer is a difficult woman who'd hated other women and conned her way across three continents leaving a trail of Disaffected followers and broken men in her wake. Why can't it be some of one and some of the other? Well, that book is madam Blavatsky the woman behind the myth by Marion Mead and while both books are hoots in their own way This dichotomy shows the true nature of the madam Blavatsky story I wonder what the responses are gonna be to this episode just because how people are

Divided on HPB and what she brought to the table and who she was as a person. She's got She's got a fucking there's something to her. Yeah, people have a sharp reactions to her. Hmm Well, listen in the one story Blavatsky sounds like a mystical pulp hero an adventurer who scoured the world searching for Ancient knowledge and new ideas about the origins of mankind like an occult Charles Darwin. Cool. Sounds fucking awesome. Yeah Yeah, the other story she was just an exceedingly weird fraud a difficult brat of nobility Who chain smoked cheap tobacco while subsisting on a diet of butter soaked eggs and fish me in college? Yeah, exactly. I I don't the interesting thing is I respect the former, but I want to hang out with the latter That's the thing. She's either a rock-and-roll mystic who traveled the whole world and broke glass ceilings and fucking

Lied her way into Tibet and cotton and willed people under her control and and materialized things with her mind Or she was an 1830s version of Lindsay Lohan yodding her way around Europe and just being like She it's very interesting how people can't pin her but a part of that was her own creation. Mm-hmm HPB destroyed her past to whoever cheek approach anybody who asked for any sort of straight answer about Where she came from got different shit every time. It's very similar to L Ron Hubbard. Her and LRH actually share quite a bit There's something about destroying your past as someone who's looking forward to becoming some form of Spiritual teacher where they believe that if they get rid of the the anchors of all this fucking family and And like all these of friends and all the fucking careers only there's people who try to make me do shit all fucking time

When you get rid of them, you're free then Become an ascend to the silhouette that you see in front of you that you're projecting yourself out to be And of course her and L Ron Hubbard one thing they definitely share a pants size This is where it starts. I'm gonna say right now HPB is the You need to look up to I'm them. I hate if it's bad to use the term role model because of what you just said For chubby witches and warlocks everywhere. How many times is a little chubby ginger? I knew that I was as a little chubby little redheaded boy where people were like Oh, you can't I look at the other Goths and I'd be like, oh, I keep you got

Cuz I got Turtle shorts on the old my belly. I got a belly. I got an uncle's belly, but I'm a tiny boy But she shows you can be chubby weird big-eyed love to Becky She's and you could go out there and still be a super powerful warlock No matter what anybody says about how tiny your feet are compared to the size of your chest. All right. Well, that's what we call projected I mean, that's a funny thing about like Madame Blavatsky's detractors is the first thing they always talk about is how Overweight she was. Oh love talking about how overweight she was She basically said that they she can't do any all of the stuff that they she said that she did they're like well

She can't do that. She's big and it's like, hey man. Listen, you can be big and hike They don't make you not be able to hike being lazy makes you not be able to hike if you said she was too lazy to do it I might agree with you Big to hike man because sometimes There's ice cream up a hill. There is of course big people can hike and then they can roll down the hill It's the difference between hiking and mountain climbing Yeah, it's like hiking is one thing. Yeah, anyone can hike anyone can hike but mountain climbing like climbing the fucking cashmere mountains

That's difficult and obviously I am joking. I got winded chasing around at Chihuahua this week Unless you can do the shit that they maybe said that she did that crouching tiger hidden dragon shit where she could float and Jump from tree to tree what you're gonna find out But they say that that's the kind of shit that HPB could do. Okay, how fun would that be? Scarred all the people saying that you're too big to play the violin all of a sudden you float up there And you say like I'll show you how many ghostbusters toys I'll have and then oh, then you'll see You'll give me some respect. Everything is okay, Henry. You're doing very well. You won But no matter who Blavatsky was as a person the fact remains that both her ideas and her public personality

Have made waves that still ripple through our lives here in the 21st century There's a reason why we're talking about her a hundred and forty years after she died Now when you consider the power Blavatsky had over her closest adherence It's quite easy to see a different path where HPB became a bona fide cult leader Just like another thinker who went by his initials did a hundred years later business man We're thinking person who's trying to create a corporation and help people at the very beginning and then yeah Do things take left and right turn? Of course they do, but don't they for all of our lives Your LRH apologism is really good in games

But Blavatsky was not interested in power structure or responsibility All three things that are necessary to be a cult leader. Yeah, she was a woman of Concepts entirely uninterested in cults now She was interested in societies and one could say that a secret society is just another term for a wealthy cult But while she herself was not a cult leader her ideas were ready made for cultism Of course, we have the cherry-picking of history's most dangerous cult the Nazis But Blavatsky inspired other cults as well if you will remember Blavatsky's belief system Theosophy formed the bedrock of the beliefs of Bonnie Nettles

Who of course was the co-founder of Heaven's Gate. Yeah, I tell you from one woman to another Me Bonnie Nettles, if I could just hang out with HVB for just a day and we make a couple of knit hats together They wouldn't meet a more wonderful afternoon and maybe I'd even think about touching the purse Oh my However, like many ideas that lead to cultism Madame Blavatsky's ideas were for the most part not her own Theosophy is a patchwork of many different existing religions borrowing heavily from Hinduism Buddhism and a thousand pre-existing sources Now I'm still trying to wrap my brain around theosophy as a whole But what I've seen I've watched a lot of lectures and first of all I have

I can't believe it took me till now. It took till I saw a theosophy lecture that I finally heard the term You know, there's a lot of people that go about debunking HPB, but I'm gonna tell you what today I'm gonna be bunking I can't believe how long it took to get to them I know it's not but I was just like yes. I would yes. We're bunking for HPB today Okay, but theosophy seems to be started when She arrived and mixed her her far east teachings with spiritualism where it started kind of like

Scientology where Scientology offered pragmatic solutions to life problems, right that we're gonna fix your problems With our like classes like you're gonna show up and we're gonna teach you how to be a better person And like pragmatically we're gonna give you steps where theosophy seemed to start as a way To move cups around and create the same things that people were seeing during spiritualist shows Spiritualist performances. I'll go ahead and just call them performances and her basically This is the way you hack that without using spirits because in the end we were never using spirits at all We were using our fucking mind soup Whoa, if you do take a whole series of ideas that already exist and create something different out of them though

It is a unique thought it is. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's what people have been doing from the beginning of time Yeah, well, supposedly Picasso just made everything flat Yeah, and I was fucking that's the technically it's like bad drawing, but like it's good I don't get it. Well supposedly well. Well, it's looking at something I knew that was gonna trigger No, I know Marcus Well supposedly Blavatsky learned much of this knowledge from men she referred to as the masters Although it isn't known who the masters really were or if they even actually existed as flesh and blood human beings

And we'll get into the masters pretty deep later into this episode. Cool But regardless Blavatsky was one of the main people who brought buddhist and hindu ideas and philosophies to the western world While also mixing in Atlantis Lemuria and the so-called root races which have nothing to do with race as we think of it Okay, Lemuria getting brought up again. Yeah, we've been talking a lot about Lemuria We did a whole episode on Lemuria a few years ago You know what it's these things are in every they keep surfacing up again and again, right? So it keeps going back to HPP. Yeah, no matter what like it keeps going back to Crowley

Like and I also didn't really we're gonna see how many contemporaries she had during this time period I think that the 1830s to the 1890s in America must have been a fucking Fascinating time to be alive. Yeah, just in America, but in Europe as well Like the entire world seemed to be caught up. I mean if you had money then It was a time where money then it was a lot of fun to Move in all these occult circles and all these Occult thinkers that were doing some cool shit in this time. It was a time when the cops didn't show up your door

Knocking on an extremely hard being like you can't throw shit out your window back then that was just going to the bathroom You would just throw dookie out the window and if it hit somebody that was seven years. Good luck How fun it was to be able to be like the little chachki boy who's just like don't get to throw the waste out today mom This is like all right. Your brother was supposed to do it yesterday, but he died And that's gotta be fun as a little kid just could dump all the shit out that window man Similar times similar times make europe great again. Although. I think it might have been more difficult It was pretty difficult. Yeah Now as gary lachman points out in the introduction to his book theosophy can seem a little bit soft

It's a little bit new agey. Well, it definitely got there Yeah, it got super soft and as it goes it becomes softer and softer There's quite a bit of i'm gonna use the term blue hairs that are involved Deep down because it's a specific type of old person. Yeah, you know what I mean? It's like they're rich and interested, but they can't walk Right, I hear you But just as a snowflake can turn into an avalanche So too can something as harmless as astral projection and simple trickery color a century

Now madame blavatsky was no fan of biographies concerning herself And she in fact tried as hard as she could to muddy the waters when it came to where she was from And what she did before she became famous So it's interesting in that she doesn't want to be famous. She wants to be famous But she doesn't like biographies about her Yes, she wants to be famous, but she wants to be famous for her ideas Yeah, she wants fame on her own terms She wants fame for the character the the entity that hbb would come

If you see the same thing with lrh when you take an acronym when you take your name and you strip it away You take all the other kind of bullshit. You become something else. She's already doing magical transformation I think there's a lot of people that it's a fine line, right between con man And enchanter like and I think that we're going to see that we're going to come up against this shit Again and again and again, but she comes from a lot. This is she's just one of them Alistair Crowley was the same Anton LeVay LRH all of these people would kind of create they would how do you put it they would

Curate their past so it was exactly as you wanted it to appear So it actually backed up the image that you would then see of the person that this character That is trying to sell you a line of thought because you are not going to go And do the readings of the ancient hindu texts because you are trying to create the slinky Other shit in your mind you have you are trying to live your modern life You don't have the time to go and read all of these ancient tomes coalesce everything Create it in a way that maybe you could sort of understand it and deliver to you They're doing that and they know that in order to do that

They also have to create like a pitchman persona that can also sell you this version of new reality And of course the slinky and silly putty made on accident interestingly enough Well to madam Blavatsky her past was not relevant to her message and therefore Superfluous information and unfortunately this purposeful obfuscation tended to hurt her credibility While allowing detractors to write their own stories in the most negative lights possible People want hard facts for some there's something about the human mind We can't live in grace. We can't sit like they there's there's something about it. We need to see

The proof we need to see like there's like an we need like an accountants receipts of every single thing that you do And I don't know if it I don't know what it was about the collective unconscious that got it heartbroken at some point That can't I don't know. I don't know But nevertheless We're still going to try as hard as we can to tell the story of madame. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. All right Blavatsky was born Helena Petrovna von Hahn in 1831 in what is now Ukraine 1831 was a cholera year and neither the prematurely born Helena nor her mother was expected to survive the birth Oh, both lived but in a moment that seemed to foretell Helena's future

The priest who performed the baptism had his robes accidentally set on fire in the middle of performing the right Well, how the hell do you do that? How does that happen? Isn't there a bunch of water involved with baptism? How do you light on fire? It just sounds like the story my dad used to tell about how because my dad used to what my mom calls He used to hang out with my mom calls a bar women Right and at one point my dad told me the story It's like okay. We had this girl came in he said that she could do this magical trick Well, she put that a mirror right on the bar Yeah, they're closed and you light a bunch of candles and if you look into the mirror you become old

Right, she wanted told all of us that she could do this shit. So she goes she gets the mirror out She lines up all the candles and sets them on fire, right? She's got big hair big crazy fucking 70s here, right? Uh leans over to look in the mirror. Oh, hey, I'm just bursting that fucking flames Just laughing and laughing and laughing and man. She was fucking bald and burned after that Yeah, we're all Michael Jackson moment not fun at all Well furthermore the timing of Helena's birth had mystical meaning in the old country As it was said in that area of the world that people born in the seventh month of the year

July had powers over evil spirits Uh, yes, that is my birth month. July 21st. I'm a cancer leo cusp. Henry poop yourself Yes, you'll notice the dookies in your pants now That is because I demanded you poop yourself again Uh extra dookie I already made my poop. So now my intestines are just coming out Yes, indeed Marcus get an erection. Haha. I'm not evil. God damn it

But it's like voodoo and you have to believe in Kissel's power over you for it to work, which is very scary Honestly to even think of believing in Kissel's magical powers, especially now that he has hellish rebuke at any point Hellish rebuke. I still have it if you're driving go the speed limit Well in particular people such as Helena had the power to control the house Duma boy Back then people believed that each house had a goblin in the form of an old man who lived behind their stove And played tricks on the household if he was not pleased My name is ross perot

Really good stuff, kissel. Thank you Yeah, you're gonna make me do so now do I have to do like My there. Hey, I'm on the stove and only wait wait. Wait. I'm before you say something. Let me finish Can I finish? Can I finish? Can I finish? That's the only thing I know is the Dana Carvey impression of ross perot Yeah, and you said I didn't have magical powers. Look at that He really is turning the chaos magic against us. I hate this. I hate that. I hate that we gave him these keys Well, it said that people like Helena could control spirits such as the doma boy and this shit was just sort of accepted knowledge

To her family Blavatsky was a sedmitka or one connected to the number seven Now when Helena was born Ukraine was still a part of the russian empire and this was when russia was still under the rule of bazaar While most people in the empire were serfs toiling for their local lords Blavatsky was of minor nobility. So she was born on third bates. Yes, okay This was a period in time when russia truly was the backward cousin to europe Still firmly rooted in medieval power structures well after american democracy was established and the french revolution Had taught the european aristocracy some very bloody lessons

As far as blavatsky's family went her father was a high-ranking soldier stationed in poland under zahra nicolas the first Who was the great-grandfather of zahra nicolas the second who as we all know later came under the sway of infamous mystic gregory rasputen My boy, I actually My my what I think is interesting about rasputen is that in terms of occult figures, right Rasputen really is the fucking like rags riches story Yeah, he really fucking came up from a tiny little village and got all the way to the czar where hpb

You know She kind of had some occult tools already at her disposal She was kind of like born into this ability to just immediately start running as a witch Well, interestingly it seems like occultism was very much a part of russian life when it came to certain members of the upper classes Because hpb's great-grandfather had a vast library of occult volumes that young helena read whenever she could Because remember when the one of the reasons why rasputen was able to get as far as he did was because Russian society at least you know the high society they were into the occult They were primed and fucking ready for it. He just walked into a space

What does it see is it more like of a fashion thing like because you know how because in america fell in love with it too It became cool in america Coincidentally as hpb started traveling to america more and more But there it seems to be it kind of was just like an end thing for the rich to be into the occult And you knew where rasputen was walking because he's uh, his penis would leave you a snail trail as a drug on the ground I thought it was a three-legged horse But then it turned out to be big smelly mine make love to my wife. Oh, that's nice Well, helena's grandfather's name was prince pavel vesilevich dolgoruky

Was he a prince or was that his name? He was a prince. Okay. Yeah, he's not fucking michael jackson's kid And his library contained hundreds of books on alchemy and magic And the prince had even rubbed elbows with some of the most famous magicians of the day like cagliostro And comp descent germain these are more I mean, I don't even know when we'll cover these characters. Yeah, I guess as we are the years go by we'll get deeper and deeper But deeper and deeper god damn it. Yeah, but cagliostro and comp the central murder they are

Proto versions of what hpb would become they also did the same shit destroyed old Personalities became new became something else come for fun for more. He was one of those who said that he was Immortal right and cagliostro. I think he was he murdered. I don't really know. I don't know I want to get into the story of cagliostro, but he's another one He's one that kind of goes under the radar as a famous magician of the 1700s Yeah, I wish that I could see you Marcus in your heaven, which I think would be one of these libraries Wouldn't you love that? I I meant I can't understand half of this shit Especially these like these really old volumes on like alchemy like and most of it is uh fucking nonsense

Well, you know, you can just jerk off on all the pages You know, what's kind of fun? First of all, I'd love to see dog meat inside of the giant hall of akashic records Just like him and Mozart and Jeffrey Epstein Just sharing secrets eating canapes But I wonder if you actually and I'm not going to say it's always the edibles I don't always want to say it helps, right? No, but sometimes what's nice is that it's just about the pictures

And then if you eat the edibles and you kind of like roll your eyes back And you like lay in the thing like you get to HPB's place where she just fucking had a lip through a Hation you just fucking let the imagery roll past you You may not get a lot out of it and it may not make you like easier to talk to her like a better person Right, but you'll see a whole lot of fucking hexagons Absolutely, that's very important No, it was even said that HPB's grandfather had an idea for a universal occult religion Beholden to a group of unknown superiors

Which sounds a hell of a lot like Blavatsky's ideas concerning hidden masters and allister crawley's later secret chiefs Yeah, and t in does cut their connections to the their masters anybody who kind of had this is one of those Like preset occult ideas that seems to be this idea that there it's like there are puppet masters behind this I'm just I'm just listen to these guys I'm just a charge of this group. I'm doing all the stuff like yeah making the money. I'm having sex with all the women in the group I'm the only one who's allowed to do any of that, but I'm not the boss I gotta go and talk to my other guys. They're the boss the ones you can't see you can't see them

And you can't tell them or complain to them or say anything about like what I'm doing Because they kind of like have a hands-off approach to what I'm doing Yeah, and it's a weird thing about human nature is that there really is no difference between the secret chiefs telling you something And the guys standing in front of you telling something. There's you're still getting uh commands, but people for some reason Need that other worldly presence They need that thing behind the curtain uh in order for them to do some really wacky shit And sometimes you just got to give it to these people and that's what HPB understands later on Well, no one wants to trust the person that they know for a fact just took a stinky dump

You have to have some be mystical no one wants to I mean that's absolutely true Yeah, it's uh you can't you hang out with anyone for more than an hour and a half and you're gonna see them do something human Oh the illusion's gone Now here's the thing about HPB and reading No matter what you think of her you cannot deny that she was an incredibly intelligent human being With a recall that was said to be comparable to nicola teslas Whatever she read she remembered and her occult education began at a very early age Check this out

Potential witches and warlocks because this is how you get there you have to start early and start reading It's all about the reading and and taking notes. She was an innate nerd. She was born with big old She's like what everybody talking about her big eyes big mop of hair Kind of surly like like a mean chubby girl But also there's something about the otherness of it that immediately put her into a role that she was willing to accept and say Okay, I'll be The antagonistic person you immediately assume. I am because of my scrunched face Right, of course perhaps this influence is what caused blavatsky to cast off the orthodox norms of the time

Which is a much harder proposition in 1840s aristocratic russian society than it is and say modern day demoine Well modern day demoine is a very fancy place What I would say is that it's it's very difficult to throw like it's not like just rebelling against your fucking parents It's rebelling against an entire Society have you told your parents that you don't like clint black and demoine? Do you really think that's gonna go well? I feel like it's very difficult to rebelling demoine Yeah, can you imagine sick being in demoine and being like guys? I'm you know, I don't want to push any buttons here

But I'm really not into corn. Wow. Wow. We thought I was talking about the vegetable What that's even Our family lineage. I'm just not. Yeah. I mean, I love the band honestly, but yeah, I'm over it Wow, you are kicked out of here my friend and you better enjoy minnesota Yeah, I just come back. I guess I'll just go be gay for carrots in minnesota then Helena was known as an abnormal child who would invent strange stories that she believed were 100 real And she'd often convince others that these stories came from a place of absolute truth She convinced her sister that russia was home to a tall white flamingo

Who had once been a man, but after he had committed fearful crimes and murder? He'd been changed by a magician into a brainless bird doomed to wander deserts and marshes forever The flamingo gets such a bad freaking rap It is a smart animal in the sense that it can almost walk on water and it's fun and every every time you see a flamingo You know, you're at margaritaville. I love flamingos Flamingos I I'm not gonna go and say that they're a smart bird or capable bird I do like looking at flamingos. Yes, you're correct on that. They're cool They are cool looking. They're pink and they're fun and they stand on one leg. Yeah, but you can I think that they drown

If you like Put a worm underneath a rock in the lake like I think that they just fucking drown. I know they eat shrimp I like shrimp everyone likes shrimp But I tell you what it's better to be a flamingo than to be a fucking russian In 1830s surf them Whoa hot take Henry Zabrowski. It sounds like an awful fucking life. I love surfing I'm a real flamingo today. I'm gonna quit. I'm gonna quit then I'm gonna quit everything great A Helena also conducted long conversations in her sleep with mysterious individuals

Such as the elderly woman who would visit her at night and give her detailed accounts of a life long past lived Hey Helena, are you awake? It's me. It's the elderly woman who who comes to you in your dreams. You awake, Helena Uh, yeah, I'm awake now Yeah, this one time I I bought a hat Yeah from a man who had a horse that he named dog Yeah, isn't that interesting? I'm a ghost. I tell you every detail of every part of my life. Right, right. Um, this one time

I bought another hat, right? He was from a man He named his horse cat Well, that is that is crazy. That's a little wild. Um, aren't you supposed to go back to the supreme court there Ruth Bader? Hello Real flamingo today She also spoke with unseen men who she said imparted knowledge and wisdom and even from a young age She claimed that these were wise men who had existed in all ages and made themselves known only to those who were worthy Okay, now depending on what school of thought you subscribe to when it comes to Blavatsky

These claims can be looked at one of two ways If you think of her as a fraud Then you can say that Helena's entire career was merely built upon childish fantasies that she never quite outgrew Like if Calvin had built an entire religion around hops smart idea. You should have done that. That's where the money is Yeah, that's kind of how stuff gets created, isn't it? That's how I I mean, that's what I believe I think that everything starts from like, hey, you know, what if we like What if we made shoes that little skates on the bottom? You know and a lot of people like you're fucking stupid and you're like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry

And then one day you fucking made roller skates, bro Yeah, yeah, I'm up to mind at this point that she created something and then it becomes real Absolutely And admittedly it is true that in our studies on cult figures We found that famous cult leaders such as Jim Jones showed abilities and interests from a young age That would inform their later career choices and while Blavatsky was not a cult figure She was still playing kind of the same sport. It's an interesting divide, right? Yeah, where what's the difference between Joseph Smith and Jim Jones, right?

This is where hpb kind of lies because she didn't go as far as to create a whole structured religion But she also there was a moment in her future When she really could have started taking advantage of people like a true cult leader and she did not She actually moved her sights upwards into more of a religious space than anything else and I wonder what takes What what is the difference between a religious figure? And lrh like in the in the very end. I think it might be as simple as buildings Because I think I mean really I mean because what Helena Blavatsky ended up creating You could argue is more of a philosophy than a religion because a religion requires

Structure a religion or structure organization a religion requires buildings. Sure You want a brick and mortar? Yeah, well, she did a lot of renting which I guess makes you filth in America But looked at a different more open-minded way You could say that hpb was chosen from birth for communication with a world that most people don't and will never understand Although Blavatsky herself eventually claimed to understand Regardless of the origins though these abnormalities were met with predictable resistance from her family Who despite believing in old men living rent-free behind the fucking stoves Blamed her abnormalities on unseen devils

To try and break her spirit her family had her exercised by priests Countless times drenching her and Blavatsky's words with enough holy water to float a fucking ship Damn, and when that didn't work. They just tried old-fashioned beatings This is like nowadays when you know You just got done taking you just you just got done trimming your baby bangs And you took a killer a hago face picture and you're posting it to your to your tumbler Or your discord and then your parents come in there and they see you doing the Weird little hago face with the peace sign thing and you got like ted bundy is my spirit animal

T-shirt on and your mom comes in and she's like you need to go be an account and you're like get out of my life mom It's the same energy interesting. All right. She's rebelling. Yeah, she's rebelling and there's a lot of holy water Yeah, there she's rebelling and they're responding with beatings and exorcisms With any luck. She'll be Johnny cash But I know she and she won't be Johnny cash. She becomes something almost different almost. I'm not gonna say better But different. Okay now fraud or not this total and complete rejection of who she was as a person Somewhat soured blavatsky on the russian aristocratic lifestyle. That'll happen And she met their rejection with sometimes extreme opposition

She hated fancy dress Finery and civilized society and she claimed that when she was 16 She was going to be forced to go to a ball at the local vise royce A bunch of ass hats. That's kind of fun though. I wish there was more balls would be fun Like town dances would be fun. No, they're not as funny as you think they are I think they're right. There's too stuffy. They're like the met gala. Would you ever want to go there? I would love better than to go to the glendale town dance And go meet all those fun armenians and see what their daughters are like and wonder what they're talking about

And there are three different cell phones and why do they all own five bmw's? They're cool guys What the vise royce ball? Madam blavatsky said her parents told her that you're gonna go to this fucking thing If we have to get the servants to dress you and drag you there themselves Oh, let her be a little goth in the basement So to avoid the party blavatsky plunged her foot into a pot of boiling water And held it there until the flesh boiled raw See, you know, I will

Mommy daddy, I'm not gonna dance and I'll show you how much I'm not gonna dance by turning my foot into a wonton What was that movie? There's there's something wrong with jimmy or something like that We gotta talk about kevin. Yeah, they had to talk about something wrong with jimmy I think is a I've seen no I've seen flashes of pictures of there's something wrong with jimmy that involves a guy named His name was like lance butt Yeah, that's what's wrong with him. He started jimmy doll. Oh, I see. Okay Now while you might think a fancy ball might be a thing a young girl want to attend in order to meet boys No, it really is a reverse Cinderella. Yeah, blavatsky was famously asexual

Oh to an almost unreasonable degree or so she claimed it's the term. I believe she was ace I believe is the term now. Yes, that is the term now that slaps I stand that Well, she said that when she was young if a boy dared speak to her of love She would have shot him like a dog who had bitten her. Oh, yeah, man Don't need to be when I say to an unreasonable degree Like if you're saying like if a boy is going to talk to me, I'm going to shoot him in the fucking face That's a bit much. I I feel like that's the overall sentiment of modern society

I'm going to embrace generation z again and say hashtag whole mood. Yeah But really blavatsky sexuality is quite possibly one of her greatest mysteries One could say that blavatsky merely passed on the pleasures of the flesh in service of a higher consciousness As she said that she had a volcano in constant eruption in her brain And a glacier at the foot of the mountain I think it's pretty obvious it does seem like a native american prescription from a doctor of why you can't have kids Oh, she's got the old could she got cold cracks. We've seen this before This is

This is not accurate entirely and I may be wrong But I seem to remember from reading the abridged secret doctrine There was like one description of her sexuality and I believe now i'm not I have no clue if this is an injury you can actually get we're going to cover a couple of these horse injuries that she's had Right, but one of them. She's sort of knocked part of her you loose She said that the only thing that she ever had approaching sexuality

She said it because she used a lot of crude terms blavatsky HPB is a funkin. She's a crude lady. She's a funny lady. Sure But the one thing she said the only I forgot what the exact terminology was But she said I just remember the end bit Which is the only thing that she needed in regards to sexuality was a close hand at a crooked cucumber Well, just because she's crude doesn't mean she doesn't have sexuality body Clyde Or Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde was very crude and the only thing that she needed to come was a bunch of murder That's it. That's it

Now Helena was said to have certain strange powers as a child She could put pigeons to sleep using only what she called Solomon's wisdom It's like a magical gift that no one gives a fuck about Yeah, because mostly how you put pigeons to sleep is just by hitting them with a hammer Yeah And she also survived a horse riding accident her first of many through seemingly supernatural means The horse she was riding bolted and Helena fell from the saddle Her foot was caught in the stirrup and her head should have been smashed to the ground over and over and over again

As the horse ran. It's a common way to die when riding a horse and folks. That's called the first ever spaghetti western Yeah, I honestly, I thought that was called pulling a Yosemite Sam But some unseen force kept her head aloft until the horse was able to be caught When she was asked what had happened She said that a tall Indian in linen had protected her and it was the same tall Indian who sometimes came to her in her dreams and held conversations about hidden knowledge Hold on a second. Is this wanes world two? No, no, no i'm talking about India, Indian from India Ah

No, no, no This all has to do with When I say Indian for the rest of this series i'm talking about a dude from india. All right Okay Yes, yes, yes, yes, it was Dalsim from Street Fighter. Cool! Awesome, he can stretch. While this might freak some people out, Helena only wanted to know more. And perhaps the person who provided some of that knowledge was her servant,

Baranig Buyak. Of course! Buyak? You know what's up, boy? Buyak! All he does is teach me how to pray. He brings me my nady fucking late. And man, sometimes we sit cross-legged for hours, I love my boy Buyak! Damn! So she really was, I mean the fact that she has a servant. Yeah, well they called her her surf, which is the same fucking thing. Well basically, yeah, you get assigned a poor person. Yeah.

Jeez, alright. Some said Buyak was a magician, and Blavatsky claimed that he taught her the occult properties of plants and instructed her upon, quote, the language of the bees. You would see it, that the bees, they go buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, and that is when they are full of the bee shit, which is what the people eat. And sometimes the bees, they go buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, and that means, kill yourself Buyak, kill yourself. And I say, why speak my inner truth to me bees?

And you have to ignore, and put on the rock and roll music. Yes, absolutely, the bees, we never want you to kill yourself. They want to sting you and hang out. And since the soldiering life of Helena's father required travel to different parts of the Russian Empire, Helena was also exposed to the idea of Buddhism at a young age. She even spent a whole summer living with Buddhists in the city of Ostrakhan, near the Caspian Sea. I must have been excited. Buddhists are, they hard sell you.

There's a Buddhist temple near where I live, where they fucking, they really harass you. For peaceful people, they really want you to meditate. And they're yelling about it, which I don't really get. But this is kind of the equivalent of studying abroad. You know, like at Florida State, I've told this story before, you know, all the people who left Florida State and came back from London from their study abroad program started calling things flats. This is when they're called, and you know, say in lifts and shit, where this is the same thing,

where she just came back, but her main thing was coming back with like fucking sandals. And you know, in Russia, it's hard to have sandals. Oh, it's cold. Because you gotta dig for your food. Yes, she was the nobility, she wasn't digging for jack shit. Hell yeah, that's true. Yeah, all right. She could, I mean, that is the thing about Helena Blavatsky is that she could afford to do a lot of this shit

when a lot of people at the time couldn't. I see. Yeah, she was, she got to do this because she wasn't forced to. She wasn't being raped for children by a feudal lord, which is the existence of everybody else that was like underneath her. She was set. It's sort of like Gwyneth Paltrow, where you're so, you have so much money and so much family clout that you're allowed to be super dumb. That's interesting. That's interesting because she just bought her way into rock pussies.

Right? Yes. But for all of Helena's knowledge and curiosity, she was still a woman of the Russian nobility during the 1840s. Oh. And when she was 17, it came time for Helena to get married. That's a little early, but I guess they die younger. They die much younger. Yeah, I mean, for reasons not quite clear if this tells you anything, like the guy that she chose, Nikifor Blavatsky,

he was in his mid-40s and they were like, why did you choose such an old man? I can't get hard anymore and she said her pussy was real cold. I don't know. It's a good choice as a 17-year-old. Get a guy who can't fuck anymore. Sure. Then you would be forced to deal with it every night. I guess.

And pawn and grab it and lick it and looking for the spots. What kind of, what is that? Looking for the spots. Sometimes a woman just lays there and yeah, and she's there and then you got to go look for all the spots. Yeah, you know, you got to. Does Natalie know that you devolved your bizarre sex acts on national radio, aka podcast? It is for, this is my inner game. Oh, okay.

Well, the rumor was that she chose Nikifor Blavatsky to spite her mother based on an unkind comment that her mother had made. And talking about a possible marriage match, Helena's mother had said that no man, not even that old asshole, Nikifor Blavatsky, would choose such an unruly, ill-tempered, unpredictable woman such as Helena. Ah, she drove her right into his arms. Exactly what you did. Because like, yeah, and the HPB is like, you want to try me? I will, I'm Marius Stump. I'll marry you goddamn well and go and get water out of it all day long if that's what I got to do.

Tell me what to do. I'm not a father. I got two dogs. Well, fostering one and a half puffin. But this is just a technique I think would work. Your daughter brings home a guy. He's a greaser, let's say. He's got cigarettes in his pocket.

I don't know what the kids are doing. Yeah. Just love him. Just be like, he's a pretty cool guy. I'm loving Larry. And then she'll hate him forever. I certainly loved his Joe Rogan shirt. Well, another story said that Helena had met a man named Prince Golletson.

You got to go with the prince. Yeah. But he was a mystic and magician who was encouraging the teenaged Helena to run away with him and see the world. This was not proper. So to protect her honor and keep her bound to Russia, it said that Helena's family hastily arranged the match to Nikifor just to get her out of the way, giving her to a man Helena had previously called the Plumeless Raven because of his receding hairline. Whoa, buddy. Whoa, whoa.

Let's think about this here. This kind of shows her immediate dynamism, right? Where she, you know, at the time, she was more of an interesting-looking woman than traditionally pretty. She had the captivating eyes, a big mop of hair. She dressed very flagrantly. She liked dressing up. She wore the red shirts of the Italian rebels at the time. I mean, it was like Garibald, you know, like she wore bright colors and all that stuff.

And there was something just about her personality that drew people to her even when she was actively like saying, now get away from me. The people were like still like all up in it. Like this prince was just straight up like, I'm going to take you on vacation woman. And she's just like, yeah, how bad do you want it? Because I'm already married and she's just already playing people. Right. Of course, the Plumeless Raven, he's a great professional wrestler.

He has his pubes cut in a certain way that if you stare at him, you die. Well, from what Helena said in a later letter, she married Nikifor Blavatsky because he, unlike anyone else in her life, believed in her developing magical abilities. So this guy's a good, I mean, for her, it's actually kind of a good match. Well, we don't know which one of these stories is true. Yeah, but I mean, if this was true, the marrying Nikifor would give her ample time to study the occult. Or so she thought. Oh my God.

Well, she had immediate second thoughts when she agreed to the marriage and she tried to back out, but Nikifor wouldn't let her. She relented, married, and during the ceremony when the priest said, thou shalt honor and obey thy husband, Helena supposedly muttered, quote. I surely shall not. Yeah, she essentially gave the 1830s version of as if. Oh, damn, cutting deep. Yeah, and she tried escaping on her wedding night.

She conspired with Kurds to ride off to the Iranian border, but one of the Kurds ratted her out to Nikifor and so she spent her wedding night under armed guard. Jeez, just let her go. Come on. And Nikifor thought that Helena would mellow out a bit after the marriage. Oh yeah, people always change after they get married. It's a thing that you need to remember is that always get married thinking you're going to change them because it always works. Yeah, yeah.

Does anyone change for the better after marriage or does it always get worse? You guys should know. I changed for the better. I changed for the better. You did? Your relationship. I think that my relationship is stronger since getting married. Yeah.

I think take that. Take that piece of shit. She's a dagger to my heart. Of course she didn't change. She didn't change at all. I mean, he thought this is going to be some sort of fucking magical spell where she does the ceremony, she takes the vows, and she's going to be a normal woman and it's going to be a normal marriage. This guy is out of line.

But when it became apparent that this would never happen with Helena, he just sort of let her go. And so she rode off alone to begin what is known as Helena's veiled years. Oh. Now, out of all the periods in Blavatsky's life, the two decades between the ages of 18 and 38 are perhaps the most controversial, partly because Helena changed her own story about these years quite a bit, and partly because documentation is scant. Is it a 20-year chunk here? Big, huge chunk we're about to go through here.

Huge chunk of her life that is completely veiled in mystery, purposefully so. She made sure after this, anybody who asked her about her past, she would give them a different story. So this is sort of what Gary Lachman did as much as he could to get as much documented proof over what he could see where she was and with sightings of her, essentially to piece together the story. Because we don't know what's true and what's not. Because apart from me, we're going to think about this entirely occult thinking. When I look at HPB's life, I look at the same way I'm looking at the secret doctrine. I'm actually looking this more for symbolic meaning.

She built the story purposefully. That was actually more of a, in my mind, if she really was the real deal, which I go every day, I think differently about HPB, I think that there's a part of it where she knew one day historians and all these people are going to look back on her life. And so what she's going to do is tell, essentially, like tales about her own version of her own history, that your job, as a person, you could take it as straightforward information, or you could look a level deeper and say, what is the meaning here? Okay. Now some of her stories are confirmed by other sources, and every once in a blue moon they're backed up by documentation.

But it's fucking impossible to say exactly what was true and what wasn't during the time that Blavatsky traveled the world. But we do know she did travel the world. She wasn't just sitting in Russia the entire time. Cool. Yeah, but it's just about whether or not was she doing an active spiritual investigation on a bunch of different continents, or did she become a fucking yotter? Like truly become like what, I brought up Lindsay Lohan before, like that kind of shit where she became sort of like professional entourage for a bunch of rich people.

We're not quite certain. Well, I mean, to be honest, I don't know, I mean, I don't want to be rude here. But I mean, who is this? I mean, are people paying to hang out with her? I mean, she's not a gigantic toad. No, I know she's not a toad. That's what I'm saying, at the time, because it's interesting how they paint her, because they all say talk about her size. And then they say she was 18 stone or something, which was the equivalent of 230 pounds.

I was like, that's normal. That's not really like, I don't care. I don't care if you're Adele from 2012, Adele from 2016, or Adele from now. They're all beautiful. Everyone is beautiful. No, people were way into her, man. She fucking, she had a way about her. It's a wink. I know what the wink is. Well, as far as how she paid for it, it's thought that she probably lived on the dime of her father,

who pretty much decided that Helene is going to do what Helene is going to do. Good. That's exactly right. And others think Nika for Blavatsky sent cash as well, deciding pretty much the same thing. But, you know, she's my wife. She's going to do whatever the fuck she wants to do. Here, here's some extra cash. Don't fucking starve on the streets. My wife wants to go to fucking India. Let her go. So Blavatsky traveled to places like Constantinople, Greece, France, England, America, and Cairo,

picking up companions along the way who would play large roles in Blavatsky's later theosophical life. Well, yeah, very cool. There should be a fucking RPG of her story. Yeah. In Constantinople, she hooked up with a countess called Kisilov, who suggested Blavatsky would have a much easier time traveling as a man. So Blavatsky took her advice and cross-dressed her way across the continents, usually dressed as a cabin boy. Oh, cool. Someone bring me that rather busty cabin boy.

Yeah, all right. Want to see if I have a feeling some of the parts are womanlike. Maybe. All right, good for her. Also, while in Constantinople, Blavatsky was once again almost killed by a horse. Damn. She was performing horse stunts on a steeple chase for cash using a wild mare who had killed two previous riders. Wait a second. So she's doing a horse? She's a stunt woman? She was a hell of a fucking horse rider. She could fucking do up men. She was a great horse rider.

Cool. I mean, really, when she got big when she got older. I'm not fucking, no, I'm done with that. I'm not even on that. I'm just interested that she's a horse rider. Well, the horse reared up, fell backward and crushed her. Oh. Impact injured her heart permanently, and this injury would turn into one of the many physical maladies that Blavatsky would succumb to again and again over the course of her relatively short life. I wonder what it was about the 1800s where it was stuff like, because she just had this like wound, this open wound on her chest for the rest of her life that would just like weep sometimes.

Or like open up or like do something. I was like, how does this happen? Why doesn't this really happen now? Well, because we have surgery. We can do open heart surgery and go in and fix it. They didn't know how to do it back then. All right, Marcus. All right. But this was the injury, and I don't mean to sound sophomore here. Oftentimes I try to be as mature as I can on the show. But this was the injury that I believe was what I said before that knocked her pussy loose.

And I'm not certain that that's a direct injury, but they said something about like her uterus got rattled. She got like fucking youth dice because of this. Like something happened and knocked loose in her gut and made so that her sex wasn't good no more for her. Okay. I am just being a storyteller and an educator. I agree. It's very important information. Well, despite the heart trouble, though, Blavatsky was a nicotine fiend and was said to constantly roll in smoke. Cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.

They said she'd smoke up to a pound of tobacco a day. Holy shit. That's like that Bill Hicks joke where it's like two packs a day. I go through two lighters a day. Yeah. How a pound of cigarettes. How much does it cost? What is that? Is that like literally 10 packs of cigarettes a day? I would like for someone to even answer this question. Side stories LPOTL at gmail.com.

I wonder if at the time tobacco was more powerful too. Like I bet tobacco was way closer to like weed. I know that it was like tougher on the system and get you high and shit back in the day. Well, I don't know. I mean, nowadays there's glass in it, doesn't it? Yeah. They said, I mean, they said that she would smoke hundreds of cigarettes a day. Oh my gosh. It was just a constant just because you also got to remember she's smoking little rollies. Right. Right. So she's not smoking like full.

She's not smoking like a hundred camel wide today. Sure. Yeah. Nah, she's not a fucking truck driver. Yeah. She ain't racking up the miles here. Right. Yeah. No inflatable chairs in her future. Not too long after recovering from the incident with the horse, Blavatsky had a run in with an opera singer named Agarty Metrovic. These names are, I wish we could go back to him.

I love these names. No, we should start. This is, I mean, Marcus is the one who wants kids. Yeah. This is your idea. You better think of long and hard what occult names you're going to give your children. Oh, Agarty Parks. That is going to, there is no way that kid's going to grow up to be a failure. Yeah. Unfortunately, Parks is one of the least occult names in fucking history.

Yeah. Changes to Park Skofsky. Like just change it and make it make a new name for the child. Yeah, just take it, but if they took their mother's name, then it'll go like that. That's an occult name right there. Yeah. That fucking work out. Absolutely. It's a cool name. Well, the nature of the relationship between Madame Blavatsky and Agarty Metrovic is highly debated.

From what Gary Lachman says, Blavatsky found Metrovic in a ditch after he'd been stabbed by a gang of Corsican ruffians working on the orders of the local Jesuits who'd put out a hit on Metrovic for reasons unknown. He dared sing pavates number five. In less than an A-shop, stab him with bread. Because in my mind, Corsican ruffians are just a bunch of like guys with scarves on, just going like, eh, you do not even eat cheese correctly. And you have to go like, this is what you're doing?

You're just going to hackle me about my table manners? Yes, I cannot believe you left more than an inch of cheese on this plate. And you be like, stop it. Stop it, you're cutting me with your words. That's the thing, I don't know if these are tough people or super comically weak people. It's tough with the history. It's tough with the history. Well, a policeman who had been offered a bribe was just about to push Metrovic's body into a ditch

when he was stopped by Blavatsky brandishing a pistol. Oh. And she guarded Metrovic until she was able to arrange for him to be taken to a hotel for further care. Now this is HPB's story. Yes, this is HPB's story. And after that, she and Metrovic stayed friends until his death. There were chums. Cool.

Chums, she loved the word chums. Love the word chums. I love chums. But according to Marion Mead, the woman who wrote the more anti-Blavatsky biography, Blavatsky and Metrovic had an on-again-off-again relationship for 20 years and actually had a hunchback child together named Yuri who died very young. Hey, mommy, is it okay if I die? I mean, the kid dies.

You have to call him hunchback every time. Just kick, kick. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's a fucking author. They made sure to put that in detail in there. I'm just reporting the facts, sir. All we do is report the facts.

Blavatsky's passport did show that she was in possession of a ward named Yuri in the 1860s, but a gynecological report from the 1880s confirmed that Madame Blavatsky had not and could not bear children owing to what she called a crooked uterus. See? I wasn't making that up. She did have a flippy floppy uterus. Can you just imagine the scroll that unfurls back then for the gynecological report? I can't imagine.

I would assume that it just sent a chill out every woman's spine. The idea of an 1840s gynecologist. What are they doing? They were just looking for reasons to cut out your fucking uterus at any turn and that's a brutal surgery and then all the tools are made out of wood. It sounds like that scene from Seven where the guy put a knife on his dick. Yeah. Well, the mysterious Yuri's origins are still somewhat of a puzzle, but unless Blavatsky

crooked that uterus herself and rearranged her vagina completely, Yuri was not hers. But it does sound like, yeah, I mean, how do you crook your own pussy? How do you do that? Do you get like fucking Chip and Jojo in there to do a bunch of demo or do you just like sit on a salad spinner or do you just punch yourself? All the time until it fucking gets lopsided? Moving on to Cairo from Constantinople, Blavatsky met an artist named Albert Rossin who witnessed HPB chowing down on balls of hash and studying with a Coptic magician named Paulos Metamon

at a four star hotel. This is how they, this is why they think she was probably bankrolled. Quite often is when she was seen in these travels, the times that she was seen, she was often in fancy hotels, nice clothes, eating good food, fucking plied with hashish, loved that fucking hash, helped with your third eye opening a little bit, also helps you go to sleep against her will. Yeah, oh my, it sounds like she had a pretty fun life here. A great life.

Oh yeah. After that, she traveled through France, astonishing Freemasons with her astral projection skills. But it was in England that Madame Helena Blavatsky first met with one of her so called masters. Now the nature of the masters are predictably a point of contention. According to Blavatsky, these were real men whom Blavatsky communicated with mentally and sometimes physically, remarkable men with remarkable powers who imparted their vast wisdom to Helena. Others think that the masters were merely Blavatsky's way of giving her ideas a masculine

backing, an identity to her inner voice. That, in the culture of the times, needed a man's perspective to be taken seriously. Well, she really wanted to be a part of, she wanted to be a part of many secret societies. Because now, because this is the time period, you know people in this time period that were a part of the Bavarian Illuminati. The very beginnings of the Golden Dawn, the very beginnings of all of these people. So these institutes and these weird little think tanks, the cult think tanks were popping up everywhere and she kept trying to get inside of one.

But they didn't want a woman. So this is maybe one way of fashioning a little opening for herself. Luckman actually thinks that the masters were possibly a joke that took on a life of its own. A fun little game that got out of hand and ended up being a much bigger part of Blavatsky's story than she intended it to be. But the masters were not necessarily supposed to be at the forefront of everything. But because one of her dudes got a little carried away with it, she had to sort of follow him.

And she kept the hook going. Then also, the more and more I fucking read this bullshit, the more and more I believe in the concept of the idea of the Tulpa. The created persona that then becomes in a way real. The more you treat it as if it's real. So then I wonder if in a way she did have contacts. She had physical contacts and teachers because she had to learn this shit from somewhere. Like somebody gave her some of these books, things that she was reading, where she got

her base knowledge from in the first place. So I feel like she must have had some contacts. But then when she's building the story of these masters, they in a way take care of themselves. They start to become more real on their own. The more you have more and more people creating an aggregate personality, all believing that these masters are real. Well, she seemed like a gal about town. It seems like it's more likely she had masters or at least someone like that.

Well, absolutely. I mean, it seems like master was really like a title of honor and respect that she bestowed upon certain men in her life. I mean, pretty much dudes who showed her respect and furthered her understanding of the universe. The first of these, according to what Blavatsky later said, came to her while she was visiting England in 1851 as a companion to her godmother, Princess Bagration Muransky. Off with his head. I don't know what she does.

One version of the story said that she saw the tall Indian man who had saved her from being killed by the horse when she was a kid in a crowd. And he told her to find him later at Hyde Park, where they had a meeting of the mines. In another tale, she said this man saved her from jumping into the River Thames at a particular low point in her life. But no matter how she said she met him, the point of the meeting was always the same. This master, whom she called Master Moria, said that he had a special mission for her. And in order to prepare, she had to spend three years in Tibet training for what was to be

her life's purpose. This is straight up Batman begins. I love it. It's the hero's journey. It really is. It's weird that you can see the same thing in fiction pop up again and again, mirroring true life. Coincidence.

Coincidence. I love it, man. This is a very cool story. It's interesting she allowed herself to be vulnerable with the acknowledgement of being suicidal or down anyway. Yeah, it's very interesting. Jim Jones wouldn't do that. No, I would say that it's possibly horseshit.

It's quite, yeah. It's quite, but even so, even appearing to be vulnerable is something in and of itself. So Blavatsky decided that the best way to get to Tibet would be, as Gary Lachman writes, to go the Columbus route and travel to India and eventually Tibet through the Americas, visiting the various mystical men and communities contained therein. Now, Blavatsky's American adventure did start on a sour note when medicine men in Quebec stole her boats. Oh, come on.

That's what they'll do. That's what they'll do. Never leave your shoes lying around a Canadian doctor. But after that, she decided to visit the center of America's new religion, filled with people still known to this day to be friendly to an almost creepy degree. Yep. She made her way to what was then the home base of the Mormons. Wow.

Navoo Illinois. Is that fucking wild? That's not wild. This story's all fucking smashed together. Yeah, she went to go see what the Mormons were all about because she was trying to, she was getting essentially a scope for every spiritual movement that was around. Very similar to the way that Jim Jones would go to every church to slowly build, like his idea of what his church would be.

She is already kind of picking up all of the parts of her philosophy and she thought maybe the Mormons got something. I mean, like, you know, they fucking took off, they built their whole own fucking city. Yeah. They always showed up a couple of weeks late for a war. That's how you live. So did she, was she given insight into like the Mormon religion or was it more just kind of like picking up on the social cues?

Well, unfortunately by the time she got there, Joseph Smith had already been killed and the Voo had been destroyed by an angry mob once again. All right. Notice. Notice. Yeah. She just got it. Moved on.

Yep. Blavatsky then went to New Orleans. There she studied Voodoo and tell Master Maria warned her that Voodoo was a dark practice. Oh, I would have loved to be in New Orleans at that time. Oh, man. Yes. She then traveled through Texas and went to Mexico, dipping down to South America to explore ancient Incan temples.

What she didn't learn anything in Texas. She just went to one of the biggest states in the country and pick up anything. No, I don't think she really picked up much in Texas. No. I picked up a chewing tobacco habit, but I'm back to cigarettes now. Interesting. She hit all the spots, right? Or she, if this is true.

If this is true. I think that this leg is actually like vaguely true because you can kind of travel through this time. What we learned about America at the time is a real fluid, right? So people are running in and out. So she was probably, she at least went and looked at it. Cool. Yeah.

Finally though, in 1852, she headed to India, joined by a German and a Hindu that she had met in Honduras. Unfortunately though, Tibet was no easier to get into back then than it is now. And at this time it was under British rule. Must have really heard all those horses to have that bumper sticker that said free to bed on their asses. Yeah. Can I ask, why is it hard to get into Tibet?

I don't know. I am going to say, honestly, I don't know a heck of a lot about Tibet. You know, I was really afraid you were going to ask me that question because I don't know either. Okay. But you know what? I will say, I will say, we're, how are we man enough to admit it? Yes, we are.

I think they got a lot. It's expensive tolls. It's like Jersey. Oh. Oh, it's like Jersey. Yeah. Thanks, Kissel. Yeah.

That's great. They tax you, but the roads aren't very good. No, it's like, what am I paying for? Jersey has, so okay. So where is it like in Jersey? Is it pork roll Jersey or is it Sopranos Jersey or is it the dump? Uh, choose. Near Matt Life.

Near Matt Life feels. I'm looking at the Wikipedia page. This is already too much for me to read right now. Well, according to Blavatsky, she was turned away at the border by British guards. And there is some small documentation of this. According to reports, border guards turned away a white woman traveling alone in the Tibetan mountains in 1854, the same year Blavatsky claimed to have attempted entry. It's not proof, but it's something.

It's something. But imagine this scene. You're guarded the fucking, the most power, like whatever Tibet is, right? The secret. It's hard to get in there and you don't let anybody in there, right? I don't know why I'm certain that someone tell me someone's going to yell at us, right? Yeah. You can't get in there.

And all of a sudden you're like, hey, hey, scrunched all of a sudden fucking, essentially Rebel Wilson with a wig on rolls out of the rolls out of the bush, comfort of the leaves and shit. Hey, I like to get in there, please get in there and then you're just like all these guards with their shimitars, which I imagine I don't know if that, oh God, I'm in so much trouble. Whatever it is that they have. They're British guards, they're British guards.

They have guns. Muskets. They got muskets. Muskets, yeah, you can't. They have rifles. At this point they have rifles. So she grows up there and they're just like, uh, no. You know?

Yeah. And then she's got to go like, okay, ah shit, and then just like back into the bushes, like back on me like, well I guess I'm not going to be enlightened today. She's got to pay the drill toe to get inside that bullet and it's over. That's a funny show. Always funny. Always sunny in Philadelphia. It's a very funny show.

Love those guys. Inspiration, as a matter of fact. Absolutely. Yeah. So after being turned away in Tibet, Blavatsky ended up back in America, staying briefly. Damn. Yeah. She went, oh, that sucks.

Yeah. Did I just say that sucks for this poor woman? Yeah. And this is like traveling by boat. So this is like, what do you mean no? What do you mean I can't come in? That's mean. The British are mean.

But she understood a little bit, again, if any of this is true. She understand that this is a mystical journey, right? She's on a mystical journey. So it's going from place to place to place. And she's already starting to understand that like, when you're on a mystical journey, knows our lessons, right? You get to know. Obviously, I'm not supposed to be in there right now.

So I'm going to fucking, I guess, hike back. It's just a big, it's just a lot of time. It's a lot of time. It is. I mean, we're talking a 20-year span here. Good Lord. With all of these fucking travels. And she just got a no?

And she just got a no. You know what she did? She went back to America, stayed with Albert Ross in a New York city for a little bit, and then she decided, I'm going to go see the Mormons again. And she took a covered wagon all the way across America to Salt Lake City. All right. I don't know what she did with the Mormons, though. Did you find out what she did with the Mormons?

She just go say hey. It seemed like she, from what I read, she went to go say hey. Yeah. And she just basically went to go see, because, again, they, at the time, would live in the drain. They got their own fucking state. They got all of the, like, the, remember when we were talking about, like, they fucking, how much they controlled, how quickly, how close we were to having a Mormon president.

Then and again, fucking hundreds of years later. So she went to go kind of see, like, well, they're figuring it out. She has hootspa. She really does. I don't think I would have traveled that much back then. No. I would have. Maybe go to Des Moines.

No time. Well, after that, it was India and Tibet again. Damn. Although this time, she attempted to go through Kashmir. On this trip, she had a shaman, but nevertheless still got lost. She was, however, saved by what she claimed were magical means. According to her, the shaman kept a strange stone under his armpit throughout the journey, but wouldn't explain when it was for.

I hate that natural deodorant, man. They must have cut up his armpit quite a bit. That was probably a smooth stone. Even so, it's not comfortable. Just up in there. They have more. If you're real skinny, Kissel, you don't have this, right? But if you're real skinny, you have them hollow armpits.

Yeah. Yeah. I see. Marcus is showing me his armpits now. Look, it's a big hole. That is a big hole. I see. Not healthy.

I think the armpits are the worst part of a man, but I like a nice armpit on the lady. Okay. When they got lost. The shaman struck a wooden peg in the ground and placed a goat's head on top. The ritual was about to begin. This is so much more fun than stopping at a gas station for directions. Yes. I'm doing this.

I'm doing this. I'm shutting my GPS off and doing this. Where is Kissel? I haven't seen Kissel in two months. The shaman then took the stone from his armpit, put it in his mouth, and immediately fell into a trance, stiff as a corpse. A deep voice then emanated from the ground and asked, what the hell do you want? What the hell do you want?

What are you doing here? What? What do you want from me? Well, Bovatsky took this voice to be coming from the shaman's astral self. So she asked, astral protector, where do we go? What do we do? What the fuck, huh? Again, this is me looking up fucking playthroughs in the outer world, speaking like, what is

happening here? How do I equip? How do I bond my armor? I'm just picturing Billy Crystal from like Dark Crystals. Is that what, was that the name of the sh-? Is that Princess Bride? You mean- Princess Bride, yes.

Billy Crystal from Princess Bride. Oh, man. Well, sure enough, after she asked for help, a few hours later, horsemen arrived and escorted Bovatsky back to the border. She got denied again. What the fuck? Jesus Christ. It's hard.

What does she gotta do? What does she have to do to get into this place? She's gonna- You gotta earn it? You gotta earn it. The time has to be right. Oh, God. I'm not.

You know, at some point I'd just give up. Doesn't she like any of the places she's going to? Just hunker down. Do a hunker down. With that fucking attitude, Kissel, you're never gonna be an ascended master. All right, all right. After her second failure to gain entry into Tibet on the order of her mystical master, Bovatsky made her way back home to Russia, where she showed up on her sister's doorstep

on Christmas night after being gone for a decade. Now she was gone for a fucking decade. She was gone for ten years. She sent a letter, and this is one of those magical things, where she sent a letter saying, I will arrive by Christmas, and you shall see me, and I can't wait to be with the family again. The time, travel, highly unpredictable, right, where it's in this, so you don't know when the hell the fuck you're gonna get there, but Christmas night, she rolls in, covered

with, like, I went to Tibet, and all I got was a slousy t-shirt, like, bullshit, like, you know, like, full on, like, Indian regalia, like, came in with all of this bullshit, I'm a mystic now, I did all of this shit, and meanwhile they're all like, what happened to your husband? You remember when you were married to a guy, and you did all of this shit, you just left, and came back? What a, what a Christmas that must have been. Yeah.

That's what Blavatsky said, she swept away all traces of her travels during this time, because had her family immediately known that she'd been out trips in the world chasing the occult dragon, they would have disowned her. Why? They said that they would have rather, rather she be a prostitute, than do what she did. And then she got accused of being one, she got accused of being one, and that's how she got to travel around the world, that's a part of the way they shunned her, and then during this time period, it's that thing where you go like, they're like, so, where you've been

for 10 years, and she's like, out. Yeah. I mean. Not here, so, and you're like, did you want to tell us like maybe what you did, or like where you went, like, you're all your shit, and you're like, forever. I'm team Blavatsky here, I don't like the parents too much, they're the whole family. Well what she did is she eased them into it. Something had happened to Blavatsky on her travels, and she'd returned with strange powers

she couldn't always control. And this part right here, this does not come from Madame Blavatsky, this comes from the testimony of her family, who weren't necessarily jazzed about Blavatsky leaving and coming back with weirdo, wackadoo shit happening all around her. She was a stain on the family, and then when she came back and became essentially a wifi hotspot for paranormal activity that she couldn't control, this is the stuff that I find highly interesting, where the way they talked about it is that the house, she came in to stay, and the house came alive.

Very similar to what we just covered with Jeff the Talking Mongoose. Yeah, you remember, but shit fucking went off when she came back. And of course you can get the Jeff the Talking Mongoose shirts for a limited time, they're going, they're hot. Yeah, LastPodCastMerch.com, I did it for the Devil Mint. Well, I mean, when she walked into the house, I mean, it's the fucking telltale knocks and wraps, you know, sounds coming from everywhere. She'd sit down, the fucking chair next to her would move across the room, and she had

no real control over it. And eventually it got to the point where she couldn't hide it anymore, she had to say like, yeah, it's me. It's freaking Beetlejuice. Yeah. But she said that she could control it to a certain degree. To convince her brother, she told him that she could make any object she chose fit too heavy to lift.

So her brother chose a small chess table. Lovazzi asked him to lift it, which he easily did, just, he, whoa, up down. She then concentrated her gaze on the object and asked him to try again. Okay, let me just get ready. You ready? Oh, it's like the, it's like the dude in a mall rats trying to do the Jedi mind trick. Well, this time he couldn't get the table to budge even when a friend tried to help. This is what they said.

And when she finally let go her hold on the object, it shot up in the air with such force, it almost dislocated her brother's arm. Cool. And she convinced her father of her occult powers by asking him to leave the room and write down a word, any word, and she would spell it out using nox. One knock for A, two knocks for B, and so on and so forth. The word was the name of her father's favorite horse during his first campaign against the Turks, Zitchik.

Which is the most difficult word in the world. Yes. Zitchik, the horse. Yeah. Zitchik, I think it's a bit of a nasty trick using a proper noun. It is. If that would be fucking words with friends, you'd get fucking executed for something. Yeah.

That's not allowed. I don't think so. But even so, Blavatsky spelled it out, astonishing her father. But you know what? She knew her dad. I don't know. I think the fact it was a proper noun might have actually helped her out a little bit. Yeah, maybe she knew that he was just light, that he's just always thinking about that

horse. Loves that horse. Good lord. One time that he's just like, fucking, she's looking through the, trying to learn what sex was. And in Russia, you didn't get those little books that fucking tell you, like, what you're fucking, in serfdom, Russia. No.

You know what's going to tell you how the birds and the bees are. So she's trying to discover it from watching her parents and her little kid. She's just watching the door, just watching her father, heave ho, and her mother. And the whole time he's going, Zatchik. Zatchik. And she's like, stop be saying, stop be saying horse name. Zatchik, I remember the Turks, how lonely and cold we were in the mountains fighting the Turks.

That's a better way to learn about sex than those Chick Tracks. For those, those Christian, those things were amazing, yet horrible at the same time. Oh, when your parents think that they're real. Did you actually get given those? Oh, I had those all the time. Are you serious? Man. I have a box of them.

That's crazy. What are Chick Tracks? They're a Christian comic book, little, they could fit in a wallet. Yeah. They were these little booklets, these little comic books made by this guy, Jack Chick. They were the ones that would, like there was the most famous Chick Tracks was the one that said that if you play Dungeons and Dragons, you will end up in hell because you will have inadvertently worship demons.

To be fair, they all ended up in hell. The one on homosexuality, that's a doozy. The guy didn't seem to like a lot. It's just the scariest choose your own adventure book. Yeah. A lot of fire. But in a horror sense, very entertaining. Very entertaining.

Yes. And effectively, as more and more people tried to get Blavatsky to perform parlor tricks, the less she was able to do them. And she claimed her inability to reproduce the phenomena on command came from a disgust born from the thirst of others. This is what's difficult, right? I get it. You all want proof.

Everybody wants proof. They want to see it up close. They want you to be able to do it on command. The phenomena as a whole is purposefully tricky. It is at the very nature. It is a tricky and I want to say I'm close to deviant. Very ironic a lot of times, paranormal abilities. So the more you force it, the more it's not going to come.

Much to the fucking frustration of every single person who's ever wanted to see a fucking ghost or UFO or a cryptic. Yes. But this is like when you get detained by the cops. So you accidentally took a piss in public because you happen to be accidentally hammered. Oh, you're a comedian. Tell me a joke. You can't just turn it on like that.

It's very difficult. I ain't tell you a joke. You just caught me mid-stream and I'm trying to drink out here, my outside living room officer. Absolutely. God knows. Yeah, Henry. I mean, it's kind of like if someone, people keep coming to you and asking you to do voices

for characters that you've done on the show, it's not going to be funny if they do it on command. Pay me and I literally will do it in a fucking heartbeat. I'll do it right now. All right. $1,000. Regardless though, Blavatsky still earned a reputation as a magician, a seer and a psychic and could supposedly read people's thoughts by seeing them emerge from their heads as

a spiral of luminous smoke that formed pictures and images that only she could see. It was the Russia in the 1800s. Everyone was just thinking about bread and how much they wanted it. Everyone thinking about how you hate being a surf. Yes. That's correct. Yep. Nothing to change about that.

Get back to work, slave. Henry Zabrowski. Take a dump. Once again. No, no. Yes. Hellish review. Hellish review.

Oh my God. My balls went back up inside of my guts and covered up my ass. I didn't intend for that to happen. Oh God. I got butterfly butt. When she went back, Blavatsky was worried that Nickaphore, whom she was still married to, would try to press the issue of living together as man and wife once again. He's got to be 65 years old at this point.

At least, I mean, he's got to be 60, right? Yeah. Well, at this point, this is about 10 years into it. 58. So yeah, he's in his mid-50s. He backed off. Oh, he just let it go. He just let it go.

What is the name that Charlize Theron movie where she, for some reason, has sex with Pat Noswalt? Oh. Oh my goodness. Jesus. I don't. Big fan? Is it the big fan one where he's the Giants fan?

That's a good one. That's the one where he's like the crazy fan. It's the one where like, Charlize Theron's like a famous author that has to live at home now because of all of her shit, like fell apart. But Blavatsky, HPB is like living that lifestyle right now where she's been living the most interesting life in the world. No one has any idea she won't let them in on it. She's a fucking psychic who could move shit with her mind now.

And now she's forced to live with her parents again in this little village. Is her husband just really mean on Twitter? What is going on? I forget what happened, something. Well, she just wanted to pursue her occult studies. And she knew if she moved in with Nickaphore, then she'd have to be a wife. Okay. That whole relationship is what I, you know, I let the, I hands to God, hands to God, whatever

that is. To support herself, she did needlework and rafted logs for the production of a porous white substance that was used as an accelerant called spunk. Oh hell yeah, you gotta get there and make that spunk. Yes, indeed. Spunk ain't gonna make itself. That's what I would say, so you go out there and you get out of that log area and you call me up from spunk and then we all sit down and have some cider and spunk for dinner.

Spunk for dinner, yay. During this time, she also met another master, a man named Hilarion Smyrdis. And I'm gonna tell you right now, if your name is Hilarion, you're probably not a funny person. No. A devastating name. But, Levotsky was once again almost killed by a horse in 1864. You gotta stop with the horses.

You gotta stop with the horses. Come on. Hey, almost knocked, you knocked your pussy sideways and then you got a fucking permanent, fucking heart throat, now every time, get off the horses. Stop with the horses. Well, this time she was thrown on the shores of the Black Sea and fractured her spine and went into a coma for a few months. You know what, I'm gonna also dog me, I'm gonna ask you to retract your statement saying

that she was good at riding horses. I did not say she was, well, she was good at, kind of. I don't know. I'm just gonna say, because once it gets to, you know, throw me once, you know, shame on you to the horse, throw me twice, shame on a horse again, because you're gonna beat the horse to try to chain the horse. Throw me thrice, still a horse's fault, throw me four times. Now we're getting to the point where the rider is the problem.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with you on that. However, when she awoke, she claimed to be in complete control of her powers. No more knocks around her, no more furniture moving around without her fucking buy and buy. Now, she could do it all on her own. She's Drew Barrymore in Firestarters. Yeah. She's Kerry at the prom.

I love it. This was the first time that she would, she says, entered into sort of like a middle mind period, like a trance state. She says that she kind of went to like where you'd call the Akashic records are, or like where the first map of the Gabala would be, like all of this, this kind of esoteric gray areas of the Astral Plane. She kind of got to go hang out there for a while. Yeah.

Cool. After recovering, she left Russia once more and claimed in 1867 to have fought on the side of Garibaldi and the Italians against the French. This is the only story. I don't believe this one. I mean, this is one of the hardest ones to believe. She said she was taken out of the action by a saber which broke her left arm in two places, and she supposedly had musket balls embedded in her shoulder and leg until the day she

died. And she did have some metal, and there was some, she could like fucking point to this piece of metal and push it around a little bit, but. Oh, all right. She could have gotten shot, could be in like annoying one time, like that possibly could have happened where she just got, got. Maybe. Yeah.

But yeah, that one, that one's a bit of a bridge too far. It was after this though, that Bovatsky claims she finally made it to Tibet. Yay. She did it. By this point, she had come to believe that Tibet was the location of the secret school where the masters and her fellow initiates congregated. And if she wanted to reach the next level, this was where she would do it. It's like you got like, it's like if you want to get in the sausage game, you got to move

to Indiana. Hell yeah. If you want to get in the show business, you got to move to Los Angeles. This is just how it is. You got to go where the stuff is. Sure, sure. Once she finally made it. You got to go to Wisconsin for the sausage game though.

No, you go to Chicago for the sausage game. Well, where do you go? Where do you go for Wisconsin? Cheese. I know the cheese, but Indiana doesn't have it. No, you go there if you want to join the Klan. Mommy, daddy, I want to join the Klan when I grow up. We knew he wasn't special.

If you say that ever again, I'm going to have to beat you today. Once she finally made it across the border, she claimed to have been taken to meet the main master. A guy named Koot Hoomey and Koot Hoomey would be Blavatsky's number one guy for the rest of her career. Like Koot Hoomey's monastery, Blavatsky learned an unknown language called Cinsar, which allowed her to translate something called the Book of Dizion, which was an ancient Tibetan text that unveiled the secret origins of mankind.

Now we don't know if any bit of that is real or true. The Book of Dizion, we don't even know if that's a real thing, but what we'll find out is that she used stanzas from the Book of Dizion for her writings, like Isis Unveilt and Secret Doctrine. Interesting enough is that the Book of Dizion seemed to parallel some actual ancient texts of Buddhist lore and Buddhist study. Maybe accidentally or maybe she did get a hold of some actual old school Buddhist instruction manuals essentially, spiritual instruction manuals, that she just kind of cherry picked

from and created her shit. Seems like a David Ike bibliography here, where you can just put a little asterisk by anything and then just be like, yeah, that was the book I got it from. She also learned how to control her psychic powers from Hukut Humi, acquiring the ability to communicate through transference, the ability to read minds, the ability to astrally project, and the ability to teleport objects. And that last skill, dozens of people later witnessed her do that, which she said the masters could also command occult entities, elementals such as the salamander, the undine,

the sylph, and the gnome, which are all ideas taken from a renaissance alchemist named Philippus aureolus theophrastus bombastus von Hohenheim. How many times do you practice that in a mirror? I didn't. I didn't practice it. I didn't. Man, that's fucking freestyle, man. Freestyle, baby.

Wow, you're a pro. Freestyle alchemy. I actually, the one they will cover alchemists, but mostly it's fighting through all of their names because they all have very long, magical names because it makes them seem more important. The masters were also quite adept at the creation of tulpas, which we, of course, just explored at length on our episode about Jeff the Talking Mongoose. I promise this is the last time we're going to fucking mention Jeff. Well, no, it's not.

I hope not. Probably not. Well, in all, Blavatsky claimed to have spent seven years in Tibet, training herself in the mystical arts. Yeah, her and Brad Pitt from that other movie about Tibet. Right? What was that? A Walk in Tibet.

Yeah, A Walk in Tibet. Yeah, I think it was called, yeah, I believe it was called Roller Coaster in Tibet. Yeah, I love that. They bought a zoo. I think they bought a zoo there. They bought a zoo. Yeah. But of course, Blavatsky's critics say that she did absolutely none of the things we've

been talking about for the last hour or so. Critics, come on. Or as the guy famous, he said, the bunkers, and they're debunkers of plentiful, but bunkers are not. It's the same person. He said that all critics work with hate in their heart, which is a lot. What? People are very, he's got very, very upset.

He was very, very upset with critics. Yeah, well, I understand. According to Marion Mead, after Blavatsky left Nikofor, she spent half her time fucking her way through the wealthier citizens of Europe and the other half failing as a business owner in Russia. Essentially, the first 10 years were just her yachting, as Henry said. Okay. And the second 10 years were just her piddling around Russia fucking around.

Cool. Like trying to make businesses go, which is just technically also an interesting story for a lady at the time. Yeah, she opened up an ink shop. This is at least what Mead said. She made and sold artificial flowers for a time, imported goods from a place called Mingrelia, and she did all this while living with the opera singer that she supposedly had a son with, Metrovic.

But as Lachman points out, it's ridiculous to assume that the famously asexual Madame Blavatsky spent years having sexual liaisons with various aristocrats. Well, it sounds like it might hurt a little bit. Yeah, it is interesting to note though that he also says it's somewhat ridiculous to assume that the famously portly chain-smoking Blavatsky was able to traverse the mountains of Tibet. Plus, she had total spiritual control over her movements and can do as many Buddhist monks are said to be able to do.

If you watch that movie, Crouching Tiger in Dragon, they do that thing where they jump up and they land on the branch and all the wire work and all that kind of shit. That's it. All of that is based on the concept that monks could do that type of shit, that they could control their bodies and they could fly and they could materialize and they could do all this kind of shit. I mean, obviously, it is far-fetched, but the concept would be if she could in a way control some nature of the physical reality around her, it might help her with transportation

as well and create some form of astral scooter, what an astral sort of rascal, to get her through all of the very difficult terrain around. I'm just looking at the Wikipedia of Tibet and it's all red and yellow around it, which this says means mountains. The problem with the Crouching Tiger hidden dragon theory, though, is that she was said to have learned all that at the monastery. That's not the problem with it, it's all insane. But she had to get to the monastery first.

Maybe she walked slowly. She only had to do the hard go once and she didn't have to do it twice and maybe she got better at it as she went and build up the muscles, right? She also had the tendons and shit. Yeah, she did. I mean, it's mostly the chain smoking that's a problem. But that wasn't a view, it's like a way to help athleticism back in the day because it made your lungs work harder so that your lungs actually got more muscles.

It was a good point, good point. But regardless of what really happened between the time she abandoned Nika 4 and the day she arrived back in Russia, we know for sure that Blavatsky once again almost died when a ship she was taking to Cairo suddenly exploded. Well, that is... This definitely happened. You do not want to build a ship out of a bomb. That's how you know you're safe because you're inside the bomb.

On July 4th, 1871, gunpowder kept in the hold of the SS-Umonia and the gunpowder was there in case they ran across pirates because sometimes you run across pirates, you get to defend yourself against the pirates. The gunpowder ignited. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They kept it right by the candle. Yep, destroyed the ship, killing 384 out of the 400 passengers aboard. Oh, damn.

Yeah. But she fucking lived miraculously somehow. She fucking was... And this is one of those which I think speaks a little bit to maybe her physical prowess where they found her fucking Kate Winslet style on top of a door in the ocean just fucking singed but alive. Okay. And that's real, huh?

That's real. Yeah, they found her floating amongst dismembered heads and limbs and torsos. This was a real fucking explosion. Damn. After surviving, Blavatsky made her way to Cairo where she set up shop, bought a shitload of monkeys, and met a woman named Emma Cutting. With Cutting, Blavatsky founded one of the spirit societies so popular at the time where they would use medium mystic techniques in the pursuit of the supernatural.

Oh, if I had to choose one time so far, this would be the time. I love monkeys and you get to hang out. Yeah. It is cute. And they are a great audience for a short period of time. Yeah, absolutely. But it's really hard to keep a group of chimps attention span, especially with the slow world of the psychic medium, because they don't understand.

Well, that's true. I think we could do it. We could entertain them. I think so. Her favorite monkey was named Coco. Oh, that's a classic name. Classic name. Jane Goodall had sex with those monkeys, though.

She did. That was science. Why are both of you so big on this idea that Jane Goodall had sex with a chim? I watched. I swear to God, she basically admitted it. She had sex with gorillas. It was gorillas, wasn't it? She loved them to the degree that it was sexual.

She wanted to show mama orangutans that it's actually really nice to swallow, because it's romantic. That's how it started. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure. I don't know why his lesson started there.

Yeah, I don't know why she even thought that that was an important lesson for a chim, but I guess she did. And congrats to those husband chimps, though. Absolutely. Good for them. Good for them, yeah. The society failed utterly when the mediums, including Madame Blavatsky, were caught cheating when they, just like most spiritualists at the time, used cheap tricks to get their point

across. But, you know, what does it matter? What does it matter? You're going there. You want to connect with your dead loved one. Just lean in. You and I are dissects where I'm close to that, where I straight up just believe, you know, in the end, you are paying for a show, but they don't think that they're paying for a

show. Yeah. I guess. Well, Blavatsky herself was caught using a long white glove stuffed with cotton attached to a piece of twine hung through the ceiling that she pretended was the materialized hand of a spirit during seances. Did Mickey Mouse die recently because it sounds like his hand? Things got even more out of hand when Blavatsky briefly left, and in her absence, the rest

of the mediums drank a little bit too much and staged even more fake seances for the general public. If there is a reality show producer out there, Hammered Mediums needs to be a show. This is us. We have to give us the show. That's our show. I think Kissel and I, we could be Hammered Mediums. I can guess what your grandpa's thinking right now.

And he's saying stuff like, and I'll say this, he's saying he's proud of you. He's also saying he's sorry for being a Nazi. Well, when Blavatsky returned, one of the people who had attended the public seance tried shooting her and damn near killed her. Geez. Although that may have been an exaggeration. He might have just gone and yelled at her a bunch. He could have waved a gun around.

She said that this Greek madman was possessed by a vile spook. Her estimation was that the mediums had not contacted the dearly departed, but rather, as Gary Luckman so wonderfully puts it, astral hobos with nothing better to do than cause mischief. With any luck, we'll all be astral hobos one day. Look up CW Ledbetters, the astral plane. He described some of these astral hobos. These are the people.

These are the Hobbes. These are the Nymphs. These are the Ives. These are the Hildefik. These are the invisible people that all populate the astral plane. This is a part where she starts to understand that maybe spiritual behavior is, she's understanding some of the mechanics that you can regenerate this behavior again and again, but partially it is to do stuff like this, is to create astral day labor for these bored ass mischievous

little things that sometimes poke through their fucking weird dodecahedron astral experience to show up in our world and eat a bunch of bacon and try to fuck your wife like you have to talk in mongers. I'll bring it up again. It's one of those things that reminds me of doorbells and foot cushions, bed knobs and broomsticks. Doorbells and foot cushions is going to be your drunken version of this story where your lazy boy comes to life and it just helps you break into all the closed bars.

I do wish that you guys could hear me at 2 a.m. in a bar because I obviously listened to everything that's happened on this show I have to, but you should hear me regurgitate what the stories are that we talk about in my, in 2 a.m. drunk bedcastle talk. It's different, but I hit the main points. You hit it with your fucking kaleidoscope vision of like, yeah the next thing you know there was a talking chicken and Hitler's to blame for all of this. Well, Henry's making a good point about like the little hobnobs and gallblends and gnomes and all the things that hang out on the astral plane.

Bobotsky said that most of these mediums were acting passively. They were letting the phenomena control them, but she was trying to be what she called an active doer where you control the phenomena. Oh, you're not going to have a good time doing that. No, you're going to have a great time doing that. You're not going to have a good time doing that. It is up to do you, you got to have discipline. You have to try to go to fuck the bed three times, you got to read a lot, you have to

read a lot and you have to be willing to look like an asshole. Yeah. Wait, did you say that the astral plane book that you've been talking about so much is by Ledbetter? Yeah. Isn't he the guy, he wasn't around to be around little boys. What? Yeah, he liked little boys.

Yeah. Yeah, he didn't like them that much, he didn't have sex with them, that's the thing everyone was like, oh, they liked little boys. It's like, no, I like, I like, oh, that sounds like a weird sentence, to like little boys is to not have sex with them. I don't like little boys, I don't need to hang out with them, you know what I mean? That's not my thing. But what you do is I can see sort of the distancing, have you crossed your eyes a little bit and

drink a bunch of tequila and you're a pedophile. If you start calling them gnomes, you're not fucking kids. But you are. But you are. But you are. Yes indeed. You are. You're not the kids on whose glasses you're wearing.

Well. Welcome my little pedophiles, Makasins, and see how you feel then, huh? I don't particularly care too. With the glove trick, it's actually possible that Blavatsky was trying to make a point about these mediums and seances. See, Blavatsky did believe that these mediums were contacting something, but she knew that they were not contacting the dead. Okay.

Because that's what seances were supposed to be, you know, we're gonna contact your dead wife, your dead grandma, your dead brother, and we're gonna ask them questions. Where's the money? Where's the money? The money! You just, can you contact my wife and tell her she's a bitch for you? You're trying to make a fucking connection with your lost loved one, but also they throw a little bit of a show in there and they do a thing where they show how they can control

all of these ghosts and it becomes a real production and became a very massive entertainment fucking thrust and especially in America, but all over the world, people love to go see these ghost-do tricks. Yeah, I mean, you don't judge plays, you don't judge the theaters if it's not real. Well, I mean, that's, people say that this is, you know, that's the whole like crossing over guy, you know, remember him? Yes. Yeah, I mean, I'm conflicted on him because some people really, some people he, I guess

he helped, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's a, yeah, the whole talking with the dead thing is it's a contentious subject to say the least. It is. And if you want to have fun, John Edwards bloopers on YouTube are so freaking funny. Yes, yes, that's right because it's the same just being like your mom, her name was Bethany,

right? No, no, no, my mom's name is Laura. She's Laura. Her name was Laura. Right. Yes, yes, yes. And she was a carpenter teacher teacher teacher or carpenters of children's minds, but again, she's still alive.

Oh shit. Is this her? Yeah. Oh, I thought this was your sister. We still like him. We still like him. Well, Bovatsky was saying that these people were in communion with something different altogether.

She just didn't know what it was. Not exactly, but not knowing exactly what it was, that didn't grab too much attention. Right. Talking to the dead. Now that grabs attention, especially when you put a little stagecraft into it. But as it always goes, as it always goes with the fucking paranormal, it always backfires. You are always found out, always. I'm talking to all you fucking paranormal people out there, people working in the paranormal.

When you juice the story, it ruins the whole fucking thing. We all know the way you do it is yes, it is not as flashy, but look at Hellier and that documentary saw the house in between where they watched the house for 10 years and they're all super excited about footage of a broom moving. And I know that to a lot of people, that is very, very boring. But that's a ghost too. You got to live in a fucking house. You got to live in there.

You got to be a part of that house's community. The ghost, the entities, they got to know you're a good guy that can be trusted before they're going to start doing shit for you. But there's never going to be a wow moment in the paranormal. You know? Like there's never going to be a ghostbusters moment. The fucking State Puff Marshmallow Man is never going to show up and fucking lay waste to New York City.

The paranormal is a cumulative study. One little thing on another. You wait until I cover myself in Marshmallow Fluff and then we'll see if there's a Marshmallow Man around. Be like Cream Daddy. What an incredible cosplay. They decided to make the Marshmallow Man anatomically correct. Whoa, no, the Marshmallow Man seems to really have taken a liking to that mailbox.

Because the whole thing backfired, the society only lasted two weeks before- Two weeks? Yeah, Blavatsky had to shut that. Well, when the great guy came waving the gun around, she's like, okay, I need to get the fuck out of here. I guess. Yeah. But she didn't leave Cairo before meeting another master named Serapis Bay.

From there she traveled further into the Middle East where she met a woman named Lydia Pashkov. Pashkov was famous for being the first woman to make a living doing travel literature and she claimed that she witnessed Blavatsky raise a spirit from the desert. Pashkov recalled that one night, she and Blavatsky were camped around a decrepit old monument when HPB drew a circle around herself and began uttering spells. Now, this is straight out of a fucking RPG. Yeah. Suddenly, Blavatsky pointed her wand at the monument and a great ball of light flashed,

which appeared to be the spirit of the person to whom the monument was dedicated, and he told them that the monument was the altar to an ancient temple of a forgotten god. Sweet! Hell yeah, man. Blavatsky then commanded the spirit to show them the monument in its full glory, and Pashkov swore that they were shown a colossal structure as it originally appeared, and a magnificent city before it all vanished just as fast as it appeared. The little fucking, it all building from all these like little circles and shittings and

sparks and stuff and it creates this whole beautiful, crazy, massive, penetrable monolith and they're just both like, yeah, that's fucking, that's the shit, right there, man. There's a lot of hashish involved, honestly, I will say there's a lot of hashish in a lot of this. Well, there's debate as to how much hashish was involved. There's some hashish. Fucking roll it up, dude. Well, this is back when you ate hashish.

You can still do that. You can still do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, this is the balls, like the big fucking sticky shit. Sticky, icky fucking, nicky, dude, because they're fucking hash lumps, open them fucking guts, dude. All right, we're almost done, then you can get back to your lovely weed that you have named.

Well, after that, Blavatsky returned to Russia where she received a letter containing a stack of cash that was said to come from one of her masters, and she followed his instructions to seek her future in New York City 20 years after beginning her journey. This was where Helena truly became Madame Blavatsky, one of the most famous people of her time, and it's where we'll pick back up for part two of our series. New York. All right. New York.

We're going to get through this fucking next week. I believe we're going to wrap it up in two. And next week with goals is to start to really go into the belief systems of HPP. Talk about the sea doctrine and talk about how we got to hear an occult thought from her. Yeah. And also all the other characters that were involved, like Henry Steele Alcott, who is a fascinating, fascinating man, and various other people that come in and out of Blavatsky's

life and how pretty much how, again, how a religion is created, but this time how an occult religion is created. All right. Madame Blavatsky. Part one. Forget it. Read that fucking secret doctrine, man. Fucking astral project yourself out into the fucking universe and start seeing some people

go to the bathroom. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. Again, we got some new merch out there. Thanks for everyone who's bought the talking mongoose, cronk, cronk, and Jeff shirt. Those are flying off the shelves. They are. Get them while they're hot.

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Again, we're all word of mouth, DIY, so thank you so much. Super cool. And don't forget to go check out all the other shows on the Last Podcast Network. Don't forget about Kind of Fun, Ben's Wrestling Podcast, Abe Lake's Top Hat, Page 7, and No Dogs in Space. We just finished our series on the Ramones. It's all out and done. Four parts.

Go check it out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And guys, just remember Apocalypse Radio. We're coming to you. Fucking, it's time to end it here, man. It's fun to do it. I kind of feel like every once in a while when you talk about it, it feels like fucking

a video game where you're like, we're like background character, like radio in a way. Yeah. We're like the people in Grand Theft Auto 5 that you listen to in the radio and you turn the channel. Yeah. It's Fallout 3. There's a whole character in a post-apocalyptic video game in which it is a radio station in the Apocalypse.

It's like that. Well, there's one in Days Gone too. Do you guys want to do this all night? There's another radio. There's another radio. Oh. Oh. Yeah, good day.

All right, everyone. Welcome to you. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Hail Geed. My Gustalations, everyone. Hey, man, hail me. I could use these days my knees are feeling weird in my feet.

Henry, take a dump. Oh, yeah. My penis. My penis is following my balls. I'm getting worse for you.