Speaker 1: Uh Man oh Man Behind the Bastards, the podcast about
Speaker 1: people who aren't good by people who are good. This week,
Speaker 1: our person who are good is Jamie Loftus. How are
Speaker 1: you doing? I'm doing good. It's real hot. I'm excited
Speaker 1: for the episode. But you know what a random lady
Speaker 1: told me once in Georgia, What when you feel the
Speaker 1: sun on your back, that's just Jesus smiling at you. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a good positive spin for global warming.
Speaker 1: Like us, there's a good chance that lady didn't believe
Speaker 1: in global warming. So she was a white lady in
Speaker 1: rural Georgia, so there's there's not a lot of ways
Speaker 1: that story is gonna end super happy. You know what
Speaker 1: a white lady in rural Georgia told me once I
Speaker 1: tried to special order a hot dog? What was that?
Speaker 1: She said, this isn't burger king. You don't get it
Speaker 1: your way? Fuck off. I love that lady. I love
Speaker 1: her too. Hot dog. She gave me a really nearly
Speaker 1: hot dog. It was wet. That's what you get for
Speaker 1: bringing your goddamn big city bullshit to her wholesome, small
Speaker 1: town hot dog. Whatever it was, I came hot. I
Speaker 1: was swinging my dick around exactly. You're swinging your dick
Speaker 1: around at a hot dog shop, which is basically full
Speaker 1: of dicks already, so nobody's impressed. Yeah, I I it
Speaker 1: was disrespectful and I go swinging. You go swinging your
Speaker 1: dick around at a euro place. Well, that's pretty much perfect.
Speaker 1: Because the hero is basically a pocket. You know, it's
Speaker 1: the most it's easy to start having sex with the hero.
Speaker 1: It is very it's incredibly easy. A hero or a hero,
Speaker 1: both of them very easy to fuck. Yeah. Yeah, although
Speaker 1: you have more opportunity to get like some hip working
Speaker 1: with the hero because the hero it's just going to
Speaker 1: come out the sides. You know, wait, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: visualize this. It's going to come out the sides. As
Speaker 1: long as you're fine with penetrating the gero, right, pushing
Speaker 1: through that that back. Uh yeah, that's not then it'll
Speaker 1: it'll stay, especially if you like hold the edges up.
Speaker 1: Whereas the hero it's just kinda because it's an open
Speaker 1: sided sandwich, right, So that okay, the open sidedness of it.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna you're not going to punch your dick
Speaker 1: through the bread of the hero though, because you can
Speaker 1: just suck straight through and they're usually longer than anybody.
Speaker 1: But you know what, what's that guy? What's that the
Speaker 1: guy who was really Will Chamberlain. Unless you're Wilt Chamberlain,
Speaker 1: then you might wilt. What the fuck? I learned your
Speaker 1: Will Chamberlain was through a cartoon Network cartoon only because yeah,
Speaker 1: Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Oh, I think I learned
Speaker 1: about him from an episode of Wasn't he was a
Speaker 1: guest on Scooby Doo right, Yes he was. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was the Mystery of the Man with the Enormous Cock.
Speaker 1: Okay that script Okay, once again, the script is really long.
Speaker 1: It is almost six words. Yes, just birthing there. I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm I'm down to fuck a hero sandwich with
Speaker 1: a with a strap on, for sure, absolutely doubt absolutely,
Speaker 1: And and I think it's just like about finding the
Speaker 1: right shop in the right and there in the right hero.
Speaker 1: You know, you know, you don't want to be like
Speaker 1: pressured if you're not feeling it in the moment. Maybe
Speaker 1: somebody puts like like the like like uh, halapenos, but
Speaker 1: not like the pickled kind that that go really good
Speaker 1: with lettuce, and you're like well, I don't really want
Speaker 1: like just a straight up hallapeno on this. I want
Speaker 1: like that texture change you get when they're pickled, you know,
Speaker 1: and there's just some food you don't want on your crotch.
Speaker 1: It's like, have you ever accidentally have you ever accidentally
Speaker 1: put Dr Brauner's soap on your private absolutely? Oh my god?
Speaker 1: After shaving for a party once horrible. No one told
Speaker 1: me I didn't the bottle. The bottle famously has too
Speaker 1: many words. I'm not going to read that, but there
Speaker 1: are a couple of very important words. Don't put them
Speaker 1: directly onto your it burns. Like, yeah, I stopped listening
Speaker 1: when Jamie said it was wet. I was showering with
Speaker 1: someone Robert, and I did that, and then I had
Speaker 1: to play it off like it was humillion. And then
Speaker 1: it's like he absolutely he saw what I had done,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't admit my mistake I was doing. Know,
Speaker 1: this feels good, It feels like I want to stay here,
Speaker 1: let's have breakfast. Yeah, I enjoy the feeling of my
Speaker 1: my junk getting burned by a schizophrenic man soup. I
Speaker 1: once again, if it just feels nice just to say
Speaker 1: it out loud, before I'm glad we're having this five
Speaker 1: minute long conversation before I had introduced the topic of
Speaker 1: the episode. But before you get to that, I just
Speaker 1: want to say that somebody please clip this out for TikTok,
Speaker 1: for me, for me, Yeah, let's become TikTok stars. Jamie,
Speaker 1: how do you speaking of burning Genitalia, do you think
Speaker 1: about Goop often? Yes, I've been thinking about Goop quite
Speaker 1: a bit, layeah. Not the Gwyneth No, not the Gwyneth flame.
Speaker 1: I was speaking of the Gwyneth one, but yeah, goog
Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow's like like snake oil brand or about Q
Speaker 1: and on a lot. Q just came back on right
Speaker 1: after the appeal of Roe v Wade started posting that's
Speaker 1: not great. Yeah, on your mind a little bit, a
Speaker 1: little alarming and and literal not sees. Those are probably
Speaker 1: on your mind occasionally, right, They're on my mind far
Speaker 1: more than I'd like to admit. What if I were
Speaker 1: to tell you that the ideas behind all of these
Speaker 1: groups have a single origin point, and in fact an
Speaker 1: origin point in a single woman. They can all trace
Speaker 1: their lineage back to one broad What if I were
Speaker 1: to tell you that Jamie I would say, I know
Speaker 1: exactly who that broad is and I can't wait for
Speaker 1: you to tell me. Yeah. Yeah, we are talking today
Speaker 1: about Helena Blovotsky Um, a woman so influential that the
Speaker 1: only way to start her episode was by spending five
Speaker 1: minutes talking about burning Genitalia as the result of a
Speaker 1: variety of mistakes and fucking sandwiches. And I honestly don't
Speaker 1: know where she would fall on any of those issues,
Speaker 1: to be perfectly honest. Well that's interesting. We're going to
Speaker 1: get into this. But she would claim most of her
Speaker 1: her life as a prominent figure that she was utterly celibate,
Speaker 1: but her biograph at least one of her biographers claim
Speaker 1: she was just like as as the kids say. She
Speaker 1: was balls deep in that year row, you know. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: so she she was in the in the hero. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm excited for this because she has I mean, I
Speaker 1: know we're going to talk about it, but she has
Speaker 1: a jumping off point of the that directly intersects with
Speaker 1: the show I was just working on Ghost She's she
Speaker 1: started with some spiritualism stuff and then and then she
Speaker 1: really took it to an a level. She the least
Speaker 1: pleasant way. What's interesting. So because your show is about
Speaker 1: spiritual specifically American spiritualism, because there's different strains of it,
Speaker 1: she was kind of you know what a magpie is,
Speaker 1: that bird that like lays its eggs in another bird's nest.
Speaker 1: She was that for spiritualism. She was never a spiritualist.
Speaker 1: She just snuck in there to sell her own thing. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a very cool story. I'm very very excited because
Speaker 1: I started researching her for the show, and then it
Speaker 1: just quickly became apparent that not only is there at
Speaker 1: least a sixteen thousand words script if he had about it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and also that like like you're saying, like she wasn't
Speaker 1: actually and she was just interested in the eyes and
Speaker 1: ears that spiritualism had. Yeah, And it's one of those things,
Speaker 1: the religion she creates, theosophy. I'm sure there's going to
Speaker 1: be some theosophus that are just going to be livid
Speaker 1: with us that the things we leave out. It's I
Speaker 1: read two biographies about this woman. Both of them were
Speaker 1: very long. Both of them have so much detail no
Speaker 1: one would ever need unless you're interested in specific arguments
Speaker 1: that weirdo occult people were having in eight like, and
Speaker 1: it's interested and of course you all know who this
Speaker 1: guy is. He wrote that, like, Um, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: boil most of that out. It's also worth noting both
Speaker 1: of the biographers I read are like believers. So no,
Speaker 1: there are no credible sources for most of this. There
Speaker 1: are a few facts that we can say for certain.
Speaker 1: And then it's like, here's one story, here's another story.
Speaker 1: Because she's like, she's an Elron Hubbard figure. She she
Speaker 1: she never told the same story about her background twice. Basically, UM,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna do our best here. But first we're
Speaker 1: going to start um before the birth of Helena Blobotsky
Speaker 1: UM by talking about the concept of orientalism. UM. Now, today,
Speaker 1: Oxford Languages describes Orientalism as quote, the representation of Asia,
Speaker 1: especially the Middle East, in a stereotyped way that is
Speaker 1: regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude. UM. I think today
Speaker 1: when people use the word, they're mainly thinking of like
Speaker 1: specifically China. UM. But this includes a lot of colonialist
Speaker 1: atitudes towards India and obviously towards the Middle East, towards
Speaker 1: Northern Africa. UM. And this is a bad thing if
Speaker 1: somebody accuses you of being an Orientalist, they're accusing you
Speaker 1: of a very specific kind of white supremacy. Right, But
Speaker 1: back in the sixteen hundreds, Orientalism was still a thing,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't necessarily white supremacist. You could definitely say
Speaker 1: it was racist, although even that's a little off to me. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's it was based on stereotypes of Asia, many of
Speaker 1: which were wrong. But the stereotypes weren't based in hate
Speaker 1: as much as the fact that it was the sixteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and it was kind of hard to get good
Speaker 1: information about out India if you were like living in France, right,
Speaker 1: So like people just like believed things and didn't really
Speaker 1: have any way to confirm them. Um. Now, specifically, Orientalism
Speaker 1: in the six hundreds would have actually centered more around
Speaker 1: Cairo in Egypt than it would have because that was
Speaker 1: the East, right, that was the that was the the like, um,
Speaker 1: that was the kind of old world to people in
Speaker 1: that period of time, this Enlightenment period, and it was
Speaker 1: it was the center of historic knowledge. Right Cairo had
Speaker 1: had had the Library of Alexandria. This kind of mythic
Speaker 1: I mean, it did exist in some form, but this
Speaker 1: like also very mythical library that supposed to contain all
Speaker 1: of the knowledge human beings. That it's this, it's this
Speaker 1: place where you go to find the secret truths of
Speaker 1: the ancients. Hey, I misspoke here and said Cairo had
Speaker 1: the Library of Alexandria. I meant to say Egypt had it.
Speaker 1: Obviously the Library of Alexandria was in Alexandria. It is
Speaker 1: so fascinating, like whenever you look at texts from that time,
Speaker 1: like I know that we're absolutely skull fucked when it
Speaker 1: comes to the proliferation, like the proliferation of all info now.
Speaker 1: But just like people in the West, their perception of
Speaker 1: Egypt would have been formed by only just like a
Speaker 1: couple of random Western people, And it's just so incredibly
Speaker 1: vague and entitled, and it's just it's also I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the things that's interesting. So again in the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds, Um, Egypt is kind of like the occult
Speaker 1: center of Western conceptions of like magic and stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: the same as kind of true for the ancient Romans.
Speaker 1: That's for how fucking old Egyptian civilization is two thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, and like Caesar's day, like hip Romans are
Speaker 1: going to Alexandria Cairo to like do some of the
Speaker 1: same ship because they're like interested in this like ancient
Speaker 1: mystical tradition and stuff and like multiple gods. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: can't believe it. Yeah, it's it's I mean they had
Speaker 1: multiple gods too, but um yeah, it's even the Romans did.
Speaker 1: But I'm talking about once once we get to just
Speaker 1: one one big guy. Yeah, it haines. This kind of
Speaker 1: there's has always been this fascination with with Cairo and
Speaker 1: with with Egypt in particular as this kind of like
Speaker 1: center of occult traditions. Um. And it's also worth knowing
Speaker 1: than the sixteen hundreds like ship, like the pyramids, like legitimately,
Speaker 1: they couldn't imagine how they could have been constructed. Um.
Speaker 1: They addressed that in the first scene of Despicable Me.
Speaker 1: Oh good, I'm glad. Yeah it was well, no, it
Speaker 1: was inflatable, oh okay, okay, and then the minions and
Speaker 1: it was the minions. The minions put it there. They
Speaker 1: used all their little minion breath and then they went
Speaker 1: to sleep while Hitler was doing his thing. Huh. You know,
Speaker 1: it's funny the minions. The other massacres, like where the
Speaker 1: minions during Rwanda, Like were they helping out with that ship?
Speaker 1: Like were the minions aiding slobadon moloss of it and
Speaker 1: the massacre? It's Rebernitza like canonically, canonically the minions serve
Speaker 1: the most evil person. I want to recut that documentary
Speaker 1: the Act of Killing for when that like Indonesian fascist
Speaker 1: is talking God, well, there's like an elderly minion behind
Speaker 1: him with the wire. Who are not putting minions in
Speaker 1: the act of killing? Someone needs to Jamie Loftus. So, look,
Speaker 1: the way in which Europeans during the Enlightenment treat Egypt
Speaker 1: is not very different from how a lot of New
Speaker 1: Age truth seekers treat India today, right right down to
Speaker 1: the fact that like people from Europe would move there
Speaker 1: to like get do fancy spiritual stuff. Now, obviously it
Speaker 1: is kind of like India's kind of the spot for
Speaker 1: that today, right, particularly a couple of cities like Rishikesh,
Speaker 1: for like white people love to go to like learn
Speaker 1: different sort of like Eastern uh spiritual traditions and whatnot. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: and and Cairo is not so much, right, You don't
Speaker 1: hear of a lot of Westerners going to Cairo to
Speaker 1: like get involved in spiritual stuff today. And the reason
Speaker 1: why that switch happened, why kind of the capital of
Speaker 1: I guess what you'd call Western Eastern spiritualism, uh moves
Speaker 1: from Egypt to India. Has a lot to do with
Speaker 1: the dude you've probably heard of named Voltaire um And
Speaker 1: and Voltaire is real into this, this idea that there
Speaker 1: are sacred truths in like kind of Eastern and Asian
Speaker 1: religion and mythology that Westerners have forgotten um And specifically
Speaker 1: in a way that, like he thinks, gives them kind
Speaker 1: of moral superiority over Westerners. In Candide, he gives kind
Speaker 1: of the final word in the book to a Turkish dervish.
Speaker 1: In The Princess of Babylon, he depicts a Golden Age
Speaker 1: civilization on the banks of the Ganji's. Um Voltaire was
Speaker 1: probably are classic Voltaire. I know so much about him,
Speaker 1: I I know every word. Yeah, you're you've you've famously
Speaker 1: got Voltaire's face tattooed across your lower back. Um. Voltaire
Speaker 1: is not mainly something I associate with one line in
Speaker 1: the Princess Diaries one definitely so Um. He was probably
Speaker 1: the best known influence and most influential orientalist of his day,
Speaker 1: which was like most of the seventeen hundreds, this guy
Speaker 1: lived for fucking ever. He was born in six and
Speaker 1: died in seventeen seventy eight. Pretty good run for that
Speaker 1: period in time. I think he had a lot of
Speaker 1: civilist by the inn there. But who didn't does he?
Speaker 1: Did he not go outside? How do you how do
Speaker 1: you achieve that he did all right for the day?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's pretty pretty good for now. Um. So
Speaker 1: one of the things that he wrote during his very
Speaker 1: long life was an essay on the Spirit of Nations um,
Speaker 1: which listed China and India. He's kind of going through
Speaker 1: in a list what he uses like the oldest civilizations,
Speaker 1: and it lists he lists China and India as as
Speaker 1: the very oldest of civilizations. Um. Now, Voltaire was not
Speaker 1: making any kind of archaeological argument here, um, certainly not
Speaker 1: in the sense that you or I would talk about today.
Speaker 1: He was instead arguing in favor of a concept in
Speaker 1: vogue at the time called diffusionism. Now, today we map
Speaker 1: cultural inventions, like say, de Phoenician alphabet, back to specific
Speaker 1: origin points. Right, at some point a person or persons
Speaker 1: in Phoenicia made an alphabet and it became popular, right
Speaker 1: in the same way that like, at some point some
Speaker 1: motherfucker's made an iPhone and it became popular. But diffusionists
Speaker 1: didn't think that that's how inventing stuff worked. They believe
Speaker 1: that there had been some great civilization in the past
Speaker 1: in which all great cultural inventions came from. Right, there
Speaker 1: was some golden age. Yeah, like an ideological Pangaea situation,
Speaker 1: Like that's exactly what they think. That's exactly what. Well
Speaker 1: that that's that's an interesting idea. I think diffusionists believe
Speaker 1: there had been kind of like a couple of civilizations
Speaker 1: in the past that everything came from. Radical diffusionists went
Speaker 1: that all believe that all human culture and technology had
Speaker 1: like a single origin point. Um. Now, one of the
Speaker 1: things that was cool about Voltaire was that he argued,
Speaker 1: and this is what he was doing by listing China
Speaker 1: and India as like old because basically, if you believe this,
Speaker 1: the older a civilization is that the closer it is
Speaker 1: to like the human original ideal civilization, you know, like
Speaker 1: the further back you go. So by arguing that in
Speaker 1: in China were older than like any of kind of
Speaker 1: the Judeo Christian civilizations, he was arguing against the primacy
Speaker 1: of Judaeo Christian beliefs in the broad sweep of human history,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty cool thing to be doing at
Speaker 1: the time. Um So, when he listed India and China
Speaker 1: as coming before Judaism in his essay, he was making
Speaker 1: the claim that Christianity and Judaism we're kind of copying
Speaker 1: or descending from older belief systems. Now, a thing that
Speaker 1: doesn't rock about this is that Voltaire also described the
Speaker 1: Jews as basically stealing their culture from other people. Um
Speaker 1: that does seem exactly there's probably it's good that, like,
Speaker 1: okay on the six hundreds, Probably Christian people needed a
Speaker 1: little bit of like, hey, you're not the center of
Speaker 1: human development, right. That's parts they don't like. They don't
Speaker 1: like hearing that round, They hate that ship. And the
Speaker 1: bad part is that Voltaire focuses a lot on the
Speaker 1: Jews and and specifically them as stealing their culture from
Speaker 1: older cultures and not inventing anything of their own, which
Speaker 1: is a central pillar of anti semity and particularly Nazi ideology,
Speaker 1: focuses a lot on like Jewish cultural theft. It's like
Speaker 1: a huge thing the Naziser, which for a bunch of
Speaker 1: Christians is very funny. But anyway, whatever I mean outside
Speaker 1: outside of like just like bald faced anti Semitism, is
Speaker 1: there a reason that he does not accuse Christians of
Speaker 1: the same thing like I think he kind of does,
Speaker 1: but he really just focuses on Jewish people. Um, he
Speaker 1: I'm not an expert on Voltaire, but he's but he
Speaker 1: does spend I think most people will agree he was
Speaker 1: a bit anti Semitic. Now anti semitic for the time.
Speaker 1: That's probably too much to say, because it was everyone like,
Speaker 1: there's regular programs and ship in this period, you know,
Speaker 1: so he's he's pretty in line with a lot of
Speaker 1: Europeans in this moment um. I want to quote now
Speaker 1: from a fascinating right up by Dan Edelstein titled Hyperborean Atlantis.
Speaker 1: Quote the Jews as well as every other people that
Speaker 1: succeeded the er civilization, which is like the the Golden
Speaker 1: Age civilization. Everything comes from merely actuated a complete cultural
Speaker 1: system which they inherited from the prima genitors of human society.
Speaker 1: At a time when polygenetic theories about the origin of
Speaker 1: human races were rampant, radical diffusionism was further bolstered by
Speaker 1: the notion that only certain select peoples could have had
Speaker 1: would have had the requisite qualities for inventing culture. According
Speaker 1: to Voltaire, these prima genitors of all human knowledge were Indian.
Speaker 1: This hypothesis was particularly seductive as it could be extended
Speaker 1: to the most sophisticated aspects of human culture, namely the sciences.
Speaker 1: The belief in the super sophistication of Brahmanic culture grew
Speaker 1: stronger after Sir William Jones's discovery of Sanskrit grammar, but
Speaker 1: even before the Asiatic researchers saw the day, Brahmanism was
Speaker 1: being hailed as the original science. And this is you'll
Speaker 1: see bits of this today if you listen to like
Speaker 1: people talk about the Baga bad Gida, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of focus, particularly in the West onlike passages that could
Speaker 1: be talking about witnessing a nuclear weapon and stuff. And
Speaker 1: right this even goes both ways because famously, um was
Speaker 1: Oppenheimer quotes from the Baga Bodh when he sets off
Speaker 1: the first atomic bomb. Right now, I am become death,
Speaker 1: such and such destroyer of world's YadA YadA um. But
Speaker 1: there's these like you can find a lot of conspiracies
Speaker 1: about like, oh, these these things from the Vetas or whatnot,
Speaker 1: are these like bits of Indian art kind of look
Speaker 1: like they could be like a spaceship or something, And
Speaker 1: so maybe like the maybe maybe these these ancient Hindu
Speaker 1: texts are talking about some like prehistoric war between advanced
Speaker 1: with an advanced human civilization that tow itself apart and
Speaker 1: we're all living in there. It's a thing people talk
Speaker 1: about today, right, And that's not a particularly common Hindu belief,
Speaker 1: but it's like a thing particularly Westerners will talk about today.
Speaker 1: So that's that's kind of like my that's kind of
Speaker 1: my big question so far as like when Voltaire and
Speaker 1: and the Voltaire adjacents talk about India and Egypt, are
Speaker 1: they talking about the Western perception of Egypt is anything
Speaker 1: they're saying based in actual fact? Yeah, there's usually ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen percent actual fact. You'll get, like you know, people,
Speaker 1: a lot of it is like some road for for
Speaker 1: the Egyptian stuff. Some Roman or some Greek like spent
Speaker 1: time in Egypt and like wrote about religious and half
Speaker 1: of what the writing is like maybe they saw some
Speaker 1: like worship, and half of it is like some dude
Speaker 1: at a bar told them about a ritual and that
Speaker 1: all kind of gets like mashed together into like herodotus
Speaker 1: writing about like what the Egyptians believed, and then a
Speaker 1: thousand is a couple of thousand years later, some like
Speaker 1: European in fucking Paris or London reads that and like,
Speaker 1: you know, off to the race as we go. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm hanging out at the wrong bars. The
Speaker 1: bar I went to last week said that overturning Roe v.
Speaker 1: Wade was good for me. I just didn't know it yet.
Speaker 1: Oh well, that's it sounds like a bar in Florida
Speaker 1: UM or or Orange County um or parts of San
Speaker 1: Bernardino Atwater Village. Shout out at Water Village for having
Speaker 1: some anti abortion old men. Continue sounds right, So speaking
Speaker 1: of old men, Voltaire argued strongly that India, not Egypt,
Speaker 1: should be considered the font of civilization. So he's saying,
Speaker 1: like even the Egyptians are just kind of like copying
Speaker 1: off of this great original Indian civilization. Um. And as
Speaker 1: you probably has occurred to a couple of people listening
Speaker 1: right now. Um, the things that he's arguing about and
Speaker 1: that other argument are like writers in the same vein
Speaker 1: are arguing about mesh is pretty well with like the
Speaker 1: most popular myth in Western mythological canon, Atlantis. Right, yes,
Speaker 1: there's there's like this perfect Golden Age civilization with advanced
Speaker 1: technology that that's like somehow got destroyed and we're all
Speaker 1: descended from them. Um, Like that's not that far off
Speaker 1: from how a lot of people interpret Atlantis. Now, the
Speaker 1: original myth of Atlantis comes from like Plato, as written
Speaker 1: by some other dude, right, Like, it's not not like
Speaker 1: Michael J. Fox movie. Yeah no, this is like, this
Speaker 1: is like when Plato got played by you and McGregor
Speaker 1: um twenty years later, or when Salvador Dolly got played
Speaker 1: by Robert Pattinson. I feel like, people, oh my god,
Speaker 1: that did happen. What a bad ship thing to do,
Speaker 1: especially absolutely unhinged if you are casting Dolly, fucking pedro
Speaker 1: Pascal is right there, and he has proven his willingness
Speaker 1: to grow a mustache. Oh he's and he can actually
Speaker 1: do it. You know who did do it the role
Speaker 1: Robert Pattinson. Baby, it's that and remember me iconically bad
Speaker 1: Robert Pattinson rum absolutely outstanding shit good movie night vibe
Speaker 1: as continue, according to Plato, was written by some other dude,
Speaker 1: Atlantis was the home of a very advanced people. Modern
Speaker 1: writers always take that to mean like spaceships and free
Speaker 1: energy in Plato's day and advanced civilization, but like their
Speaker 1: aqueducts worked better, right, Like that's what he was not
Speaker 1: advantaging imagining starships. He was like, yeah, and they're really
Speaker 1: good at making water, incredible at it. In time, Atlantis
Speaker 1: mutated as a myth into a pre Egyptian globe spanning
Speaker 1: civilization that had colonized the world in a manner similar
Speaker 1: to how Europeans has started to colonize it in the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds. Right, the Atlanti Smith kind of transforms to
Speaker 1: ape what Europeans are doing at the same time. Right,
Speaker 1: Europeans see themselves conquering the entire world and colonizing it.
Speaker 1: And because these myths, like they kind of adapt the
Speaker 1: Atlantis Smith in media rez to be oh, this happened before,
Speaker 1: and confirmation bias when people manufacture their own confirmation bias myths. Yeah,
Speaker 1: galaxy brain shit. There's a lot of guys who are
Speaker 1: like super hard for this or a good example, Sir
Speaker 1: Francis Bacon gets his like like it's just coming constantly
Speaker 1: over fucking Atlantis in the early sixteen hundreds, and um, yeah,
Speaker 1: in the late seventeen hundreds, near the end of Voltaire's life,
Speaker 1: a s astronomer named Jean Sylvain Bailey decides to find Atlantis,
Speaker 1: right this, like because it's all it's this they've decided
Speaker 1: there's because of folks like Voltaire. They don't really believe
Speaker 1: that Atlantis is this like Greek Island anymore. Um And
Speaker 1: in fact, a lot of people are like placing it
Speaker 1: in the east, but nobody knows where it was. So
Speaker 1: they all very much believe in this place that kind
Speaker 1: of its existence, especially if you if you imagine that
Speaker 1: you're going to find some artifacts that like maybe have
Speaker 1: some writing and stuff that looks Latin or something in there.
Speaker 1: It's existence could kind of justify what you're doing and
Speaker 1: colonize in the world, right if some previous civilization had
Speaker 1: ruled the world and you're kind of descended from them.
Speaker 1: You know, that's how what a lot of people are thinking, right. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's so funny to me. It's like the fact
Speaker 1: the fact that there are people looking for Atlantis back
Speaker 1: in the day and people like it. They are just
Speaker 1: like the Bigfoot hunters of their time, basically, and people
Speaker 1: act like it's the most uncivilizing in the world. I
Speaker 1: was like, dude, this used to be a thriving industry.
Speaker 1: It's a dying industry. If I were at the point
Speaker 1: I am in my career now, in like the early
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, which was famously a period in which there
Speaker 1: were no problems, I would be doing nothing but looking
Speaker 1: for Atlantis in Bigfoot, Like, Yeah, the thing is, it's
Speaker 1: not the silliest thing you could do. I don't like
Speaker 1: when it's trained in that way. The silliest thing you
Speaker 1: can do is right, a book about how history has
Speaker 1: come to an end. Um, That's right, Fuku Yama, Go
Speaker 1: look for Atlantis, motherfucker. So Jean Sylvain Bailey decides I'm
Speaker 1: gonna find Atlantis, and because history is actually not as
Speaker 1: cool as fiction, he does not put together a badass
Speaker 1: steampunk expedition with hot air balloons and ship, which is
Speaker 1: part devastating Jamie, absolutely devastating. So he's not doing the
Speaker 1: steampunk cartoon movie that I used to know it is.
Speaker 1: It wrenches my soul in Twain. But he writes a
Speaker 1: bunch of really boring books trying to use math and
Speaker 1: logic to like figure out where it would have been
Speaker 1: and um, you know, fuck you, Jean Sylvain Bailey like
Speaker 1: go to suck a home. I want to go to Atlantis,
Speaker 1: bitch anyway. Whatever. In Bailey, we see the synthesis of
Speaker 1: the diffusionist trend with a new eighteenth century appreciation for
Speaker 1: the value of myths previously rejected as being the beliefs
Speaker 1: of pre rational civilizations, which is the fund up term.
Speaker 1: But that's what they're talking about, right, They view civil
Speaker 1: earlier civilizations as pre rational. I don't believe that's the case,
Speaker 1: because you can't survive as a hunter gather if you're
Speaker 1: not pretty rational. But whatever. And also they are even
Speaker 1: arguing that the West was rational at this time. This
Speaker 1: is this is how they were talking about it scholars
Speaker 1: in this period. Um though, this is actually kind of
Speaker 1: kind of in some ways of positive trend, where like
Speaker 1: they're there's a lot of scholars are going against this
Speaker 1: attitude that earlier civilizations have been like just fundamentally irrational
Speaker 1: and there's nothing to learn about their mythology. Scholars start
Speaker 1: to argue that, like, well no, there's actually a lot
Speaker 1: of truth in in certain myths. That's why, like they
Speaker 1: spread um and the good the aspect of this is healthiest.
Speaker 1: And so we should like study and appreciate the different
Speaker 1: mythologies and whatnot that human beings have embraced over time,
Speaker 1: because they can teach us a lot about ourselves. Instead,
Speaker 1: a lot of scholars decide, like, well, this must mean
Speaker 1: that all of these myths are like branches of some
Speaker 1: great historic truth that has been corrupted over time. And
Speaker 1: if we can figure out like a secret set of
Speaker 1: codes that allow us to like peel away the parts
Speaker 1: of the myths that have gotten corrupted over time, you
Speaker 1: could unlock a sacred discourse that reveals the truth about history. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's not discord And that was a very funny.
Speaker 1: There is a special discord board that people are doing
Speaker 1: that there is now. Uh So, Dan Edelstein writes, quote
Speaker 1: Hercules is twelfth and last labor in the traditional sequence
Speaker 1: led him beneath ground to capture Cerberus, just as Persephone
Speaker 1: and other solar figure had disappeared underground for half the year.
Speaker 1: These episodes and others Bailey surmise, symbolize the complete disappearance
Speaker 1: of the sun. The inventors of the myth must therefore
Speaker 1: have lived in a latitude where the sun periodically vanished
Speaker 1: from the sky. Dismissing earlier theories about the location of Atlantis,
Speaker 1: Bailey thus reached the surprising conclusion that Atlantis Lane near
Speaker 1: the North Pole, roughly where the Novaya Zimilia archipelago is situated.
Speaker 1: So you see what he's doing there, He's being like
Speaker 1: number one, he's saying that, like, well, because all of
Speaker 1: these myths have a common origin point and it's much older.
Speaker 1: It can't be like Greece, like it has to be older. Um,
Speaker 1: the Hercules myths can't have just been something some Greek
Speaker 1: dudes came up with when they were drunk as around.
Speaker 1: It has to originate from somewhere. So let's well, let's
Speaker 1: pinpoint within the story. They're talking about an eclipse, which
Speaker 1: must mean that they live near the North Pole. I
Speaker 1: in some ways you gotta handed to it. It's very funny.
Speaker 1: It's very funny the way logic works, Like and you're Africa,
Speaker 1: Africa is also here, like there, there's other places we
Speaker 1: can explore and then trace the myth, I mean, not exploit.
Speaker 1: But again it is funny that like this is one
Speaker 1: of those cases where the people earlier and who were
Speaker 1: generally wronger about a lot of things, were right about
Speaker 1: the origin of civilization or writer when they like proposed
Speaker 1: that it was in Egypt because like, yeah, it did
Speaker 1: start in like North Africa. Like that's more and more
Speaker 1: or less, it's only Egypt that is worth exploit. So
Speaker 1: they go to the Hercules myth too. Yeah, they go
Speaker 1: the I mean Hercules clearly grew up in the North
Speaker 1: Pole Jamie, I don't know if you've read Hercules. Look,
Speaker 1: would I watched that movie? A million percent? I would
Speaker 1: watch that movie there. I I like to think. I
Speaker 1: was like, what would be the like popular current myth
Speaker 1: that people could that once society collapses, that future cryptids
Speaker 1: can assume is based on truth? And like, is it Aragon?
Speaker 1: Is it? Yeah? Let's let's let's have it be the
Speaker 1: rip off of Ja or Token, Like, let's have it
Speaker 1: be Aragon or my favorite vampire story, Cirque to freak.
Speaker 1: Let's have it be served to freak. There you go, Jamie,
Speaker 1: Let's yeah, it'll be cirrud to freak. Um, that's our
Speaker 1: our foundational myth um. Also, I think that Santa Claus
Speaker 1: should start traveling around with Hercules. But but specifically young
Speaker 1: Arnold Schwarzenegger Hercules where he can't really talk like in English,
Speaker 1: like he's just like he's just like pronouncing words fonetically
Speaker 1: because he doesn't know what he's saying. I want that
Speaker 1: Hercules hanging out with Santa Claus, just hucking people into
Speaker 1: the East Bay. Um North Hercules is a strong idea
Speaker 1: for a franchise. Free ip folks, come on, Disney, money
Speaker 1: on the table. You know what else's money on the table?
Speaker 1: Jamie Loftus, tell me what the products and services that
Speaker 1: support with this podcast money we're taking, which is why
Speaker 1: you're about to hear these ads. I hope they're about
Speaker 1: to try. I hope Quinny is about to try to
Speaker 1: sell you a jade egg. Wouldn't that be amazing? Fingers crossed, well,
Speaker 1: other times crossed. We're back. Oh, so have you ever
Speaker 1: have you ever seen a jade egg, Robert, I've seen
Speaker 1: jade eggs. I haven't seen anyone the kind that you stick.
Speaker 1: I've seen some people put some things inside them. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you that much. Oh my god, friend, who can
Speaker 1: put one of those metal coke straws all the way up? Anyway? Um?
Speaker 1: I used to use I used to use one as
Speaker 1: a stage prop where I did a show where at
Speaker 1: the end, like I would have the jade egg in.
Speaker 1: I would put it in at the beginning of the show,
Speaker 1: and then people would totally forget I had done that,
Speaker 1: and they would also assume I never actually did it.
Speaker 1: And then at the end and at the end I
Speaker 1: would they would watch me pull it out and then
Speaker 1: and and people hated it. They did not like it.
Speaker 1: But I had a great times a kid. I had
Speaker 1: great parties that only happened because somebody was able to
Speaker 1: hide a bag full of pills inside themselves in a
Speaker 1: similar way and drive across Dallas when there were a
Speaker 1: checkpoints set up. That's a good comrade. That's that's a
Speaker 1: good buddy. Um. So we're talking about Bailey and his
Speaker 1: conclusion that Atlantis lays near the north pole, right, and
Speaker 1: this this is what brings us the concept that is
Speaker 1: called today like Hyperborean Atlantis. Hyperborea is this like mythical
Speaker 1: in some myths, it's like it's it's like a whole
Speaker 1: like Pangaea style continent way back in the day. But
Speaker 1: the Hyperboreans are like this mythical people who had supposedly
Speaker 1: existed somewhere in the far north of green like far
Speaker 1: north of Greece and worshiped Apollo and these kind of Hyperboreans.
Speaker 1: Kind of that Hyperborea becomes kind of the word for
Speaker 1: the civilization, the great civilization that anything it originated from.
Speaker 1: It's also the civilization that Conan the Barbarian comes from
Speaker 1: in the Robert Howard novels. But that's because Howard is
Speaker 1: specifically a fan of this like mythology. He's like growing up.
Speaker 1: This is all still very like when Robert Howard, the
Speaker 1: guy who creates Conan the Barbarian, is like writing the stories.
Speaker 1: This mythology is incredibly common because of Helena Blovotsky. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so hyper boring Atlantis is the concept that
Speaker 1: kind of comes up out as a result of Bailey's work.
Speaker 1: Um and Bailey argues that the Hyperboreans had been real
Speaker 1: and that they've lived up near the Arctic back when
Speaker 1: the world was warmer. Um. And again it's face failure.
Speaker 1: That's just another silly myth theory. There's a bunch of
Speaker 1: different myths about early human beings that are all very fun,
Speaker 1: very fun, but not literally true, literally true. I mean,
Speaker 1: for example, the the opening of the movie Minions offers
Speaker 1: some really interesting ideas about how Minions came to be. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, and and Jamie. Actually that's based heavily on
Speaker 1: Catholic doctrine that's been buried beneath the Vatic for centuries.
Speaker 1: But minions do believe in in dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are a
Speaker 1: thing for minions. There is for Catholics. Yeah, really Catholicism.
Speaker 1: They've always been shitty about abortion, but like they've been
Speaker 1: good about evolution for a long time. Um, okay, well
Speaker 1: that's good to know. I lapsed. What they're bad about
Speaker 1: is strong molestation. Um, which the Minions probably helped with.
Speaker 1: You have to assume, right, Okay, No they didn't, Robert Jamie.
Speaker 1: They're helping all of the villains. What's more of a
Speaker 1: villain than the Catholic Church in Ireland and like fifty
Speaker 1: years Ireland over the last time you do see them,
Speaker 1: I believe, unless I'm unless I was misreading who they were.
Speaker 1: You see them help at the beginning of the movie.
Speaker 1: You see them help. Then you see them help a
Speaker 1: t rex. You see them help the meanest cave man.
Speaker 1: Why is the t rex a bad guy? It's just
Speaker 1: an animal. I hate this fucking show. You see you
Speaker 1: see them help Napoleon Bonaparte. Oh, Napoleon was not a
Speaker 1: bad guy. He was the only hero in European history. Look,
Speaker 1: that's my opinion. What happens in the movie that and
Speaker 1: then they find Grew who is um Steve Correll and
Speaker 1: he's Hitler. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna take that as
Speaker 1: as given. So Jamie he is Hitler. Yeah. Again, At
Speaker 1: face value, this idea of like a hyperboreing Atlantis just
Speaker 1: sounds like another silly myth. But as Edelstein continues, the
Speaker 1: impact of Bailey's conclusions here was significant. Quote Bailey dissociated
Speaker 1: Atlantis from the Atlanteans, the place from the people. He
Speaker 1: thus mobilized the myth, tracing its progress from the North
Speaker 1: Pole through Asia via Mongolia down to India, and from
Speaker 1: there from east to west. Atlantis became a floating signifier,
Speaker 1: an indicator of cultural superiority and originality that could be
Speaker 1: affixed to any place in people with whom the migrant
Speaker 1: Atlanteans might have come into contact. By situating their original
Speaker 1: homeland beyond the scope of empirical inquiry, under the concealing
Speaker 1: lid of polar ice sheets. He turned the Atlanteans into
Speaker 1: what would soon become the nineteenth century myth par excellence,
Speaker 1: the myth of race, and more specifically the white of
Speaker 1: the white races pere peregrineation. I don't know how to
Speaker 1: say that word. Um. So basically, what he's doing, let
Speaker 1: me let me tell you, let me explain it. So
Speaker 1: basically what he's doing is he's saying, like, the Atlanteans
Speaker 1: came from this area near the North Pole, which is
Speaker 1: now under ice. You can't find it, so there's no
Speaker 1: documentation of it. And after this great calamity, the Atlanteans
Speaker 1: migrated down like through China and then into India and
Speaker 1: then through the Middle East and then eventually to Europe. Right,
Speaker 1: So that number one, there's elements of like actual history
Speaker 1: that jels with. Right. You have like the Indo Arians,
Speaker 1: we're not coming from the North Pole. But you have
Speaker 1: these like different groups of people primarily defined by their language,
Speaker 1: that do migrate from vast swaths of like of the
Speaker 1: globe over period of time. And so there's bits and
Speaker 1: pieces of like evidence that shows like, oh, these people here,
Speaker 1: you know, originally like uh came from or at least
Speaker 1: people migrated down from this area and like you can
Speaker 1: see evidence of that, which when you just have bits
Speaker 1: of it kind of seems to confirm, Oh, there's this
Speaker 1: like migrating race that's bringing civilization in its way, right,
Speaker 1: So basically a lot of white supremacists will eventually this
Speaker 1: will evolve into like the Aryan myth, right that there's
Speaker 1: this like ancient Areyan race that brought civilization to Europe
Speaker 1: and it's being corrupted now. But there is this like
Speaker 1: original pure race that you can trace and like the
Speaker 1: Nazis do trace back around to that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and it again there's bits of actual because there there
Speaker 1: is like an Indo Aryan like people that travel up
Speaker 1: from India and eventually make it into Eastern Europe and stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's not like what the Nazis you're talking about.
Speaker 1: But the Nazis do they sit The Nazis sind researchers
Speaker 1: to India to like, um, the fucking Himalayas and shipped
Speaker 1: to talk with um people that they leaved are like
Speaker 1: the ancestors of the Arians. Like there's a lot when
Speaker 1: they when are they doing that? And like the in
Speaker 1: the thirties and there's an SS well in the thirties,
Speaker 1: particularly once the Nazis gained power. There's an SS division
Speaker 1: called on an Air Bay, which is like the SS
Speaker 1: kind of occult history division. A lot of like historians
Speaker 1: and researchers are funded by the Nazis to go over
Speaker 1: into India and find evidence of the ancient Arians, because
Speaker 1: the Nazis believed so strongly in this idea that there's
Speaker 1: this er culture that are our ancestors that traveled through
Speaker 1: the world and they've just been kind of like corrupted
Speaker 1: by mistakenly breeding and like the Jews come into this
Speaker 1: at a certain point. Um, so you just have to
Speaker 1: like send someone to find a scrap of information to
Speaker 1: create your confirmation by a smith. Yeah, and we can. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm going to continue that quote. Now we can now
Speaker 1: fully fathom the political thrust of Bailey's gesture. Rather than
Speaker 1: orientalized Atlantis, which is what Voltaire had done, he atlantic
Speaker 1: sized the orient making a snow white northern Europe and
Speaker 1: people the Hyperboreans responsible for the cultural achievements and splendors
Speaker 1: of the East. He did not deny Oriental achievements. On
Speaker 1: the contrary, he'd been over backwards to concur with Voltaire
Speaker 1: that Asian civilizations were truly awe inspiring, but a Hyperborean
Speaker 1: Atlantis allowed him to credit a European stock with the
Speaker 1: foundation of these ancient cultures. So well, tears like obviously,
Speaker 1: like we we we in Europe are not so fancy
Speaker 1: and we shouldn't be as proud of ourselves. Look at
Speaker 1: how much like grander these civilizations in the East were.
Speaker 1: And Bailey comes along and he's like, yes, and it's
Speaker 1: because these white Hyperborean Atlanteans brought them civilization before they
Speaker 1: brought it here, when their civilization was like closer to peer,
Speaker 1: and that's why they had all these achievements. But it's
Speaker 1: still like white people, right, yeah, yeah, it's definitely yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Bailey's ideas did not gain tremendous ground in his time.
Speaker 1: Jules Verne actually mocks it. The whole book twenty tho
Speaker 1: Leagues under the Sea is Jules Verne making fun of
Speaker 1: this guy pretty much. Um, it's one of those things
Speaker 1: you don't catch now because like it's this argument between dudes.
Speaker 1: We've been dead for hundred Yeah, but Verne is kind
Speaker 1: of like mocking Bailey specifically in that book. I always
Speaker 1: enjoy something like that. Where you're like, yeah, you could
Speaker 1: read the like when you find out the Wizard of
Speaker 1: Oz is an allegory for something that you're like, well,
Speaker 1: I didn't know about these agrarians, Like what this is
Speaker 1: not relevant to me. But at the time people were like, oh,
Speaker 1: he got their asses well, and that is the mark
Speaker 1: to me of like great like like you know, shitty political,
Speaker 1: shitty fiction. It's very obvious that like this is just
Speaker 1: some like stupid political rant, and if it's really good fiction,
Speaker 1: you know there's probably some dumb political rant there, because
Speaker 1: all authors do that kind of ship, but you don't
Speaker 1: notice it. It's like Taking was actually extremely angry about
Speaker 1: about Tory fiscal policy, and that's really what he's talking
Speaker 1: about when he discusses the delineation of the different orci
Speaker 1: Ish people's from the elves, um, it's all. It's all
Speaker 1: that was Tory economic policy. To continue this joke, that
Speaker 1: was a lie. I've not found the patients in this
Speaker 1: lifetime to to dive into Tolkien and Laura. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's going to happen for me. Oh, it's funny.
Speaker 1: He really hated the idea that anybody would read anything
Speaker 1: into his books, but like but like he the man
Speaker 1: lives through a battle of the psalm in which thousands
Speaker 1: of his comrades are like sucked into mud and drowning
Speaker 1: it like while he watches. And then he like writes
Speaker 1: in his book about this battle where thousands of corpses
Speaker 1: are like trapped forever in a bog and people are like,
Speaker 1: was this about, like you like writing about World War
Speaker 1: One at all? And he like hits them in the
Speaker 1: face with a beer bottle like, fuck you, p assuming
Speaker 1: um exhausting, what a king? So Jamie, Yeah, this somewhat
Speaker 1: meandering discussion. Um, you know, Bailey think it's been very
Speaker 1: on topic. Yeah, thank you. So Bailey is kind of
Speaker 1: ignored in his time, mocked by guys like Jules Verne.
Speaker 1: But about sixty years after he publishes his work, aman
Speaker 1: is going to be born who will take his ideas,
Speaker 1: expand them, and carry them forward into a new and
Speaker 1: bloodier age. Her name is Helena Petrovna von Hahn, and
Speaker 1: she's born on August twelfth, eighteen thirty one, in a
Speaker 1: Katarina slav Now she's a leah so a little bit
Speaker 1: showy Robert and her her whole childhood is in in Ukraine. Specifically,
Speaker 1: it's in like a lot of the parts of Ukraine
Speaker 1: that are people are fighting and dying over right now.
Speaker 1: Her hometown, um, Katerinoslav was a very modern city by
Speaker 1: the standards of the Russian Empire. It had been built
Speaker 1: just a century before um, and it specifically was like
Speaker 1: a city they had established in like honor of Catherine
Speaker 1: the Great, um, who is uh, the ruler of Russia
Speaker 1: for quite a while. Very interesting lady, also a good
Speaker 1: friend of Voltaire. Just interesting note. Um, now you may
Speaker 1: have noticed that she is there's a Vaughan in her name, right,
Speaker 1: she's she's Helena Petrovna von Hahn. Um. This means that
Speaker 1: she's nobility. But you also might not like v is German,
Speaker 1: right Yeah, if you're a Vaughan, is like a marker
Speaker 1: that you're a member of, like the nobility in in
Speaker 1: German culture. Umm. Yeah, I feel like I should have
Speaker 1: known that. Does it does everywhere? Not? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: like the guy who assassinated Hitler close von Staffenberg's was
Speaker 1: Prussian nobility, right um. Yeah, it's why a lot of
Speaker 1: grifters put Vaughan in their name, and like the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, it's because they're like pretending to be European nobles. Um.
Speaker 1: And obviously von Hahn is a German name. She's German,
Speaker 1: but she's Russian because a huge chunk of the Russian
Speaker 1: aristocracy are actually German. This is going to cause serious
Speaker 1: problems for some of them in about a century. But
Speaker 1: at the time everybody's fine about it because like their surfs,
Speaker 1: and they don't have any choice but to be fine
Speaker 1: about it. So anyway, she's German, but she's Russian, and
Speaker 1: she lives in Ukraine. This is the Russian Empire, not
Speaker 1: weird at the time. The first great event of her
Speaker 1: childhood would have been a cholera epidemic, which killed so
Speaker 1: many people that coffins piled up in the streets of
Speaker 1: her hometown unburied. Um. Now, her mother was seventeen when
Speaker 1: she had her, which, um, we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: that quite a bit. Her mom is also named Helena,
Speaker 1: and she is not in particularly good health. Uh. She
Speaker 1: and her new baby both catch cholera and nearly die. Um.
Speaker 1: And in fact, young Helena the baby was so sick
Speaker 1: that her godparents and a household called for a priest
Speaker 1: to baptize her immediately. As a newborn infant because like
Speaker 1: they thought she was going to die. Um and according
Speaker 1: to family legends, Helena's aunt, who was actually also a
Speaker 1: child at the time, accidentally set the priest's robes on
Speaker 1: fire during the baptism, which is a pretty cool thing
Speaker 1: to have happened at your baptist That's pretty funny. You
Speaker 1: have to you have to hand it. There is something,
Speaker 1: there is something about a near death experience as a
Speaker 1: baby that will just like set you on the most
Speaker 1: bizarre life paths. And unfortunately, I am thinking about an
Speaker 1: Elvis Presley and how his twin died and now they're like,
Speaker 1: you have to live the life of two men. And
Speaker 1: then like you just if something happened, if you almost
Speaker 1: died as a baby, you're going to have a very
Speaker 1: fucked up life due to the baggage that you're like
Speaker 1: constantly reminded of. Yeah, that's why we should hollow out
Speaker 1: the center of the country and make it a giant
Speaker 1: child prison. But that's a story for another day. So
Speaker 1: Jamie the Old Tidings, Helena and her mom both survived
Speaker 1: the epidemic. You may notice that I have not mentioned
Speaker 1: her father yet. This is because he was a captain
Speaker 1: with Russia's horse artillery with some fancy royal unit, and
Speaker 1: he was generally not at home. He first meets his
Speaker 1: daughter when she's six months old, um, and this is
Speaker 1: going to be like the pattern for her life. He
Speaker 1: is away all the time. Um. Now for US horse
Speaker 1: artillery is like an elite military unit in this period,
Speaker 1: like you're you're dragging like it allows you to like
Speaker 1: drag cannons around and move them a position quickly. And
Speaker 1: Peter on Haunt is kind of like an elite military
Speaker 1: commander for Zar Nicholas the First, he wins awards for
Speaker 1: helping to suppress a bunch of different uprisings. He's a
Speaker 1: shock trooper for the empire. UM. And Nicholas the First,
Speaker 1: who is like the Czar at the time, is one
Speaker 1: of the most brutal and effective tsars in the history
Speaker 1: of the Russian Empire. So while Peter's daughter is struggling
Speaker 1: with her seventeen year old mom to survive cholera, he
Speaker 1: is helping to crack down on an uprising in Poland,
Speaker 1: and they kill thousands of people like stopping this uprising.
Speaker 1: It is nat blood running through the streets. Ship Now
Speaker 1: the primary impact that all this has on young Helena's
Speaker 1: life is that they move constantly. Um. Also her dad
Speaker 1: is thirty four and her mom is seventeen, which is
Speaker 1: not cool. Uh, Elvis parallel not at all uncommon for
Speaker 1: the aristocracy. At the time, this would have been kind
Speaker 1: of cheered, I think for like normal people, but for
Speaker 1: aristocrats not uncommon. Were they were they vaguely related? Do
Speaker 1: we know? I mean probably right, but I don't don't specifically. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna we could get into their genealogy. I'm
Speaker 1: sure a lot more if we wanted to, But who's
Speaker 1: got that kind of time. So the primary impact again,
Speaker 1: they move constantly, and they're generally because he's like a
Speaker 1: military officer whose job is to help put down rebellions.
Speaker 1: They're not saying in the good cities in Russia right
Speaker 1: there in backwaters. You know, they're far from famous all
Speaker 1: art like from the art and cultural scene in Russia. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is a problem for Helena's mother, who's again
Speaker 1: also Helena, because she becomes a celebrated novelist. Um, she's
Speaker 1: a really interesting lady. Actually again she's she marries her
Speaker 1: husband when he's like she's a child. Um. But she
Speaker 1: as a young adult, she starts writing novels that become
Speaker 1: actually very popular in Russia, and they're all about women
Speaker 1: who are in unhappy marriages to brutes. Um, so like
Speaker 1: a part of her history that I was like, this
Speaker 1: is very cool, Like her mom is a really interesting person. Um.
Speaker 1: I want to quote a passage from one of her books,
Speaker 1: titled The World's Judgment, which I found exerted and exerted
Speaker 1: in a Gary Lachman's biography of Madame Blovotsky. The fine,
Speaker 1: sharp and fast mind of my husband, as a rule,
Speaker 1: accompanied by a cutting irony, smashed every day one of
Speaker 1: my brightest, most innocent and pure aspirations and feelings. All
Speaker 1: that was sacred to my heart was either laughed at
Speaker 1: or was shown to me in the pitiless and cynical
Speaker 1: light of his cold and cruel reasoning. Oh so, I
Speaker 1: think you can grasp a lot about their relationship from
Speaker 1: that passage. I love, I mean as I just always
Speaker 1: I don't know. My my favorite areas of history are
Speaker 1: women with no rights finding the way to to subtweet
Speaker 1: their oppressors into fucking oblivion. Like that is so fun,
Speaker 1: And not to draw another minions parallel. Robert but the
Speaker 1: man who is at least the co creator. One could
Speaker 1: argue the creator of the Minions, co director of the
Speaker 1: Despicable Me franchise, Pierre Coffin, raised by a very famous
Speaker 1: Indonesian feminist who wrote novels when she was still working
Speaker 1: as a flight attendant that became very famous, very influential.
Speaker 1: She marries a French guy. They have a uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a little Pierre Coffin, and what does he do to
Speaker 1: thank her creates the minions? Huh, an entire bunch of
Speaker 1: from two generations of a family. Or you can interpret
Speaker 1: it as all the minions are are men. They're all
Speaker 1: men doing evil things, and you're like, where where is
Speaker 1: he going with this? Does he realize it's all connected
Speaker 1: in the way that I I do when I go
Speaker 1: on my long walks. You know, we don't know, we
Speaker 1: don't know. So Jamie, that's uh, that's that's pretty. And
Speaker 1: I think we can assume from that passage also sex
Speaker 1: probably wasn't great. Uh no, probably not very good. Probably
Speaker 1: probably I'm gonna guess Peter worse at sex than say
Speaker 1: hears him a foot a foot long subway sandwich, one
Speaker 1: of the ones on the the the herbs and spices bread. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the best bread to fuck. If you're gonna fuck
Speaker 1: some bread, you want to be sucking that herbs and spices.
Speaker 1: You know, that's the best bread. But I feel like
Speaker 1: it might have a doctor Brauner's kind of effect on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's gonna be a little peppery. That's why you
Speaker 1: have him at extra mayo. You really need to wash
Speaker 1: right away? Yeah, you want to and wash with mayo? Right,
Speaker 1: It's it's like washing your eyes out with milk if
Speaker 1: you get don't do that. If you get tear gast,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I don't even want to spread that. Um
Speaker 1: funny though, right. So anyway, Helena, the mom was never
Speaker 1: in because again they're both named Polina, was never in
Speaker 1: good health. Uh so she doesn't ever fully get better
Speaker 1: from getting horribly sick, and they move constantly, which is
Speaker 1: bad for her health. They live in army housing, which
Speaker 1: isn't good either, although she and her baby still have
Speaker 1: like again, they're rich. They have a small army servants
Speaker 1: at their back and call. So it's it's like hard
Speaker 1: but not hard compared to how most people in Russia
Speaker 1: would be living at the time. Um. When she was
Speaker 1: too when Helena the Baby are Helena was to her mom. Also,
Speaker 1: Helena has another baby named Sasha who dies immediately, which
Speaker 1: was tradition for roughly half of babies at the time.
Speaker 1: And you know who else kills babies roughly half the time?
Speaker 1: Is it the people who sponsor this show on their
Speaker 1: special child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. Um,
Speaker 1: that's been leaving a chicken with its throat slid on
Speaker 1: my front porch every week for six years. I can't
Speaker 1: pay them to stop. That's right, Jamie. You know why
Speaker 1: they're doing that, So you keep your mouth shut about
Speaker 1: the child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. You're right, anah,
Speaker 1: And and here we are. It's never gonna end. Uh.
Speaker 1: We're back after making Sophie mark a bunch of places
Speaker 1: in the episode to bleep out the name of Cool.
Speaker 1: So like how you keep calling her Helena the baby, Um,
Speaker 1: it does make her sound like a TikTok rapper. Deathmakers
Speaker 1: sound like a TikTok She would have Oh my god,
Speaker 1: I have to say, of all of the bastards we've
Speaker 1: talked about on this show, easily would have had the
Speaker 1: best TikTok. I do see what you're saying. Unfortunately, we'll
Speaker 1: get to that she would have done. I mean, her
Speaker 1: legacy lives on on TikTok unfortunately. But now Saddam Hussein,
Speaker 1: that's a Twitter head. You get Saddam on Twitter. Ain't
Speaker 1: nothing else happening on Twitter. Oh man, that would have
Speaker 1: been a good time he would be making. He would
Speaker 1: be using the threat emoji for oh my god. It
Speaker 1: would have been a bible. So after this, the family
Speaker 1: moved briefly to St. Petersburg. Right, they get like stationed
Speaker 1: there for a year or two, which thrills Mom Helena
Speaker 1: because St. Petersburg is like the cultural center of Russia.
Speaker 1: She's this is when her her literary career starting to
Speaker 1: take off, and she's able to like go to art
Speaker 1: galleries and fancy parties and and sit at salons with
Speaker 1: other adults who aren't like drunken soldiers. This is like
Speaker 1: her dream life. She finally gets to live for like
Speaker 1: the only two years or a year or whatever that
Speaker 1: she will actually get to be anything close to happy. Um.
Speaker 1: When baby Helena is six, Peter tells them that they're
Speaker 1: going to have to move again to the middle of
Speaker 1: nowhere to brutalize people. And this time mom Helena says no. Um.
Speaker 1: She refuses to move with her husband and like go
Speaker 1: with the army basically. Um. So she stays in St. Petersburg, awhile,
Speaker 1: and then her father comes to her and asks if
Speaker 1: she and her daughter want to go on an adventure. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: Helena's maternal grandfather father had been made a trustee for
Speaker 1: the Kalmuk, which was wandering tribe of horse riding warriors
Speaker 1: who like part of the area that they lived and
Speaker 1: they had like a moving city and stuff that they
Speaker 1: took with him, and like part of the area that
Speaker 1: they they live in is in is in Russia. Um.
Speaker 1: I think they go to a number of places, but
Speaker 1: like they live like within kind of the bounds of
Speaker 1: the Russian Empire because it's big and there's different kind
Speaker 1: of rules for tribal peoples. And one of the things
Speaker 1: is you've got like this guy who's appointed by the
Speaker 1: government to be the intermediary of the tribe and the
Speaker 1: Russian government. And Helena's maternal grandmother gets that job for
Speaker 1: this this group of like horse riding warrior nomads who
Speaker 1: are also Buddhist. Right. So again Russia is very fucking
Speaker 1: big um. So he takes his daughter and his granddaughter
Speaker 1: on a journey to a city called Ostra Khan in
Speaker 1: the very distant steps, where the Kalmuk are like camping out,
Speaker 1: and young Helena, as like seven something eight years old,
Speaker 1: gets to spend time in direct contact with Buddhists. This
Speaker 1: is her first experience with Eastern religion, and this legitimately happens.
Speaker 1: Gary Lachman writes quote here, the young Helena Blovotsky was
Speaker 1: exposed to the Mongolian lemaic system and had her first
Speaker 1: taste of Tibetan Buddhism. Her mother, too, was inspired by
Speaker 1: the meeting and later wrote a novel about Calmuc life,
Speaker 1: which was translated into French. The prince spent his days
Speaker 1: in prayer in a Buddhist temple he had built himself.
Speaker 1: The colors, the images, the incense, the strange words murmured
Speaker 1: in an unfamiliar tongue must have made a deep impression
Speaker 1: on the six year old. I guess she was six,
Speaker 1: who had already led a remarkably adventurous life. Bulovotsky would
Speaker 1: later say that her interest in Tibet began at that time.
Speaker 1: So and again Tibet is this kind of mythical place.
Speaker 1: It is a real place, but like you can't go
Speaker 1: to Tibet if you're like a Westerner. It's it's pretty,
Speaker 1: it's it's closed. Um. But you know this guy, Tibet's
Speaker 1: you know, obviously like kind of one of the centers
Speaker 1: of Buddhism. And so this like horse Nomad prince is
Speaker 1: like talking to this little girl about Tibet and she
Speaker 1: kind of falls in love with with, you know, East
Speaker 1: during religion and mysticism. Um. And after this period of time,
Speaker 1: which legitimately sounds like a pretty rat experience to have
Speaker 1: as a six year old, the family all wind up
Speaker 1: back together with Peter in Odessa Um, mainly because Helena
Speaker 1: the mom is really sick again and Odessa has these
Speaker 1: mineral baths that are thought to be good for her health. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like I love old school rich people. It's like you
Speaker 1: just just go sit in some salt water. You'll be fine,
Speaker 1: It'll be good. You just do rich people ship people.
Speaker 1: It's back then, so they just go sit in baths
Speaker 1: when they could take simple prescription medicine any of us
Speaker 1: could get from a pharmacy today, like go to walbrafool, dumbasses,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, did you not consider going to CVS? Yeah,
Speaker 1: motherfucker's loser. Your death's on you. I don't even care
Speaker 1: like it takes. We're about to We're about to get canceled.
Speaker 1: Yeah we are. So she probably had um what's the thing?
Speaker 1: Uh uh, it's like consumption. UM. I think is generally
Speaker 1: like what people assumed she had. Right, They just kind
Speaker 1: of described her as sickly. So she had some sort
Speaker 1: of like chronic lung illness that eventually kills her. Um
Speaker 1: that again, you could probably knock out in like ten
Speaker 1: minutes today. Anyway, she dies in eighteen forty two. Her baby, Helena,
Speaker 1: now the only Helena, was eleven at the time. Um.
Speaker 1: Her mother was twenty eight years old when she died. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's has her kid at seventeen. She's got her novel,
Speaker 1: her novels done before. That's impressive. Ship, that's impressive ship. Um.
Speaker 1: And probably what killed her ultimately was the fact that
Speaker 1: her doctors kept taking all of her blood um, because again,
Speaker 1: medicines not great. In eighteen forty two, she dies in
Speaker 1: her mother's arms, which is one of the saddest ways
Speaker 1: of year old can die. Um, yeah, yeah, that's not
Speaker 1: not great. Her mother, who's probably like forty eight. Um,
Speaker 1: so Helena was presumably like, you know, the daughter, Helena
Speaker 1: was presumably pretty devast. Life goes on, though, and soon
Speaker 1: she and her siblings she has two siblings now are
Speaker 1: all sent to live with her grandparents because army guy, like,
Speaker 1: Army Dad's not gonna take care of him. Like, he's
Speaker 1: not going to be a single Army Dad Like, no,
Speaker 1: they're gonna go grew again, desiably in fairness, these are
Speaker 1: all rich people. So they're staying with their grandparents at
Speaker 1: like basically a castle, you know, like they're they're living
Speaker 1: in like a mansion type palace deal. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in in in kind of like the eastern e well
Speaker 1: not east for Russia, but East for Europe, part of Russia. Um.
Speaker 1: Gary Lachman writes quote. She was, according to her sister Vera,
Speaker 1: the strangest girl one has ever seen, with a distinct
Speaker 1: dual nature. One side of her was mischievous, combative, and obstinate,
Speaker 1: while another was mystical and metaphysically inclined, characteristics that those
Speaker 1: who got to know the mature Helena Blovotsky would agree on.
Speaker 1: Her aunt Nadia, just a few years older than her,
Speaker 1: tells us that from an early age she was sympathetic
Speaker 1: to the lower classes and preferred to play with the
Speaker 1: servants children rather than those of her own class, and
Speaker 1: often made friends with ragged street boys. This solidarity with
Speaker 1: her social inferiors wasn't uniform, and she once had to
Speaker 1: apologize to an elderly servant whom she had slapped. Again,
Speaker 1: Lachman likes and defends her. So it's very funny that
Speaker 1: he's like, she loved the poor. She didn't slap that guy,
Speaker 1: she loved the poor. Well. I also like how it's
Speaker 1: included in texting. Well, she apologized, so you know she
Speaker 1: must have just been having a bad day. Jesus Christ. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean she was made to it. He does say
Speaker 1: she had to apologize, right, so we're not okay, she
Speaker 1: didn't mean just that. I mean again, this is why
Speaker 1: the servants are a bad thing to have, because any
Speaker 1: kid who has a chance to slap an adult and
Speaker 1: get away with it's going to try. You know, that's
Speaker 1: just being a child. I mean that is true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah, um. Again, Lachman claims a lot that
Speaker 1: she like deeply loves the poor and the lower class.
Speaker 1: I I don't see any actual documented evidence of that
Speaker 1: at all. And the fact that even he is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: she would slap around the servants makes me I wonder
Speaker 1: maybe she wasn't playing with the servant kids just because
Speaker 1: they had to do what she told them, because she's
Speaker 1: the noble girl. I don't know. I do appreciate that
Speaker 1: he that he left it in any ways, even though
Speaker 1: it directly undermines his point. I'm like, Okay, not the
Speaker 1: worst journalism, but I mean, the logical thing to do
Speaker 1: would be to just simply omit that. But yeah, i mean,
Speaker 1: like all of these by people who write about Blovotsky,
Speaker 1: he's like enthralled by her, but there's a there's so
Speaker 1: much shady ship. She don't like. He can't keep it out.
Speaker 1: So there's these moments where you can tell like he
Speaker 1: just he has to include something negative about her even
Speaker 1: though it hurts him. Um. Anyway, it's very funny all
Speaker 1: of these books about Blovotsky or a little like that. Um,
Speaker 1: So there is some ample evidence so that she was
Speaker 1: kind of a pretty what I would call a fun kid.
Speaker 1: The most detailed stories about her, it makes her sound
Speaker 1: like the proto Wednesday Adams right like she she's she's
Speaker 1: constantly hearing spirits and ghosts the family manner like that
Speaker 1: she grows up on. There's the subterranean basement system that
Speaker 1: she spends her time exploring. She's often found down there
Speaker 1: by man servants, like sleepwalking or talking to invisible companions,
Speaker 1: so like servants will find her wandering ghosts. Yeah, that's dope.
Speaker 1: That's a cool kid, I like. Um. She frequently played
Speaker 1: with beings no one else could see, who she called
Speaker 1: the hunchbacks, and sometimes she would threaten other kids to
Speaker 1: like sick her invisible friends on them if they didn't
Speaker 1: do what she said. Um, and I bet they totally believed.
Speaker 1: Ah man, witchy kids are so funny. It does sound
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Yeah, that's that's that's a great use of
Speaker 1: child ghost power. That sucking rocks absolutely, Her sister later
Speaker 1: recalled quote. Helena used to dream aloud and tell us
Speaker 1: of her visions, evidently clear, vivid, and as palpable as life.
Speaker 1: To her, it was her delight to gather around herself
Speaker 1: a party of us younger children at twilight and after
Speaker 1: taking us into the large dark museum to hold us
Speaker 1: there spell bound with her weird stories. Then she narrated
Speaker 1: to us the most inconceivable tales about herself, the most
Speaker 1: unheard of adventures of which she was the heroine every night,
Speaker 1: as she explained, so she was like telling them lies
Speaker 1: about going on adventures with her. I was in the
Speaker 1: I got taken by like a spirit to this place
Speaker 1: and like I had to do this and you know,
Speaker 1: fought this other spirit or whatever. Like she's you know what,
Speaker 1: you know what Helena Blovotsky really would have thrived with
Speaker 1: is some friends to play D and D with when
Speaker 1: she was like eleven. It does it just yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's a big imagination kid thing. And it just sounds
Speaker 1: like she didn't have anyone matching that level of imagination
Speaker 1: around her, which just means that you'll be we finally
Speaker 1: gets it. It's going to be with adults. But like, also,
Speaker 1: this is a period in which you're into that there's
Speaker 1: not like a fictional outlet like today. A lot of
Speaker 1: the bad stuff maybe wouldn't have happened. Maybe she would
Speaker 1: have gotten really into fan fiction and eventually started writing
Speaker 1: around ship um and stuff like well, I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting because her mom was a novelist. So you think
Speaker 1: that there would have been that like baseline of like
Speaker 1: game write some of the ship down. You know, there's
Speaker 1: bits of that happening here, but especially like it's this.
Speaker 1: I mean again, we're kind of like in the period
Speaker 1: where like Mary Shelley is going to invent the concept
Speaker 1: of science fiction. So there's not a lot of there's
Speaker 1: not a ton of role models in terms of like
Speaker 1: taking your weird dreams about ghosts and spirits and turning
Speaker 1: it into a mythology. Um, learning that Mary Shelley lost
Speaker 1: her virginity against her mother's own grave was really just
Speaker 1: like I think maybe the highlight of my well, well,
Speaker 1: well we'll do Mary Shelly in behind the Ladies who rocked. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: behind behind the unimpeachable women. Uh god. So okay, so
Speaker 1: she's she's yeah, so she's making up stories about spirits
Speaker 1: and ghosts, hanging out in the catacombs scaring kids. Um,
Speaker 1: pretty dope. So while she's living with her grandparents and
Speaker 1: this isn't a town on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan.
Speaker 1: She she claims, Now we're getting into the things that
Speaker 1: I don't think happened. She claims during this period, she
Speaker 1: discovered her great grandfather's massive occult library. Um, now I
Speaker 1: want to read you how one reasonably credible account written
Speaker 1: for an unpronounceable Polish magazine by Thomas Stalwartsinski describes it quote.
Speaker 1: There she found hundreds of decaying books by the sixteenth
Speaker 1: and seventeenth century masters of alchemy and her medic philosophy,
Speaker 1: such as Paracelsus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and Heinrich Kunrath. Helena's
Speaker 1: great grandfather, a high ranked freemason who in the seventeen
Speaker 1: seventies was initiated into the Rosicrucian mysteries, selected the books
Speaker 1: for his meticulous kid. We're talking about that crucious we'll
Speaker 1: talk about it. Collected the books for his collection with
Speaker 1: meticulous care. Helena devoured them with passion, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: long and until she became an expert in the field
Speaker 1: of occultism. The only other person she could tell about
Speaker 1: her spiritual adventures was Prince Alexander Golitzen, a colorful character
Speaker 1: and a frequent guest at Helena's grandparents house. Glitzen was
Speaker 1: a freemason and a practicing maige who searched for ancient
Speaker 1: occult secrets had led him to travel to Greece, Iran, India, Egypt,
Speaker 1: and numerous other places. We don't know much about his
Speaker 1: relationship with Helena, but without doubt it is Glitzen who
Speaker 1: instilled the yearning for faraway travels in her. Helena wanted
Speaker 1: to seek out the unknown, the magical, the mysterious. Now
Speaker 1: there is a lot going on in those paragraphs. So
Speaker 1: that is as like a fifteen year old girl her
Speaker 1: best friend is a prince wizard um the wizard Prince Golitzon,
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool. That's again very cool, there is it.
Speaker 1: I know that Bolotsky goes in a wildly different direction,
Speaker 1: but it's like, I don't know, just like imagine it
Speaker 1: of kids creating going on to create, uh, controversial religions
Speaker 1: huge in this time because that was also how spiritualism started,
Speaker 1: was with like and there's two sisters playing a prank
Speaker 1: more like yeah, like, So Glitzen is a legitimately interesting guy.
Speaker 1: He was in the circle of a lot of major
Speaker 1: Masonic and spiritual proto gurus in in the day. One
Speaker 1: of his good friends was a Christian mystic named Carl
Speaker 1: von Eckerthhausen. Um who was like like one of the
Speaker 1: major dudes who inspired Alistair Crowley. Um. Again, Crowley is
Speaker 1: like a generation later basically, So that's the set that
Speaker 1: Helena is hanging out with as like a teenage girl.
Speaker 1: These weirdo occultists who are like a generation back from Crowley.
Speaker 1: Um now Glitzens circle of dudes are all just super
Speaker 1: obsessed with secret societies. Eckerchausen's wrote about a secret interior
Speaker 1: church and they were all very into the Rosa Crucians.
Speaker 1: Now you had a reaction to that. You probably you
Speaker 1: don't know who the Rosa Crucians are, right, I don't
Speaker 1: know who the Rosa Crucians, but most the first thing
Speaker 1: about them is that they didn't exist. Probably didn't exist.
Speaker 1: So when she claims your great grandfather was one, that's
Speaker 1: her myth making, right. But I'm gonnacote again from Stalazinski
Speaker 1: about the Rosicrucians. In sixteen twelve and the German city
Speaker 1: of Castle, an anonymous brochure was published. It was a
Speaker 1: manifesto of the Rosicrucian Order, an organization nobody had ever
Speaker 1: heard of before. The manifesto claimed that medieval occultist Christian
Speaker 1: Rosencroy had founded an order that gave its members access
Speaker 1: to the universal mystical truth about human nature and the
Speaker 1: ways of the world. Two years later, another manifesto was
Speaker 1: released called The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencroy. Rosencroy, it's
Speaker 1: cruts rousing, crutz. I don't know r O s e
Speaker 1: n k r e U t z, I don't know
Speaker 1: ROSENKROI yeah, Rose Lacroix. The hero of the story is
Speaker 1: presented as Hermes tris tri majistice, a god of Hellenic
Speaker 1: and Egyptian origins, and Hermes is the alleged author of
Speaker 1: the Emerald Tablet, which is like a European alchemical text
Speaker 1: um and definitely like a central mystic document of the
Speaker 1: Renaissance era um. And both of those books had been
Speaker 1: written by a guy named Johan Andrea, who was a writer,
Speaker 1: a mathematician, a theologists and a cabalist um. So the
Speaker 1: history of the Rosicrucian Order and its founder were like
Speaker 1: books written by this by by Johan Andre. This like
Speaker 1: mystic theologist and cobbalist who like invents this guy rosen Croy,
Speaker 1: who isn't real and a mysterious order. It's like, it's
Speaker 1: not it's it's a it's a it's I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's a prank because I don't know the degree
Speaker 1: to which this guy writes a fake manifesto that he
Speaker 1: that he he credits to a guy who doesn't exist,
Speaker 1: who's based in part of like Hellenic and Egyptian mythological figures.
Speaker 1: It's a little too it's a little bit too calculated
Speaker 1: to be classified as a prank. Yeah. So basically in
Speaker 1: six twelve, this like Rosa Crue manifesto gets like posted
Speaker 1: up in Germany. And again there's not real Rosicrucians as
Speaker 1: far as anyone's ever been able to prove. But because
Speaker 1: this thing it gets goes kind of viral, this like
Speaker 1: manifesto being published, they become like a conspiracy theory, right,
Speaker 1: Like people are like, oh, the Rosicrucians are behind this,
Speaker 1: or that they're the secret Order and they have all
Speaker 1: this influence here and this influence here, and it's like
Speaker 1: a popular belief or is a kind of a little necessary.
Speaker 1: Dudes are fucking writing conspiracy theories about the Rosicrucians um
Speaker 1: into the twenty first century. Um, it goes very viral.
Speaker 1: So Helena is hanging out with dudes who are super
Speaker 1: into the idea of the Rosicrucians in this period with occultists,
Speaker 1: and she has another entry point um into uh weird
Speaker 1: occult conspiracy theories from the seventeenth century. Um anyway, So
Speaker 1: so she has another entry point into kind of like
Speaker 1: occult conspiracy culture, which are the books of her favorite author,
Speaker 1: Edward Bulwer Lytton. Now this guy number one. Her mom
Speaker 1: had translated a number of this dude's books into Russia.
Speaker 1: This is like one of her mom's side jobs. Bulmer
Speaker 1: Litton publishes a very famous book in eighteen seventy one
Speaker 1: titled The Coming Race. And now it's about an underground
Speaker 1: master race. Yeah, yeah, The Coming Race, Baby, I've watched
Speaker 1: that one. Um. It's like the Great American Bake Off,
Speaker 1: but less horny. So The Coming Race is about an
Speaker 1: underground master race who have a secret energy called real
Speaker 1: that they used to like. It's they're kind of occult
Speaker 1: electricity almost. Um. And yeah, this book, it's not Bulward
Speaker 1: Letton obviously, this is published eighteen seventy one. Not a Nazi.
Speaker 1: I don't even think he's particularly a white supremacist, but
Speaker 1: his book is going to become extremely influential to the
Speaker 1: weirdest kind of Nazis. Nazis loved talking about real today
Speaker 1: um and secret underground Nazi bases in the art tech.
Speaker 1: All of that has its origin point in Bulwer Lytton's
Speaker 1: The Coming Race um So Buller is a Edward Bulwer
Speaker 1: Litton is a very popular author. His books has been
Speaker 1: translated again his Helena's mom translate them when she's a
Speaker 1: little girl. Um And one of the books that Helena
Speaker 1: would have grown up loving from this guy is Zononi,
Speaker 1: which is about a secret order of rosa Crucians who
Speaker 1: had psychic powers and lived forever. This is probably why
Speaker 1: Helena later claimed that her great grandfather had been a Rosicrucian,
Speaker 1: because she loves these books as a kid, and she
Speaker 1: wants to like tie herself and her family to them
Speaker 1: so that she can claim to have some connection with
Speaker 1: these like Rosicrucians from her favorite book that become part
Speaker 1: of her like conspiratorial belief system about the world. Right.
Speaker 1: It's like she's making her own occult superhero origin story
Speaker 1: right by tying herself and like, no, my grandfather was
Speaker 1: with the Rosicrucians, and like you know these these fiction
Speaker 1: books by Bulwer Lytton aren't fiction. They're him telling the
Speaker 1: real story. But he has to keep it secret because
Speaker 1: it's like a conspiracy. You know, God, I mean this
Speaker 1: is such fantasy, kid, behave still still? I mean you see,
Speaker 1: there's variants of this this basic art, like a lot
Speaker 1: of secret knowledge conspiracy grifters in the modern era have
Speaker 1: similar stories. Bill Cooper, who's the father of modern conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: the first Alex Jones. His whole backstory is that like
Speaker 1: he when he was working at the Pentagon, he snuck
Speaker 1: into his boss's file cabinet and he like saw evidence
Speaker 1: of all the conspiracies. Who had spend the rest of
Speaker 1: his life talking about Keith Rawnieri claimed that he had
Speaker 1: like interviewed all of this most successful people in the
Speaker 1: world and had like synthesized the secret information about how
Speaker 1: to have success from their backgrounds and stuff. Right, this
Speaker 1: is like well trod guru grifter ground the idea that
Speaker 1: like at some point, as a younger person, you came
Speaker 1: across like the font of all secret knowledge, and so
Speaker 1: you got it directly from the source and you can't
Speaker 1: show anyone else for like whatever reason. Right, you don't
Speaker 1: have it anymore, but you remember it all and that's
Speaker 1: why they should listen to you. Okay. So that that
Speaker 1: brings up an interesting point to which is like, it's not, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not just like fantasy fan behavior, because most fantasy
Speaker 1: fans don't have the access and like wealth to take it.
Speaker 1: As far as what you just described and like what
Speaker 1: Blovotsky would have had access to, it's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can like try to attempt to make it happen
Speaker 1: because you have more influence and power and money and
Speaker 1: all that. Yeah, And this brings us to the last
Speaker 1: well documented part of her early life, her marriage at
Speaker 1: age seventeen, just like her mom, to a middle aged
Speaker 1: as man named Nikophor Blovotsky. He was the vice governor
Speaker 1: of aravan Uh in modern day and also within day Armenia. Um,
Speaker 1: like I think today it's the capital of Armenia. So
Speaker 1: he's like he's like the second guy in command of
Speaker 1: basically that of Russian art like Russia controlled Armenia in
Speaker 1: the period um of their marriage, Lachman writes, quote. One
Speaker 1: story is that she did so to spite her governess,
Speaker 1: who said that no man would have so unruly ill
Speaker 1: tempered and unpredictable a woman for a wife, not even
Speaker 1: the old gentleman she had recently taunted and laughed at
Speaker 1: so much. Faced with such a challenge, the teenaged Blovotsky
Speaker 1: cast her spell, and her plumeless raven was quickly netted.
Speaker 1: Another story is that hearing of the plan to run
Speaker 1: away with Prince Golitzen, the family felt duty bound to
Speaker 1: protect her honor and its own, and hastily shanghaied the
Speaker 1: old by their standards Nikophor into making an honest woman
Speaker 1: of her. A third possibility is that she married Nikophor
Speaker 1: out of anger at her father, who had recently remarried
Speaker 1: to a Countess von Lane. Yet Blovotsky herself tells a
Speaker 1: different story. Prince Prince Golitzen, it seems, wasn't the only
Speaker 1: one who took her mystical passion seriously. In the letter
Speaker 1: to her friend Prince Alexander, I'm not going to try
Speaker 1: to pronounce that last name mentioned earlier, she wrote, do
Speaker 1: you know why I married an old Blovotsky? Because whereas
Speaker 1: all the young men laughed at my magical superstitions, he
Speaker 1: believed in them. She explained that her suitor had so
Speaker 1: often talked to me about the sorcerers of Aravan or
Speaker 1: the mysterious science of the Kurds and the Persians, that
Speaker 1: I took him in order to use him as a
Speaker 1: latch key to the latter. Right. So Number one, there's
Speaker 1: a myth that like or some people will argue she
Speaker 1: and Prince Golitzen had like a thing, which by the way,
Speaker 1: would have been him molesting her because she would have
Speaker 1: been like sixteen. But whatever that, her family marries her
Speaker 1: off to another middle aged man in order to get
Speaker 1: her away from this, this this prince. Um. She claims that, no,
Speaker 1: I took advantage of this guy. I married him because
Speaker 1: I wanted to get over to like these these Armenian
Speaker 1: and these Kurdish and Persian mystics, and he was a
Speaker 1: powerful man in that area, and I knew he would
Speaker 1: like open the door to me getting into there. I
Speaker 1: actually think she's probably telling the truth about that she
Speaker 1: has this guy kind of wrapped around her finger for
Speaker 1: most of the time that he's alive. Um. I don't
Speaker 1: have trouble believing that she this was a calculated move
Speaker 1: on her bath she he's good at that, Um. And
Speaker 1: obviously you're a fucking seventeen year old Russian noble girl
Speaker 1: in this period of time. You don't want to grow
Speaker 1: up like your mom did married to some like miserable
Speaker 1: ass fucking soldier. Dude. If you want to take some
Speaker 1: autonomy in your life, you have to scheme a bit, right,
Speaker 1: So maybe that's what she does. Um now, Madame Blovotsky,
Speaker 1: as she becomes known later with aim for the rest
Speaker 1: of her life. That quote I never was his wife,
Speaker 1: by which she means that the marriage was never consummated.
Speaker 1: They did not fuck. This is a topic of heavy
Speaker 1: debate which I see no reason to wait to the
Speaker 1: two biographers that I hey, I mean, of course the
Speaker 1: biographers who are followers and fans of hers are going
Speaker 1: to want to heavily speculate about who when she was
Speaker 1: exhausting it is. We will talk about it more because
Speaker 1: it is relevant because a big part of the religion
Speaker 1: she makes is like a staticism, and a lot of
Speaker 1: it involves sex denial, and there's credibility issues that like, well,
Speaker 1: she was fucking the whole time, and obviously that does
Speaker 1: matter if you're like right, because there was the celibacy thing. Right. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this is a topic of debate. Gary Lackman just takes
Speaker 1: it as like, takes her word for it. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: she was celibate, she might even have been. Lackman kind
Speaker 1: of described her as possibly even a sexual. Um. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the other biographer I use for this Mary and Meade,
Speaker 1: who is more both way more into woo. She describes
Speaker 1: herself as like a PSI practitioner with side powers, but
Speaker 1: also a much more critical biographer of Blovotsky. Um. We'll
Speaker 1: note that she has at least two husbands at one point,
Speaker 1: she has two husbands at the same time, I should
Speaker 1: say she has numerous lovers. She may have had some kids. Um,
Speaker 1: And that basically she she fucks. And one of the
Speaker 1: fun things is that like later again, later in her life,
Speaker 1: when she's a guru, sorry to skip ahead a little bit,
Speaker 1: but she gets like a doctor's uh to examine her
Speaker 1: her bits, and the doctors like, it doesn't look like
Speaker 1: you've had a kid, And she takes that little bit
Speaker 1: and she strong arms him into writing a note that
Speaker 1: says quote, I hereby certify that Madame Blovotsky has never
Speaker 1: been pregnant for with a child, and so consequently can
Speaker 1: never have had a child, and then she she uses
Speaker 1: this note to claim that also she's a virgin, even
Speaker 1: though that's not really what the doctor says. But she
Speaker 1: gets a doctor to write something and then like uses
Speaker 1: that as part of it. Okay, that is kind of funny.
Speaker 1: That is kind of funny. I do I made it,
Speaker 1: Like any any like information about how doctors treated vaginas
Speaker 1: at this time is just like so hysterically wrong, Like
Speaker 1: this was at the same time where you would possible that,
Speaker 1: Like she had that doctor looking at her foot and
Speaker 1: he was like, this seems like a vagina to me.
Speaker 1: I'm a man in the eighteen seventies, none of the
Speaker 1: seventies you could be like, okay, like you can examine me,
Speaker 1: but the lights have to be off, like and then
Speaker 1: you're like, okay, ghosts are coming out of my vagina.
Speaker 1: And if you don't believe me, um, you hate women.
Speaker 1: It's the best, it's the best, good time to be
Speaker 1: got to bring back or a vagina. So, for her part,
Speaker 1: Blovotsky claimed quote, never physically speaking, has there ever existed
Speaker 1: a girl or woman colder than I. I had a
Speaker 1: volcano when conscient constitucent eruption in my brain and a
Speaker 1: glacier at the foot of the mountain. Okay, that's kind
Speaker 1: of sexual icon I've had. I've had ex boyfriends who
Speaker 1: have said similar things about me. Yeah. So again the
Speaker 1: to the two arguments here, either she was basically a
Speaker 1: sexual or she was fucking constantly. Um. I don't know
Speaker 1: the truth, but there's a lot of fun stories. So
Speaker 1: she was about to hit the world like goddamn bomb, right,
Speaker 1: She's she's basically an adult. She's she's wants to get
Speaker 1: out there and travel to all the different mystical centers
Speaker 1: of the world. But she has to do one thing first, Jamie,
Speaker 1: and that's get away from her dorcass nerdi of a husband, Right,
Speaker 1: you can't have that dude hanging around. Um. So she
Speaker 1: claims that, like she warned her husband he was making
Speaker 1: a big mistake before the wedding and begged him to talk.
Speaker 1: She escaped before the wedding briefly and then got caught. Um,
Speaker 1: and after they were married, she escaped. Fun indication of
Speaker 1: things to come the sed of your own wedding. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Right before their honeymoon, she like bribes some Kurdish warriors
Speaker 1: to smuggle her out and she gets caught. Um, I
Speaker 1: think she might have made it to Iran. UM hate
Speaker 1: that she was put in this position, but I love
Speaker 1: her tactics to not she is, it's pretty fun. It's
Speaker 1: pretty fun. She's like, she's like bribing these like nomadic
Speaker 1: warriors to like help her escape and like getting caught
Speaker 1: and it's this, it's this, she's she's like dealing with
Speaker 1: massagy with a real dramatic flair. She is, it's pretty
Speaker 1: pretty wild stuff. So she gets caught again. For a while,
Speaker 1: she's under constant guard in her husband's palace, but Helena
Speaker 1: keeps her focus and she eventually, yeah, she escapes to
Speaker 1: Tiflis in Georgia, where she gets caught again and her
Speaker 1: husband sends her back to her family so that they
Speaker 1: can send her and her servants to St. Petersburg to
Speaker 1: try to like keep a lock on her while they
Speaker 1: figure out what to do about her. Um. So, like
Speaker 1: she's basically going supposed to be traveling with her servants
Speaker 1: to St. Petersburg to be like locked up somewhere until
Speaker 1: they can break her spirit. But while she's on her
Speaker 1: way back home, she bribes the captain of an English
Speaker 1: boat to help her, and with the help of an
Speaker 1: escape kayak. She kayaks to safety, evading her servants, and
Speaker 1: like gets on this boat and gets taken to Constantinople.
Speaker 1: I know in that dope, that's a pretty cool story.
Speaker 1: This is cool, This is goddamn and it's like, I
Speaker 1: know where this story is going, but I didn't know
Speaker 1: these details and they're all cool, and that's dope as hell.
Speaker 1: And that's what we're going to end for today. All
Speaker 1: Blotsky has escaped on a kayak to Constantinople, which is
Speaker 1: pretty cool. I mean, she kayaks a boat and that
Speaker 1: takes you to Constantinople, but still pretty cool, really impressive.
Speaker 1: All right, Jamie, have you ever had to kayak away
Speaker 1: from a bad marriage? No, I've I've kayaked towards a
Speaker 1: bad relationship. Yeah, baby, Um, have you ever had to
Speaker 1: paddle away? I have had. I've had. I've had some
Speaker 1: adventures while kayaking that involved a sunken kayak um. And
Speaker 1: I've definitely had some some strenuous arguments while kayaking with
Speaker 1: a part. Oh. No, I don't like kayaking. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be honest with you. I'm not a big fan. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I got so upset about your kayaking. Anecdote that I left. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have. You have a tattoo of a kayak on
Speaker 1: your bicep that says yeah, it says, do not tread
Speaker 1: on me. Right before you came in this morning, you
Speaker 1: were drilling holes in canoes. Um, because kayakers hate canoeists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you don't feel like you're in a safe
Speaker 1: womb like space in a canoe. I like to feel
Speaker 1: like I'm being born when I get out of the
Speaker 1: little boat. Okay, that's that's right. That's right. Like like
Speaker 1: Jim Carrey in the second Aman Share a movie, It's like,
Speaker 1: where is this going? Yes, exactly? Do you want to
Speaker 1: plug your ship? Yeah? I guess that the best plug
Speaker 1: for this is listen to Ghost Church. It's the limited
Speaker 1: series I just finished that is Blovotsky Adjacent, which I
Speaker 1: think will become clearer in the next episode. But it's
Speaker 1: about American spiritualism and a bunch of time I spent
Speaker 1: with some psychics and mediums in Central Florida. Roberts in it,
Speaker 1: Paul left Compkins is in it. Sophie produced it and
Speaker 1: edited it. It's just it's just a cool zone jamboree,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's all. Every episode is out now. So
Speaker 1: you can listen to all of it and if and
Speaker 1: then follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Uh that if
Speaker 1: you want listening to Ghost Church. It personally hurts my feelings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you don't listen to Ghost Church, I will find
Speaker 1: you and I will put your children on the Blue
Speaker 1: Apron Iron Island where they'll be hunted by Elon Musk
Speaker 1: for food. Yeah it's Elon Musk and all of his
Speaker 1: his kids. Go. Somebody's listening with his kids, their kids
Speaker 1: right now. And I want you to know, children, that
Speaker 1: was a threat there. Your parents better listen to Ghost Church.
Speaker 1: I feel Look, it's it's high, it's high octane ship.
Speaker 1: I just got I do what I would. I I
Speaker 1: still cut and check Apple podcast reviews sometimes, and I checked.
Speaker 1: I checked them, and I had one that said, uh,
Speaker 1: I liked the whole show, but I'm going to stop
Speaker 1: listening now because Jamie wants the Supreme Court to be abolished.
Speaker 1: But they still gave me four stars. I just lost
Speaker 1: one star incredibly based. I think. Look, yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you know, that's pretty fair and balanced. Yeah, I have
Speaker 1: to give credit where it's due. Look, they understand that
Speaker 1: this isn't the content for them. But they're not going
Speaker 1: to punish your show for it. They're like, look, I
Speaker 1: enjoyed the whole show, but we have we have a
Speaker 1: personal disagreement, and I have to dock you a star.
Speaker 1: I'm like, all right, you know what, yeah, look, you
Speaker 1: know what. Good for you, good for them, Good for them,