Latest / Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson / Occult Philosophy, Rationalism & Esoteric History with Dr. Justin Sledge - EP 30

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Occult Philosophy, Rationalism & Esoteric History with Dr. Justin Sledge - EP 30 · Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson

• 0:00
  Rupert Isaacson: Thanks for joining us.
• 0:01
  Welcome to Live Free, Ride Free.
• 0:03
  I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of
• 0:06
  The Horseboy and The Long Ride Home.
• 0:08
  Before I jump in with today's guest, I want to say a huge thank you to you, our
• 0:13
  audience, for helping to make this happen.
• 0:15
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  To find out about our certification courses, online video libraries,
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  books, and other courses, please go to rupertisakson.
• 0:33
  com.
• 0:34
  So now let's jump in.
• 0:36
  Welcome back to Live Free.
• 0:38
  Ride Free Self-Actualization comes in many forms um, following your
• 0:44
  passions, following your interests, following your obsessions.
• 0:48
  Nerding out and being able to eventually make that one's profession is I think
• 0:53
  something that we all regard been
• 0:56
  following this man just in Sledge for quite a while on YouTube.
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  And I urge you, in fact, I could make a little pun and
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  I could say I demy urge you.
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  Which he will explain what that pun is.
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  To follow him too.
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  He, he has a, a YouTube channel called Esoterica, the esoteric,
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  the arcane, the mythological, the occult, but looked at through the lens of a
• 1:27
  scholar while being pretty entertaining.
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  I can't resist that stuff.
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  Ex adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at Wayne State University.
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  Now full-time sharer of the esoteric muse with the rest of us.
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  Dr.
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  Sledge, what an honor to have you on.
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  Please, can you give us a bit of an idea about who you are and
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  what you do and why you do it?
• 1:53
  Justin Sledge: Thank you.
• 1:54
  Thank you for having me on.
• 1:56
  Yeah.
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  My name is Justin Sledge.
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  I'm full-time public educator on topics in the study of Western as Aism.
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  So I study as Aism, which as you mentioned, those things like the, the
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  occult and alchemy and Kabbalah and magic.
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  But studying those through an academic lens not that the academic lens is the
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  only, or even maybe even the best way of studying them, but it's certainly
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  one of them and it has its own set of rigors, which are, are useful.
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  But yeah, I, I study this material and I do public education on my YouTube channel.
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  I also teach in the university here locally in the philosophy and religion
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  department, but mostly transitioned to being a full-time public educator.
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  You know, I think any educator, if you could say, look, if you
• 2:39
  could reach a, an audience of 30 students, that's pretty impressive.
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  What if you can reach an audience of 30,000 students?
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  And so I think most educators want to do something like that.
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  And so I've been very blessed and very lucky to have a built
• 2:52
  up a pretty substantial audience on my YouTube channel and.
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  That's basically what I focus most of my time on though.
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  I've done some publishing and recently returned from Egypt where
• 3:02
  I did some tours and seminars there.
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  And so really building out kind of a educational system one might say, for
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  really making this information, which historically is quite difficult to
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  access and even difficult to access now, but making that much easier for
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  people to access for for whatever reasons they, they choose to study it,
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  Rupert Isaacson: right?
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  History and philosophy.
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  Most people like, oh, I was just gonna leave the room immediately.
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  And that I never understood because I always loved it.
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  'cause I'm a massive nerd until I actually had to study it at school.
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  And then I thought, Jesus, these guys suck all the life out of it.
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  I absolutely understand now why everybody hates it.
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  Because it's presented not as it should be, which is a, as a sort of a game of
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  throne zest, sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the past, allowing us to understand the
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  states, which never did anyone any good.
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  You managed to present history and philosophy and make it feel.
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  Like you are sort of in the room with the guys.
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  So for the listeners I want you to imagine things like questions you
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  might have had about witchcraft, questions you might have had about
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  the Salem Witch trials, questions you might have had about Kabbalah.
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  These words that you hear, questions that you might have had about,
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  about Angels and Demonology and the seal of Solomon and all.
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  Justin Sledge gonna tell you all about 'em.
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  What,
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  Justin Sledge: something about them
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  Rupert Isaacson: a lot more than a lot of others.
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  Perhaps, yeah.
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  What prompted you to do this?
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  Take us back to when you were a boy, you, you grew up in Mississippi, which
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  is not known necessarily as, as the, one of the great seats of Western ESO Terra.
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  Well, maybe it is because of Ole Miss and you know, the Greek
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  revival thing of the old South.
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  I dunno.
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  But, you know, we tend to think of Miss Zippy as a state sort of defined
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  by racism and things like that.
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  So you are down there and somehow you get interested in all this and
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  you now make your career in it.
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  Tell us the story.
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  How did it, how did it all happen?
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  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I've gotten asked this question a lot, and the
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  more that I think about it, the more the, the question, the, the more I
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  think about it, the more the answer becomes more and more complex.
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  Because I think more and more about my own, my own childhood, it, it must
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  have been several redundant things.
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  Mississippi as a place is kind of a pressure cooker.
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  And which is to say that if you're not going to conform, you
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  have to not conform all the way.
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  'Cause the social pressures are so severe that you have to really achieve
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  an enormous escape velocity if you're going to be unique in any specific way.
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  And you can see this in the kind of writers that we produce.
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  You know, we think people like Udo Welty are are William Faulkner.
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  Yeah.
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  Justin Sledge: You know, so it produces people like that not to compare myself
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  in any way to, to those great titans.
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  But I think that I, I grew up watching a lot of the shows that I think a lot of
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  people in my generation watch with sort of author c Clark's Mysterious World
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  and in search of with Leonard Nemoy.
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  And these are shows that are, are unsolved mysteries Robert
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  Stack walking out of the fog.
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  And you know, and it would be these sort of shows that highlight
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  unusual aspects about history.
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  You know, things like Atlantis or Ghosts or Sasquatch or the Bermuda
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  Triangle or something like that.
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  Those kinds of shows just fascinated me because they basically told
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  me that the world was much weirder than I thought it was.
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  And I just, you know, it was the kind of thing where I couldn't let it go.
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  It was just interesting whether or not they really were ghosts or they
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  really were UFOs or, or what have you.
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  And I think what what ended up happening was that I maintained a
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  deep interest in that material, but I also became pretty skeptical of it.
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  I, I began to think to myself, alright, if there is a lochness monster and
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  that Lochness monster doesn't have magical properties and it's just an
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  animal, then it has to be able to eat.
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  So how much fish would need to be in the lochness for a family of lochness
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  monsters to be able to survive?
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  And you start doing some math.
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  They eat haggis, they eat haggis, they eat haggis.
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  Yes, of course.
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  They, you know, they, they come up a common shore and they drink scotch too.
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  They do la fig and lulin or the lochness monster that's on the
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  Rupert Isaacson: western end of the lock on the eastern end.
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  They, they drink the space sides.
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  Yeah,
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  Justin Sledge: exactly right.
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  Yeah.
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  It all depends on where they are.
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  And so these kind of questions is, you know, vampires, right?
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  Like, if we're interested in vampires, and I'm like, all right, well if
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  there is a vampire and they bite one person and they don't turn them into
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  a, that person becomes a vampire.
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  How long until the world becomes all vampires.
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  And at these, the questions just like.
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  Vexed me.
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  Right.
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  And it became the case where the skepticism, how old you at this
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  Rupert Isaacson: point getting vexed by vampires?
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  Justin Sledge: Oh, I must have been in middle school.
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  Okay.
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  In fact, I must maybe even earlier than that.
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  'cause I distinctly remember being in fifth grade and thinking that a girl in
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  the sixth grade was in fact a vampire and becoming very terrified of her to
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  this very bright, vibrant red hair.
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  And, you know, for whatever reason I was convinced.
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  And I remember the moment where I was like talking to a friend in hushed tones,
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  and I'm like, I think she's a vampire.
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  And she looked over at me with like these glaring eyes and smiled at me.
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  And of course, fifth grade me didn't think, oh, that's a girl smiling at you.
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  That's the beginning of like flirting fifth grade me was
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  like, oh god, she's a vampire.
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  And she can read my thoughts and she knows that I know it's over.
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  Like, I'm dead.
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  But what
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  Rupert Isaacson: could be more compellingly attractive?
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  I hope you immediately became her loyal slave.
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  Justin Sledge: I wouldn't one would hope.
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  But I don't know if you know what happened with her.
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  I would, I should look her up and, you know, see if she's still a vampire.
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  She looks exactly the same.
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  She's still 12 years old.
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  But yeah, so these kinds of things just fascinated me, Uhhuh.
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  And I think that typically people go one of two ways.
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  They sort of grow up and become a skeptic in the most boring sense of that word.
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  They, their world becomes completely disenchanted and they live a life
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  of of, slavish adherence to a fundamentally disenchanted world.
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  Joylessness
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  Yeah.
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  Justin Sledge: Joylessness, but also kind of like very boring,
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  incorrect version of like 18th century mechanical or something like that.
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  Yeah.
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  Or they become sort of the other side of it where you become convinced that
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  basically every unusual thing is real.
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  Yeah.
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  Is sort of what I refer to as like conspiracy comorbidity.
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  You don't really meet the person who believes just in Atlantis.
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  They typically are part of a nexus of all kinds of other in my opinion,
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  unwarranted and unfounded beliefs.
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  And what happened to me was that I maintained both positions.
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  I maintained a deep interest in those kind of topics, and I developed a kind
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  of pretty rigorous skepticism about them.
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  And this led me eventually to discovering people like Dr.
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  John D and his conversations with angels.
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  I was learning Latin at the time, and that's who John,
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  Rupert Isaacson: not everyone knows who John D was.
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  I know who John D was, but please tell the listeners quickly who John D was.
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  Justin Sledge: John D was a 16th century scientist.
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  He was a hermetic philosopher.
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  He was a mathematician.
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  He was court astrologer to Elizabeth.
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  I he was a spy.
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  I mean, he was sort of everything.
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  He was just a really strange in interesting guy.
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  A renaissance
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  Rupert Isaacson: man with an occult twist.
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  Justin Sledge: Yes.
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  I mean, not that there weren't any Renaissance men without occult twists.
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  That was kind of what made Renaissance men renaissance men.
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  And one of the things we've carefully excised from, from history we don't
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  like that occult part of them.
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  And so we have.
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  Promptly forgotten that Newton wrote far more on Bible interpretation and alchemy
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  than he ever did on physics or chemistry.
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  Physics or, or optics.
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  It's an inconvenient fact about Newton.
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  But but yeah, I sort of became interested in, in Dr.
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  John d and folks may know that he worked through a medium and had these
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  long conversations with angels, which eventually revealed the language
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  of the angels, what is called the celestial speech or the Ian language.
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  And I think I was learning Latin at the time in high school, and it was a moment
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  where I was looking at this and I could see the fact that this angelic language
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  had conjugations that had decension.
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  It was deriving nouns from verbs or verbs from nouns.
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  We're reading
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  Rupert Isaacson: original 16th century sources at this point.
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  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
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  Oh yeah.
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  I was reading, yeah, reading the, the, the text at age
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  Rupert Isaacson: 12.
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  Justin Sledge: No, no, no.
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  I was in high school by then.
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  I must have been 15, 14 at the time.
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  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
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  But not your average 14-year-old is not running around reading original
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  16th century sources in Latin.
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  Justin Sledge: No, no, no.
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  Probably not.
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  I mean, my, my Latin, my Latin teacher, God bless her, really put up with a lot.
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  She let me translate a, an alchemical text from the 16th
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  century as my Latin two project.
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  Far more interesting than reading Cicero.
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  But but yeah, so I got interested in that stuff and, and there was a
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  moment where I was looking at this and I was like, it can't be random.
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  You, if you're just generating random gibberish, you don't
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  get conjugations into clin.
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  Something's going on here.
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  Like, this is really weird.
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  And it became obvious to me as I ultimately transitioned into,
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  into college, which was a very accidental and slow transition.
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  I never intended to go to college.
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  My dad was a working class guy from Mississippi who was a, a pipe fitter,
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  and I worked with him and I thought basically that my life would more
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  or less be some version of that.
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  And yeah, and it was a moment where these questions just didn't let go of me and I
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  had to, you know, settle my earth while philosophical conscious to quote marks.
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  And eventually when I got into college, I just turned my full
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  attention to these kinds of questions.
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  Like, what, what is the, the upside down of the history of philosophy, the history
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  of science, the history of spirituality.
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  The history of history what is the upside down of that world?
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  And it turns out there's an enormous upside down and it it's still collectively
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  forgotten, still collectively repressed.
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  I could tell you shocking stories about graduate school when I was
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  in graduate school for philosophy, where I was literally told
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  that things just didn't happen.
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  Things just didn't go that way.
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  Not because they gimme a shocking
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  Rupert Isaacson: example.
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  Please shock me.
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  Justin Sledge: So, one of the things that I'm pretty interested in is the
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  foundations of what is we now call rationalism, the philosophical school that
• 13:00
  is associated with the en enlightenment.
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  It comes roaring out of people like Descartes en Leni
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  Rupert Isaacson: and Spinoza.
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  Right.
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  And a and a reaction to the church.
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  Repression of the Middle Ages.
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  To some degree.
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  Yeah.
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  Justin Sledge: To some degree, yeah.
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  And, you know, and it's, that's, you know, it's a complicated story, but at
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  the heart of the story, at least one of the important aspects of the story
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  is that insofar as Descartes is at the lynchpin of the rise of modernity and
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  the rise of rationalism, and I think that he is, is that it's not often talked
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  about that the fact that he started his entire philosophical program because
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  he had a bunch of mystical dreams and these mystical dreams involved a divine
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  being, coming to him in his dream and revealing to him this new philosophy.
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  Okay.
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  If you read his philosophical works, beginning with the regular and going
• 13:45
  all the way through the discourse on method, the meditations and the principles
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  he's writing and rewriting the exact same book over and over and over again.
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  It's like a Beethoven, dun, dun.
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  It's obsessive.
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  And it's because he's working out what was revealed to him in a dream years ago.
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  And I wanted to really focus in on the fact that, and one of the things I really
• 14:06
  wanted to focus in on was like that the origins of modernity and rationalism
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  have their fundamental building block in a series of mystical dreams.
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  Why?
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  And I was told that that didn't happen.
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  You can't talk that way.
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  You can't focus on that.
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  Please repeat that.
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  Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna write that down.
• 14:25
  The, the foundation, I'm paraphrasing, so correct me.
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  The foundation of western empiricism.
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  Rationalism.
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  Rationalism.
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  Not empiricism, rationalism.
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  Rationalism.
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  Right.
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  I believe it when I see it type stuff.
• 14:42
  Sure.
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  Rationalism has its foundation.
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  What is roots in a series of mystical dreams.
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  Right.
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  Experienced by a man called Dick Art.
• 14:58
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  Leman was reading Kabbalah.
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  Newton was, was reading Kabbalah.
• 15:04
  Leitz, the guy invented calculus co-invented calculus.
• 15:08
  As I mentioned, Newton was knee deep in alchemy and biblical numerology.
• 15:12
  And so, and, and again, I'm not saying that that all of modernity
• 15:16
  is downstream of this stuff that I study called Western as a terrorism.
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  What I'm saying is, is that it, it's there, it played a role, it played
• 15:23
  an important role, and yet there's something about it that, that we can't
• 15:28
  term, we can't come to grips with.
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  We don't want to admit.
• 15:30
  It's there again, I was, I was told in graduate school, it
• 15:33
  just didn't happen that way.
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  And if you say that it happened that way, they're, they're, you're going to, like,
• 15:39
  you're gonna scuttle your entire career.
• 15:41
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 15:42
  Yeah.
• 15:42
  My, my step-grandfather was a professor of philosophy at Boston University, and
• 15:48
  he was the first to say you that, that you just have to tow a line, and if you
• 15:56
  don't tow that line, you won't get a job.
• 15:57
  Yep.
• 15:58
  Rupert Isaacson: And I, I think that's true of actually most of academia.
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  It's true of all of academia.
• 16:01
  Yeah.
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  Justin Sledge: But it's, especially somehow, and again, I came up through
• 16:06
  the philosophical ranks, you know, I was, you know, I, I remember finding
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  Aristotle when I was in middle school and really, like, remember
• 16:13
  reading an a, you know, an Aristotle.
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  That philosophy begins in awe.
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  And I didn't come from a middle class family.
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  I came from a working class family.
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  And
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  Rupert Isaacson: I, philosophy begins in, or you can't just say these
• 16:23
  things, Justin, and not like pause for like a power cord, but hold on.
• 16:27
  Philosophy begins, it
• 16:30
  Justin Sledge: begins in awe.
• 16:31
  A bewilderment is even a better, a better translation.
• 16:33
  I,
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  Rupert Isaacson: all right.
• 16:35
  Okay.
• 16:36
  Philosophy began
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  Justin Sledge: and, and that stuff stuck with me.
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  And when I got into the academic side of, of philosophy, I found that
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  it, it, it in some way, in some ways had betrayed so much of the things
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  that led me to it to begin with.
• 16:49
  Mm-hmm.
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  And I, I really gristle with it.
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  I did.
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  I never, I, I found that my philosophical training in graduate
• 16:54
  school was very unpleasant.
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  I often bucked against things.
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  I, I asked questions that were apparently inappropriate.
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  I was told, yeah, tell the line, tell the story.
• 17:04
  You know, modernity begins with Descartes and it begins with doubt.
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  And we doubt our way to the truth.
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  And therefore, what really matters is doubt.
• 17:10
  And the most important things you doubt is God and religion.
• 17:13
  Right.
• 17:14
  And, and then I was like, that's not what de Hart's arguing.
• 17:17
  And that's not why ta hart's arguing that like Descartes structures the meditations
• 17:22
  in order to prove God, to get certainty.
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  And he structured them around a, a cycle of meditations that are religious
• 17:30
  in character and for six days, because that's how long God made the world.
• 17:35
  And you rest on the seventh,
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  the story you're telling is just ipso facto like you, like
• 17:43
  you, you, you have, you have a mythology that you want to tell.
• 17:46
  Right about modernity.
• 17:48
  And I'm not saying that one earth is better than the other, but I'm saying
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  you can't pretend to be the purveyors of truth and philosophical wisdom and
• 17:59
  also be part of this semi-conscious myth building that that you're contributing to
• 18:08
  at this at one level, but telling yourself that it's really true on the other.
• 18:12
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 18:12
  I think what you're putting your finger on is that one can't say,
• 18:16
  given that everything is myth, we create mythologies about everything.
• 18:18
  Right?
• 18:19
  So as you said, your, your professors there we're creating mythologies about
• 18:23
  which were dogmas, which, which is just another word for mythology, right?
• 18:26
  Just means a mythology that I, I might punish you for not believing, but doing
• 18:32
  that in reaction to another mythology, IEA religion or something, and saying,
• 18:36
  well, our mythology is the mythology that mythology is not the mythology.
• 18:40
  Right.
• 18:40
  You know?
• 18:41
  But it's all actually a mythology, you know?
• 18:43
  And at some point it's got to be all right to say if it's all mythology,
• 18:49
  what isn't that kind of interesting.
• 18:51
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 18:51
  And I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say it's all mythology.
• 18:54
  I would say that, that I.
• 18:57
  And I'm, I'm, I'm a child of the Enlightenment.
• 18:59
  I'm pretty convinced that there is a, there is a, a, a better way of
• 19:03
  telling the, the history of philosophy.
• 19:05
  And that's part of why I'm committed to doing what I'm doing.
• 19:07
  It's not because I believe in any of the things I talk about.
• 19:10
  I'm not a believer in, as a tism, I'm a believer in OC Cultism.
• 19:14
  I don't believe, you know, metaphysically I'm not committed to any of it.
• 19:18
  But what I'm committed to is telling the history, telling our history better
• 19:22
  so that we can live in a better future.
• 19:24
  Because the more that we live in this sort of the semi formed semi-conscious
• 19:29
  mythology, I don't think that's good, a good predictor for building
• 19:34
  a good future because we haven't come to terms with our own past yet.
• 19:37
  And so,
• 19:38
  Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
• 19:39
  Justin Sledge: And so for me, it's just holding up a, a mirror to say
• 19:42
  this is part of the, the past and it's part of the present and it's
• 19:47
  gonna be part of the future, frankly.
• 19:49
  And until we come to terms with it and stop telling ourselves that rationalism
• 19:53
  was born out of a hatred of the church and a hatred of religion, and we
• 19:58
  rejected superstition for the clarity of science, that just didn't happen.
• 20:03
  It just simply did not happen that way.
• 20:05
  And the more we continued, the more we continued to tell that story and not
• 20:10
  admit to us that it is in fact a story.
• 20:13
  We need to have a more nuanced view of this stuff.
• 20:15
  And I, that's my goal is to say, it doesn't matter whether you believe in.
• 20:21
  Whether Descartes doesn't really matter whether or not you believe that
• 20:24
  there a divine being came to Descartes and really told him the truth about
• 20:29
  history, philosophy, science, or whatever, what matters is that happened.
• 20:32
  He believed it happened,
• 20:34
  Rupert Isaacson: right?
• 20:36
  So, and I've got questions and we need to
• 20:36
  Justin Sledge: wrestle with that, come to terms with it, right?
• 20:38
  Rupert Isaacson: So I've got some questions about that.
• 20:40
  But quickly before we go there, one of the things I love about what you've done
• 20:43
  is you've then traced those mythologies.
• 20:46
  So in your YouTube series, which I just can't recommend listeners to you
• 20:52
  to listen enough, just while you're driving around, just listen to them.
• 20:54
  They're brilliant.
• 20:55
  But you, you more or less start it, you know, as far early as
• 20:59
  you can in Mesopotamia more, I, I haven't found one earlier than that.
• 21:04
  If you have done one about earlier than that, then I dunno.
• 21:07
  And then you, you, you trace through all of the different Mesopotamian,
• 21:13
  historical belief, philosophical systems.
• 21:16
  'cause there were many.
• 21:17
  And then so Sumaria, Acadia, Babylonian, I'm missing one, you know,
• 21:22
  hit heights, medians, blah, blah.
• 21:24
  And then you get to, you, you take us through Egypt in many,
• 21:28
  it's many, many permutations.
• 21:30
  You take us through Greece in its many, many permutations.
• 21:32
  You take us through Hellenic Greek, Egypt in its many permutations.
• 21:38
  You take us through Roman into early Christian stuff, and then
• 21:41
  you take us through pretty much up to, well, the enlightenment.
• 21:50
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 21:50
  Basically the, my, the minute of the channel ends sometime in
• 21:53
  the 18th century, 1750, which is
• 21:54
  Rupert Isaacson: about a 6,000 year timeline.
• 21:56
  Right.
• 21:56
  It's, it's, it's, it's a solid chunk of, and it's where we all come from.
• 22:01
  You were the son of a pipe fitter in Mississippi, but Mississippi,
• 22:05
  as we also know, is actually quite a deeply spiritual place.
• 22:08
  Mm-hmm.
• 22:08
  Both from the black point of view, African American point of view,
• 22:11
  and from the white point of view.
• 22:13
  Were, was your family a religious family?
• 22:16
  Were, were you Southern Baptist, were you taking up rattlesnakes and things, or were
• 22:20
  you, you know, going to ecstatic services?
• 22:23
  Or were you actually born into a pretty secular household?
• 22:27
  Justin Sledge: I was born into sort of a, my, my father is a, a a bit of a
• 22:30
  pessimistic man, so I think that his view of religion was always relatively gloomy.
• 22:35
  So I don't think he was terribly ever religious.
• 22:37
  And I think that my family, I wouldn't describe them as being very religious
• 22:40
  Rupert Isaacson: because there's pressure on you to be religious in, in the south.
• 22:45
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 22:46
  Rupert Isaacson: South is strange.
• 22:46
  I lived in the south.
• 22:47
  There's some pressure.
• 22:48
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 22:48
  The south is a weird place where there's a pressure to conform and there's a pressure
• 22:52
  to be religious, but deep into the south, there's also a cynicism about things.
• 22:57
  Okay.
• 22:57
  Southern attitudes, you know, yeah.
• 23:00
  There, there's sort of a credulity to cynicism, you know, circuit that,
• 23:05
  that runs around a pendulum almost.
• 23:07
  Yeah.
• 23:08
  And and you can see this and you know, again, I mentioned Faulkner, you read the
• 23:11
  sound on the Fury and they're religious, but also they're like, no, there's no God.
• 23:15
  Come on.
• 23:15
  Yeah.
• 23:15
  And so, but it was a strange journey because my biological
• 23:19
  father died when I was quite young.
• 23:21
  And my mother was kind of held on to some aspects of, of him and was like, look,
• 23:27
  you know, just so you know, like your, your dad was Jewish and if that's a thing
• 23:31
  you're interested in, you know, I called the local rabbi and he set up a meeting
• 23:34
  and he's happy to talk to you about it.
• 23:36
  They allowed you in Mississippi.
• 23:37
  Sorry, I didn't have, sorry.
• 23:38
  I'm kidding.
• 23:39
  Yeah.
• 23:39
  There, there, there are 200 families.
• 23:41
  And in fact, you know, the Jew Southern Jews are a strange breed.
• 23:46
  All, all their own, you know, they, they, the, they were one of the largest chunks
• 23:49
  of people to fight for the Confederacy.
• 23:51
  And interesting.
• 23:52
  And happily will, some of them will happily tell you that the only Jewish
• 23:56
  person to ever occur on Amer on, on money in this hemisphere where
• 24:00
  we are was Judah p Benjamin, the Secretary of State for the Confederacy.
• 24:04
  Interesting.
• 24:06
  Rupert Isaacson: I myself am half Ashkenazi.
• 24:08
  Oh, really?
• 24:08
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:09
  Wrong.
• 24:10
  The wrong kind.
• 24:11
  That's why I can make all the Jewish jokes.
• 24:12
  So it's my dad which means I get all the anxiety, neurosis, and guilt.
• 24:16
  But no cigar?
• 24:17
  No, no.
• 24:18
  For the club.
• 24:20
  Justin Sledge: I mean, you could, you could, you could fix that.
• 24:21
  You could have both.
• 24:22
  But I guess if, if you were inclined, but but no, it was, you know, I was like 12.
• 24:27
  My mom was like, you're gonna go meet with the synagogue.
• 24:29
  I remember it was like a rainy cold Tuesday night.
• 24:32
  Mm-hmm.
• 24:33
  And met with the, you know, Jimmy golfer, rabbi by Jimmy
• 24:35
  Golfer was a big imposing guy.
• 24:37
  And he was, was sort of stare at you until you said something.
• 24:40
  And he was like, why are you here?
• 24:43
  And I'm like, I have no idea why I'm here.
• 24:45
  Like, you know, good answer.
• 24:46
  And it was and he was like, well, what do you want from being here?
• 24:49
  And I'm like, I don't know.
• 24:50
  What is this?
• 24:51
  And it, it was a sort of an interesting journey.
• 24:54
  How old are you at that point?
• 24:55
  Like 12.
• 24:56
  Okay.
• 24:57
  And yeah, that resulted in, you know, learning Hebrew, going,
• 25:01
  starting going to synagogue.
• 25:02
  And I think much of my parents' horror I became religious, although
• 25:07
  in a, a strange way and remain religious in a very strange way.
• 25:09
  I'm married to a rabbi.
• 25:11
  I would consider myself pretty religious.
• 25:13
  In, in, in many ways.
• 25:15
  But well,
• 25:16
  Rupert Isaacson: given that you just said that you don't necessarily buy
• 25:19
  all of the philosophical occult, mythological and religious things that
• 25:25
  you cover in your, episodes, and I think people could sometimes be misled into
• 25:30
  feeling that you do, because I think you, you, one of your great traits
• 25:34
  is that you can empathize with the people who are presenting these things.
• 25:40
  So it can sound sometimes like, oh, well, Dr.
• 25:42
  Sledge must be a, you know, a capitalist, or he must be a believer in witchcraft,
• 25:47
  or he must be because the way you present it, it's very immediate and real.
• 25:51
  So as skeptical then as, or as, as dispassionate as you are with ghosts
• 25:58
  and demons and things how does that marry up to being religious, not just
• 26:03
  spiritual, but actually religious?
• 26:05
  How does religiosity come into that?
• 26:08
  Justin Sledge: For me, religion is how we navigate the world through
• 26:12
  the, in the way that we produce, meaning through systems of symbols.
• 26:17
  And I think that those systems of symbols they, they make
• 26:21
  the world make sense to us.
• 26:22
  They provide meaning, they provide structures like community.
• 26:25
  They provide rituals and, and these kinds of mechanisms that I think
• 26:29
  basically everyone has or everyone needs whether, whether they know it or not.
• 26:34
  And to me, I am
• 26:38
  what's the right way of putting it?
• 26:39
  I can take my mythology very seriously without taking any of it literally.
• 26:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 26:45
  So what you're, am I right in saying that what you are saying is that
• 26:50
  this is a mythology that has a.
• 26:55
  Way of making sense of the world that you find helpful.
• 26:59
  Mm-hmm.
• 27:00
  Rupert Isaacson: But you are not necessarily saying that every
• 27:04
  word of, as you point out, that library of books, which we've come
• 27:08
  to call the Torah or the Bible is necessarily a sacred text by which
• 27:15
  you must live your life or be damned.
• 27:18
  Justin Sledge: Or that it even contains historical facts.
• 27:21
  Yeah.
• 27:21
  That I don't know that the exodus happened.
• 27:22
  I don't know that Moses was really a real person.
• 27:24
  I don't think Abraham was really a real person.
• 27:26
  You know, I, these are the kind of questions where someone's like, well,
• 27:29
  do you, if you don't believe that Moses really was a real person and
• 27:31
  really went up on mountain and really got rules, then why follow the rules?
• 27:35
  I'm like, because it's the following of the rules that builds
• 27:38
  the meaning, not the not well.
• 27:41
  Why
• 27:41
  Rupert Isaacson: those rules and why not other rules,
• 27:44
  Justin Sledge: I guess.
• 27:44
  'cause I, those other rules don't make any sense to me and they're foreign to me.
• 27:48
  Mm-hmm.
• 27:49
  And that doesn't make them bad.
• 27:51
  It just makes 'em not the rules that are compelling to me, but, right.
• 27:53
  Rupert Isaacson: For example, Buddhism, you know, classic common sense.
• 27:56
  You know, don't be a dick basically.
• 28:00
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 28:01
  Rupert Isaacson: Why not that?
• 28:02
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I guess I, I find that I don't like sitting
• 28:04
  around a lot, a lot being quiet.
• 28:08
  Like I don't find enlightenment to be, you know.
• 28:12
  Yeah, it just seems like a lot of work for something I'm not very interested in.
• 28:15
  I know that sounds very flippant, but if, if someone, if I had to, if
• 28:19
  I have to sit down for an hour a day being quiet but the Buddhism doesn't
• 28:23
  Rupert Isaacson: tell you you have to do that.
• 28:24
  I mean Yeah.
• 28:25
  Or just, or, or the Don't be a dick.
• 28:28
  And don't be a dick in the way that suits you best.
• 28:31
  Yeah.
• 28:31
  If you want to meditate, then by all means meditate, but you don't have to.
• 28:35
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 28:35
  I mean, in that sense that I'm like, yeah, I guess I don't speak poly.
• 28:38
  I don't live in a culture that operates in poly.
• 28:40
  I don't believe in reincarnation.
• 28:42
  Reincarnation strike me as a terribly inter karma does, strikes
• 28:44
  me as a horrifying belief system.
• 28:46
  Right.
• 28:47
  Yeah.
• 28:47
  So it's, it's the system of rules that makes the most sense to me.
• 28:50
  Got it.
• 28:50
  And also it's because they're, they're diaphanous.
• 28:54
  I don't even notice them as rules.
• 28:56
  They're just the way that I live my life.
• 28:58
  Right.
• 28:59
  Rupert Isaacson: And I think you also, you know, pointed out that culturally, you
• 29:03
  know, what you are looking at is western.
• 29:05
  Right.
• 29:05
  Esotericism, we can include Judaism in that, you know, because even though it's
• 29:10
  confusing, because Judaism and Mesopotamia and all that places, we think of it as
• 29:15
  the Middle East, but really it's what engenders Western are, Western culture
• 29:21
  comes outta that because the Greeks and the Romans borrow it, basically Nick it.
• 29:25
  Right.
• 29:25
  Basically.
• 29:26
  Or our products of it.
• 29:28
  So in a funny way, we're all Middle Eastern without knowing it.
• 29:31
  Yeah.
• 29:32
  To some degree.
• 29:32
  To some degree.
• 29:33
  But
• 29:34
  Justin Sledge: yeah, it's a thing where, you know, I, I, I.
• 29:38
  Same with, you know, Christianity seems like a, a often a very, for like, in
• 29:41
  many ways I was just in Egypt and Islam seems like a much closer religion to me,
• 29:47
  for instance, I could easily imagine.
• 29:49
  And I have like, I could pray in a mosque.
• 29:51
  That is, that's the kind of thing that makes them very easy sense to me.
• 29:55
  It's a very like, transparent how that would work.
• 29:57
  Churches seem very foreign places to me when I go inside of a, a
• 30:00
  Coptic Orthodox church or you know, a know sort of Catholic church.
• 30:04
  I'm like, it was funny 'cause I had a friend of mine who she switched from being
• 30:09
  Catholic to being pagan sort of spirit.
• 30:11
  Nah, same thing.
• 30:12
  Yeah, yeah.
• 30:13
  Spirit sort of, you know, so you kind, and that was my opinion.
• 30:15
  I was like, oh, that's, there's, they're basically the same.
• 30:18
  I, I tend to look at Catholicism and Paganism as being very similar,
• 30:23
  like, and with all their saints and all these rituals and all these like
• 30:27
  lighting candles and you know, the, these like, it's the incense and stuff.
• 30:31
  I'm like, those look very similar to me.
• 30:32
  And she was horrified, but because for her, she had abandoned something
• 30:37
  as a rebellion against it and transferred to something else that she
• 30:40
  thought was completely the opposite.
• 30:42
  And it was something very shocking to her dear.
• 30:43
  Someone say, you know, and for, and it's funny 'cause I was talking to my, one
• 30:46
  of my Muslim tour guides when we were in Egypt and we also were, we shared
• 30:51
  in common the fact that, that we didn't understand, you know, it was like a very.
• 30:55
  It was a very that the, that the, that the churches were very foreign to us.
• 31:00
  And it's funny that we couldn't be more different in terms of our geographical
• 31:04
  history, our language history, but mythologically we were closer in the way
• 31:09
  that we made sense of the world than we were, you know, to the Catholic cathedral
• 31:14
  that's literally in my neighborhood.
• 31:15
  Rupert Isaacson: And it's interesting to me when you say that, because I had this
• 31:19
  weird upbringing where I was listening this morning while I was picking my
• 31:23
  horse's poo to your one of your and I was actually a coer at the temple in London.
• 31:29
  So that's the second oldest building in London.
• 31:32
  It's now the seat of law, you know, the judges and the barristers.
• 31:36
  It's their church.
• 31:38
  And the school I went to provided the choir boys either for that church
• 31:42
  or the Chapel Royal, which was the, at that point, the Queen's chapel.
• 31:47
  Now the kings.
• 31:48
  And you would be drafted into one or the other.
• 31:50
  And interestingly, you know, you, you are there.
• 31:54
  I, I'm not baptized, I'm not circumcised.
• 31:57
  I'm neither Jewish nor Christian.
• 32:00
  And some of the other boys in the choir were like Muslims and Hindus.
• 32:02
  We were just picked for our voices.
• 32:05
  But it was very, very clear that you were in this kind of seat of power.
• 32:08
  And there are the effigies of all the Marshall family or the
• 32:11
  English Knights Temple lying there.
• 32:13
  There's a copy of Magna Carta, but they don't talk to you about any of that.
• 32:17
  But the ritual of it, the high Anglican ritual, which is effectively Catholic,
• 32:22
  you know, while being Protestant, I don't see much difference between
• 32:27
  that and a synagogue, honestly.
• 32:31
  And perhaps that's because I had this perspective of being Colonial
• 32:34
  African, even though we grew.
• 32:36
  So I worked a lot with these people behind me in their systems of the
• 32:41
  hunter gatherer shamanic traditions, and which is effectively very similar
• 32:47
  to mysticism within any religion really.
• 32:51
  So I don't see a lot of difference in any organized religion.
• 32:56
  I, I lived in India for a bit too, and I, I remember going into temples,
• 33:00
  but effectively chanting in these particular tones and big resonant stone
• 33:07
  buildings and chaps wondering about telling you what to do and what not to do.
• 33:11
  And with a sort of slight air of you'll be in trouble if you don't type thing.
• 33:15
  And this idea of, you know, punishment and reward.
• 33:18
  And that's not, for example, in the hunter gatherer sense,
• 33:22
  that's just not even there.
• 33:24
  And, but there is divinity.
• 33:27
  And there are ancestors and there are,
• 33:31
  there is the divine, but not in a sort of an organized way, which not,
• 33:36
  and also not in a way that you have to, you don't have to be reverent.
• 33:39
  So let's say for example, there is a healing going on.
• 33:44
  It usually comes out with healing and the healer is there going into
• 33:47
  an alter state of consciousness and you'll see them bleeding and pulling
• 33:51
  stuff out of people and it's like, whoa, I'm actually seeing that.
• 33:55
  But right next to 'em, there's a bloke smoking a cigarette, like flirting with
• 33:59
  a girl and there's kids just running about, and no one is supposed to be
• 34:04
  approaching it with a sense of reverence.
• 34:07
  Yet at the same time, there is awe this much greater thing that,
• 34:15
  and presumably given that we all sort of come from that and then we found
• 34:20
  all these ways of expressing it.
• 34:23
  But what we're really are or are we not, I shouldn't say what
• 34:27
  we're already doing 'cause that's a really misled thing to say,
• 34:32
  are we not just all talking about love?
• 34:36
  Justin Sledge: I don't know.
• 34:37
  I mean, I, I I, I guess there's two things that, that I would think is that I
• 34:40
  would be slow to compare hunter gatherer.
• 34:45
  Religion today with what we may have come from, because I don't know
• 34:48
  that we know, you know, in lieu of texts, we don't really know what
• 34:53
  they, what they were doing in, you know, a hundred thousand years ago.
• 34:56
  So I'm, I'm, I'm slow to extrapolate from the present too far back into the past.
• 35:03
  And then I think that that religion,
• 35:08
  when I look at, I'll give an example.
• 35:10
  For instance, ancient Israelite religion.
• 35:11
  There's not much love there that is a god of, that is a tribal God
• 35:15
  who's there we're talking about.
• 35:16
  Rupert Isaacson: And lil more or less aren't, we we're talking about a, that's
• 35:19
  the first bloke coming along with a big beard who's gonna slap you on the
• 35:22
  bottom for being a naughty boy, right?
• 35:24
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 35:24
  I mean, in Lil Yahweh Indra.
• 35:26
  Yeah.
• 35:26
  You know, I think that once you get once you get territorial,
• 35:31
  once you get city states, yeah.
• 35:32
  The gods start to look a lot like the people ruling those city states.
• 35:35
  Yeah, exactly.
• 35:35
  And so, you know, and I think that underneath it all is
• 35:40
  there is no underneath at all.
• 35:41
  It, it depends on the material, historical circumstances upon
• 35:46
  which rests these religious
• 35:48
  Rupert Isaacson: expressions.
• 35:49
  Justin Sledge: And I think, but, but there is, is
• 35:50
  Rupert Isaacson: is there not a mystical thread that runs through
• 35:53
  most religions where people seem to be able to find common ground?
• 35:58
  I don't think so.
• 36:00
  Or you don't think so?
• 36:01
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 36:01
  I'm, I'm, I, I am notoriously a, a, a non perennial.
• 36:05
  I'm this is a, a notorious fact about me in the religious studies world
• 36:09
  is that m many people who come to Western as a tism or as a tism and
• 36:13
  mysticism typically come at it from the point of view of perennialism.
• 36:16
  What
• 36:16
  Rupert Isaacson: does perennialism
• 36:17
  Justin Sledge: mean?
• 36:18
  And so it says that at the core of religion is sort of a mystical center,
• 36:22
  and that at, and then, then that at that mystical center religions grow out
• 36:27
  of that mystical center and therefore Judaism is an expression of it.
• 36:31
  You know, shamanism, all the different religions are somehow grow out of that
• 36:35
  core mystical that core mysticism.
• 36:38
  And so this is a position held by people like ETA and Yung and William
• 36:43
  James and sort of classic peral list.
• 36:45
  I tend to come from the traditionalist camp which is very unpopular
• 36:49
  for both the right and the left.
• 36:50
  Don't like traditionalism.
• 36:51
  Well, if you're
• 36:52
  Rupert Isaacson: pissing off both sides, it's usually means
• 36:53
  you're onto something good.
• 36:54
  Justin Sledge: Maybe, maybe.
• 36:56
  Or are you just gonna get yourself in a lot of trouble?
• 36:58
  But I'm of the camp traditional typically that says that there, that there
• 37:02
  is no core, that when you study the religions closely enough, they're much
• 37:07
  more different than they are the same.
• 37:09
  And that, that if there is a universal, it can only be known through the
• 37:15
  particular and therefore only individual.
• 37:20
  Traditions exist.
• 37:21
  And those are hyper-local, hyper-specific, and often are more marked by their
• 37:26
  discontinuity than by their continuity.
• 37:29
  So, I'll, you know, the, for instance, a good example of this is we tend to
• 37:34
  think that there's a lot of continuity between Israelite religion and Judaism.
• 37:38
  But if you study the two, they couldn't be more discontinuous.
• 37:41
  They're extraordinarily different from each other.
• 37:44
  Now, of course there's connective tissue, the uniting them, but if you were to drop
• 37:48
  a modern orthodox Jew into the temple 2000 years ago, they would be as lost
• 37:53
  as anyone else as to what, what would be
• 37:55
  Rupert Isaacson: the major difference that they would see?
• 37:58
  Justin Sledge: They would be in a giant building, killing
• 37:59
  animals and burning things.
• 38:02
  And that would be the principle mechanism by which you would
• 38:05
  interact with your God is by killing, killing animals and burning stuff.
• 38:10
  Typically and you would not be, most of us would not be allowed into that building.
• 38:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay?
• 38:16
  There
• 38:16
  Justin Sledge: would be a distinct group of people allowed in, and you would
• 38:18
  not be, you would very statistically be unlikely to be one of them.
• 38:22
  Rupert Isaacson: So that would be the Jewish temple, right?
• 38:24
  About the time that the Romans go in there and destroy it, and the diaspora begins.
• 38:28
  Okay, let's go back a thousand years before that, what would the Jewish temple,
• 38:32
  what would the temple look like then?
• 38:34
  Lot
• 38:34
  Justin Sledge: smaller, but similar.
• 38:36
  It's still mostly a, a priesthood run by very small, basically a family.
• 38:41
  And then there would be a, a, a monarch and that monarch would be in relationship
• 38:46
  to that priesthood, somehow often married into it or part of that family.
• 38:50
  And yeah, there would be a series of pilgrimage festivals in which people
• 38:53
  would be expected to come to that temple.
• 38:54
  And it would be, again, mostly slaughtering animals and burning things.
• 38:58
  And since
• 38:59
  Rupert Isaacson: at that stage, if we're now 3000 years back mm-hmm.
• 39:04
  Would that, would that Jewish temple be a monotheistic or a polytheistic
• 39:08
  or probably polytheistic, right?
• 39:10
  Or that seems to make a big difference, right?
• 39:13
  Yeah,
• 39:13
  Justin Sledge: henotheistic probably, if you're thinking about sort of 1000
• 39:16
  BCE, it probably would've been the case that the Israelites would've
• 39:19
  worshiped their God as the best God, sort of like, my dad can beat up
• 39:23
  your dad, but your dad still exists.
• 39:25
  Okay.
• 39:26
  He's just not the dad.
• 39:26
  He's just not my dad.
• 39:28
  Rupert Isaacson: And in that temple, would we hedge our bets by sacrificing
• 39:31
  to your dad as well, just in case?
• 39:33
  'cause you never know type thing.
• 39:34
  Justin Sledge: Depends on the mon.
• 39:35
  Depends on the monarch.
• 39:36
  But yeah, in many cases it seems like the monarchs typically I'll give one
• 39:40
  example is that if you marry, if you married a woman from a local powerful
• 39:45
  nation like the Phoenician, then she's gonna bring along her gods and
• 39:48
  there's gonna be an expectation that.
• 39:50
  But would they be allowed
• 39:51
  Rupert Isaacson: in your temple or would they have to have their own temple?
• 39:53
  Justin Sledge: They'd probably be allowed in your temple.
• 39:54
  I mean, that's that, you know, we have evidence for that in the Hebrew Bible.
• 39:57
  Okay.
• 39:58
  And some of that, some, some people did not like that.
• 40:01
  So the prophets did not like that 'cause they were really on team, our dad,
• 40:05
  and they didn't think anyone else was.
• 40:06
  Dad should be in there.
• 40:07
  Mm-hmm.
• 40:07
  But but no, you, you would go back in time far enough and you would see
• 40:10
  that this God, Yahweh had a wife.
• 40:13
  Rupert Isaacson: As you know, if you followed any of my work, I'm
• 40:15
  an autism dad and we have a whole career before this podcast in helping
• 40:22
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• 40:27
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• 40:40
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• 40:42
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• 40:47
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• 40:50
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• 40:51
  And she told me what to do.
• 40:53
  And it's been working so amazingly for the last 20 years.
• 40:57
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• 41:02
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• 41:11
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• 41:16
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• 41:19
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• 41:22
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• 41:29
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• 41:32
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• 41:58
  live their best life, to live free, ride free, see what happens.
• 42:02
  Right.
• 42:02
  Well, that's what, that was my next question.
• 42:04
  So at what point does my dad become only my dad?
• 42:08
  And what about dad and mom and dad, mom, brother and his mates.
• 42:13
  Like, yeah.
• 42:13
  What point does Yahweh become a single thing?
• 42:18
  It's a huge debate.
• 42:19
  One of several things.
• 42:20
  Justin Sledge: A huge debate.
• 42:21
  Some scholars would say not until second and third sec.
• 42:24
  Second and third centuries of a common era.
• 42:26
  I tend to think it's a bit earlier than that.
• 42:28
  Yeah.
• 42:29
  Yeah.
• 42:29
  They, the evidence to
• 42:30
  Rupert Isaacson: support
• 42:31
  Justin Sledge: that.
• 42:32
  There's evidence to say that, that the, the Israelites continue to believe
• 42:36
  in deities, mostly sort of like sub deities in the sense of angels and Okay.
• 42:42
  And, and in entities being converted into sub.
• 42:45
  Rupert Isaacson: So do you think that those original multi gods, got
• 42:48
  subverted just became, okay, well we'll make those guys angels and demons.
• 42:52
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 42:52
  They got demoted into angels and demons.
• 42:54
  We certainly know that happened in, in Christianity.
• 42:56
  I tend to think that we see the first expressions of monotheism in Deutero
• 42:59
  Isaiah, so during the Babylonian exile.
• 43:02
  But give
• 43:02
  Rupert Isaacson: us a, a timeline
• 43:03
  Justin Sledge: on that.
• 43:04
  That would be what, so 5 86 is when the Babylonian exile begins.
• 43:07
  So I would say it's quite late.
• 43:09
  It sixth century, BCEI think we get Right.
• 43:11
  So it's
• 43:11
  Rupert Isaacson: contemporary with like Mythe and Greece and Homer and stuff.
• 43:15
  More or less, give or take a little, a little later
• 43:17
  Justin Sledge: actually.
• 43:18
  Yeah.
• 43:18
  Okay.
• 43:19
  Yeah, I think it's late.
• 43:20
  I it's much later than people think it is.
• 43:21
  Okay.
• 43:22
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 43:22
  Right.
• 43:22
  It's not how it's presented right at all.
• 43:24
  You know?
• 43:24
  So when Moses goes up the mountain, is he talking to Yahweh?
• 43:29
  Yahweh's brother?
• 43:29
  Yahweh's wife or Yahweh's mates?
• 43:31
  Justin Sledge: I mean, I think by then the Moses story is pretty late.
• 43:34
  And when is the Moses story?
• 43:36
  Well, it's set historically around thir 1500, 1300 BCE, but I think it was
• 43:41
  probably written closer to five 600 BCE.
• 43:44
  Right.
• 43:44
  So I think the story is, is a bit's really quite late.
• 43:47
  I think that there's memories of something that go back earlier,
• 43:49
  but I think the Moses story itself is, is relatively, relatively late
• 43:54
  Rupert Isaacson: because that's not much before, you know, your Socrates
• 43:59
  and Neo Platos start coming along.
• 44:01
  I mean, there's only about a hundred years in it.
• 44:03
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, it's, it's a, you know, this is the
• 44:05
  so-called axial age, right?
• 44:06
  Where Ezekiel and you know, Socrates and Parmenides and, you know,
• 44:13
  Confucius and all those guys were around and almost, you know, within
• 44:15
  a couple hundred years of each other
• 44:17
  Rupert Isaacson: It almost makes you wonder if they were meeting in
• 44:18
  some altered state of consciousness place elsewhere and saying, why
• 44:22
  don't we just come up with a bunch of stuff that sounds really the same
• 44:25
  and just out of everybody later,
• 44:28
  Justin Sledge: I think that they, I mean, I, I can't imagine
• 44:29
  they would've liked each other.
• 44:30
  I, I imagine that that Socrates and Confucius would not have seen eye to eye.
• 44:35
  I think his Socrates would've bothered Confucius to the ends of the earth.
• 44:38
  Why Ezekiel?
• 44:39
  Because I think the Confucius had a very clear idea about how the world should be
• 44:42
  structured after the warring state period.
• 44:44
  And I think Socrates had a very clear idea that no one had a clear idea of anything.
• 44:49
  And I think that Ezekiel would've hated them because he would've he'd
• 44:52
  have seen them as idolaters and, and, and he was really all about like
• 44:56
  reinstituting the power of his God.
• 44:58
  And quickly bringing back a third temple and ushering in some kind of
• 45:02
  apocalyptic renovation of the world.
• 45:04
  I don't think they'd have gotten along at all.
• 45:08
  Rupert Isaacson: Fascinating.
• 45:09
  Okay, so, let's go back to your discovery then of, of John d as your are.
• 45:14
  You, you we're in your teenage self.
• 45:16
  You are reading an Elizabethan, a cultist, who's also, as you say, a courtier, a
• 45:23
  spy, an ambassador, an advisor to Good Queen Bess, who is still to this day, one
• 45:28
  of our most successful British monarchs.
• 45:30
  She lays the foundations for the British Empire and the Bank of England
• 45:34
  and everything that followed our great greatest act of piracy that,
• 45:38
  you know, we still to some degree.
• 45:40
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I mean, it was John d that found, that
• 45:42
  coined the phrase British Empire.
• 45:44
  That's his phrase.
• 45:45
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 45:46
  So you have a guy who's fairly practical and savvy and can also navigate the
• 45:54
  inter Nissan conflict of a court like that and have some longevity there
• 46:00
  because it was easy to fall out of favor.
• 46:03
  Particularly if you're pretending to talk to the divine, because any, any mo
• 46:06
  Monarch worth their salt's gonna say, all right, well then, you know, gimme
• 46:10
  lots of goodies and if you can't come up with the goodies, then you know,
• 46:13
  things might not go so well for you.
• 46:15
  So what's he talking to Angels?
• 46:18
  And if he wasn't talking to Angels, why was he spending
• 46:21
  so much time saying he was.
• 46:24
  Justin Sledge: So he never talked to the angels directly, right?
• 46:26
  He always talked to them indirectly via his reer.
• 46:29
  A dude named Edward Kelly, right, who was a convicted conman.
• 46:32
  In fact, he had his ears cut off for for previous con jobs.
• 46:37
  And he even presented himself to Dee as a, under a false name, an alias.
• 46:40
  He called himself Edward, but Dee was not, was
• 46:42
  Rupert Isaacson: not a gullible man.
• 46:45
  Justin Sledge: He, I think he was a very gullible man.
• 46:46
  I think he was very smart.
• 46:47
  I've met lots of smart people who are also extremely gullible because the
• 46:51
  people tell them what they want to hear.
• 46:53
  And I think that Dee Dee had run up basically up against a wall and he
• 46:59
  admits as much, and he was on this quest for what he calls radical truths.
• 47:03
  And you know, he, he, he, I think he had grown exhausted with trying
• 47:07
  to find them the conventional way, which is to say, you know, using
• 47:11
  equipment and using reason to do it.
• 47:14
  And I think that for him, he wanted to short the circuit.
• 47:18
  And the way you shorten the circuit is go straight to the people that designed
• 47:21
  the whole world, and you go right back to God and you interact via the people that
• 47:26
  built the world, and that's the angels.
• 47:28
  Rupert Isaacson: And so, but this was a risky thing to do.
• 47:30
  I mean, okay, he wasn't in Spain or Rome, but previous to
• 47:36
  Elizabeth, you have Bloody Mary.
• 47:38
  She's burning everyone in sight.
• 47:41
  After Elizabeth, you've got King James comes in, he burns everyone in sight.
• 47:45
  It is dangerous to go around saying.
• 47:47
  You're doing this sort of thing.
• 47:48
  Justin Sledge: Oh, he didn't go around saying it.
• 47:49
  He kept it very quiet.
• 47:50
  Yeah.
• 47:51
  This was a very quiet thing.
• 47:52
  And, you know, he
• 47:52
  Rupert Isaacson: was, he was he telling Queen Bess that he was doing
• 47:55
  Justin Sledge: it?
• 47:56
  I don't know that he communicated to her.
• 47:59
  And also remember just a year after he starts this business of talking
• 48:03
  to Angels, he's on the continent for the next six years, and he's in the
• 48:07
  Holy Roman empire, basically under the protection of Rudolph ii, who himself
• 48:11
  was a very mercurial, strange guy.
• 48:15
  And so I think that there was a lot more latitude.
• 48:17
  Rupert Isaacson: He was an occultist.
• 48:18
  It's true.
• 48:19
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 48:19
  Yeah.
• 48:19
  And he was able to move around and, and the Inquisition did try
• 48:21
  to get him, they did invite him.
• 48:23
  Oh, they did.
• 48:23
  They did.
• 48:24
  And they knew that something was going on.
• 48:26
  But I mean, Dee was cautious.
• 48:28
  Edward Kelly was not cautious.
• 48:30
  He got them in a, a good bit of trouble.
• 48:32
  But I think that, I think also that Elizabeth needed Dee
• 48:38
  alive because he was useful.
• 48:40
  He was a, and I don't think she cared what he, the weird things he got up
• 48:43
  to at night, as long as he didn't make a big deal about it, because
• 48:46
  there was lots of people doing strange things and don't do it in the street
• 48:48
  Rupert Isaacson: and frighten the horses stuff.
• 48:49
  Yeah.
• 48:50
  Justin Sledge: Right.
• 48:51
  And I think even James, James knew that he was doing this stuff, and
• 48:54
  Dee publicly told James, well, put me on trial for witchcraft.
• 48:57
  I'll prove to you that I'm not doing anything bad.
• 49:00
  And James declined it, you know, and this is the days of the witch finder
• 49:03
  General and all that, you know?
• 49:05
  Yeah, yeah.
• 49:05
  Killed 200 women.
• 49:06
  James knew that killing Dee would be a bad look.
• 49:09
  And so basically we gave him a pension and, and let him alone.
• 49:13
  So, again, this is the kind of thing where we, we typically think
• 49:17
  of the witch, the period of the witch trials as being a no-no time
• 49:21
  for any kind of occult shenanigans.
• 49:24
  But there were lots of occultists at that time, publishing.
• 49:28
  I mean, Cornelius Agrippa published the three books of occult philosophy in 1533.
• 49:33
  You know, the Inquisition tried to intervene, but ultimately they were
• 49:36
  shut down by the local archbishop.
• 49:38
  The local archbishop shut them down.
• 49:40
  So the local Archbishop where in cologne in Germany, and, you know, that's the
• 49:45
  heart of the trials, which trials were, you know, horrifying in, in, in Germany.
• 49:50
  Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
• 49:50
  Where I'm sitting is in a village called Eden Hausen, which is next
• 49:55
  door to a town called Ich ine.
• 49:58
  And Ich INE has a tower called the Witches Tower.
• 50:00
  Mm-hmm.
• 50:01
  And outside they have a monument to all of the witches that were
• 50:05
  kept there before execution.
• 50:08
  All of the names, 'cause they're all in the Paris Regi parish Register.
• 50:12
  Yeah.
• 50:12
  Interestingly, about a third of them are men.
• 50:14
  Yeah.
• 50:14
  Yeah.
• 50:15
  Rupert Isaacson: And the hill, which we pass on the way to Itchin, which
• 50:18
  interestingly you also leave the Roman Empire and there's, you go through
• 50:21
  what's called the Lemus, which was, you probably know is the line of
• 50:25
  embankments that went from the mouth of the Rhine down to the Danube.
• 50:28
  You pass over that and there's a reconstructed Roman tower.
• 50:31
  And then very quickly on your right there's the hill
• 50:33
  where they killed them all.
• 50:34
  And then.
• 50:35
  Down the road in Bamberg.
• 50:37
  Yeah.
• 50:37
  They invented a special furnace where, 'cause they cut down so many,
• 50:40
  so much forest to, to, to burn so many people that they had to come
• 50:44
  up with a more efficient furnace to burn whole families at one time.
• 50:48
  That not run outta fire would crazy.
• 50:51
  So in that case, why could some people get away with it?
• 50:57
  Justin Sledge: Because they were wealthy, educated men and not poor people.
• 51:03
  And also because
• 51:04
  Rupert Isaacson: typically, but they did put to death wealthy, educated men if
• 51:07
  they, if it was politically expedient,
• 51:10
  Justin Sledge: often for political reasons and not for reasons of sorcery.
• 51:12
  It did happen.
• 51:13
  I mean, we do have people that were executed like Czech Oli, who
• 51:15
  was executed in the 14th century.
• 51:17
  But almost always, when you see an execution for sorcery, it's,
• 51:21
  it's, it's a precursor for some other kind of political move.
• 51:25
  It's a game of their own thing.
• 51:26
  Rupert Isaacson: Like with the temps, they're all Yeah.
• 51:28
  The temps, the debt.
• 51:30
  Right, right.
• 51:31
  Justin Sledge: The temps are, are executed because the, the king, you
• 51:33
  know, Philip ViiV is badly in debt.
• 51:36
  Yeah.
• 51:36
  To them.
• 51:37
  And so that's the best way of dealing with your creditors is.
• 51:39
  Killing them all.
• 51:40
  So, but in the cases, the witch trials, is that the, that the crime that you
• 51:44
  were accused of in the witch trials was a very specific crime called Maia.
• 51:49
  And this was a, what is now called by scholars, the elaborated theory
• 51:53
  of witchcraft, which meant that you signed a pact with the devil
• 51:56
  to wage a war against Christianity.
• 51:59
  And clearly John d is, is a Christian Agrippa was a Christian Bruno, not so much
• 52:05
  that that's what got him ultimately burned alive, although even then it was the case
• 52:09
  that he was a a, an ex priest who had, who had said things about the Trinity that
• 52:14
  were heretical and refused to recant them.
• 52:18
  But you'd be surprised how few educated Occultists were executed.
• 52:23
  Paracelsus never persecuted.
• 52:26
  I don't wanna say they had good lives, and they certainly had to be careful
• 52:29
  and they had to be on the move.
• 52:31
  But you know, Kelly also the guy literally talking to the angels, he, you know,
• 52:36
  he rats them out on several occasions.
• 52:38
  He tells the truth about what's going on.
• 52:40
  He ultimately dies jumping out of a prison cell.
• 52:43
  He's ultimately arrested for trying to, or ultimately arrested and put under
• 52:47
  house arrest so that he could do alchemy and tries to escape and ultimately
• 52:51
  breaks his leg badly and, and dies.
• 52:53
  So.
• 52:54
  Being an OC cultist in the 16th century wasn't the desonance that people thought
• 52:59
  that it is, but being a poor woman who curses a lot and on is on the out with her
• 53:03
  neighbors, that was probably a sentence
• 53:06
  Rupert Isaacson: if you were Kelly.
• 53:08
  And so you, you were reading the language of the angels there at and as a teenager
• 53:15
  and asking this question, well, hold on.
• 53:17
  This seems very, very structured.
• 53:19
  This seems very, very, this isn't some random thing.
• 53:23
  So was there any truth in it?
• 53:26
  What, and what I mean by that, do you think Kelly actually did think, was, was
• 53:29
  Kelly in an altered state of consciousness where he was somehow downloading
• 53:33
  some sort of information or it was bubbling into his perception somehow?
• 53:39
  Or do you think he actually sat down, said, I need to make up something pretty
• 53:43
  complex even though I'm not a linguist?
• 53:45
  You know, what, what, what was going on?
• 53:47
  I think it was
• 53:48
  Justin Sledge: both.
• 53:48
  I think that we have these sort of binary ways of thinking that either
• 53:53
  it was fraud or it was revelation.
• 53:55
  And I think that it's the mind can operate in both at once.
• 54:00
  Ululation Yeah.
• 54:01
  Fraudulent.
• 54:02
  I, I, I think it someone like Joseph Smith, right, who channeled
• 54:07
  the, the Book of Mormon people are like, oh, he's just a fraud.
• 54:10
  And I'm like, I don't think he's just a fraud.
• 54:11
  And, and this is the same way I think of Kelly.
• 54:14
  I think there's a way of thinking about what they're doing that
• 54:17
  is neither fraud nor revelation.
• 54:19
  I.
• 54:20
  And I do, I do think that Kelly was in an alter state of consciousness.
• 54:23
  I, I think there's good reason to believe that from the diaries, but do
• 54:27
  I think that he was talking to angels?
• 54:28
  I don't know.
• 54:29
  I just the data for that is inconclusive to me.
• 54:32
  What I will say is that while the language isn't random, it
• 54:38
  never betrays non-English syntax.
• 54:42
  It seems to derive words from languages that Kelly knew.
• 54:46
  The angels that Kelly speaks to make mistakes, both in arithmetic and in Latin.
• 54:51
  Dee has to correct their arithmetic and their Latin at times.
• 54:54
  The angels to strategically know things and not know things that
• 54:58
  Kelly knows and doesn't know.
• 55:00
  The angels seemed to plagiarize Agrippa at times.
• 55:03
  So when you get to reading them, and again, when I was 14 and 15 reading
• 55:07
  them, it was just bewildering because I had never, how good is my Latin?
• 55:12
  How much do I know about Cornelius Agrippa?
• 55:13
  How much do I know, really know about Alchemy?
• 55:16
  Now that I'm a bit older and, and a and a and I have read this
• 55:20
  material and I, you know, I know it.
• 55:21
  I'm like, hold on.
• 55:22
  The angels are making very conspicuous kinds of mistakes.
• 55:25
  Hmm.
• 55:26
  And they're the kind of mistakes that Kelly makes.
• 55:28
  And so again, am I gonna get into the business of saying
• 55:31
  they weren't talking to angels?
• 55:32
  Well, I can't say they weren't.
• 55:33
  'cause you can't prove a negative that's just philosophically not possible.
• 55:37
  But is it conspicuous that the Ian language doesn't have.
• 55:43
  Any non-English pH names, right?
• 55:47
  There are no glottal stops, you know, looking at the, the hunter gatherer
• 55:50
  in the background, there's no like, sounds like there's no clicks, right?
• 55:55
  And if, and if, if, you know, if I, if they were speaking a language and
• 55:57
  all of a sudden there was a sound that you hear only in Ulsa, that would
• 56:02
  be weird For an Englishman who had never been to, to the land of Bantu
• 56:06
  people to do that, or a glottal stop or a a, a voice pharyngeal fricative.
• 56:12
  Rupert Isaacson: W wouldn't, wouldn't somebody like Dee just say, oh, well,
• 56:14
  of course divine revelation comes, you know, in the form that the brain
• 56:18
  of the person, the mind of the person receiving it can best understand because
• 56:21
  God speaks all languages, blah, blah.
• 56:23
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, he could.
• 56:24
  I mean, then why just not do it in English?
• 56:25
  I mean, you know, when the Angel Gabriel tells the prophet Muhammad,
• 56:28
  I've given to you a ko, an Arabic Koran, so you can understand it.
• 56:31
  Well, that's pretty convenient.
• 56:32
  Fair enough.
• 56:33
  It been, it'd been, it'd been a thing.
• 56:34
  Well, if they'd have given him a Mayan Koran, that would've been impressive.
• 56:38
  You know?
• 56:39
  If, if, if, if Mohammed would've gotten the Quran and Mayan, I
• 56:42
  would convert to Islam immediately.
• 56:45
  Right.
• 56:45
  That would tell me something really weird had happened.
• 56:48
  But the Ian language you know,
• 56:50
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, I, I've, that's something that confuses me.
• 56:53
  Why Enoch?
• 56:53
  And it's got nothing to do with the book of Enoch, right?
• 56:55
  Justin Sledge: So it, it does and it doesn't so to be clear, Dean Kelly
• 56:59
  and the Angels never call it Ocion, that's a modern thing that we call it.
• 57:02
  They always refer to it as the celestial speech or the Adam iCal speech.
• 57:07
  So the reason why it's associated with Enoch is because Enoch wrote it down
• 57:11
  and allegedly wrote it down in a series of tablets, and those tablets were
• 57:14
  preserved and ultimately destroyed.
• 57:17
  And then the angels reve it.
• 57:19
  And so the last time anyone had access to it was Enoch.
• 57:23
  And so that's why it gets called in Noian.
• 57:25
  And do the angels
• 57:26
  Rupert Isaacson: say this to Kelly and Dee?
• 57:28
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 57:29
  I see.
• 57:30
  Yeah.
• 57:30
  And there, and there, there are, there are at least two Antiochian languages.
• 57:35
  In the text, there's the, the se there's a series of 49 by 49 grids that are
• 57:42
  filled with letters and numbers, which are said to be the kochia language.
• 57:45
  And then there's the system of calls, which are like Psalms.
• 57:49
  And those have glosses.
• 57:50
  And we, we, we have translations of those.
• 57:53
  And so we can know, we can see for instance, that the word earth in that
• 57:57
  text is Kas, C-H-A-O-S-G, which seems to be derivative of the Greek cows.
• 58:05
  But Okay.
• 58:05
  Rupert Isaacson: So let's, let's assume that people like these, these
• 58:10
  occultists were somewhere between.
• 58:14
  Credulous of their own experiences.
• 58:16
  Somewhere between altered state subconsciousness, somewhere between
• 58:21
  true seekers after truth, somewhere between con men when it suited
• 58:25
  them, and various points in between.
• 58:28
  And sort of created a, a cannon, if you like, of AOC cult philosophy that
• 58:36
  the Enoch thing talking about Mytho mythologies and canons of mythologies.
• 58:41
  So Enoch, the Book of Enoch.
• 58:43
  So again, for listeners that dunno about it, super interesting thing.
• 58:47
  Why?
• 58:47
  'cause it's a bloke going up to heaven and encountering
• 58:51
  effectively the celestial throne.
• 58:53
  And there's a bunch of, if I get this right, there's a bunch of
• 58:56
  angels or celestial beings arguing about whether we monkeys down here
• 59:01
  should be allowed to continue.
• 59:02
  And then there's, 'cause we're disruptive.
• 59:04
  And then there's a, a Satan, a Satan, not the Satan a judge, a prosecutor.
• 59:09
  So it seems to be what it means.
• 59:11
  And, but it seems that we get a reprieve somehow.
• 59:14
  And then Enoch comes back down and says, lads, you know, gotta pull our socks up.
• 59:20
  And then after he dies, he somehow he goes back up again and somehow
• 59:24
  becomes the angel Metatron later on.
• 59:29
  Mythologies.
• 59:30
  Now, as you know.
• 59:32
  I'm gonna use the Anki word.
• 59:35
  So one of, to my mind, one of the great fun mythologies that's come out of the
• 59:41
  more modern age is the whole ancient astronauts theory because it's enjoyable.
• 59:47
  And it also ties in with the ancient Sumerian old, older stuff that we know
• 59:54
  of written downy stuff saying, you know, we had these kings who lived
• 59:58
  for, you know, way, way longer than anyone possibly could because they
• 1:00:02
  sort of came from somewhere there.
• 1:00:03
  And that these gods actually were among us because they were
• 1:00:06
  actually from somewhere else.
• 1:00:07
  And they came down and they made us so that, you know, we could in various ways.
• 1:00:12
  And then you, later on you have someone like Zacharia Sitin coming along as,
• 1:00:17
  as Ajani or Armenian can't remember but saying, okay, I have translated
• 1:00:23
  these ancient Kune form things.
• 1:00:26
  And they say that, yes, this happened, and actually these old Gods Anky
• 1:00:31
  and lil and all of these things from Mesopotamia, these are actually aliens.
• 1:00:34
  And then they become mythologized later on.
• 1:00:36
  They bugger off somewhere around a thousand BC or so because they're, somehow
• 1:00:42
  the work here is done, but they leave us with a memory and we keep it going
• 1:00:46
  through the deities and blah, blah, blah.
• 1:00:48
  Well, maybe they're still around or maybe there's lizard people,
• 1:00:50
  or maybe there's, or maybe that.
• 1:00:53
  I'm always interested in this because people get very, have
• 1:00:56
  big emotional reactions to this.
• 1:00:57
  Like they either seem to go for full on credulity.
• 1:01:01
  Yes.
• 1:01:02
  It's ancient aliens.
• 1:01:03
  And part of me goes, well, honestly, why not?
• 1:01:05
  You know, if you've got an Atlantis and Lumia, but you've got Plato
• 1:01:11
  saying, yeah, there's this thing, there's this Atlantis thing.
• 1:01:13
  Is it allegory?
• 1:01:14
  I don't know, but they're talking about it.
• 1:01:16
  Or you know, it's the, the other way.
• 1:01:18
  No, you know, absolutely not.
• 1:01:20
  Blah, blah, blah.
• 1:01:21
  And the timeline is as we know it, and then they find places like
• 1:01:25
  Gobekli Tepi in Anatolia, which seems to be earlier than Sumeria, maybe.
• 1:01:30
  I don't know.
• 1:01:31
  People, people argue about it.
• 1:01:32
  People will continue to argue about it.
• 1:01:34
  Right.
• 1:01:34
  But isn't it in those arguments, in those mythologies that the fund lies
• 1:01:38
  or what do you think of all that?
• 1:01:41
  Justin Sledge: I don't know that, I don't know that the arguing about the
• 1:01:43
  ancient Illian stuff to me is very fun.
• 1:01:44
  I think it's a very I mean, it would be, it would be fun if, like
• 1:01:50
  Zacharia Chen's translations of these texts were at all reliable.
• 1:01:54
  Mm.
• 1:01:54
  And they're just not.
• 1:01:56
  So, I, I'm, I'm all about having academic fun when we're actually, you know, when
• 1:02:02
  we're all playing by the same rules.
• 1:02:03
  And if the rules are, I get to make up stuff and, and call it translations,
• 1:02:07
  and then we're not playing by the same rules anymore in the same way that,
• 1:02:10
  you know you can take the net down, but you can't call that tennis anymore.
• 1:02:14
  But you're doing something.
• 1:02:15
  And it might be fun, but it's not tennis.
• 1:02:18
  And so when the ancient alien folks want to take the net down,
• 1:02:22
  then I can just say, well, we're not playing the same game anymore.
• 1:02:25
  Mm.
• 1:02:25
  Justin Sledge: And therefore, to me it's not, it's not a fun conversation.
• 1:02:29
  Rupert Isaacson: But if we're, if we're looking at mythologies, what
• 1:02:32
  makes one mythology okay to look at and discuss, and another one not,
• 1:02:39
  Justin Sledge: I would say that they don't think that what
• 1:02:41
  they're doing is a mythology.
• 1:02:43
  They think that what they're doing is actually telling the
• 1:02:44
  history of, but I would say that,
• 1:02:46
  Rupert Isaacson: but that's not limited to the ancient alien people.
• 1:02:48
  Right.
• 1:02:48
  I mean, there's lots of people who believe mythologies that are questionable.
• 1:02:52
  Right,
• 1:02:53
  Justin Sledge: right, right.
• 1:02:53
  In the same way that I would, you know, if someone, if a Jewish person came to
• 1:02:56
  me and says, you have to believe that Moses went up on a mountain and got rules,
• 1:03:00
  literally that actually happened, I would say it's fun to play Dungeons and Dragons.
• 1:03:05
  It's another thing to think you're an elf.
• 1:03:09
  Can't I be an elf?
• 1:03:11
  You can think you are one and you, you can coplay and you can dress up as an elf.
• 1:03:14
  Exactly.
• 1:03:15
  But the moment you think that you really are an elf, you've crossed
• 1:03:17
  over into some kind of psychosis.
• 1:03:19
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, sure.
• 1:03:21
  Or state of consciousness.
• 1:03:22
  I mean, it's a fine line between, right, right.
• 1:03:24
  Justin Sledge: Well, I think that an state of consciousness
• 1:03:26
  is, is not a belief system.
• 1:03:28
  I think it's when you, when you, when you concretize, beliefs that are
• 1:03:33
  derivative of bad data and zacharia is a great example of just bad data.
• 1:03:39
  Then the, that becomes you're believing in, in, in a state of affairs that's
• 1:03:43
  contrary to what we know about what those uniform tablets actually say.
• 1:03:47
  And
• 1:03:48
  Rupert Isaacson: what do Thefor tablets actually say about
• 1:03:52
  Justin Sledge: Donna
• 1:03:53
  Rupert Isaacson: and stuff?
• 1:03:54
  Justin Sledge: Nothing that's not, but they do,
• 1:03:56
  Rupert Isaacson: do they, do they not say there was on the king list, for
• 1:04:00
  example, do they not say there were these chaps who lived impossibly long lives
• 1:04:05
  Yeah.
• 1:04:05
  Rupert Isaacson: In the mythological sort of way.
• 1:04:07
  And it was this king, this king, this king starts with sort of almost
• 1:04:10
  tens of thousands of years and then
• 1:04:12
  Right.
• 1:04:12
  Rupert Isaacson: Whittles down to thousands of years and whittles
• 1:04:14
  down to hundreds of years.
• 1:04:14
  And then there's us lot, you know, living normal lifespans.
• 1:04:21
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:04:21
  And is there not, is there not some stuff in the K form script saying
• 1:04:26
  we got knowledge from the gods or
• 1:04:31
  Justin Sledge: there at all?
• 1:04:31
  Right.
• 1:04:31
  Right.
• 1:04:32
  It's there in the sense that, you know, in lil and you know, the, that
• 1:04:35
  these other gods EA and stuff, they communicate with people, but that's
• 1:04:38
  just true of most religion, that the gods show up and teach people stuff.
• 1:04:42
  But this
• 1:04:43
  Rupert Isaacson: is the earliest religion that we know of.
• 1:04:44
  Right.
• 1:04:45
  Justin Sledge: I don't know if it's the early, it's the earliest written text
• 1:04:48
  of a religious religion that we know of.
• 1:04:49
  Right.
• 1:04:50
  It's, but I would say
• 1:04:51
  Rupert Isaacson: it's canon that we have access to.
• 1:04:52
  Right.
• 1:04:53
  Justin Sledge: You're right.
• 1:04:53
  But I would say that Goble, Tepi and Chat Holyoke are.
• 1:04:57
  They had religions.
• 1:04:57
  We don't know.
• 1:04:58
  It's hard to interpret what those sites mean.
• 1:05:00
  'cause they didn't, they didn't write things down.
• 1:05:03
  Sure.
• 1:05:03
  But mean Africans were having religious beliefs for 200,000 years prior to that.
• 1:05:07
  Indeed.
• 1:05:08
  You know, the, whatever the, whatever the strange animals they were
• 1:05:10
  painting in the caves of Las Co.
• 1:05:13
  Fairly confident that something like religion.
• 1:05:16
  So I would say it would be very slow.
• 1:05:17
  I mean, the Sumerians are the first people to write down things, but even the
• 1:05:22
  Sumerians don't agree with each other.
• 1:05:23
  Like from city, state to city state.
• 1:05:25
  They have disagreements about, about which gods are really the best gods and which
• 1:05:30
  ones are why the world got flooded or so if you even look at the, the Sumerian
• 1:05:35
  literature, we're not getting one story.
• 1:05:38
  Yeah.
• 1:05:38
  We're getting rival city states and their stories about why, you know, you know, why
• 1:05:45
  this happened as opposed to that happened.
• 1:05:47
  And because there's no, unlike in Egypt, there's no hegemon binding the city states
• 1:05:53
  of ancient Sumeria together until you get to Sargon and Sargon iss not Sumerian.
• 1:05:57
  He's Acadian.
• 1:05:59
  And so, what's the difference?
• 1:06:01
  The Sumerians were, because they're all people living in
• 1:06:04
  Rupert Isaacson: the same area, right?
• 1:06:05
  More or less.
• 1:06:05
  They're
• 1:06:05
  Justin Sledge: living in, they're living in somewhat the same area.
• 1:06:07
  The Sumerians are primarily living in Southern Mesopotamia.
• 1:06:10
  We don't know where they came from.
• 1:06:11
  They're very, they mean they're admittedly mysterious and their
• 1:06:14
  language isn't related to any other languages that we know of.
• 1:06:16
  The Acadians aliens, sorry.
• 1:06:20
  I mean, I mean that's, if you know that it could be, I mean, there's, but there's
• 1:06:23
  lots of languages, like their languages.
• 1:06:25
  Oh.
• 1:06:25
  You know, we have Basque and caucuses languages that are similar structurally
• 1:06:30
  to, to Sumerian and, and their tivity and, and stuff like that.
• 1:06:33
  Okay.
• 1:06:33
  Being a glu of languages and stuff.
• 1:06:35
  But, but okay.
• 1:06:35
  Rupert Isaacson: You, you've got these different people living in this area
• 1:06:39
  between these two rivers, not, you know, Tigris and Euphrates Right.
• 1:06:43
  Over some thousands of years making these city states and we don't know of anything
• 1:06:47
  before them that was that organized.
• 1:06:49
  Right.
• 1:06:51
  Justin Sledge: Well, we don't know of anything organized
• 1:06:52
  in terms of living in cities.
• 1:06:54
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:06:55
  And it, writing stuff down that we can recover and translate
• 1:06:59
  Justin Sledge: and read.
• 1:07:00
  I mean, yeah.
• 1:07:00
  We can't, we can't read the industry River valley script.
• 1:07:03
  And we can't, it doesn't seem like the people at Goble Tepi and Chateau
• 1:07:07
  Holyoke in those sites in Turkey wrote.
• 1:07:09
  And, and also we know why writing emerged in Sumer and
• 1:07:13
  the places that it did emerge.
• 1:07:15
  It was because they needed it for bureaucratic reasons.
• 1:07:17
  Rupert Isaacson: They had.
• 1:07:18
  Why did, why did the other people not need it for bureaucratic reasons, do you think?
• 1:07:21
  Why, why do you think Gobekli Tappi people didn't need a bureaucracy?
• 1:07:25
  'cause they were doing massively organized building projects and things.
• 1:07:29
  Justin Sledge: Well, I mean, that site's not that big.
• 1:07:31
  If you look at, you know, you look at it, if you're, you go to it and
• 1:07:34
  look at it and measure it, it's, it's monumental, but it's not very big.
• 1:07:38
  And so, you know, they, that building project would've taken.
• 1:07:42
  Some degree of central planning and organization, but nothing
• 1:07:45
  on the register of, or yeah.
• 1:07:48
  Where you have irrigation and, you know, elaborate agriculture and trade.
• 1:07:53
  You know, so those are orders of magnitude in terms of, of difference.
• 1:07:57
  In fact, to me the most impressive thing about go about Goble Tepi is
• 1:08:00
  not the fact that they build it, but the fact that they buried it.
• 1:08:03
  Why in the world go through all the trouble to build that thing then to
• 1:08:07
  use it for a while, then to bury it burying It must have been just as in
• 1:08:11
  many ways, just as Herculean use of resources and calories and building it.
• 1:08:17
  That to me is the more interesting thing about Go Lucky Tepy.
• 1:08:20
  But there
• 1:08:20
  Rupert Isaacson: is Did they bury it or was it buried?
• 1:08:23
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I don't think it was, I don't think it was buried on accident.
• 1:08:25
  I think that the, I think the data indicates that it was intentionally
• 1:08:29
  filled in, built, filled in.
• 1:08:30
  That's why it's so well preserved is because some, some people
• 1:08:34
  decide to fill in and that's weird.
• 1:08:35
  Can you just,
• 1:08:36
  Rupert Isaacson: for the people that dunno what Gobekli Tepi
• 1:08:38
  is, just give us a timeline.
• 1:08:39
  What's, what's go Beckley Tepi and why is it older and how much older
• 1:08:42
  is it than the Sumerian stuff?
• 1:08:43
  Justin Sledge: I think that the data on Go Tepi now is 10,000 BCE 12,000 BCE,
• 1:08:48
  Rupert Isaacson: right?
• 1:08:48
  I forget exactly on that.
• 1:08:49
  Basically it's as old behind Sumer as we are in front of it, more or less.
• 1:08:52
  Yeah.
• 1:08:53
  Yeah.
• 1:08:53
  And it's,
• 1:08:54
  Justin Sledge: it's, it's part of the, yeah, it seems to be part of the same
• 1:08:57
  culture that Chateau Holyoke and, and tho Jericho and those neolithic societies
• 1:09:02
  were part of some kind of trade systems.
• 1:09:05
  We don't know what go lucky Tempe was.
• 1:09:07
  It may have been a religious site, it may have been a site for trade.
• 1:09:10
  It may have been both.
• 1:09:10
  They may have come there for pilgrimages and then traded stuff like
• 1:09:13
  seeds and stuff, and then moved on.
• 1:09:15
  Agriculture, it seems like emerged in Anatolio through selective breeding of
• 1:09:20
  grass, and those grasses became grains.
• 1:09:23
  Rupert Isaacson: Did the grass domesticate us or did we domesticate the grass?
• 1:09:26
  That seems to be the,
• 1:09:28
  Justin Sledge: I mean, it seems like, I mean, at least in that area
• 1:09:30
  you know, that's where you get some primitive emmer and stuff like that.
• 1:09:33
  And so I think that it probably goes both ways.
• 1:09:35
  I think there's an accident that's involved.
• 1:09:36
  Also probably women did it.
• 1:09:38
  I mean, that's who's doing the gathering at that time.
• 1:09:40
  So I imagine that that breakthrough was pioneered by some lady
• 1:09:43
  scientist who's will be, whose name will be mysterious forever.
• 1:09:47
  She must have noticed, right, that the, this type of grass produces these
• 1:09:52
  type of seeds, and that if you plant these two together, they grow big and
• 1:09:57
  you have to manually knock them off.
• 1:09:58
  The, the wind doesn't knock them off.
• 1:10:00
  You have to manually knock them off.
• 1:10:01
  But they do fall off just by shaking them, and they kept breeding and breeding and
• 1:10:05
  breeding until eventually they get Yeah.
• 1:10:07
  Things like hammer.
• 1:10:08
  Rupert Isaacson: So, okay, let's, so Gobekli Tepi older
• 1:10:11
  than Sumera gets buried now.
• 1:10:15
  Let's go back to some myths.
• 1:10:16
  Flood myths.
• 1:10:17
  So we know everyone's got one.
• 1:10:19
  And they seem to pop up all in every corner of the planet, more or less.
• 1:10:23
  What's going on there?
• 1:10:24
  And do you believe in the younger dryers stuff?
• 1:10:27
  And again, for the listeners, I just give them a quick background.
• 1:10:30
  Yeah.
• 1:10:31
  Younger dryers being the last ice age, some people believed that there was some
• 1:10:36
  environmental cataclysm perhaps induced by stuff going on around our planet in
• 1:10:45
  one form or another that caused a big flood, big melting of ice caps and so on.
• 1:10:50
  And, but what we do know is there was some sort of flood and everyone
• 1:10:54
  seems to talk about it and it seems to affect everybody's worldview.
• 1:11:00
  What's going on with that do you think?
• 1:11:03
  Justin Sledge: I mean, I'm not, so I have to be, be careful.
• 1:11:05
  I'm not sure that every culture has a flood story.
• 1:11:07
  I mean, let's just
• 1:11:08
  Rupert Isaacson: say a lot of them do.
• 1:11:09
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, some do.
• 1:11:09
  And I, I can say that, I mean, I don't know if the ancient Chinese had
• 1:11:12
  a flood story or, you know, I think there are Chinese flood stories.
• 1:11:15
  Yeah, yeah,
• 1:11:16
  yeah.
• 1:11:16
  Justin Sledge: That I don't know.
• 1:11:17
  I mean, not being an expert in those mythologies, so I have to
• 1:11:19
  see, I'd be careful to say that the like the ancient Egyptians, I'm not
• 1:11:22
  sure had a, an a, a flood story.
• 1:11:24
  But I think the reason why the Mesopotamians had a flood story
• 1:11:28
  is because they had floods and they had very cataclysmic floods.
• 1:11:31
  If you compare the flooding of the Nile to the flooding of the tigers
• 1:11:34
  and the Euphrates, the flooding of the Nile was very predictable.
• 1:11:37
  And, in fact, some anthropologists even linked to the relatively positive
• 1:11:41
  outlook of the Egyptians both on the afterlife and on this life to
• 1:11:44
  the relatively stable society that you had in ancient Egypt where the
• 1:11:48
  floods came, they were predictable.
• 1:11:50
  It was hard to invade Egypt.
• 1:11:51
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:11:52
  That they had relatively, you know, not to say it didn't get invaded.
• 1:11:54
  It did get invaded.
• 1:11:55
  The hick invaded it and stuff, but even when they invaded, it didn't cause
• 1:11:59
  a huge amount of social disruption.
• 1:12:02
  And that's unlike Mesopotamia, which was the Nile, the Euphrates
• 1:12:06
  and the Tigris flood randomly, they flood catastrophically.
• 1:12:10
  Their cities are not built out of stone.
• 1:12:12
  They're built out of mud brick.
• 1:12:13
  And when the tigers and your Freddy flooded, it destroyed whole cities.
• 1:12:16
  I mean, you could wipe an entire city out in a day.
• 1:12:19
  Mm.
• 1:12:20
  And it, I mean, literally wipe them off the face of the earth.
• 1:12:22
  I mean, you take mud brick structures like a zig garrot and you have
• 1:12:25
  a category aro type of pyramid.
• 1:12:27
  Right.
• 1:12:27
  Kind of, kind of pyramid.
• 1:12:28
  Yeah.
• 1:12:28
  Step pyramid that's built a mud brick.
• 1:12:30
  That's nothing compared to, you know, a flood.
• 1:12:34
  And if you look at the literature of the Sumerians and the, the
• 1:12:37
  Acadians it's extremely pessimistic, very pessimistic literature.
• 1:12:41
  They have a very dower point of, you know, Dow or outlook on life.
• 1:12:45
  And I would say that the, the flood myth develops because they dealt
• 1:12:49
  with floods and they dealt with floods that ended their world.
• 1:12:53
  That is to say they had cities that were just wiped out and the, this became sort
• 1:12:57
  of a an archetypal story that they told.
• 1:13:01
  And when the Hebrew Bible, the writers of the Hebrew Bible they tended to
• 1:13:05
  look much more toward the mesopotamians for their cultic information,
• 1:13:10
  mostly because they were under the imperial thumb of those people.
• 1:13:14
  And they tended to copy them.
• 1:13:15
  And I think that's where we get the, the Noah story being copied.
• 1:13:20
  Not word for word by no means, but, you know, there's certainly enough
• 1:13:23
  similarities between the utna num AK story that we get in the Mesopotamia
• 1:13:28
  mythology to the, to the Noah story.
• 1:13:31
  But even the Noah story doesn't internally make sense.
• 1:13:35
  For instance, when, when God tells Noah to go put the animals on the ark one story
• 1:13:39
  has clearly you should take seven of the clean animals and two of the unclean.
• 1:13:44
  Well, how does Noah even know which ones are clean and unclean?
• 1:13:46
  That's not been disclosed since, that won't be disclosed until no Moses' day.
• 1:13:51
  And then a few lines later it says, oh, take two of every kind.
• 1:13:54
  And that's what we see in all the pictures of Noah's Ark is two of every kind.
• 1:13:58
  But the text seems to have two different versions of the story sitting side by
• 1:14:01
  side where there clearly was a, some version of it where Moses was gonna
• 1:14:06
  take a lot more animals with him.
• 1:14:08
  So, so yeah, I'm, I'm reticent to say that it is a, a worldwide.
• 1:14:14
  Ubiquitous flood story.
• 1:14:16
  I think there is a, there are mesopotamian flood stories of which
• 1:14:20
  some variant of that flood story does end up in the Hebrew Bible.
• 1:14:24
  Rupert Isaacson: Right?
• 1:14:25
  I mean, there are definitely flood stories, mythologically,
• 1:14:30
  far East, central America, Africa, that they definitely exist.
• 1:14:35
  Yeah.
• 1:14:36
  Rupert Isaacson: You know, these are open questions that are
• 1:14:38
  just, I think, fun to discuss.
• 1:14:41
  Right.
• 1:14:41
  Justin Sledge: And without me knowing more about those flood stories, it's hard for
• 1:14:44
  Rupert Isaacson: me to, to weigh in.
• 1:14:45
  I think your point about the flooding of the rivers is, is, is a very good one.
• 1:14:49
  Okay, so let's go to another myth, Atlantis.
• 1:14:51
  So you've got Plato saying, my ancestor Solon went to Egypt, and some lads
• 1:14:58
  there in a temple said, listen here, Solon, there was this thing called
• 1:15:03
  Atlantis and it was this and it was that.
• 1:15:06
  And then it disappeared in a great cataclysm.
• 1:15:09
  And then Plato, of course, you know, bequeaths the myth to us.
• 1:15:14
  And it goes on and becomes all the things that it's become.
• 1:15:18
  Justin Sledge: What are your thoughts?
• 1:15:19
  Mostly, mostly because of a, a confederate ex Confederate soldier.
• 1:15:23
  Oh.
• 1:15:23
  Do tell.
• 1:15:24
  Yeah, it's William Donnelly, I think was his name.
• 1:15:26
  Okay.
• 1:15:27
  It, it's Don, I think, I think it was Donnelly.
• 1:15:29
  Donnelly was a ex confederate soldier who wrote the first book that really
• 1:15:33
  popularized the idea that Atlantis might be a real place before that,
• 1:15:36
  I don't think anyone believed that.
• 1:15:37
  I don't think that, or I don't know of any data to indicate that people thought
• 1:15:40
  it was anything other than a myth.
• 1:15:42
  Because Plato often will put myths at the end of his dialogues.
• 1:15:46
  Sure.
• 1:15:46
  Like the myth of ER and other myths at the end of the republic.
• 1:15:48
  The myth of Atlantis, I think occurs at the end of the tus.
• 1:15:53
  I can't remember Crito one of them, but, but
• 1:15:54
  Rupert Isaacson: it's tricky, isn't it?
• 1:15:55
  Because he talks about an actual ancestor of his own.
• 1:15:58
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:15:58
  I mean,
• 1:15:59
  Rupert Isaacson: in
• 1:15:59
  Justin Sledge: the way that,
• 1:16:00
  Rupert Isaacson: that's also the name of a real place.
• 1:16:01
  So what's going on with that, with that?
• 1:16:04
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I mean it's, you know, I think that it's creative,
• 1:16:06
  you know, historical fiction, right?
• 1:16:08
  He tells the story of Solon going to Heliopolis and learning all this stuff.
• 1:16:11
  You know, the, the, the, the question for me when it comes to, and then
• 1:16:15
  of course we have the new age Atlan stuff that kicks up with Edward Casey.
• 1:16:19
  So, where he thinks that it's by the Isle of Bimini.
• 1:16:22
  And then people find the called BI and Tell, tell, tell us
• 1:16:24
  Rupert Isaacson: this.
• 1:16:24
  They not everyone's gonna know who Edward ca Edmond.
• 1:16:26
  So,
• 1:16:27
  Justin Sledge: Edward Casey was a trance medium.
• 1:16:29
  Who went to, he was called the sleeping Prophet.
• 1:16:31
  He would go into Ultras of consciousness and
• 1:16:33
  Rupert Isaacson: 1920s or so, right?
• 1:16:35
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I think so.
• 1:16:35
  Early 20th century.
• 1:16:36
  Yeah.
• 1:16:36
  And he would reveal all kinds of, everything from medical
• 1:16:39
  treatments to mythological history.
• 1:16:42
  And Atlantis played a big role in, in his and he was the
• 1:16:45
  Rupert Isaacson: guy who said he was tapping into something
• 1:16:47
  called the Akashic Record.
• 1:16:48
  I think so.
• 1:16:49
  Justin Sledge: Or, and this is a relationship to Blavatsky and
• 1:16:52
  Theosophy and, and stuff like this.
• 1:16:54
  Yeah.
• 1:16:54
  I think that the Atlantis story is, so for me, the question is historically,
• 1:17:01
  when did people begin to believe that it was a potentially real place?
• 1:17:04
  And I think that that's Dateable to Connolly.
• 1:17:06
  So after
• 1:17:07
  Rupert Isaacson: the American Civil War?
• 1:17:08
  Justin Sledge: Yep.
• 1:17:08
  Yep.
• 1:17:09
  I don't think that prior to that people thought that it was a, a real place.
• 1:17:13
  You sometimes have maps that people sort of guess that it may have been over there.
• 1:17:16
  They'll, they'll be land masses, they think were atlan or so, whatever.
• 1:17:19
  But I think that part of the reason why that story, people like
• 1:17:22
  that story is it's, it's about imperial arrogance being punished.
• 1:17:26
  And I think we like to see bullies get their comeuppance.
• 1:17:29
  And Atlantis was a bully, which is a really interesting story because we
• 1:17:33
  now tell it as if, and again, there's lots of variants of it in the New age
• 1:17:37
  movement and other kinds of things where they think of it as sort of a
• 1:17:39
  utopia that seeded all the world's knowledge and, and this kind of stuff.
• 1:17:43
  But it's pretty clearly a bully country in, in the original telling.
• 1:17:48
  And they were just mean and arrogant, and the gods destroyed them for good reason.
• 1:17:52
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:17:53
  Justin Sledge: I just
• 1:17:54
  Rupert Isaacson: basically,
• 1:17:54
  Justin Sledge: yeah, they, they mean, I mean, I, I, but I like the fact that the,
• 1:17:58
  this story, this mythology has changed that it goes from, this is a story, this
• 1:18:04
  is a cautionary tale of, you know, again, Plato's writing to Athenians who are
• 1:18:09
  themselves known at that time for having just lost, you know, a a, you know, just
• 1:18:16
  the Peloponnesian War in which their heroic navy did not ultimately save them.
• 1:18:21
  And they were under the rule of the, the, the tyranny of the 30 and
• 1:18:25
  all of the stuff that, like this is a moment of, of their own fall.
• 1:18:28
  And they had just murdered Socrates.
• 1:18:30
  And, and, and Playdoh really wants to rub their nose in it.
• 1:18:33
  Right.
• 1:18:33
  And he tells a myth
• 1:18:34
  Rupert Isaacson: the opinions are perfectly capable of being
• 1:18:35
  bullies themselves as we know.
• 1:18:37
  Yeah.
• 1:18:37
  They
• 1:18:37
  Justin Sledge: were, I mean, the deal thing about what they did to
• 1:18:38
  the, the, the Deion League Yeah.
• 1:18:40
  Has massacred those people.
• 1:18:42
  Yeah.
• 1:18:43
  And, and they were bullies.
• 1:18:45
  I mean, they, you know, they, they were bullies to, to in
• 1:18:47
  the, in the Peloponnesian War.
• 1:18:49
  They, they went to neutral parties and told them, we're gonna murder
• 1:18:52
  you all if you don't side with us.
• 1:18:54
  And gladly did it when they didn't.
• 1:18:56
  And I think Plato's rubbing the Athenians nose and the fact
• 1:19:00
  that they, they were bullies.
• 1:19:01
  They just got handed, they just got a black eye by the, the Spartans.
• 1:19:05
  They'd just been ruled by the tyranny of the 30.
• 1:19:08
  And when they finally did get some freedom, the first thing
• 1:19:10
  they do is kill Socrates.
• 1:19:12
  And the, and you know, the Republic and other kinds of texts are, I
• 1:19:17
  think part of what they're doing is Plato's rubbing the Athenians nose and
• 1:19:22
  that, and I think Atlantis is meant to be, this is what you get, right?
• 1:19:27
  It's an all
• 1:19:28
  Rupert Isaacson: right for them gonna get your US handed to you if you
• 1:19:32
  Justin Sledge: Right.
• 1:19:32
  And what to me is interesting is how that mythology has changed.
• 1:19:35
  It went from what I think of as social criticism, thinly veiled, frankly
• 1:19:40
  social criticism of by Plato to this is where all the white people came from.
• 1:19:45
  And they like made all of the great civilizations.
• 1:19:48
  And it becomes this sort of like neo-Nazi.
• 1:19:50
  Mythology that you see in, you know, some ridiculous YouTubers videos and stuff.
• 1:19:56
  So to me that's just, it, it, it's, to me, what's most interesting about Atlantis is
• 1:20:00
  not whether there really was a historical Atlantis that, that I think the data for,
• 1:20:04
  that's pretty clear that there wasn't like islands that size just don't sink.
• 1:20:08
  That's not what islands do.
• 1:20:10
  Like, well, there's the thing, islands aren't
• 1:20:12
  Rupert Isaacson: something tectonic happened in with the younger dryas.
• 1:20:16
  I mean, water coming down from the ice sheets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:20:19
  And so, yeah, I mean,
• 1:20:19
  Justin Sledge: it would have to be, if ice Plato's descriptions of it are accurate.
• 1:20:22
  Right?
• 1:20:22
  It was a size of Libya.
• 1:20:24
  I mean, it would've been massive.
• 1:20:25
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:20:26
  Justin Sledge: I mean, it, it would've been, it would've been
• 1:20:27
  the size of like, Texas, like in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
• 1:20:30
  Rupert Isaacson: Ooh.
• 1:20:31
  Is that an cautionary tell for Texas?
• 1:20:32
  Justin Sledge: Texas?
• 1:20:33
  Yeah.
• 1:20:33
  You know, nothing's big as Texas.
• 1:20:35
  But again, to just look at the, if, if Plato is, if we're gonna take Play-Doh as
• 1:20:40
  accurate, we gotta take Plato as accurate.
• 1:20:41
  And he's telling us a story that it's this size and it's
• 1:20:43
  beyond the pillars of Hercules.
• 1:20:45
  It would need to be massive.
• 1:20:47
  And any tectonic event in the Atlantic we have really good maps
• 1:20:52
  of the sea floor or the Atlantic.
• 1:20:54
  It would, we would see remnant, we would see some archeological
• 1:20:56
  evidence of something.
• 1:20:58
  Rupert Isaacson: Why do you think this guy Donnelly, this ex confederate soldier,
• 1:21:01
  was so enamored of it, and how did he manage to get it into the public con.
• 1:21:09
  Justin Sledge: There's a great video if you wanna learn more about this.
• 1:21:11
  A good friend of mine Andy films did a great documentary on, on Donnelley.
• 1:21:15
  I'd love to.
• 1:21:15
  What's, how did he find out
• 1:21:18
  Rupert Isaacson: about, 'cause this, this guy Donnelley is not known about Really.
• 1:21:20
  Justin Sledge: I've never, he's not known about.
• 1:21:21
  No.
• 1:21:21
  This is part of this is, and this is part of how these mythologies
• 1:21:24
  get a life with our own, is that we often don't know that the mythologies
• 1:21:28
  that we're telling have a history.
• 1:21:30
  You mentioned, did he publish a
• 1:21:31
  Rupert Isaacson: bestseller?
• 1:21:31
  19th Century bestseller?
• 1:21:32
  Yeah, it was
• 1:21:33
  Justin Sledge: very popular.
• 1:21:33
  It was
• 1:21:33
  Rupert Isaacson: a very popular book.
• 1:21:34
  Justin Sledge: What was the name of the
• 1:21:35
  Rupert Isaacson: book?
• 1:21:36
  Justin Sledge: Atlantis the something something, let me see.
• 1:21:38
  Okay.
• 1:21:38
  Don Lee Atlantis.
• 1:21:39
  Rupert Isaacson: I'll just google it.
• 1:21:40
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:21:41
  Rupert Isaacson: And do you know what he did in the Civil War?
• 1:21:43
  Bernie Chance?
• 1:21:44
  He was a soldier.
• 1:21:45
  Yeah, but was he an officer?
• 1:21:47
  Was he a grunt?
• 1:21:48
  Was he a cavalryman?
• 1:21:49
  Was he Ignatius
• 1:21:50
  Justin Sledge: Donnelly?
• 1:21:50
  What was he?
• 1:21:51
  He was a congress ignatious man.
• 1:21:53
  Yeah, you can look him up.
• 1:21:54
  Mean.
• 1:21:54
  He was kind of, I mean, but he was a sort of a cultist in,
• 1:21:57
  into, into theosophy and stuff.
• 1:21:59
  But but comes up in 1882.
• 1:22:03
  Okay.
• 1:22:04
  But it's called Atlantis, the anti-dilution world.
• 1:22:06
  And again, as you mentioned earlier about Zechariah ci, right?
• 1:22:08
  That that people don't also link back to Eric Von Danigan, who's really
• 1:22:12
  the, the primordial all father of this sort of ancient alien stuff.
• 1:22:16
  Rupert Isaacson: If you made it this far into the podcast, then I'm
• 1:22:20
  guessing you're somebody that, like me, loves to read books about not
• 1:22:24
  just how people have achieved self actualization, but particularly
• 1:22:28
  about the relationship with nature.
• 1:22:32
  Spirituality, life, the universe, and everything.
• 1:22:36
  And I'd like to draw your attention to my books.
• 1:22:39
  If you would like to read the story of how we even arrived here, perhaps
• 1:22:44
  you'd like to check out the two New York Times bestsellers, The Horseboy
• 1:22:49
  and The Long Ride Home, and come on an adventure with us and see what engendered,
• 1:22:54
  what started Live Free Ride Free.
• 1:22:56
  And before we go back to the podcast, also check out The Healing
• 1:23:00
  Land, which tells the story of.
• 1:23:03
  My years spent in the Kalahari with the Sun, Bushmen, hunter gatherer people
• 1:23:09
  there, and all that they taught me, and mentored me in, and all that I learned.
• 1:23:13
  Come on that adventure with me.
• 1:23:14
  Tell us about him, because again, not, not, not a lot of
• 1:23:17
  people know who's listening.
• 1:23:18
  Maybe he wrote
• 1:23:19
  Justin Sledge: a book, he wrote a book called The Chariots of
• 1:23:21
  the Gods and the Swiss guy,
• 1:23:22
  Rupert Isaacson: right?
• 1:23:23
  Swiss
• 1:23:23
  Justin Sledge: German.
• 1:23:24
  Makes sense?
• 1:23:24
  Yeah, I think so.
• 1:23:25
  Yeah.
• 1:23:25
  And he makes this argument the same kind of argument that the, the, all
• 1:23:29
  the old gods are in fact, aliens.
• 1:23:30
  And, you know, again, very selectively goes and looks at the, I don't
• 1:23:35
  know, the top of the burial shroud and, and, and Mayan territory
• 1:23:40
  and says, that's the spaceship.
• 1:23:41
  And then sees the spaceship and this thing, and sees the
• 1:23:43
  spaceship here and there.
• 1:23:44
  And again, you know, it's the kind of it's the kind of thing that would be fun
• 1:23:49
  if it didn't lead to what I think is like real damage to the field of archeology.
• 1:23:55
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:23:57
  I mean, as an ex I did archeology and history and I actually switched to
• 1:24:02
  just history because unfortunately the archeology department at York
• 1:24:07
  University where I went to in the uk, they were after bastards.
• 1:24:11
  They really were.
• 1:24:12
  And I got into terrible trouble and was actually threatened with being kicked
• 1:24:16
  out for writing up an essay, just one essay in which I likened the mean river.
• 1:24:25
  Iron Age smelting culture which was a Celtic pre Roman place where they
• 1:24:33
  were doing a lot of metal working along a river in England, which was,
• 1:24:36
  they were busy excavating at the time.
• 1:24:40
  And I said, I likened, I made a an analogy to it being like a, a sort of
• 1:24:46
  ancient world, black country, black country being the area around Birmingham
• 1:24:51
  where the industrial revolution sort of got going and that I got
• 1:24:55
  hauled in and hauled over the coals.
• 1:24:58
  And I remember saying, but guys, it sort of was, I'm not saying it was on
• 1:25:01
  the same scale, but I'm saying that if you walked along that river, you'd
• 1:25:04
  have seen a lot of industrial activity that have been guys dumping shit in
• 1:25:08
  the river, that have been piles of slag there would 'cause you found them.
• 1:25:13
  'cause you are excavating those piles of say that and or if I say that and
• 1:25:18
  you think it's wrong, okay, that's fine.
• 1:25:20
  But why are you threatening with kicking me with being kicked out?
• 1:25:22
  It was really odd and I saw this time and time again among the archeologists.
• 1:25:30
  And the archeologists were also sort of a bit of an old boys club of
• 1:25:34
  certainly the uk It was very much a sort of private boys school thing.
• 1:25:42
  And I come out of that culture myself.
• 1:25:45
  I went to one of those schools, but I also know how protectionist.
• 1:25:49
  They are in the same way that Oxford Dons are very protectionists and
• 1:25:53
  so on, and, and they're often, you know, frankly wrong, you know, about
• 1:25:58
  things or at least not open to.
• 1:26:01
  And so the fact that one could say something as kind of innocent as that
• 1:26:05
  and you know, not be taken to task for like, well, you know, Rupert, we just
• 1:26:09
  want you to qualify this essay with saying by no means on the same scale, which I
• 1:26:13
  would've said, yes, of course, absolutely.
• 1:26:15
  I will happily put that clause in there, silly old, 18-year-old me.
• 1:26:20
  But no, it was aggressive and it was hostile and it
• 1:26:23
  was strange and it was weird.
• 1:26:25
  And then when I transferred to do history, it wasn't much different actually.
• 1:26:31
  And then it got to the point, I'm sure you've had this where I realized I
• 1:26:34
  knew a bit more about certain things than I, some of my professors did.
• 1:26:38
  And then that became very uncomfortable and you just had to keep your mouth shut.
• 1:26:41
  For example, I specialized in the Bo war as well as the medieval stuff
• 1:26:46
  and the, and the French Revolution.
• 1:26:47
  I did two modern things, the Bo war, what My family fought on
• 1:26:50
  Every, every side of the Bo War.
• 1:26:52
  And what I mean by that is the, the English and
• 1:26:55
  sort of non-white mercenaries in that.
• 1:26:58
  So we have a whole record within our family of original texts and
• 1:27:04
  letters and documents and this and that, and blah, blah, blah.
• 1:27:07
  And.
• 1:27:08
  So anyway, it, it didn't make me by any means antis history, but it did
• 1:27:14
  make me wary of academics a bit.
• 1:27:17
  That said, I met some very good ones too and had some
• 1:27:19
  wonderful professors and so on.
• 1:27:21
  But I, I guess that thing of, of when, I guess what, what I was responding
• 1:27:28
  to there is when you said they do the, the people that believe in Atlantis or
• 1:27:31
  ancient aliens do damage to archeology.
• 1:27:34
  Do they, I mean, do they really The people, the
• 1:27:37
  Justin Sledge: people that believe in it don't.
• 1:27:38
  I think the people that popularize it on Netflix do,
• 1:27:42
  Rupert Isaacson: but it comes, that's what I view it as.
• 1:27:44
  Another mythology.
• 1:27:46
  Justin Sledge: If they, if they, if, if at the very beginning they
• 1:27:48
  said, what I'm presenting to you is a myth, that's not what they do.
• 1:27:52
  What they say is archeologists are all involved in a conspiracy of
• 1:27:56
  silence about about a civilization that existed at 10,000 BCE and seeded
• 1:28:01
  all the civilizations in the world.
• 1:28:03
  Right.
• 1:28:03
  Those are very different kinds of claims.
• 1:28:05
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:28:07
  You know, it's the difference between me getting on TV and saying, you
• 1:28:11
  know, a guy named Moses went up a mountain and got rules as opposed
• 1:28:14
  to, this is Israelite mythology.
• 1:28:16
  We don't have any archeological evidence to suggests that the exodus ever happened.
• 1:28:21
  Rupert Isaacson: There is this naughty part of me that likes to see all the
• 1:28:24
  archeologists hopping about jumping up and down and getting upset, but that's.
• 1:28:29
  In that interrogation room at York University.
• 1:28:32
  But I agree.
• 1:28:33
  Yeah,
• 1:28:34
  Justin Sledge: I mean that, that, yeah.
• 1:28:34
  I mean, I, and, and again, I also like the, the, that I
• 1:28:37
  do think that, that there is,
• 1:28:41
  what's the right way of putting it?
• 1:28:41
  I, I do like the idea of hand grenades being thrown into dogma.
• 1:28:48
  And I do think that academia functions with a lot of dogma.
• 1:28:52
  Mm.
• 1:28:52
  Justin Sledge: But I think you combat dogma not with more dogma.
• 1:28:57
  You, you, you combat it with problematizing and showing that the, that
• 1:29:04
  the very stories they're telling don't make sense given their own internal data.
• 1:29:08
  Another way of putting this is the way that I go about doing the work that I
• 1:29:12
  do is I don't do external criticism.
• 1:29:14
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:29:14
  For instance, I don't debunk anybody.
• 1:29:16
  I've never done a debunking video ever.
• 1:29:18
  That's
• 1:29:18
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, that's true.
• 1:29:19
  You don't.
• 1:29:19
  And, and interestingly, I think that causes some people to mistake
• 1:29:24
  that maybe you are bel espousing or believing it might, even though you
• 1:29:28
  frequently say that you're not yeah.
• 1:29:29
  Or hear what they hear.
• 1:29:30
  And it might,
• 1:29:31
  Justin Sledge: and then that's fine.
• 1:29:32
  I'd rather take that.
• 1:29:33
  I'd rather risk that danger because I don't want to do, I'd rather just tell
• 1:29:37
  the history in its complicatedness and leave it at that, as opposed to say, well,
• 1:29:42
  they, we've told this elaborate story about Descartes and it's false because
• 1:29:46
  that lets the false story lead in the same way that I'm not going to say, well,
• 1:29:50
  the Anki or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:29:53
  I'm not gonna like.
• 1:29:54
  I'm gonna say, if I'm gonna do an episode on the Anunnaki, I'm
• 1:29:56
  gonna say, here are the 15 UNIFOR tablets that describe the Anunnaki.
• 1:30:01
  Here's what the Sumerian says.
• 1:30:03
  This is the best data we have.
• 1:30:06
  Have you done?
• 1:30:06
  I'm not
• 1:30:07
  Rupert Isaacson: gonna
• 1:30:07
  Justin Sledge: episode on the Anki.
• 1:30:08
  No, they're not very interesting.
• 1:30:12
  I, I mean, I hate to tell people, but they're just like underworld spirits.
• 1:30:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:30:16
  Justin Sledge: They're just, they're the kind, like, they're
• 1:30:18
  like, it's the same reason why some ask me like, you've, you've done
• 1:30:20
  Rupert Isaacson: episodes on other underworld spirits.
• 1:30:22
  I haven't though.
• 1:30:23
  I mean,
• 1:30:23
  Justin Sledge: maybe.
• 1:30:24
  And people, like, I always ask people like, why are you so interested in
• 1:30:26
  the Anki and not the gala demons?
• 1:30:28
  'cause the gala demons actually have an active role and maybe they haven't
• 1:30:31
  Rupert Isaacson: heard of them.
• 1:30:33
  And that's
• 1:30:33
  Justin Sledge: just, that's the funny thing is that yeah, they're just
• 1:30:34
  underworld spirits that that Dezi and other folks have to deal with.
• 1:30:38
  And they're, you know, they're like sort of cathartic beings
• 1:30:40
  that seem to have existed prior to the creation, which is weird.
• 1:30:44
  Okay.
• 1:30:44
  Justin Sledge: They're the standard creation love craft stuff.
• 1:30:46
  Yeah.
• 1:30:46
  Lovecraftian kind of stuff.
• 1:30:48
  Yeah.
• 1:30:48
  And I think that the, the gala demons are far more weird than Anki, but
• 1:30:52
  but yeah, it's like, it's the, I don't do the debunking stuff because
• 1:30:56
  I don't want the, what I take to be a bad history to lead the story.
• 1:31:03
  I'd rather just say, this is the data.
• 1:31:05
  And if someone says, I disagree with it, I can say, you can
• 1:31:09
  disagree with whatever you like.
• 1:31:10
  I don't get to control the data.
• 1:31:12
  I can all, all I can say is like, these are the six tablets
• 1:31:15
  where the stuff is described.
• 1:31:17
  Here are here, here's the, here are the debates among scholars
• 1:31:20
  about how to read those tablets.
• 1:31:21
  'cause that's not even agreed upon.
• 1:31:22
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:31:23
  And that's, to me, the thing that strikes me as the most shockingly egregious
• 1:31:26
  about, you know, someone like Zacharia or something, is that the idea that he
• 1:31:31
  knows what they say when Sumerian scholars are like, we're not clear even how to
• 1:31:37
  read some of this because we don't even totally understand Sumerian as a language.
• 1:31:42
  Rupert Isaacson: That actually is a question.
• 1:31:43
  How did people decode Sumerian?
• 1:31:47
  Justin Sledge: So we have, so we know, and again, to be careful
• 1:31:50
  'cause I'm not a, a ologist, but we know Sumerian through Acadian.
• 1:31:54
  So Acadian is a language that we do know a lot about because it's related to,
• 1:31:58
  it's a Semitic language like Hebrew.
• 1:32:00
  Like in Hebrew, if you wanna say like, I, you could say Nu and in,
• 1:32:06
  in Aca in an Acadians ku Okay.
• 1:32:08
  They're very similar languages.
• 1:32:10
  Okay.
• 1:32:10
  They're not identical, but they're similar.
• 1:32:12
  But we have text, we have bilingual texts in Acadian and Sumerian, and
• 1:32:16
  they were able, scholars were able to decode Sumerian by reading it.
• 1:32:21
  Okay.
• 1:32:21
  You know, it's like Rosetta Stones.
• 1:32:23
  Got it.
• 1:32:23
  Lots of them.
• 1:32:24
  And one of the big texts that the Acadians produced, because Sumerian was a
• 1:32:28
  language, a bit like Latin, it was a dead language, but it was a language they, they
• 1:32:31
  preserved as a kind of academic language.
• 1:32:34
  And so we have lots of basically word lists.
• 1:32:38
  And we have text in both languages.
• 1:32:40
  And so scholars were able to do this, and so they, they can read Sumerian
• 1:32:44
  with a high degree of, of accuracy.
• 1:32:47
  But the, the problem is, is that the older you go back, the less
• 1:32:50
  standardized the language is.
• 1:32:52
  The less the more idio, the more idiosyncratic it becomes, the
• 1:32:56
  more, the more they tend to use a lot more audiograms as opposed
• 1:32:59
  to syllabic spelling, which the syllabic spelling's a lot clearer.
• 1:33:03
  There's a lot less guesswork involved.
• 1:33:06
  And so when I hear people say like, you know, this Sumerian tablet says
• 1:33:10
  this, well, that immediately jumps my hackles up where I'm like, I doubt it.
• 1:33:16
  I bet it, I bet there's debate about what it says.
• 1:33:19
  And, and any, and, and it's almost always when I read text about
• 1:33:23
  Atlantis or the Anunnaki or the ancient aliens, there's no debate.
• 1:33:27
  This is what happened.
• 1:33:28
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:33:29
  It's I think your point about replacing dogma with dogmas is fair.
• 1:33:32
  I, I'm, I'm still on Team Cat among the pigeons, and at the same time, I'm very
• 1:33:37
  grateful that people like you come along and say, yeah, but listen, lads, actually,
• 1:33:41
  here's what we really know to date.
• 1:33:43
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:33:44
  We need one means
• 1:33:45
  Rupert Isaacson: both.
• 1:33:45
  Right,
• 1:33:46
  Justin Sledge: right.
• 1:33:46
  And, and again, I, I feel like the, any, the more that I see, I'll
• 1:33:51
  give an example in my field, right.
• 1:33:52
  The, you mentioned earlier the key of Solomon, the Quila Soleimani.
• 1:33:56
  This is the most important book of magic produced in the Western world.
• 1:34:00
  We know of a hundred and different 150 different manuscripts of it.
• 1:34:04
  We know that they exist.
• 1:34:06
  Those are the ones we know of so far.
• 1:34:08
  There is no standard edition of this text, and no one has ever looked at all 150.
• 1:34:14
  It's just, we don't even know what they all look like.
• 1:34:16
  We don't even what they all say.
• 1:34:18
  They're not in private.
• 1:34:19
  Some of them are private hands, some of them in public hands.
• 1:34:21
  It's a mess.
• 1:34:22
  When I make episodes talking about Solomonic Magic, one of the things I have
• 1:34:26
  to remind people is this is so provisional because in 50 years, 30 more manuscripts
• 1:34:34
  will be found, 15 more will be published.
• 1:34:37
  Maybe all of 'em will be published.
• 1:34:39
  And everything I'm saying now is provisional.
• 1:34:41
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:34:41
  And
• 1:34:42
  Justin Sledge: I think that's
• 1:34:43
  Rupert Isaacson: like, like the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
• 1:34:45
  and then we find a whole bunch not muddy library and, you know.
• 1:34:49
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:34:50
  Justin Sledge: The more that, the more that I find, you know, one of the things
• 1:34:54
  that makes myth interesting to me is that the mythological texts are almost always
• 1:35:01
  disagreeing with each other internally.
• 1:35:03
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:35:03
  The, the Bible Sumerian text and the text.
• 1:35:06
  I know.
• 1:35:06
  You know, if someone goes to tell you what is North mythology,
• 1:35:10
  which ones the, the have the stories all contradict each other.
• 1:35:13
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:35:13
  Justin Sledge: They're, they're not coherent.
• 1:35:15
  And when I, Christianity
• 1:35:16
  Rupert Isaacson: rather than Christianity.
• 1:35:17
  Christianity,
• 1:35:18
  Justin Sledge: yeah.
• 1:35:19
  Right.
• 1:35:19
  The, the myths are, the myths are internally incoherent.
• 1:35:21
  That doesn't make 'em any more or less right.
• 1:35:23
  Or any more or less valuable, but it makes them authentically human.
• 1:35:27
  'cause that's what human beings do.
• 1:35:28
  Mm.
• 1:35:28
  But when you see these, these new mythologies that emerge, they emerge
• 1:35:34
  from the same point of view and the same mindset as the enlightenment.
• 1:35:38
  We have gotta figured it all out.
• 1:35:39
  It's just totalitarian impulse.
• 1:35:41
  Rupert Isaacson: Totalitarian good word.
• 1:35:43
  Yes.
• 1:35:43
  Justin Sledge: And in that totalitarian impulse in science,
• 1:35:46
  that science has figured it all out.
• 1:35:47
  I'm very skeptical of that.
• 1:35:49
  But also I see the exact same kind of impulse in the mythological
• 1:35:53
  world where like, you know, for instance, the perennials will tell
• 1:35:57
  me, we figured it all out, every religion comes from this mystical
• 1:36:01
  core, and they're all, I'm like, huh.
• 1:36:05
  Like that, that impulse.
• 1:36:06
  As a historian, as a, as a scholar of this material, anyone who beats the drum
• 1:36:11
  of, this is the answer, when I hear that drum, I know which direction to run.
• 1:36:19
  And
• 1:36:20
  Rupert Isaacson: let's go to the biggest, the biggest mythology of all.
• 1:36:22
  Then you study everyone in the Western world's belief in the afterlife.
• 1:36:30
  What conclusions have you drawn?
• 1:36:33
  Justin Sledge: In the afterlife.
• 1:36:34
  Yeah.
• 1:36:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Because every, every, every mythology, every religion, every
• 1:36:39
  occult group that you are looking at in the esoterica series, they all
• 1:36:43
  have a position on it, more or less.
• 1:36:46
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I mean, they're not, I would say they're by no means coherent.
• 1:36:49
  Rupert Isaacson: No.
• 1:36:49
  By for sure.
• 1:36:50
  Yeah.
• 1:36:51
  What's your, what, what have you gleaned?
• 1:36:52
  What, what, what, what do you, what rings true for you out of
• 1:36:55
  all the stuff that you've studied?
• 1:36:57
  Justin Sledge: Oh, I don't know.
• 1:36:58
  I hope there is no afterlife.
• 1:36:59
  That's what I've gleaned.
• 1:37:01
  If I wake up after my death and to anything, I'm going to be pissed.
• 1:37:06
  I'm gonna write a letter if I would, God forbid I wake up and I'm in
• 1:37:10
  heaven and everything is perfect, and I have to be there forever.
• 1:37:13
  That is the most miserable imaginable situation possible.
• 1:37:17
  Watering pot
• 1:37:17
  Rupert Isaacson: plants.
• 1:37:18
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:37:19
  Yeah.
• 1:37:19
  Just anything, anything.
• 1:37:21
  If, if there is any afterlife at all I'm going to be,
• 1:37:27
  yeah.
• 1:37:27
  Rupert Isaacson: I'm gonna be enraged.
• 1:37:28
  Yeah.
• 1:37:28
  So many of these, of these traditions that you're studying are convinced of it.
• 1:37:33
  Yeah,
• 1:37:33
  Rupert Isaacson: of course.
• 1:37:34
  Where does that come from?
• 1:37:37
  Not the desire for one.
• 1:37:38
  I think we can understand that, but
• 1:37:42
  Justin Sledge: yeah, it just, I think it's the human beings have the worst
• 1:37:45
  case of Megan Character syndrome.
• 1:37:48
  Maybe that is of main character syndrome.
• 1:37:50
  Ooh.
• 1:37:51
  You know, like we, we built a universe that was designed for us,
• 1:37:57
  you know, we're the center of it.
• 1:37:59
  God made us, were they made in the image of God?
• 1:38:02
  But could we not be, be in the image of
• 1:38:03
  Rupert Isaacson: God?
• 1:38:03
  Could there not be?
• 1:38:04
  I mean, could, could not.
• 1:38:05
  Let's say there's life on a billion planets.
• 1:38:07
  Could not, could they not all be images of God?
• 1:38:10
  Justin Sledge: Maybe.
• 1:38:10
  Maybe.
• 1:38:11
  But that's not the way that, that medieval people and other people that formulated
• 1:38:15
  these mythologies thought about it.
• 1:38:16
  They thought they were the center of everything.
• 1:38:17
  Yeah.
• 1:38:18
  Justin Sledge: The earth is right there at the middle of everything.
• 1:38:20
  And, and I, I think that, you know, the hu the human being can
• 1:38:24
  imagine almost anything aside from there not being human beings.
• 1:38:29
  Mm.
• 1:38:30
  Like we can imagine the end of God, we can imagine the death of God.
• 1:38:33
  We can imagine God being a mythology.
• 1:38:35
  We can imagine all being superstition, but we can't imagine us not being around it.
• 1:38:40
  It's the, it's the narcissistic impulse that the human being will endear forever.
• 1:38:45
  That death, is it narcissistic
• 1:38:46
  Rupert Isaacson: or is it just the just a, a a the feature of our biology that
• 1:38:50
  we are, we are in the consciousness that we're in, and that's just that.
• 1:38:53
  So we, we look through the lens.
• 1:38:54
  We look through we have no choice.
• 1:38:56
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:38:56
  Yeah.
• 1:38:57
  But I think the idea that, like, you know, again, with the, you know, I
• 1:39:01
  always imagine like when I look at different diversions of the afterlife,
• 1:39:03
  that there are no animals there or that ev or that there are no like,
• 1:39:08
  you know, dinosaurs there or you know, what about all the other life?
• 1:39:12
  You know, if you get married twice and your first wife dies,
• 1:39:16
  what, what's gonna happen when you get there with your new wife?
• 1:39:19
  She's gonna get pissed.
• 1:39:20
  You know, the.
• 1:39:22
  The no, because we're with
• 1:39:23
  Rupert Isaacson: God and we're beyond all that.
• 1:39:24
  We're, we've now grown, grown up and we're nice to each other.
• 1:39:27
  Justin Sledge: Right?
• 1:39:27
  And then what's the point of there being an afterlife?
• 1:39:29
  Because if it's so unlike what it is to be a human being that it's
• 1:39:32
  unrecognizable in the next one, then there's no continuity at all.
• 1:39:37
  You know, Decart even says this, like, memory has to persist
• 1:39:41
  through death, because otherwise there's no point in an afterlife,
• 1:39:46
  right?
• 1:39:46
  Because otherwise you're just a different, you're just, it's, you're
• 1:39:48
  just, there's no connection to this world.
• 1:39:50
  The whole point is there's continuity between the two that somehow you survive.
• 1:39:55
  Right?
• 1:39:56
  But if there's no memory, then there is no survival.
• 1:40:00
  If I were to, God forbid, hit someone on the head hard enough and they're
• 1:40:03
  completely erase their memory, they're not the same person in any,
• 1:40:08
  in any meaningful sense of the term.
• 1:40:10
  Right.
• 1:40:10
  Rupert Isaacson: And so let, let's play devil's advocate with that one, just the
• 1:40:13
  other, well, I'm just trying to think what the devil's advocate would say.
• 1:40:16
  What would they say?
• 1:40:17
  They might say, well, yes, Justin, but what if because life comes in infinite
• 1:40:24
  forms of expression, there could be infinite forms of expression of life
• 1:40:33
  in a sort of an of which our idea of a linear
• 1:40:39
  born live die is one expression.
• 1:40:43
  But perhaps is, could it be that.
• 1:40:46
  In fact, there's a much more complex picture there that you could transmute
• 1:40:55
  into other things or, you know, the, the, the end of a physical life.
• 1:41:00
  I mean, you, the, the, the traditions that you study, you know, talk about
• 1:41:09
  being a soul, being embodied, and then when the body dies, the soul is, is
• 1:41:18
  still there, the spirit is still there.
• 1:41:20
  But whether it's still there in terms of the personality of
• 1:41:23
  that person or not, who knows?
• 1:41:25
  Justin Sledge: I think most of them Do you, I
• 1:41:26
  Rupert Isaacson: mean, you, you studied this, so you must
• 1:41:28
  have pondered these questions.
• 1:41:29
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, sure.
• 1:41:30
  I mean, I think that most of them imagine that, at least the Western
• 1:41:34
  traditions, imagine that the soul becomes disentangled from the body,
• 1:41:37
  but the body will come back later.
• 1:41:38
  That's standard view in Christianity, Islamic Judaism that the, you get,
• 1:41:42
  you get a better body later somehow, but you do get put back into a body.
• 1:41:47
  Hopefully you
• 1:41:47
  Rupert Isaacson: get an upgrade.
• 1:41:48
  Yeah,
• 1:41:48
  Justin Sledge: yeah.
• 1:41:48
  It's some glorified body or something like that.
• 1:41:51
  But far be it for me to know exactly what all that means.
• 1:41:54
  Yeah.
• 1:41:54
  Justin Sledge: But if it were the case that the afterlife is somehow
• 1:41:59
  sufficiently unrecognizable from this life, then I simply would have no interest
• 1:42:04
  in it because if it's so different than what I understand of this life.
• 1:42:08
  Then it will be unpredictable.
• 1:42:09
  So unpredictable about it will be on the other side that I
• 1:42:12
  don't have any interest in.
• 1:42:15
  I wouldn't have any, I mean, I wouldn't have any interest in it
• 1:42:17
  because it just, but you, you, you're
• 1:42:18
  Rupert Isaacson: a skeptic.
• 1:42:19
  You, you, you don't necessarily believe in an afterlife or,
• 1:42:22
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I don't, I, yeah, I don't know that there is an afterlife.
• 1:42:25
  Rupert Isaacson: What does Judaism say?
• 1:42:28
  Because you, you're a practicing Jew, so, I'm a never having practiced Jew.
• 1:42:33
  So what does, given that there have been, as you say, many Judaisms in the same
• 1:42:37
  way that there are many Christianity,
• 1:42:41
  give us like three points historically about what Judaism says about
• 1:42:47
  afterlife from sort of pri Moses, Moses e Jesusy, that millennium
• 1:42:56
  to now, what, what do they say?
• 1:42:58
  Justin Sledge: So the earliest Israelite literature seems to
• 1:43:00
  have believed in a place called Sheol, which is just sort of a dark
• 1:43:04
  underground place where dead people go.
• 1:43:07
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:43:07
  You're, yeah, you're there, but you're not very conscious.
• 1:43:12
  You're not really doing anything.
• 1:43:13
  It's a place of inactivity.
• 1:43:15
  God doesn't know.
• 1:43:16
  Are you,
• 1:43:16
  Rupert Isaacson: are you there as yourself just kind of bored or are you It's
• 1:43:19
  Justin Sledge: not even, it's not clear.
• 1:43:20
  I mean, the references to it are so few and so vague.
• 1:43:24
  Everyone goes there.
• 1:43:25
  It doesn't matter whether you're good or bad, everyone goes there.
• 1:43:28
  Rupert Isaacson: Are you broken down into a sort of primordial soup and
• 1:43:30
  then reconfigured for later use?
• 1:43:32
  No.
• 1:43:33
  Justin Sledge: You've stared forever.
• 1:43:33
  There's no sense of you ever come out of there.
• 1:43:35
  It's just that's where everyone goes.
• 1:43:37
  You sit around, it seems to be similar to Hades, the Greek Hades.
• 1:43:40
  Okay.
• 1:43:40
  You know that it's not great and not bad either.
• 1:43:42
  But you don't want to go there.
• 1:43:43
  Like no one's looking forward to going there.
• 1:43:45
  But de
• 1:43:45
  here is better.
• 1:43:46
  Justin Sledge: Here is better.
• 1:43:46
  Yeah.
• 1:43:47
  I mean, I think of that famous line in the Odyssey where, or
• 1:43:50
  Achilles says to Odysseus better a living dog than a dead Achilles.
• 1:43:55
  You know, that he'd rather be a living dog than a dead Achilles.
• 1:43:57
  So I, I think of that, it's like no one wants to go there, but it's
• 1:43:59
  not You're, but you're have to
• 1:44:01
  Rupert Isaacson: go there.
• 1:44:02
  Justin Sledge: Everyone goes there.
• 1:44:03
  Yeah.
• 1:44:03
  Every, everyone who dies goes to Shaul and we're not even
• 1:44:06
  sure what the word Shaul means.
• 1:44:08
  It's a very strange word,
• 1:44:09
  Rupert Isaacson: but it's not pleasant.
• 1:44:11
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:44:11
  You don't want to go there.
• 1:44:12
  It's, it's, yeah,
• 1:44:14
  Rupert Isaacson: you don't want to go there, but you're gonna have to go there.
• 1:44:15
  It's kind of like the D dv dv the driving, yeah.
• 1:44:19
  The DMV, yeah.
• 1:44:21
  The DM V.
• 1:44:21
  Yeah.
• 1:44:22
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:44:22
  Fast forward to Jesus' time.
• 1:44:24
  There's definitely Jews have interacted with Raan and they
• 1:44:27
  picked up heaven and hell.
• 1:44:29
  Rupert Isaacson: Is that where we get heaven and hell
• 1:44:31
  from the Iranians, it seems,
• 1:44:32
  Justin Sledge: yeah.
• 1:44:32
  It seems to be as, as a, a, seems to be a raan influence when the
• 1:44:37
  Jews were in the exile in Babylon.
• 1:44:39
  So that seems to be where that idea comes from.
• 1:44:42
  And there, there's the idea that you go into the sky.
• 1:44:46
  Where the God lives and you live there if you're good, and if you're bad, you
• 1:44:49
  go to some place and you get tortured for some period of time, maybe forever,
• 1:44:53
  but maybe for some period of time.
• 1:44:55
  Rupert Isaacson: Are the Egyptians are not saying something slightly
• 1:44:57
  similar as well at that time.
• 1:44:59
  Justin Sledge: So they, the Egyptians in the New Kingdom have the belief
• 1:45:03
  that if you have a good soul, then you can go into the duo, the afterlife.
• 1:45:08
  But if you have a bad one, then you get your soul gets
• 1:45:11
  eaten by a monster called Amit.
• 1:45:13
  And then after there's no bad afterlife, but there's just,
• 1:45:15
  there's a good one and no bad one.
• 1:45:17
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:45:18
  You just get destroyed.
• 1:45:18
  You go, it's
• 1:45:19
  Justin Sledge: oblivion.
• 1:45:19
  It's like good or oblivion.
• 1:45:20
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:45:21
  Justin Sledge: Which doesn't seem that bad actually.
• 1:45:22
  No, I just, that's right.
• 1:45:24
  Actually, it's like, yeah.
• 1:45:25
  So that's not, you know.
• 1:45:27
  And then after Heaven and hell, that becomes so associated with Christianity
• 1:45:30
  that Judaism distances itself from heaven and hell and basically
• 1:45:33
  quits contemplating much of it.
• 1:45:35
  Rupert Isaacson: At what point?
• 1:45:37
  Justin Sledge: Sometime third, fourth century.
• 1:45:38
  It seems like Judaism drifts away from talking about the afterlife.
• 1:45:43
  Fine.
• 1:45:43
  You
• 1:45:43
  Rupert Isaacson: guys can have heaven and hell.
• 1:45:44
  We didn't want, in the
• 1:45:45
  Justin Sledge: divorce, they got heaven and hell and exorcism and stuff.
• 1:45:48
  And then in the, in the 16th century you have reincarnation appears in the kabbah.
• 1:45:54
  Rupert Isaacson: Why, why so suddenly?
• 1:45:56
  Justin Sledge: So it seems
• 1:45:58
  Rupert Isaacson: from.
• 1:45:59
  Justin Sledge: So the, well, the Kabbala has a very long, complicated
• 1:46:01
  history going back to the, the 13th century, if not prior, but the, the,
• 1:46:06
  the big idea seems to come from a guy named Isaac Luria and his student Al.
• 1:46:10
  And they developed this idea of Gil Goul, which means something like Ole,
• 1:46:16
  and this is the idea that souls roll.
• 1:46:19
  Where are
• 1:46:19
  Rupert Isaacson: they living?
• 1:46:19
  These two guys, these two Rabbi.
• 1:46:21
  So
• 1:46:21
  Justin Sledge: its like Luria is living in Cairo.
• 1:46:23
  He ultimately immigrates, this is all inside of the Ottoman Empire.
• 1:46:27
  So he immigrates to what is now the Galilee, and k Vita is living in
• 1:46:32
  the Galilee, and ultimately he goes to Damascus and then reincarnation
• 1:46:36
  enters into Judaism as a, as a viable
• 1:46:38
  Rupert Isaacson: and where do you think they picked that up from?
• 1:46:41
  It's not clear talking to Hindus.
• 1:46:42
  Were they talking to
• 1:46:44
  Justin Sledge: No, because the, the hin there's no sense of karma
• 1:46:47
  and there's no sense of you can't, you can't, there's no sense of cat.
• 1:46:51
  You can't go from you, you don't go from if you, if you commit bad
• 1:46:55
  stuff in this life, you don't get sent to be a woman in the next life
• 1:46:58
  or made into an animal or something.
• 1:46:59
  You can't be reincarnated down the food chain, so to speak.
• 1:47:03
  But it seems to be tied up to their theory of redemption and the idea that
• 1:47:08
  there's a finite number of souls and that in order for the redemption to occur,
• 1:47:13
  one has to make reparations for all the sins committed in one's past life.
• 1:47:19
  And how does one kind
• 1:47:19
  Justin Sledge: of.
• 1:47:20
  Yeah.
• 1:47:20
  So you, you undergo a kind of past life regression and there's
• 1:47:24
  a kind of ritual expert that does the past life regression for you.
• 1:47:27
  A kind of Jewish shaman.
• 1:47:29
  This happens before
• 1:47:30
  Rupert Isaacson: you die.
• 1:47:30
  You, you, you say, yeah, you
• 1:47:31
  Justin Sledge: figure this out before you die.
• 1:47:33
  And then they tell you it worked or not.
• 1:47:35
  Who, who, who were your past lives?
• 1:47:37
  What their ma, what the major sins they committed were and how to fix them.
• 1:47:40
  K vial his, and these called soul roots.
• 1:47:43
  The idea that this is the root of your soul.
• 1:47:46
  And for instance, K Vial, who was lu student, his soul route was Cain.
• 1:47:52
  He was the primordial murderer, and they're responsible for all murders.
• 1:47:57
  Which made him, because he was, if he could redeem that sin he
• 1:48:01
  could have been he could have been the Messiah or whatever.
• 1:48:04
  So you get this, and there's still people out there today in the
• 1:48:06
  kabbalistic world that will do this past life regression with you.
• 1:48:10
  But that's similar to,
• 1:48:11
  Rupert Isaacson: to Buddhism.
• 1:48:12
  Hinduism.
• 1:48:12
  Then you sort of get off the karmic wheel, even though you
• 1:48:14
  say there's no karma there.
• 1:48:15
  But isn't that something, a similar idea?
• 1:48:17
  Okay, I've, I've expunged this, these sins, but you could call that karma.
• 1:48:23
  Well, you do it and now I could do something else.
• 1:48:25
  Well, you,
• 1:48:26
  Justin Sledge: you, the, you do it in order to usher in the Messiah, and so
• 1:48:29
  that some point, the, the, the Messianic age will be ushered in once enough sin
• 1:48:35
  has been expunged and then the Messiah mess, the Messianic era will start,
• 1:48:39
  but it's not expected for normal.
• 1:48:40
  Like the
• 1:48:40
  Rupert Isaacson: Rastafarian idea of chant down Babylon sort of thing.
• 1:48:43
  Just we.
• 1:48:45
  Put enough good stuff out there in all these ways and the bad stuff,
• 1:48:50
  Justin Sledge: the battle stuff.
• 1:48:51
  Yeah.
• 1:48:51
  And Judaism has sort of two minds about how the Messiah will come.
• 1:48:55
  Either it'll get so bad that only the Messiah can fix it, or it'll get so good
• 1:48:58
  that the Messiah will be happily welcomed into the world, that there's no medium.
• 1:49:02
  But in general, you know, if you go to a local rabbi and ask them,
• 1:49:05
  what happens to me when I die?
• 1:49:06
  The rabbi will tell you, I'll let you know when I get there.
• 1:49:08
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:49:09
  That's the, that's the predominant view now.
• 1:49:11
  Right.
• 1:49:12
  And that's the view.
• 1:49:12
  So when you're going in synagogue, they're not threatening you
• 1:49:14
  with hell, fire and brimstone?
• 1:49:15
  No.
• 1:49:16
  Okay.
• 1:49:17
  Justin Sledge: No, there's no, yeah.
• 1:49:19
  Historically saying, be a
• 1:49:20
  Rupert Isaacson: inch.
• 1:49:21
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, be a inch.
• 1:49:22
  And, and the idea is that, you know, the, you know, and if you
• 1:49:25
  look at the Torah, the rewards are always this worldly, follow the
• 1:49:27
  rules and you'll get children, land, agriculture, life will be good for you.
• 1:49:33
  Rupert Isaacson: Your, your bonds will be bursting at the seams
• 1:49:36
  and your cut will runeth over.
• 1:49:38
  Justin Sledge: Eth over.
• 1:49:38
  And so that's the kind of, it's, it's a very, this worldly religion.
• 1:49:42
  Okay.
• 1:49:42
  And there's even a line in the Talman that says that people who do the
• 1:49:45
  right thing with the expectation of reward have that reward.
• 1:49:49
  But that's like a child.
• 1:49:51
  It is like a, it's like a toddler version of religion that if you do
• 1:49:55
  the right thing to get a reward.
• 1:49:58
  God's like pat you on the head.
• 1:50:00
  Good for you.
• 1:50:01
  But like, it's a, it's a, it's an in, it's an ins ultimately insufficient
• 1:50:07
  way of getting people to do the good, because then you only do good, do the good
• 1:50:10
  when you get reward or only do the good when you get public recognition for it.
• 1:50:15
  And the rabbis are very skeptical of the idea that you should be
• 1:50:18
  rewarded in the afterlife for having done the good in this world.
• 1:50:21
  Because it, it's interesting.
• 1:50:22
  It sets up a, a bad idea about why you should do the good.
• 1:50:25
  You shouldn't do the good 'cause you get something you should do
• 1:50:27
  the good because it's a good,
• 1:50:29
  Rupert Isaacson: this feels to me almost like a parallel with Ana Buddhism or
• 1:50:32
  not the sort of, you know, Buddhism of Tibetan, which is sort of like
• 1:50:36
  high Catholic Buddhism or whatever.
• 1:50:37
  But it seems again, very similar to the kind of golden rule thing.
• 1:50:42
  Just, you know, don't be a dick because your life is worse if you are be mentor.
• 1:50:47
  Yeah.
• 1:50:47
  I, because things kind of go better if you are.
• 1:50:51
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I guess, I mean, I think that, you know, Spinoza
• 1:50:53
  famously said that religion can be boiled down to two things, right?
• 1:50:56
  That, that there's a, that something made all this so there's probably
• 1:51:00
  a God and that whatever is hateful to you don't do to your neighbor.
• 1:51:05
  And he thought basically religion could be boiled down to those two things.
• 1:51:08
  And everything else he thought of was he called superstition.
• 1:51:11
  He said those two things can be logically proved.
• 1:51:13
  The rest of it is just cultural fad and, and superstition.
• 1:51:17
  I'm not sure I go that quickly.
• 1:51:17
  Who
• 1:51:18
  Rupert Isaacson: knows?
• 1:51:18
  It was, 'cause again, not everyone knows.
• 1:51:20
  Justin Sledge: Espinoza was a 17th century rationalist philosopher, famous for being
• 1:51:24
  excommunicated by the Jewish community.
• 1:51:27
  He was living in the Netherlands, right?
• 1:51:29
  The Netherlands, that's right.
• 1:51:29
  Yeah.
• 1:51:30
  I've been to his house on many occasions.
• 1:51:32
  He's kind of a you know, one of the, I don't know if he's one
• 1:51:35
  of my favorite philosophers, but he's certainly a philosopher that
• 1:51:37
  I Why, why should we, why should
• 1:51:38
  Rupert Isaacson: we know about him?
• 1:51:41
  Justin Sledge: I think that he pioneered the idea that one could
• 1:51:45
  believe in a transcendent reality without being part of a religion.
• 1:51:51
  That you could be secular.
• 1:51:53
  I mean, Spinoza was the first secular person.
• 1:51:55
  He was kicked out of a religion, but he never joined another one.
• 1:51:57
  But he didn't give up believing in something like God was Descartes secular.
• 1:52:01
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:52:02
  Justin Sledge: No, he, he continued to be a, a pious Catholic.
• 1:52:05
  I mean, he got in trouble with them, but he, I think if you'd asked him if
• 1:52:08
  he were a Catholic, he would say yes.
• 1:52:10
  He took confession.
• 1:52:11
  But Spinoza was excommunicated.
• 1:52:13
  Rupert Isaacson: And so if, if, if, okay, so sorry.
• 1:52:15
  He, so he said, he's saying, I interrupted you for why we should know about him.
• 1:52:19
  Please go on.
• 1:52:20
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:52:20
  I think that he's important because if you've ever left a religion and
• 1:52:24
  didn't join another one and you still believe in God, then you, you can
• 1:52:28
  thank him 'cause he did it first.
• 1:52:31
  Rupert Isaacson: That sort of describes to me,
• 1:52:35
  you might have
• 1:52:35
  Justin Sledge: a, you might have a grandfather in Spinoza.
• 1:52:37
  Rupert Isaacson: I might, you know, I mean, hey, I've got Dutch roots as
• 1:52:41
  well as everything else there, you.
• 1:52:44
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 1:52:44
  He, you know, he also made the first protest sign that we know of in history.
• 1:52:47
  Really.
• 1:52:47
  He ever held up a, yeah, after the, the mob murdered the Det Brothers
• 1:52:52
  he wanted to hang a protest sign outside of his apartment saying, you
• 1:52:55
  know, this is the worst Barbarity.
• 1:52:57
  And his land Leddy was like, are you crazy?
• 1:53:00
  They'll tear those guys apart.
• 1:53:01
  They'll tear you apart.
• 1:53:02
  Like,
• 1:53:02
  Rupert Isaacson: don't do that.
• 1:53:03
  Who were the Det brothers and why were they murdered?
• 1:53:05
  Justin Sledge: The Det brothers were the head of the of the Dutch
• 1:53:07
  Republic and royalist Mob who wanted to restore the house of Orange
• 1:53:13
  which was eventually restored.
• 1:53:14
  Lynch them.
• 1:53:15
  And if you wanna see a, a nightmare fuel painting, there's a painting
• 1:53:19
  made from life of what they look like after they were lynched.
• 1:53:21
  And it's really horrifying.
• 1:53:22
  They're emasculated faces torn off.
• 1:53:25
  Rupert Isaacson: Where do you, where does one find this painting?
• 1:53:27
  You can Google it, I'm sure if you just Google the murder of the DVI Brothers I'm
• 1:53:32
  gonna make And, and how did that play out?
• 1:53:35
  Because they must have had a whole power structure around them, the Devet brothers.
• 1:53:39
  I mean, how could, how did the mob get hold of them so easily?
• 1:53:41
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I wonder this too.
• 1:53:42
  And I can say that.
• 1:53:43
  Why were they so
• 1:53:43
  Rupert Isaacson: enraged?
• 1:53:44
  'cause they, you know, they're sort of Dutch people, you know, who Yeah, they're
• 1:53:46
  Justin Sledge: Dutch people.
• 1:53:47
  I don't have any emotions.
• 1:53:48
  I think that the, I think that they, again, the, the politics and inspires,
• 1:53:51
  you know, people to do bizarre, crazy things, including hateful,
• 1:53:54
  murderous things was Nietzsche said that insanity in individuals is rare,
• 1:53:59
  but insanity in crowds is the rule.
• 1:54:02
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:54:03
  And so I, I think Nietzche said that that's the kind of thing Nietzche
• 1:54:05
  would say, but yeah, I think that they, again, it was political tensions
• 1:54:09
  were pretty high, and the royalists and the Republican through h Joe's
• 1:54:12
  throats and ultimately the English were able to reinstall their whatever,
• 1:54:18
  cousins or whatever on the throne
• 1:54:20
  Rupert Isaacson: ah, we were behind it.
• 1:54:21
  That makes sense.
• 1:54:22
  Yes.
• 1:54:22
  The Brits,
• 1:54:23
  Justin Sledge: I mean, they, they were behind in the sense that, you know,
• 1:54:25
  they definitely did not want to continue dealing with the Dutch Republic as a
• 1:54:29
  naval enemy, and they wanted to have, you know, and so they, you know, I
• 1:54:32
  mean that's the reason why the oh, I found the painting, the ulcer royalists
• 1:54:36
  and and Northern Ireland to this day still have orange the same way the Yes.
• 1:54:39
  Of orange.
• 1:54:40
  They're all connected.
• 1:54:41
  It's all part of the one big royal family.
• 1:54:43
  Rupert Isaacson: I have found the painting and trigger alert guys.
• 1:54:46
  Yeah,
• 1:54:47
  Justin Sledge: I don't, I don't recommend it.
• 1:54:48
  Rupert Isaacson: I wouldn't recommend looking at it.
• 1:54:50
  Yep.
• 1:54:50
  Yeah.
• 1:54:50
  Fair warning.
• 1:54:51
  Yep.
• 1:54:51
  Yeah.
• 1:54:52
  I, I, yeah.
• 1:54:53
  Yeah.
• 1:54:53
  Justin Sledge: It's, you know, but it is, you know, that's how Democracy dies.
• 1:54:57
  That is a painting about the death of a republic.
• 1:54:59
  And.
• 1:55:00
  For all of us people who believe in rule by the people, for the people, you know,
• 1:55:05
  that's a, it's a gruesome painting.
• 1:55:07
  Well worth contemplating.
• 1:55:09
  'cause to me it's
• 1:55:09
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:55:09
  And of course, you know, rule by the people, for the people can
• 1:55:12
  easily turn into oligarchies and
• 1:55:14
  Sure.
• 1:55:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Mafias as we know.
• 1:55:17
  Yep.
• 1:55:17
  So there's arguments for monarchies, IE the devils, you know, the mafia, you know.
• 1:55:22
  Right.
• 1:55:23
  Stability with that.
• 1:55:24
  It is the office, not the person.
• 1:55:27
  And changing your gangsters up every four, two, however many years.
• 1:55:33
  Yeah,
• 1:55:33
  Justin Sledge: yeah.
• 1:55:34
  No, no.
• 1:55:34
  Who knows?
• 1:55:34
  We, maybe it could be just be the case.
• 1:55:36
  We're all shuffling the deck, the deck chairs in the Titanic.
• 1:55:38
  But indeed, indeed.
• 1:55:40
  But no, I I like Hobbes.
• 1:55:42
  Hobbes says, you know, I don't care if it's a, a king or a republic
• 1:55:46
  or a whatever, it doesn't matter.
• 1:55:48
  What matters is the, the sovereignty of the people that kings sit on their thrones
• 1:55:53
  as long as the people want them to.
• 1:55:55
  Mm.
• 1:55:55
  And then tell us who Hobbes was.
• 1:55:57
  So another 17th century political philosopher and translator.
• 1:56:02
  People often sit on, they really sleep on Hobbes's translation.
• 1:56:04
  So he did street really great translations of like, acidities and stuff.
• 1:56:08
  Did a translation of Homer.
• 1:56:09
  But he was an important political philosopher, especially a political
• 1:56:12
  philosopher of sovereignty.
• 1:56:13
  Rupert Isaacson: Was he in Oxford, Don, like, how, how was he funding
• 1:56:16
  himself to, that's a good question.
• 1:56:18
  I forget exactly where he
• 1:56:19
  Justin Sledge: graduated from.
• 1:56:20
  He was, you know, worked for one of these wealthy, right.
• 1:56:23
  Wealthy got a patron or whatever.
• 1:56:24
  Yeah.
• 1:56:25
  Patron.
• 1:56:25
  That's, I think so.
• 1:56:27
  So,
• 1:56:29
  Rupert Isaacson: and that sort of brings us to YouTube because one of the things
• 1:56:33
  I find really fascinating about channels like yours, it's a big channel now.
• 1:56:39
  I mean, if I look at your views, you know, it's in the hundreds of thousands
• 1:56:43
  which is brilliant because, you know, it, it, it's, for me, it's revenge of
• 1:56:47
  the nerds because it vindicates that people say, oh, history's so boring.
• 1:56:51
  It's like, oh yeah, oh yeah.
• 1:56:53
  Well look at Justin Church's esoterica thing then, and, and look how many,
• 1:56:57
  you know, because it's brilliant.
• 1:57:00
  Frankly.
• 1:57:01
  Your, your channel is brilliant, Justin.
• 1:57:03
  I mean, it's, I appreciate that.
• 1:57:05
  It's, I'd say it's beyond brilliant because it's entertaining,
• 1:57:08
  informative, deeply non-partisan and
• 1:57:16
  fair and humorous.
• 1:57:18
  You know, there's so many chuckles through, through the whole thing, and
• 1:57:22
  you've made a real success of this.
• 1:57:24
  I think there's a lot of people out there who, just switching gears completely
• 1:57:29
  now you lead a very different life now, I should imagine, to when you were an
• 1:57:33
  adjunct professor To explore and study what you want to, to showcase what
• 1:57:39
  you want to, to sort of inform people.
• 1:57:41
  And it's vindicated because people are voting with their feet, with their views.
• 1:57:45
  So you must be making a living from this.
• 1:57:47
  Now.
• 1:57:48
  How did you manage to evolve that?
• 1:57:51
  And I watched videos of yours from four years ago to now sort of thing,
• 1:57:55
  and it's, it's, I find it really interesting that you can present
• 1:58:01
  material that if I was to go to the bank and say, could you give me a loan, please
• 1:58:05
  so that I can do a, a YouTube channel on really, really esoteric stuff that
• 1:58:11
  people might or might not be interested.
• 1:58:13
  I dunno, but I'm interested in it.
• 1:58:14
  And they probably say, Rupert bugger off.
• 1:58:17
  You've made such a go of it.
• 1:58:19
  How,
• 1:58:22
  Justin Sledge: what do you mean?
• 1:58:22
  How, just
• 1:58:23
  Rupert Isaacson: in terms of, yeah, because I mean, like, literally
• 1:58:26
  what, what's, if you were to write a bio, your autobiography and
• 1:58:29
  say, I started here and I got here and these were sort of the steps.
• 1:58:34
  I said, 'cause it must have been a real voyage of discovery for you.
• 1:58:36
  You must have, you didn't come out of your mother's womb knowing how to do YouTube.
• 1:58:39
  I mean,
• 1:58:40
  Justin Sledge: yeah.
• 1:58:40
  No, I still don't know how to do YouTube.
• 1:58:42
  Still have no idea what I'm doing.
• 1:58:43
  You know, I, so maybe the, the easy way to answer it was that
• 1:58:47
  before I was an academic, I was in the entrepreneurial world.
• 1:58:50
  I was in like the tech world.
• 1:58:52
  Okay.
• 1:58:52
  And I knew a good bit about.
• 1:58:54
  How to start a business and like, and how to run a business and
• 1:58:58
  how to, like what did you do in the tech world out of interest?
• 1:59:00
  I, I worked in like security, like tech security.
• 1:59:02
  Okay.
• 1:59:04
  And you know, I, when I, it was my brother that ultimately convinced me to
• 1:59:07
  do the channel and after he convinced me, I spent, I spent five months
• 1:59:12
  planning how I wanted the channel, what I wanted it to look like, what I wanted
• 1:59:17
  to cover, the cadence of the channel, you know, almost all the major things.
• 1:59:23
  Nothing's fundamentally changed.
• 1:59:24
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:59:25
  I've gotten better at it.
• 1:59:26
  Yeah.
• 1:59:26
  I've found my own voice.
• 1:59:28
  You know, apparently people think that the bizarre things I say are funny
• 1:59:32
  and so I, I've, you know, I don't mind, you know, interjecting some
• 1:59:35
  degree of my whatever sense of humor, assuming, you know, that I have that.
• 1:59:39
  But you know, I think that part of why the channel has grown is because
• 1:59:43
  of the vacuum of other reliable data.
• 1:59:46
  I think that when I tell people this book says this, here is the book, here is the
• 1:59:52
  manuscript that the book is based on.
• 1:59:54
  Here is a link to the manuscript.
• 1:59:55
  You can read it yourself.
• 1:59:57
  Here is a thing to help you learn to read Latin so you can read the manuscript.
• 2:00:00
  Right.
• 2:00:00
  You know, I don't and also I don't tell people how history was.
• 2:00:04
  I say, look, this is the debates.
• 2:00:06
  You know, it's, these are, this is the data, these are the debates over the data.
• 2:00:09
  Here's the data for yourself.
• 2:00:10
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 2:00:10
  But there's people out there that do that, and they're not you.
• 2:00:15
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 2:00:15
  I mean, but I think that maybe they, I mean they don't do do in this field.
• 2:00:20
  I don't know anyone else really doing it, doing that in this field.
• 2:00:24
  There's other people doing that in, I don't know, maybe other fields,
• 2:00:28
  Beowulf or something, I don't know.
• 2:00:30
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:00:30
  But you know what, I think what people like is that they
• 2:00:33
  don't feel sold something.
• 2:00:34
  They don't feel told that this is the way that it is.
• 2:00:37
  Okay.
• 2:00:38
  I think people like saying, you know, people like knowing that these
• 2:00:41
  are my sources, you know, and also the whole channel is engineered
• 2:00:45
  around the idea that I'm empowering people to do the work themselves.
• 2:00:48
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:00:48
  Justin Sledge: You know, people get angry sometimes when I say, well,
• 2:00:50
  I'm not gonna summarize the book.
• 2:00:53
  And they're like, well, that's what I want.
• 2:00:55
  I want to, and I'm like, yeah, you think you want that?
• 2:00:58
  'cause that feels like you're learning, but you're not learning.
• 2:01:01
  Wikipedia feels like learning, but it's not learning.
• 2:01:05
  You need to read these books.
• 2:01:07
  You need to study the material.
• 2:01:08
  And the only way to do that is by feeling like you can, and the way
• 2:01:12
  that you prepare people is to say, look, Sumerian is not magical.
• 2:01:16
  It's a language like any other language.
• 2:01:17
  Latin's not magical.
• 2:01:18
  It's a language.
• 2:01:19
  You can learn it, you can learn to read medieval handwriting
• 2:01:23
  Rupert Isaacson: and you can read in translation too.
• 2:01:25
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 2:01:25
  And here's a good translation.
• 2:01:26
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 2:01:27
  Justin Sledge: And here's why it's a good translation, because the
• 2:01:29
  translator will tell you why they make the decisions they're making.
• 2:01:32
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:01:33
  Justin Sledge: And it's about empowerment.
• 2:01:35
  And I think people want to feel, people often come to education and they come
• 2:01:38
  away from education, feeling disempowered.
• 2:01:41
  And I want people to feel empowered.
• 2:01:45
  And the way you make people feel empowered is you make them feel like
• 2:01:48
  they can join the conversation too.
• 2:01:50
  And I do believe that eter, that esoterica allows people the tools to empower
• 2:01:56
  themselves to enter the conversation.
• 2:01:59
  Now, not at a high level and not at, you know, whatever, but it's certainly more
• 2:02:03
  empowering than, here's some stuff I heard in a dream, or here's some stuff that,
• 2:02:09
  like I read in a book that's not reliable, or Here's my personal beliefs about this.
• 2:02:14
  Very rarely will you ever hear me interject my personal beliefs
• 2:02:17
  into an esoteric episode.
• 2:02:19
  Almost never.
• 2:02:20
  Rupert Isaacson: Did you have any idea, did you plan that it would get this big?
• 2:02:23
  Did you have any idea that it would, or was it more just a question of,
• 2:02:26
  look, I'm surprised by how big it
• 2:02:28
  Justin Sledge: got.
• 2:02:28
  Yeah, no, I had no idea it would get this big.
• 2:02:30
  I'm, I'm, I'm flabbergasted every time I open up the analytics
• 2:02:34
  that it's, that it's this big.
• 2:02:36
  Yeah.
• 2:02:37
  Yeah.
• 2:02:37
  And, you know, that's great and terrible, right?
• 2:02:39
  Because that means I can make a living doing it.
• 2:02:42
  But it also means that the amount of eyes on me are enormous.
• 2:02:47
  And so making mistakes becomes a much bigger deal.
• 2:02:50
  And also it means that, you know, I was talking to my former teacher v Holograph
• 2:02:54
  who at the University of Amsterdam where I was trained, and he was like, it's
• 2:02:58
  great that your channel's gotten this big, but just know that any mistakes
• 2:03:01
  you make, we have to clean up later.
• 2:03:05
  Rupert Isaacson: And
• 2:03:05
  Justin Sledge: that's a lot of responsibility, but it keep
• 2:03:06
  Rupert Isaacson: the conversation going and at least it puts it out
• 2:03:08
  there in the public conscious earth.
• 2:03:10
  Right.
• 2:03:10
  I mean, if one was so afraid of making mistakes, one would never do anything.
• 2:03:15
  You should hear my German, it's terrible, but it's functional.
• 2:03:18
  And I don't mind sounding like a toddler because otherwise
• 2:03:21
  how will I learn, you know?
• 2:03:22
  It, its, but Okay.
• 2:03:24
  Well, you said you were trained at the University of Amsterdam.
• 2:03:26
  What were you trained in there?
• 2:03:27
  'cause you trained in the study out of your, the study of,
• 2:03:30
  Justin Sledge: Of Western as a terrorism.
• 2:03:31
  That's where I received sort of like my how to study Western as a tism.
• 2:03:34
  What Western as a terrorism is.
• 2:03:37
  Did you do that as an ma?
• 2:03:38
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:03:39
  Rupert Isaacson: Or MSC?
• 2:03:40
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 2:03:41
  Or d
• 2:03:41
  Rupert Isaacson: you know, whatever the, whatever the, the Dutch.
• 2:03:43
  And why did you go to the Netherlands?
• 2:03:45
  Justin Sledge: It was the only place.
• 2:03:47
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:03:48
  Did you have to self-fund that?
• 2:03:51
  Justin Sledge: I got a loan.
• 2:03:51
  Yeah, I got a loan and I got a scholarship.
• 2:03:54
  So, but because you must have come
• 2:03:56
  Rupert Isaacson: out of that in some debt.
• 2:03:58
  Justin Sledge: Yeah, I think I, I came out self some debt, but I, I think,
• 2:04:00
  you know, it wasn't, you know, I paid, I since paid it off, thank God.
• 2:04:03
  So, but yeah, it was the, it was just a task.
• 2:04:06
  It was, I remember finishing undergraduate and just being
• 2:04:08
  like, this is what I have to do.
• 2:04:11
  I gotta go.
• 2:04:12
  Rupert Isaacson: Why?
• 2:04:13
  Why is it the only place that teaches the history of Western Esoterism?
• 2:04:18
  Justin Sledge: Because everyone's interested
• 2:04:19
  Rupert Isaacson: in it.
• 2:04:20
  Justin Sledge: I don't know that everyone is, some people are, I mean, I think
• 2:04:23
  it's the only place because there are not many people skilled enough to teach it.
• 2:04:26
  And there's an endowed chair, a very wealthy woman decided that
• 2:04:30
  she was, decided she was really interested in it and decided she
• 2:04:33
  was going to endowed chair and
• 2:04:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:04:35
  Justin Sledge: Threw millions of dollars at an institution and conjure in, in, into
• 2:04:40
  being the way that rich people can do.
• 2:04:42
  Yeah.
• 2:04:42
  Justin Sledge: So I think it has more to do with the accident.
• 2:04:45
  And, you know, V Va GRA is a, a, a Titanic scholar was a really
• 2:04:49
  intellectual hero of mine.
• 2:04:51
  And
• 2:04:51
  Rupert Isaacson: why so tell us about him.
• 2:04:54
  Justin Sledge: Voucher Ner Van DeGraff.
• 2:04:56
  RAF Vata.
• 2:04:57
  Raf, yeah.
• 2:04:58
  Raf, yeah.
• 2:04:58
  He's, you know, he, he's, he's just been able to shepherd the whole field in
• 2:05:02
  many ways by making it respectable, by publishing really great monographs and
• 2:05:07
  articles by, by making the department a collegial place where a range of
• 2:05:13
  opinions are appreciated and diverse.
• 2:05:16
  You know, it's a diverse field, you know, a diverse place with, you
• 2:05:19
  know, lots of different people there.
• 2:05:20
  Yeah, he's just, you know, the Dutch, you know, the, the Dutch are a
• 2:05:24
  practical people and he's a practical person with an obscure interest,
• 2:05:28
  and he's been able to make it work.
• 2:05:30
  And yeah, I've always, you know, the one thing I'll say personally
• 2:05:35
  is that every time I've ever been around him, he listens as a, you
• 2:05:38
  know, to me as a junior scholar, as a.
• 2:05:42
  First day in his classroom when I said something, he listened
• 2:05:45
  and he interacted with me.
• 2:05:46
  And there was never a moment from between then and now when I
• 2:05:49
  interact with him where I never feel like he's like just biting his
• 2:05:54
  time to correct me or something.
• 2:05:56
  He's a real educator.
• 2:05:57
  He's a real scholar.
• 2:05:58
  He he's done Titanic important things for the field and yeah, it's a real, like
• 2:06:03
  I said, an intellectual hero of mine.
• 2:06:05
  So
• 2:06:06
  Rupert Isaacson: if you were to put into a nutshell why we ought to study
• 2:06:10
  Western esotericism, why should we?
• 2:06:14
  Justin Sledge: It's, it's part of our history.
• 2:06:17
  Rupert Isaacson: Go on.
• 2:06:18
  There's more than that.
• 2:06:20
  Justin Sledge: I think it's a part of our history that systems of power
• 2:06:24
  have sought to repress, that modernity has sought to repress that myth, that
• 2:06:33
  modern peddlers and conspiracy theories distort for their own interests.
• 2:06:39
  And it's had a disproportionate impact on the development of modernity.
• 2:06:43
  Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
• 2:06:44
  Justin Sledge: And so why
• 2:06:45
  Rupert Isaacson: think what we think?
• 2:06:46
  Yeah,
• 2:06:46
  Justin Sledge: it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's right there at the heart of it all.
• 2:06:49
  And I think that those are reasons why it should be taken seriously.
• 2:06:53
  I don't think that every religious studies department needs a Western
• 2:06:56
  as Tism scholar, but I do think that there's no reason why, you know, there
• 2:07:02
  are not more of us out there as a, you know, as a, as a, as a, you know,
• 2:07:08
  Rupert Isaacson: it's astonishing really, that there aren't given that.
• 2:07:11
  Western Esotericism is the belief bedrock of all our stuff.
• 2:07:17
  Justin Sledge: Some of it, you know, a lot of it, you know.
• 2:07:18
  Yeah.
• 2:07:19
  It just, you know, but again, I can say in the United States, I, you
• 2:07:23
  have to beg, borrow, and still to get religious, religious studies classes.
• 2:07:26
  Yeah.
• 2:07:26
  Just reli basic religious studies classes.
• 2:07:29
  The idea that you would have a specialization in religious
• 2:07:32
  studies classes is beyond the pale.
• 2:07:36
  Rupert Isaacson: And do you think that just comes from dogmatic
• 2:07:38
  Christianity or dogmatic science?
• 2:07:41
  Science saity or somewhere in between
• 2:07:44
  Justin Sledge: scientism?
• 2:07:45
  Yeah.
• 2:07:45
  I think it's also just uni.
• 2:07:46
  Universities are often skeptical of, they don't wanna be perceived as pushing an
• 2:07:51
  agenda, especially a religious agenda.
• 2:07:53
  And religious studies tends to be academic.
• 2:07:56
  I mean, it's, we're not taking a side, we're just trying to teach religious
• 2:08:00
  studies and somehow that offends people that you're not taking a position, but
• 2:08:04
  also taking a position isn't allowed.
• 2:08:06
  So it's a complete catch 22.
• 2:08:08
  Rupert Isaacson: It's so interesting.
• 2:08:10
  Okay.
• 2:08:11
  So here's the thing.
• 2:08:12
  Somebody needs to understand and begin somewhere.
• 2:08:16
  What are like the five things that.
• 2:08:20
  Somebody should start with to take them from Sumer ish to here to get a
• 2:08:25
  bit of an understanding to get going.
• 2:08:28
  You're talking to a 14-year-old, you say, dude, look at these five things.
• 2:08:34
  What are they?
• 2:08:35
  Justin Sledge: Wow.
• 2:08:35
  Look at these five things.
• 2:08:38
  Well, I think there's no better place in the beginning.
• 2:08:41
  Look at the Keshe and the instructions of ak.
• 2:08:43
  Those are the first two literary documents ever written.
• 2:08:46
  The Keshe.
• 2:08:48
  Yeah.
• 2:08:48
  KeHE.
• 2:08:49
  And the instructions of she ak
• 2:08:51
  Rupert Isaacson: instructions of she ak.
• 2:08:52
  And that's Sumeria.
• 2:08:53
  Justin Sledge: That's Sumeria.
• 2:08:54
  Those are the first two literary documents ever written down that we have.
• 2:08:57
  It's the earliest we have, I dunno if they're the, the
• 2:08:59
  first or the earliest Yeah.
• 2:09:01
  That we've recovered.
• 2:09:03
  Skipping ahead further ahead than that.
• 2:09:07
  Oh God.
• 2:09:07
  This is like an impossible question.
• 2:09:09
  Rupert Isaacson: Are we in Egypt?
• 2:09:11
  Are we in Greece?
• 2:09:14
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 2:09:15
  I, I think that,
• 2:09:18
  I mean, I would from Egypt, I would say that the text that I
• 2:09:21
  would read from ancient Egypt would be the pyramid text of Unes.
• 2:09:29
  That's the first appearance of the soul and the afterlife and the
• 2:09:32
  world that we know of in literature.
• 2:09:34
  Great.
• 2:09:35
  Uns, how do you spell it?
• 2:09:36
  UNAS.
• 2:09:39
  Rupert Isaacson: So that's the first.
• 2:09:40
  What's fun with that name?
• 2:09:42
  Justin Sledge: Hmm.
• 2:09:42
  Rupert Isaacson: You could have all sorts of fun with that name.
• 2:09:44
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 2:09:44
  It's either wanes.
• 2:09:45
  We don't know how it was really pronounced in ancient Egyptian.
• 2:09:47
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:09:48
  Justin Sledge: Greece.
• 2:09:48
  I would say that you could spend a lifetime with Parmenides.
• 2:09:51
  Parmenides.
• 2:09:52
  Rupert Isaacson: Not Plato, not Socrates.
• 2:09:54
  Not everything is a
• 2:09:55
  Justin Sledge: commentary to Parmenides.
• 2:09:57
  Everything is downstream of parities.
• 2:09:58
  Everything's downstream of Plato, but Plato's downstream of Parities.
• 2:10:01
  Okay.
• 2:10:02
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:10:02
  Didn't know that.
• 2:10:04
  Okay.
• 2:10:04
  Parities.
• 2:10:05
  I'm gonna go have a look at Parities.
• 2:10:08
  Okay.
• 2:10:09
  Then I presume we hit Rome or,
• 2:10:14
  Justin Sledge: yeah.
• 2:10:14
  Or the Middle Ages.
• 2:10:16
  I don't know.
• 2:10:16
  Probably the Confessions by Augustine.
• 2:10:19
  That's the first time we get a person, like something like a subject.
• 2:10:24
  The confessions.
• 2:10:25
  Okay.
• 2:10:26
  Everything you need to know about Christianity is Western
• 2:10:28
  Christianity is in the Confessions.
• 2:10:30
  Rupert Isaacson: And that's fifth Century.
• 2:10:32
  Yeah.
• 2:10:32
  Yeah.
• 2:10:33
  Justin Sledge: Twilight of the Roman Empire.
• 2:10:35
  Rupert Isaacson: And he's also, he's been a Pagan, right?
• 2:10:40
  August Augustine.
• 2:10:40
  So he's, he, he's, he, he knows of what he rejected a bit,
• 2:10:44
  Justin Sledge: right?
• 2:10:45
  Yeah, he's a smart guy.
• 2:10:45
  I mean, maybe one of the smartest philosophers ever we've ever produced.
• 2:10:49
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:10:49
  Alright.
• 2:10:49
  And then we're at five.
• 2:10:51
  Is it Spinoza?
• 2:10:53
  Justin Sledge: Oh, wow.
• 2:10:54
  Then we have to go over the Middle Ages.
• 2:10:56
  Nah, it's not, he's important, but I, I can't imagine he's
• 2:10:59
  that, that high on the list.
• 2:11:01
  God, this is like, these lists are just so impossible.
• 2:11:04
  Rupert Isaacson: Do we need to go to,
• 2:11:06
  Justin Sledge: might be Leonard Bernard
• 2:11:07
  Rupert Isaacson: Pvo or do we need to go?
• 2:11:08
  Yeah.
• 2:11:08
  Maister Eckhart Probably.
• 2:11:09
  Maister Eckhart.
• 2:11:12
  Okay.
• 2:11:13
  Why, why him and not Hildegard of Bing or someone.
• 2:11:16
  Justin Sledge: I mean, it's all, you know, Hildegard is doing a very different thing.
• 2:11:18
  I think that Maister Eckhart brings us the closest we ever got to
• 2:11:23
  a kind of radical philosophical spiritual mysticism in the West.
• 2:11:30
  And, and he only didn't get excommunicated.
• 2:11:32
  'cause he died.
• 2:11:33
  Okay.
• 2:11:34
  But he's, you know, Meister Eckhart is, he's so important that I literally copied
• 2:11:41
  out an entire sermon of his by hand in, in calligraphy once the Sermon on Hunger.
• 2:11:48
  I think it's such a brilliant, I copied it out just so I could meditate on it.
• 2:11:51
  Like letter by letter.
• 2:11:52
  I copied the entire thing out in Latin.
• 2:11:54
  Okay.
• 2:11:55
  Took me, took me weeks.
• 2:11:58
  But Okay.
• 2:11:59
  Any, any, anyone who says that I, you know, I, I don't I don't
• 2:12:02
  take this stuff seriously.
• 2:12:03
  I take it so seriously that I, I literally will copy it out by
• 2:12:07
  hand in a 14th century style.
• 2:12:11
  So listen,
• 2:12:11
  Rupert Isaacson: I know you have to run.
• 2:12:12
  Tell us how people can find you.
• 2:12:14
  How can they and lads listeners support this dude?
• 2:12:19
  Go to his Patreon buy his cool black metal merch, which I'm about
• 2:12:24
  to do and listen to his show.
• 2:12:26
  But how do they find you Justin and stuff?
• 2:12:29
  Justin Sledge: Yeah.
• 2:12:30
  And I apologize for the noise down below.
• 2:12:31
  I'm in the process of, you know, you notice my shelves are all
• 2:12:33
  empty in the process of about to renovate this whole study.
• 2:12:37
  I only have YouTube.
• 2:12:38
  You can find me on YouTube.
• 2:12:39
  But esoterica, I have a website where poking can learn a little bit more
• 2:12:42
  about me, but I don't have any other social media 'cause it scares me.
• 2:12:46
  Yeah.
• 2:12:46
  But that's it.
• 2:12:46
  But if people
• 2:12:47
  Rupert Isaacson: want to consult with you, can they, if people have
• 2:12:49
  questions, if people wanted to engage you as some sort of a mentor or tutor
• 2:12:55
  and pay you to do that, can they Or do you keep out completely back?
• 2:12:58
  Yeah,
• 2:12:58
  Justin Sledge: it's so, it, it's the kind of thing where, you know, I've done
• 2:13:01
  a little bit of that, but I've, I've found that to be not a very rewarding
• 2:13:05
  experience because often people, you know, time is expensive for me.
• 2:13:09
  Yeah, sure.
• 2:13:09
  And I don't, and charging people, if I give, if one person could pay me a lot
• 2:13:14
  of money, then that's taking time away that I could be serving lots more people.
• 2:13:19
  Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely.
• 2:13:20
  Justin Sledge: And so I've done that on, I've done that on a few occasions and I'm
• 2:13:23
  like, yeah, I don't feel good about it.
• 2:13:26
  'cause I feel like it's sort of like a, I feel like I'm medieval person where I'm
• 2:13:29
  bought as opposed to being able to give, and I'd rather give them than, and what,
• 2:13:35
  Rupert Isaacson: what you do is extremely generous and, you know,
• 2:13:38
  when I'm listening to your stuff, I feel like I'm kind of wandering
• 2:13:40
  through the library of Alexandria, you know, somewhere in, you know, I.
• 2:13:46
  The Hellenic Egypt at some point, and the books are just
• 2:13:50
  popping out and talking to me.
• 2:13:51
  Justin Sledge: No, I'm really glad that's so any educator wants to
• 2:13:54
  hear is that, that the, the past is coming to life in a rewarding way.
• 2:13:58
  Because, you know, again, the William William Faulkner
• 2:14:01
  said the the past isn't dead.
• 2:14:03
  It's not even past.
• 2:14:04
  Mm.
• 2:14:05
  Justin Sledge: And I think that that's what I wanna make clear to
• 2:14:07
  people is that the past isn't dead.
• 2:14:09
  You're living in it.
• 2:14:11
  Rupert Isaacson: That's very hunter gatherer of you.
• 2:14:12
  It's the non-linear time thing that Yeah, it passed, I guess.
• 2:14:16
  Yeah.
• 2:14:17
  Having
• 2:14:18
  Justin Sledge: not many hunter gatherers, I can't say, but I can say that.
• 2:14:21
  Yeah.
• 2:14:21
  I don't, I don't, I don't tend to think of the past as being a dead
• 2:14:23
  thing that influenced, influenced us.
• 2:14:26
  Yeah.
• 2:14:27
  It's a living thing that is influencing us.
• 2:14:30
  I so agree.
• 2:14:31
  We should be self-conscious of that influence.
• 2:14:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:14:35
  I can't recommend it enough lads.
• 2:14:37
  Go listen to esoterica.
• 2:14:38
  Drive around P Poo with your horses, whatever you're doing,
• 2:14:41
  go to the toilet, listen to it.
• 2:14:42
  It's brilliant.
• 2:14:45
  Justin, it's been fantastic to have you on.
• 2:14:47
  I I'm, you're a hero.
• 2:14:49
  I'm a fanboy.
• 2:14:51
  It's fantastic.
• 2:14:53
  I, I, I can't thank you enough for coming on.
• 2:14:55
  Justin Sledge: I appreciate it.
• 2:14:56
  Thank you for having me on.
• 2:14:57
  Rupert Isaacson: I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
• 2:15:01
  If you did, please help us to make more.
• 2:15:05
  Please like, subscribe, tell a friend, give us a thumbs up.
• 2:15:09
  If you'd like to support us on Patreon, please go to my website, rupertisakson.
• 2:15:14
  com.
• 2:15:15
  And if you'd like to find out about our certification courses with.
• 2:15:19
  autism, education, horsemanship, everyday shamanism.
• 2:15:23
  There's a whole range of cool stuff.
• 2:15:25
  Putting a show together like this is not an easy task.
• 2:15:30
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• 2:15:35
  and showing us some love there.
• 2:15:37
  Even the smallest donation, it really helps us to keep the good content coming.
• 2:15:43
  So go to rupertisakson.
• 2:15:45
  com and click on the Patreon link.
• 2:15:48
  Not to mention our excellent merch.
• 2:15:50
  Please go to our shop and check out some of our really cool
• 2:15:56
  rock and roll themed merch.
• 2:15:57
  T shirts, hoodies, all that sort of thing.
• 2:15:59
  rupertisatson.
• 2:16:00
  com, it's all there.
• 2:16:01
  I can't wait for our next guest and also to meet you there.
• 2:16:06
  In the meantime, remember, live free.
• 2:16:10
  Ride free.