Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / The history of the OCCULT with dr. Justin Sledge from Esoterica

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The history of the OCCULT with dr. Justin Sledge from Esoterica · The Smart Cookies podcast

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  Dr. Justin Sledge is a professor of philosophy and religion whose work engages religious
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  studies in Western esoteric tradition, particularly in religious and philosophical thought.
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  He is the host and creator of a fantastic and fantastically popular YouTube channel
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  called Esoterica.
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  Dr. Sledge, Justin, welcome to the show.
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  Thank you.
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  Thank you so much for having me.
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  Okay.
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  So I'm just going to start with this.
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  As soon as I hear esoteric or occult mentioned, my brain immediately conjures up some sort
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  of a sinister image.
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  For example, something like that infamous scene in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
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  I don't know if you've seen that.
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  Oh, yeah.
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  That's a great scene.
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  The creepy masked ball.
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  And I think a lot of us have that instant association when we hear these words, esoteric,
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  occult, arcane.
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  Has the occult always appeared that way in the collective consciousness?
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  Not entirely.
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  I mean, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, occult just meant hidden.
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  In the same way that we don't see gravity, they would call that an occult cause.
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  And so the idea that they were apparent and occult causes was just a basic factor in the
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  medieval world and the Renaissance world.
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  So no, the world of occult is only really since the 19th century had come to have a
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  kind of more or less negative connotation.
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  But the most famous book of occultism, the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, written
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  by Cornelius Agrippa and published in 1533, it faced a little resistance.
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  But ultimately it was published and it was actually published primarily because Agrippa
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  was good friends with the Archbishop of Cologne.
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  So this is a kind of book that at some level, the Inquisition, the Dominicans didn't want
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  to see published, but at some level also there were other elements in the Catholic Church
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  that were totally OK with the idea of it.
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  So it's mostly a contemporary idea that the occult is somehow linked with Satanism or
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  diabolism or evil, something like that.
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  So it's a more contemporary connotation of the word.
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  Well, when it comes to the origin of these ideas, can we even talk about a set of ideas
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  that are consistently associated with these traditions or am I completely jumping the
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  shark here?
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  It just depends.
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  There's a lot of scholarly debate about to what degree as a terrorism or the occult represents
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  a coherent theory or a coherent system of thought or tradition or what have you.
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  I think that in general, the way that I typically frame it is that we can talk about sort of
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  what has been allowed into the canon of Western thought.
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  We all know Immanuel Kant or Hegel or whatever, even someone like Karl Marx.
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  Marx is very polarizing, but we all acknowledge that he's part of the Western canon.
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  You can also think about the idea that there's a bunch of folks who have been excluded from
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  the canon that we don't teach, that we actively want to forget or that we've suppressed.
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  And in general, the idea is that there is a grab bag of that kind of material, whether
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  it's magic or alchemy or Kabbalah, mysticism, witchcraft or whatever, that we've rejected
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  as sources of knowledge.
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  We do not, as a popular kind of idea, think that there is anything to be learned from
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  alchemy or from magic.
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  We think that basically those are failed theories of nature or religion or whatever.
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  And so that grab bag of failure and rejection and suppression and oppression is generally
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  how scholars have grouped esoteric thought.
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  And so this is an idea pioneered by a scholar named Walter Hanegraaff.
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  And so that's kind of the way that we group it.
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  Now are there lines of thinking in those forms of thought that are somewhat continuous or
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  connected?
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  Sure.
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  For instance, the idea that the microcosm, the world down here, is a mirror of the macrocosm
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  of the larger cosmic structure of the universe and that one can manipulate the macrocosm
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  by manipulating the microcosm and in between, that there's a profound sense of connectivity
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  through the world.
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  Yeah, those are ideas that certainly are part of the broader scope of West Inesotericism.
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  But is there sort of a general agreement?
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  No.
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  You would see things, the ancient Gnostics, for instance, or profound dualists, whereas
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  the ancient Hermeticists were profound monists.
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  And so that's a deep sense of philosophical tension.
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  But in the sense that neither the Hermetics nor the Gnostics have become part of the dominant
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  intellectual culture means they all get thrown into the same rubbish bin of history that
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  we now call West Inesotericism.
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  Oh no.
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  Okay.
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  You brought us down a couple of pegs.
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  So from that glamorous masked ball of Stanley Kubrick's eyes wide shut to a trash bin of
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  discarded ideas, quite the fall there.
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  It's quite the fall.
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  So at the same time that we can talk about sort of the trash bin of history, it's not
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  like this stuff ever went away.
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  It was a case of Dominicans in the Inquisition tried to burn people for believing this stuff.
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  The Enlightenment pretended that it vanquished all superstition or whatever.
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  There's always the idea that this stuff is always there.
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  And occult spirituality and occult ideas, Gnosticism, they're all there.
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  And they're in some sense more popular than they ever have been before.
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  There are probably more Gnostics in the world now than there ever was in the ancient world.
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  There are probably more people who identify as witches now than there ever was for certain
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  in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance.
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  So in a way, the desire on the part of Western history to suppress and repress these kinds
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  of ideas has spectacularly failed.
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  The success of my channel, Esoterica, is a great testament to the fact that there's enormous
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  interest in this kind of material.
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  And so in a sense, it's the waste bin of history.
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  But in another sense, this is a place where people are extremely interested to go back
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  to what has been allegedly forgotten or repressed or has gone extinct.
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  And it's turned out to be an enormous mine of spiritual and philosophical importance
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  for people, so much so that we're now going back, for instance, to the history of philosophy.
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  You can talk about a philosopher like Hegel.
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  Hegel's had an enormous impact on modernity.
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  And we can go back now and say, oh, yeah, actually, it turns out that Hegel was deeply
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  influenced by all of these kinds of ideas.
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  And those kinds of ideas have had their impact, even if in a way that we don't often recognize.
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  Interesting.
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  OK.
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  But just to resolve it once and for all.
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  So it's usually just stuff that sort of did make it into a certain religious canon.
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  And then people just ran with it outside of official doctrine until it became sort of
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  a separate thing.
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  So kind of like what alternative rock is to stadium rock.
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  Yeah, I suppose that's a way of.
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  Yeah, that's the best analogy that I could.
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  Yeah.
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  Back when it was still cool to like, you know, it was Nirvana in the late 80s, early 90s
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  as opposed to.
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  Yeah.
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  So it's like that.
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  But yeah, in the sense that it's it's the underground.
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  In fact, we even refer to sometimes we talk about the Platonic underground.
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  This is the underground version of Plato.
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  This is the clerical underground.
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  We talk about priests practicing necromancy in the Middle Ages.
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  So yeah, this is sort of the the hipster version of of religiosity and spirituality and philosophy.
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  OK.
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  You said that this sort of vilification in an organized manner kind of begins in medieval
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  era.
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  But you know, I went to Bible school, was raised as a Catholic.
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  I'm not religious anymore.
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  I'm from Eastern Europe.
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  And I remember a story that deeply resonated with me.
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  Or maybe I should say it really scared me.
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  It was about King Saul, king of the Israelites before David.
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  And and he consulted a certain point towards the end of his reign, the witch at Endor,
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  I believe.
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  And she conjures the spirit of the prophet Samuel, who's dead.
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  And the spirit tells him that God has abandoned him.
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  But consulting a medium is apparently even in those days such a sin that it becomes one
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  of the reasons why Saul has to die soon after.
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  So that was pretty harsh, if you ask me.
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  And we're talking about thousands of years before the medieval era.
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  So there were certain ideas that were already kind of not grata in those days.
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  No, that's true.
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  I mean, the Hebrew Bible has this great story of Saul visiting what in Hebrew is called
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  a Baalat Ove.
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  We don't know what a Baalat was.
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  We don't know what that means, actually.
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  It means the master of the Ove or the mistress of the Ove.
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  The Hebrew there is a bit mysterious.
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  That whole story is very strange.
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  The spirit of the prophet coming up from the earth is referred to as an Elohim, a god.
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  So what exactly is going on with that whole story is extremely strange, especially when
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  you read it in the original Hebrew.
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  But yeah, there's always been a sense that there are boundaries.
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  The living should not muck about with the dead.
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  The living should not muck about with demons.
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  That these entities are dangerous.
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  And yeah, it has been the case that part of what religion does is tell us what are the
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  boundaries.
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  And religion has always had, and this is true of science and other things as well.
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  We always talk about the idea of playing God, that there's worries, there are anxieties
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  around things like atomic power.
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  There's worries around things like genetic manipulation.
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  People talk about you shouldn't be down there playing God, manipulating the genes or unleashing
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  the power of the atom.
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  And those kind of anxieties have been there well before science, that there are powers
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  in the universe much more profound and perhaps dangerous.
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  And human beings are relatively stupid and shouldn't mess about with them.
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  So I think there's wisdom there.
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  I think that we should tread carefully, whether it's with demons or up and down quarks and
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  the strong and clear force.
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  And I think that there's wisdom in those traditions.
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  At the same time, I think that it's also very important to know that prohibition is always
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  two things.
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  Prohibition is always evidence that people are doing something.
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  You don't ban things that people aren't doing.
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  And secondly, prohibition is always an invitation to do it.
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  Oh, yeah.
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  Always.
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  So anytime you prohibit something in history, we can always tell, well, there were people
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  doing it.
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  You don't prohibit things that people aren't doing.
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  And the moment you pass a prohibition is an invitation.
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  Prohibitions are always invitations.
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  And so in the history of thought, most of what I study has always been prohibited.
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  And that prohibition is a red flag for me to say, ah, what were people doing?
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  And further, when the prohibition came down, for instance, in 1389, there was a prohibition
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  issued by the University of Paris against the practice of sorcery.
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  A dozen or more things were prohibited by the University of Paris for students and faculty
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  to not engage in certain kinds of sorcery.
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  Well, that immediately tells me that the sorcery is going on at the University of Paris.
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  And it also tells me what kind of sorcery was being done.
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  And then it's interesting that we see an increase in magical manuscripts after that.
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  It's a Streisand effect.
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  The moment you prohibit it is the moment that it becomes all the rage, all the cool kids
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  want to do sorcery once you prohibit it.
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  You said that there's some wisdom in these boundaries sort of imposed by religious dogmas.
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  Could you speak more about that?
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  I think that part of what religion does when it does its job well, and this is true of
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  any kind of legal system, is that legal systems give us boundaries.
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  And what is it?
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  Hegel, again, I feel like I'm on a Hegel kick now.
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  Hegel said that freedom is a recognition of necessity.
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  And I think that there's some deep wisdom in the idea that human beings, and I'm a father
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  of two small children, and one of the things I've learned as a parent is that boundaries
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  and rules and rituals and regulations and structure actually provide for flourishing.
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  That creativity means nothing if there aren't boundaries.
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  If you can't transgress a boundary, then the creativity doesn't mean anything.
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  Creation means that there is a something and a nothing, and that you've done something
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  as opposed to done nothing.
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  That's what creation is.
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  Creativity requires boundaries.
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  Now it also requires that you test those boundaries and transgress those boundaries at times,
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  and this is why we need artists and philosophers and other kinds of people to do this.
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  But I do think that we benefit from institutions and from other kinds of systems telling us,
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  you know, pump the brakes on that.
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  That's maybe not the best idea.
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  And again, I give the example of people like to, you know, all the rage these days is people
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  loving text about summoning demons.
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  And you know, there's kind of an edgy quality of the idea of people wanting to summon demons
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  to do whatever.
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  And to me, that sounds like a terrifyingly stupid idea.
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  It sounds like the beginning of every horror movie ever.
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  And people ask, like, why would you, what's so bad about the idea?
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  Would you let a bear in your house?
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  Would you invite a gangster, like a hardened mafioso in your house and make a deal with
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  them?
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  One realizes, like, you're going to get the Russian mafia, like, in your house to have
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  dinner and like, make a deal to like, the Russian mafia is going to get you a girlfriend.
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  That's a terrible idea.
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  Would you let a tiger in your house?
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  Like, and the idea that you would let a demon in your house, much less an angel, angels
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  are far more terrifying, in my opinion, you would muck about with that seems patently
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  stupid to me.
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  And so, again, this is a thing that people do, allegedly.
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  And I think that tradition, when it comes out and says, you wouldn't let a bear in your
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  house, why would you let a demon in your house?
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  And that seems wise, you know, wise to me.
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  I don't even want squirrels in my attic, much less a, you know, a demon in my living room
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  or my kitchen.
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  You know, we set traps for mice because they get in our food and cause us trouble and can
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  get us sick, much less a fallen angel.
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  What are you doing?
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  So I think there's wisdom in it.
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  And again, now, is there wisdom in burning people alive because they're doing it?
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  Probably not.
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  I don't think that's the best solution for what to do with heterodox or unorthodox religious
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  belief in practice.
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  Obviously, the church and other institutions that have engaged in mass murder of women,
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  especially during the witch trials, that's horrifying and rightly to be condemned.
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  But I do think, even as an atheist, I'm not a theist myself, even as a non-theist, you
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  know, we could have pumped the brakes when we were developing the atomic bomb.
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  We could pump the brakes when we began to experiment with biological weapons, which
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  I'm sure we're doing now.
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  No one ever thinks to pump the brakes while they're doing it.
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  And I think there is wisdom in traditions that ask, you know, that the wisdom in traditions
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  that tell us that can does not imply should, that can does not imply should.
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  And I think there's wisdom in that.
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  Okay, going back to the demon trend, just for a second, I had no idea that's a thing
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  right now.
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  Is that like a TikTok thing?
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  I don't know if it's a TikTok thing because I stay away from TikTok because it terrifies
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  me.
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  I'm far more scared of TikTok than I am demons.
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  But yeah, yeah, you know, the most in general, I think the largest trend in occultism, so
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  far as I can tell, when you sort of look at the, you know, the Reddit and the other kind
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  of the publications, there's a vast interest in people interacting with demonic beings.
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  And that seems to be a quite popular, quite popular kind of occult pastime.
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  It's a bit beyond me, but that seems to be a thing that people are interested in.
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  There's a wide variety of publications on this.
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  And then again, my job as an educator is not to tell people what to do and what not to
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  do.
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  That's not my job.
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  I don't want that job.
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  It's not my job to preach to anyone.
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  But insofar as people are interested in spiritualities like that, my job is to inform folks of the
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  history, how this developed, you know, the actual material culture, what are the manuscripts
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  actually say?
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  You know, what does it mean to summon a demon when you have 15 different sigils for these
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  entities or, you know, 150 different manuscripts that describe how to do it in all kinds of
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  contradictory ways?
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  Now, my job is not to resolve that.
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  My job is simply to say, you know, the guru on the internet that's telling you that you
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  can summon a demon to get a girlfriend is probably lying to you because they don't have
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  access to manuscripts that I have access to.
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  And I can guarantee you when you actually look at the manuscripts, it's a mess.
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  It's a mess in the same way that, you know, when a Christian or a Jewish person or Muslim
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  tells me that their religious scriptures are completely non-contradictory and everything
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  is comes from God and it all makes perfect sense.
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  I read Hebrew, I read Greek, I can tell you that's not true in the same way that I can
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  be like, well, if you want to summon a demon, you got to fix this manuscript problem because
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  the manuscripts don't, they don't agree.
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  And you might try to summon Paimon and you get Beleth, I don't know.
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  So yeah, the manuscript tradition is a bit of a mess.
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  But yeah, as an educator, my job is to lay out the historical reality of these kinds
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  of practices, not to have jurisdiction, thank goodness, on what people do and don't do.
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  Also must be quite a lonely exercise in futility, summoning demons.
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  Yeah, there's a great t-shirt, right?
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  Where like, there's a bunch, you know, like, you know, there's people like, I want a friend.
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  And so they summon a demon to go play basketball with them.
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  This is like...
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  Oh, I would love that.
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  I love basketball.
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  Yeah, it's a great...
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  Is there in any traditions, is there demons who could be like cool roommates or are they
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  always like a bit of a downer?
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  No, if you look at the literature, most of them seem like they're, you know, some of
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  them are pretty bad, some of them are pretty evil, but most of them seem relatively easy
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  going.
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  You know, they can teach you ethics and rhetoric, they can teach you how to find buried treasure,
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  get a girlfriend, you know.
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  And again, this is part of the Christian mythology about demons, right?
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  That demons used to be angels.
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  And because they used to be angels, God farms out as like, you know, proletariat workers,
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  right?
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  All of the jobs in the universe, the angels, God doesn't do everything.
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  God's like the boss of the universe.
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  So the angels get all the jobs.
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  And because the angels get all the jobs, they're responsible for controlling the weather or
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  making gold or, you know, controlling, you know, love and things like this.
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  The angels get all the jobs and many of the angels that were in heaven, according to a
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  Christian mythology, well, some of them rebelled against God and were thrown out.
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  Well, just because they were thrown out doesn't mean they've forgotten all the stuff that
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  they knew.
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  They still know all that stuff.
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  And also they're really old.
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  They've been here since the beginning of the world.
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  And so they know a lot about the world and how the world works.
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  And they've seen the Roman Empire come and go.
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  And so they know everything about sort of the ends and outs of history at some level.
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  And so they're extremely knowledgeable and they're extremely like well versed in the
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  functioning of the universe.
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  And so in many ways, part of what summoning demons is, is kind of hacking the universe.
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  You're summoning a fallen angel who's an expert at blah, blah, blah, blah.
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  And then you're basically using divine names to bind that demon to get them to do stuff
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  for you.
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  So it's a bit like, you know, capturing a wild animal and then using that wild animal,
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  using that wild animal to do X, Y, and Z.
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  And so yeah, these demons allegedly are quite good at a huge range of things.
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  We have historically demonological catalogs that tell you the name of the demon, how to
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  summon them, what holy name will bind them, and what they're good at, what they can do
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  and what they can't do.
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  And so we have pretty extensive literature from history telling you, you know, what these
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  demons do.
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  And you know, if you want to find buried treasure, there's a demon for that.
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  If you want to learn languages, there's a demon for that.
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  If you want to control the weather, there's a demon for that.
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  And so it's a bit like the, you know, it's a bit like a, you know, phone directory, as
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  much as those used to exist, where you look up a demon and you call them and use magical
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  powers to control them and you get what you want.
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  So now to be clear, St. Augustine makes the argument that I find actually very interesting
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  that most of these demons can't do the things that they say they can do.
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  They can only create illusions and that the demons are all engaged in a long con.
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  They make you believe that you can summon them and then bind them and make them do stuff.
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  And they might do things for you, but ultimately they're only doing that because they're really
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  in control and they're conning you.
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  And ultimately what they're trying to do is doom your soul to hell.
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  And so Augustine has the argument that, yeah, you think you're controlling them, but at
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  the end of the day, they're older and smarter and wiser than you.
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  And that they're in fact conning you.
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  And again, the same way that you think you might be making a deal with the Russian mafia,
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  you're not making a deal with the Russian mafia.
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  The mafia is making a deal with you.
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  And at the end of the day, you're not in control of the situation.
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  When you go into debt to the mob, you never get out.
• 22:04
  And in the same way that when you go into debt with a demon, you never get out.
• 22:09
  You are the mark at the table.
• 22:12
  You know, the old saying, right, if you don't know who the sucker at the table is, it's
• 22:15
  you.
• 22:16
  You're always a sucker at the table when it comes to demons, according to Augustine.
• 22:20
  And I think, again, if you look at the history of these entities, that has to be true.
• 22:26
  I mean, it just seems obvious to me.
• 22:29
  Like I said, in the same way that I'm not going to take a loan out from Vladimir, you
• 22:34
  know, with all the tattoos on his knees and stuff, I'm not going to take a deal with an
• 22:41
  ancient malevolent deity, you know, quasi deity.
• 22:44
  So people compiling these Rolodexes with like demonic entities, were they just inventing
• 22:50
  stuff out of whole cloth?
• 22:52
  Because I don't remember hearing about any of this stuff from our local priest when I
• 22:57
  was going to Sunday school.
• 23:00
  Now, he was drinking a lot and that was his favorite like pastime activity.
• 23:04
  But even so, like I don't remember any of this kind of like, you know, armies of demons,
• 23:10
  fallen angels that you can trap with magic and that sort of stuff.
• 23:15
  It just didn't feature prominently in our Catholicism.
• 23:18
  So where is this stuff coming from?
• 23:20
  I think it would probably be in the best interest of the Catholic Church, given that they're
• 23:24
  hemorrhaging believers to focus more on this stuff, because I think at least would hold
• 23:27
  people's attention more than, you know, the homo ucio, so whatever it is that they're
• 23:32
  selling.
• 23:33
  So the traditions go back really far.
• 23:35
  There are demonological catalogs that go all the way back before the common era, before
• 23:38
  the birth of Jesus.
• 23:40
  There were Jewish demonological catalogs that go back to things like the Book of Enoch and
• 23:45
  maybe even prior to that.
• 23:47
  So yeah, this literature goes back a couple thousand years at least, maybe probably more.
• 23:53
  And what you see primarily is that there's an interest in early Judaism.
• 23:59
  And this is around the turn of the common era, a couple of centuries before the common
• 24:03
  era.
• 24:04
  As you can easily imagine, things have not always gone well for the Jewish people.
• 24:08
  And insofar as things have not gone well for the Jewish people, one of the things that
• 24:11
  the Jewish people have asked is like, why is the world so bad?
• 24:15
  Why is life so terrible?
• 24:18
  And one of the answers has been, well, demons.
• 24:21
  Like the world is populated with evil.
• 24:22
  In fact, the Talmud says that, you know, it's a good explanation for why the world's so
• 24:26
  bad.
• 24:27
  It's just full of demons.
• 24:28
  In fact, the Talmud even says that if you could see demons, that's all you would see.
• 24:33
  There's so many demons that if you could see them, they would, you wouldn't see anything
• 24:37
  else.
• 24:38
  The world is ubiquitous.
• 24:39
  The world is a pandemonium.
• 24:41
  In fact, that literally means full of demons.
• 24:44
  The word was invented by John Milton for Paradise Lost.
• 24:48
  But the idea is that there must be something responsible for all this evil.
• 24:54
  And obviously, evil comes in lots of flavors.
• 24:56
  There's all kinds of evil in the world.
• 24:58
  There's war and disease and greed and there's lust and there's all kinds of evil.
• 25:04
  And so one of the ways that they thought to deal with this problem was by assigning basically
• 25:11
  some kind of malevolent entity to all the various flavors and species of evil in the
• 25:15
  world.
• 25:17
  And so many of the demons actually end up with names of the particular evil, right?
• 25:22
  The particular evil attached to a divine name.
• 25:25
  So you might get a demon like, that's a good example of a demon, Samael.
• 25:33
  Samael is sort of the closest thing in Judaism to the devil and Samael means the poison of
• 25:38
  God.
• 25:39
  It's like, you know, it's a pretty metal.
• 25:41
  And literally, there's a band called Samael.
• 25:44
  And so like you get all these demonic beings because basically you need somebody to explain
• 25:47
  the forces of evil.
• 25:48
  Of course, the angels do the opposite job, right?
• 25:51
  You get Raphael, God heals.
• 25:54
  And so the opposite of God healing people must be God poisoning people.
• 25:57
  And so Samael, God's poisoner, or the Malak Meshit in Hebrew, the destroying angel, the
• 26:08
  angel of death.
• 26:10
  So that's kind of where you get.
• 26:12
  And so it's not hard to imagine that the world's populated by a bunch of evil beings.
• 26:17
  And that's why evil exists in the world, or at least how evil happens.
• 26:22
  And ultimately what ends up happening is, well, if God is ultimately in control and God made
• 26:28
  all these beings and we're on the side of God, perhaps it's the case that we can use God
• 26:35
  indirectly to bind these demons to get them to do stuff for us.
• 26:39
  In the same way that we can capture a wild horse, break that horse, and then make that
• 26:44
  horse carry chariots around or whatever.
• 26:46
  And so there is a logic here.
• 26:49
  It is not completely crazy that you can bind demons and make them do things.
• 26:55
  Evil clearly exists in the world.
• 26:57
  And you can also manipulate evil.
• 27:00
  And you can use evil to the interest of the good.
• 27:04
  Now, of course, this was never a widespread acceptable practice.
• 27:10
  You can't do bad things in order to do good things.
• 27:13
  But sure, there's definitely necromancers in the middle ages that would say things like,
• 27:16
  yeah, I use demons to find buried treasure, but then I also give some of the money to
• 27:19
  the church.
• 27:23
  And of course, the church is not going to be super about that.
• 27:27
  But I suspect that if you showed up to a church with a bunch of gold, they're not going to
• 27:32
  ask a lot of questions about exactly where it came from.
• 27:35
  And to your point earlier about your drunken priest, in the middle ages, there's only one
• 27:41
  group of people who can read books, who can get books, who can do rituals, who can do
• 27:47
  stuff in Latin, who know all this theology and philosophy that allows them to do this.
• 27:52
  There's only one group of people in the middle ages with those kinds of skills.
• 27:55
  It's priests.
• 27:57
  And we know now that Olaf the farmer is not going to be able to recite a bunch of weird
• 28:05
  stuff in Latin to summon a demon.
• 28:07
  The only people capable of doing that kind of stuff, the only people with access to books,
• 28:11
  books and literature was the priestly class.
• 28:14
  And so we now know, and we now have good evidence to believe that a lot of the people engaged
• 28:20
  in these kinds of demonic shenanigans in the middle ages were priests, so much so that
• 28:25
  that layer of priests is now referred to as the clerical necromantic underground.
• 28:30
  And yeah, that's what they're officially known as in the literature, the clerical necromantic
• 28:35
  underground, which I literally have on my channel, Merch, what a great band name.
• 28:39
  That sounds also like a chapter of a particularly scary video game.
• 28:43
  Yeah, it's, you know, again, it should be a movie.
• 28:47
  And we know that because of the distribution of texts and the distribution of literature
• 28:51
  around this, that there must have been a lot of them because we see texts traveling over
• 28:57
  Europe and that we see them getting copied.
• 28:59
  And it must be the case that one cleric goes from one town to another.
• 29:03
  He must know someone who's connected to this underground network.
• 29:07
  They exchange information and that information travels.
• 29:10
  And it's so ubiquitous through Europe that there must have been a relatively thick layer
• 29:15
  of these necromancer, necromancer priests who were active in the church.
• 29:22
  And we know that because not only do we have the actual empirical evidence of the manuscript
• 29:27
  tradition, but also on top of that, we just have prohibitions on it constantly.
• 29:31
  We have constantly a church being like bishops, get your people, like stop.
• 29:35
  You cannot have these exorcist priests doing necromancy on the side.
• 29:39
  You cannot have a necromancy side hustle.
• 29:42
  But we know that they did because imagine, again, imagine you're a person in the middle
• 29:46
  ages.
• 29:47
  Life is crappy because it's 1380, the plague or whatever infant mortality, all the things
• 29:54
  that we know about how bad the middle ages were.
• 29:56
  So you pray to God at the church and God doesn't answer the phone.
• 30:00
  So then you pray to Mary and Mary doesn't answer the phone.
• 30:03
  So you start the priests, the priests don't answer the phone, you know, the saints or
• 30:06
  whatever.
• 30:08
  If no one picks up the phone and your kid is sick, your animals are sick, you don't
• 30:14
  stop.
• 30:16
  Everybody knows that father so-and-so at two parishes over is able to bind demons and get
• 30:24
  stuff.
• 30:25
  So you don't, you don't know when in their right mind, if their kid is sick, is this
• 30:28
  going to stop?
• 30:30
  You're going to knock on the God door.
• 30:32
  You're going to knock on the Jesus door.
• 30:33
  You're going to knock on the Mary door.
• 30:34
  You're going to knock on the saint's door.
• 30:36
  And then you're going to knock on the necromancer's door.
• 30:40
  And you're going to keep knocking until either you run out of doors to knock or it works.
• 30:44
  And we should not think that medieval people are fundamentally different than anyone else.
• 30:51
  Of course, when we're in dire straits or we want something really bad, we're going to
• 30:56
  knock on every single door until we get it.
• 30:58
  And it's unsurprising that necromancers in the middle ages were ubiquitous.
• 31:08
  Speaking of that, I just read a really disturbing account of some nobleman in France who fought
• 31:14
  with Joan of Arc, who later became a saint.
• 31:17
  And this guy was an aristocrat.
• 31:19
  I think his name was Gilles de Re.
• 31:21
  And he fell into debt after the war.
• 31:25
  And then he started summoning demons in his castle.
• 31:30
  But the person who apparently aided him with all this stuff was a priest, an Italian Catholic
• 31:36
  priest.
• 31:37
  Right.
• 31:38
  And not falling.
• 31:39
  I mean, they were just like part of the church.
• 31:40
  It was just, you know, oh, yeah, yeah, they were kicked out.
• 31:43
  I mean, they were, you know, they again, part of the power, the part of the binding of these
• 31:46
  demons is you have to have divine grace.
• 31:49
  So at some level, you have to be a priest.
• 31:51
  You can't be a sinner.
• 31:53
  You can't be a bad person.
• 31:55
  It requires that you actually be a Christian in good standing.
• 31:59
  You know, and the question of Gilles de Re or the Templars, who were also executed in
• 32:04
  mass because allegedly worship some demon named Baphomet.
• 32:08
  Again, there's always the question that when there's debt and when there's the church
• 32:14
  and when there's political power, is there, you know, is there demon worshiping going
• 32:20
  on here?
• 32:21
  Is there summoning going on here?
• 32:22
  You know, the famous story of the Le Dune possessions.
• 32:27
  This was a very important moment in the 17th century where a bunch of nuns allegedly were
• 32:32
  possessed at a convent and they accused a bishop of a popular priest of summoning demons.
• 32:41
  And there's really no evidence that he was involved in any of this at all, actually.
• 32:45
  And so this is a very powerful mechanism by which to basically get your enemies executed.
• 32:52
  And in fact, it's a very efficient way because you can't prove you didn't do it.
• 33:00
  And it's really easy to fabricate evidence that you did.
• 33:02
  In fact, in the Le Dune case, they were even able to fabricate a signed pact with the devil
• 33:10
  with demonic signatures and stuff.
• 33:12
  It's quite a lovely piece of work.
• 33:15
  But yeah, you know, it's these kinds of things that, you know, when people are accused of
• 33:19
  it, when we go look at it in history, in some cases, the evidence is quite good.
• 33:24
  You know, we have a character like Cecho d'Escoli, who was accused of necromancy, who also made
• 33:28
  a bunch of enemies at court.
• 33:30
  He was ultimately executed by burning in the 14th century.
• 33:33
  But we do know, without a shadow of doubt, that he wrote books of necromancy.
• 33:38
  His book of necromancy survives.
• 33:41
  He basically copped to it in the trial.
• 33:43
  But in other cases, people like Gilles de Rea or the Templars, I think that the evidence
• 33:47
  is much more, let's say, flimsy.
• 33:50
  It's much more of a kangaroo court, I think, in those cases.
• 33:55
  So we talked about how a lot of this kind of knowledge, a lot of these traditions were
• 34:02
  not vilified, were not on the bad side of an authority.
• 34:07
  But then in the Middle Ages, it flips.
• 34:10
  Could you talk about that a little bit?
• 34:11
  Why does that happen?
• 34:12
  When does that happen?
• 34:13
  And what exactly happens there?
• 34:16
  So some things have always been on the bad side of the law.
• 34:19
  Summoning demons is never a thing that you're going to be able to get away with in Orthodox
• 34:22
  Christianity.
• 34:23
  But something like alchemy or astrology is a great example.
• 34:27
  Alchemy we now think of as sort of a cult or esoteric.
• 34:31
  But with few exceptions, alchemists were never persecuted by the Inquisition or persecuted
• 34:36
  as sorcerers or whatever.
• 34:38
  Astrologers were never either, very rarely.
• 34:40
  In fact, astrology was taught in university classes.
• 34:44
  So it was an official thing that you could go take a class at the University of Cologne
• 34:47
  and learn how to do astrology.
• 34:49
  So what ends up happening is that through the Middle Ages, there is a growing sense
• 34:55
  among Christians that one, the world's coming to an end.
• 34:59
  That's just sort of a thing Christianity has built into it, the imminent end of the
• 35:03
  world that goes back to the earliest Christians.
• 35:06
  And there's also the idea in Christianity that Satan and God are at war, that the earth
• 35:11
  is a kind of a battleground in the war between Satan and God.
• 35:16
  And in the Middle Ages, the idea was as the world gets closer to coming to an end, Satan
• 35:22
  intensifies his war.
• 35:26
  The war gets amped up.
• 35:27
  And of course, what Satan wants to do is outrage God, is insult God.
• 35:31
  And the best way to do that is to take human beings who are made in the image of God, the
• 35:36
  closest thing Satan can get access to in the form of God, even better than the angels.
• 35:40
  The angels are sort of again, angeli, they're workers.
• 35:45
  They're not made in the image of God in the same way that human beings are.
• 35:48
  And insofar as Satan can get access to us and our soul, and then damn us, send us to
• 35:53
  hell, he can destroy little micro regions of the image of God.
• 35:59
  And so insofar as the world's coming to an end, Satan ramps up his campaign to outrage
• 36:07
  God.
• 36:08
  And the way that Satan does that is primarily through getting demons to tempt people into
• 36:14
  doing things that will ultimately get them damned.
• 36:16
  And what's more tempting than power?
• 36:19
  There's nothing more tempting than power.
• 36:21
  Power is the most tempting thing of all.
• 36:23
  And so what can the demons do?
• 36:24
  They can pretend to give you powers.
• 36:26
  And what emerges in the church is the idea that Satan has introduced the final heresy.
• 36:32
  And the final heresy is the idea that human beings can make a pact with demons or with
• 36:38
  the devil.
• 36:40
  And that pact allows them to contravene Christianity.
• 36:44
  And insofar as they contravene Christianity, they're able to get powers while on earth.
• 36:49
  This is a foul story.
• 36:51
  And this idea is these people, particularly women, are able to accomplish this through
• 36:57
  making pacts with the devil.
• 36:59
  And this is the final push against God, that the devil now has a final heretical move.
• 37:06
  There's been all kinds of heresies in the past, Gnosticism, Marcionism, all the different
• 37:11
  isms, Arianism.
• 37:13
  But this is going to be the final gesture.
• 37:17
  And the church unleashes massacre to try to stop this.
• 37:23
  And that becomes basically the early modern witch trials.
• 37:27
  So in a sense, the church early on viewed sorcery as one sin among other sins.
• 37:34
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, summon the devil.
• 37:35
  That's bad.
• 37:36
  You had adultery.
• 37:37
  That's bad.
• 37:38
  You stole.
• 37:39
  That's bad.
• 37:40
  Come to the church, get your confession, say your Hail Mary's and you're done.
• 37:43
  Beginning in around the 13th century and then into the 15th century, sorcery becomes less
• 37:51
  and less thought of as merely a sin.
• 37:54
  And it becomes associated with a heresy that you are in fact a heretic.
• 37:58
  You've abandoned Christianity.
• 38:00
  You've made a pact with the devil and you're ultimately trying to destroy Christianity
• 38:05
  and league with the devil.
• 38:08
  And that transition of sorcery from a sin to a heresy brought you under the jurisdiction
• 38:14
  of the Inquisition and inaugurated the witch trials as we know them.
• 38:19
  And of course, the witch trials executed somewhere between 40 and 60,000 people, mostly women.
• 38:24
  So that's the big transition.
• 38:26
  Sin heresy or rather sorcery goes from just a sin to becoming a heresy.
• 38:33
  And that transition is decisive in European history.
• 38:37
  Is that just sorcery or do these other, I don't know what to call them disciplines,
• 38:42
  like you said, like astrology, etc. divination, whatever.
• 38:46
  Do they fall suddenly under the same kind of interdict?
• 38:51
  This alchemy, one famous inquisitor in the 14th century named Nicholas Emmerich tried
• 38:56
  to argue that the alchemists were in fact sorcerers.
• 38:59
  That argument didn't work.
• 39:00
  Most inquisitors rejected that argument.
• 39:04
  But yeah, astrology, divination, even medicine, they all became not associated with it, but
• 39:14
  they all became sort of like, what's the right way of putting it?
• 39:19
  If you were practicing a lot of astrology and if you began to, and again, we have to
• 39:25
  remember, right?
• 39:26
  Medieval people thought that demons lived in the air.
• 39:28
  They lived in the space between the earth and the moon.
• 39:32
  They didn't live in the earth.
• 39:33
  They didn't live in hell.
• 39:34
  Hell is where they go at the end of the world.
• 39:36
  But right now they live in the earth and they live in the space between the earth and the
• 39:40
  moon.
• 39:41
  That's why medieval people thought where demons lived.
• 39:43
  And because you're dealing with that region up there, well, that's where the demons live.
• 39:48
  And there's always a bit of suspicion that if your astrological predictions are like
• 39:52
  making you rich or getting your enemies hurt or they're weirdly accurate, well, maybe you're
• 39:59
  not just looking at the planets.
• 40:01
  Maybe you're also up to no good.
• 40:03
  And so yeah, there's always a sense of if you're too good at what you do or if you're
• 40:06
  out late or if you're in the woods by yourself a lot or you're a little too educated and
• 40:11
  you have a lot of weird books, well, you might be up to some kind of necromancy or some kind
• 40:16
  of consorting with demons.
• 40:19
  But no, astrology, alchemy, not ipso facto, but never be too good at what you do because
• 40:27
  it might be the case.
• 40:28
  If you go from being poor to all of a sudden now you're rich because your alchemy worked,
• 40:34
  the Inquisition is going to ask some questions about where all that money came from.
• 40:37
  And same with the IRS, the government.
• 40:40
  If you get rich all of a sudden, they're going to wonder.
• 40:44
  If you can't give them good proof that you converted lead to gold, they're going to be
• 40:47
  like, where did you find this gold?
• 40:48
  Where did you get this gold?
• 40:50
  And yeah, they're going to knock on your door.
• 40:52
  So yeah, these kind of other disciplines, not inherently associated with sorcery, but
• 41:00
  there's always a tinge of it.
• 41:04
  I never quite understood the following.
• 41:07
  If I kind of grasped the dogma of the Catholic Church at the time, and maybe I'm completely
• 41:12
  wrong here and way off, but that miracles or supernatural events are reserved only for
• 41:18
  God.
• 41:19
  So everything else is superstition because these sort of events or powers can only come
• 41:24
  from God himself.
• 41:25
  And yet, like you say, a lot of people get persecuted.
• 41:31
  So I don't know how to square the two.
• 41:33
  Maybe my first premise is, doesn't hold water.
• 41:36
  No, that's certainly the official position of the Catholic Church, right?
• 41:41
  That only God can do miracles.
• 41:43
  And that's right.
• 41:45
  And so the, or right, at least according to the Catholic Church, the position that emerges
• 41:50
  is that yes, the demons can't do supernatural things.
• 41:53
  They can't do that, but they can do trickery in the same way that you're, I don't know.
• 41:57
  I don't know if you're, when you're younger and your uncle could like make a quarter coin
• 42:02
  come out of your ear and you're like, oh wow.
• 42:05
  You know, when you're six years old, you can believe your uncle can take a quarter out
• 42:08
  of your ear.
• 42:09
  Well, demons are a lot more powerful than your uncle and they're a lot older and they're
• 42:13
  a lot smarter and they can do a lot of tricks and they know a bunch of stuff.
• 42:19
  And so imagine the kind of illusions and the kind of trickery they have up to them.
• 42:23
  And so in the same way that a six year old, you can believe that your uncle can pull a
• 42:27
  quarter out of your ear.
• 42:29
  Well, 30 year old, you could be tricked by a demon who's 6,000 years old and can do all
• 42:34
  kinds of stuff.
• 42:36
  And so the Catholic Church argued that the demons can't do supernatural things, but they
• 42:39
  can trick you.
• 42:41
  And that trickery can be pretty damn convincing.
• 42:43
  I mean, I've seen, I don't know, magicians who I know don't have supernatural powers,
• 42:48
  but I have no idea how they're able to like find the card or make the thing disappear
• 42:52
  or to make this happen over there.
• 42:55
  I have no idea.
• 42:56
  I mean, they can trick pen and teller, some of the best illusionists in the world.
• 43:01
  Well, if human beings can trick people, all the more so ancient demons.
• 43:06
  And that's the, that's the, that's the grift, that's the con is that the demons can't,
• 43:11
  but they can make you believe that they can.
• 43:13
  And the Catholic Church is like, please don't be tricked by these entities because at the
• 43:17
  end of the day, yeah, they can trick you into doing things and they can trick you into believing
• 43:21
  things and they can even like, for instance, demons can't control the weather.
• 43:25
  This is the main thing that in the middle ages worried so many people was that sorcerers
• 43:31
  and witches could cause weather magic.
• 43:35
  And weather magic doesn't seem terribly terrifying to us now, but if you live in agricultural
• 43:40
  society where a single hail storm can destroy your entire crop, the idea that a person can
• 43:46
  summon a hail storm and ruin your crop, you starve, you can destroy a whole community
• 43:50
  that way.
• 43:51
  And so weather magic, and then you look at the earliest depictions of witches, they don't,
• 43:55
  they're not, they don't like witches in the way we think of them.
• 43:57
  They just look like women and in the background almost always is a hail storm.
• 44:02
  It's weather because you know, we associate thunder and lightning with witches and stuff
• 44:05
  because we still associate with this with, with weather magic.
• 44:09
  Well, witches can't cause the weather to change.
• 44:12
  That would require divine intervention, but what can demons do?
• 44:16
  Well the demon hunt, the, the, these manuals will say things like, well, demons can't control
• 44:20
  the weather, but they can fly and they can go really high up in the air and they can
• 44:25
  see where bad weather is coming and they can tell a woman or a sorcerer, Hey, if you do
• 44:30
  the summoning on Tuesday at five o'clock, then I can guarantee you at Sunday, I'll cause
• 44:36
  a storm to destroy your neighbor's crop.
• 44:39
  But what's happening is the demons can see the storm coming and they trick the person
• 44:45
  to believing that they're summoning the storm, but the storm's coming anyway.
• 44:48
  It's just a demon can fly, go up and see the storm over there.
• 44:51
  And then this is the way that this is, this is the way that the Catholic church officially
• 44:54
  believes that demons can trick people.
• 44:57
  They're not really causing the storm.
• 44:59
  They're just allowing the, the, the dupe to believe that correlation has causation.
• 45:04
  So this is the kind of way that it works.
• 45:06
  So no demons can't cause things according to the Catholic church, but they can trick
• 45:11
  you and they do know a bunch of stuff.
• 45:14
  So in the same way that we would think of psychological manipulation, can a demon get
• 45:19
  you a girlfriend?
• 45:20
  No, but do you, do demons know a little bit about like psychological manipulation?
• 45:24
  Yeah.
• 45:25
  So in the same way that like pickup artists, uh, these kinds of, uh, Andrew Tate demons,
• 45:31
  uh, those kinds of people can teach young men, allegedly ways of picking up women.
• 45:36
  That's kind of what demons do.
• 45:38
  And so they can't get you a girlfriend, but they can teach you techniques of psychological
• 45:41
  manipulation to do that or, or whatever.
• 45:46
  Um, so again, there's a lot of wisdom in, in the, in the church's position that these
• 45:51
  demons are like, they're deviant.
• 45:55
  They don't really have power, but they can trick you into believing that they do.
• 45:59
  And again, we can look at the people now who are like cult leaders who are able to engage
• 46:02
  in psychological manipulation of people.
• 46:05
  And we look at those and go, this is really dangerous.
• 46:08
  Why would you get him?
• 46:09
  Why would you make, make a deal with someone like that?
• 46:12
  You're probably being conned by them and no cult member will ever, ever tell you they're
• 46:16
  in a cult.
• 46:18
  Never because they've been brainwashed to believe they're not.
• 46:21
  And this is what the church is going to say.
• 46:23
  Of course the church is ironic, right?
• 46:24
  They're going to tell you that you're not in a cult, but they're going to tell you these
• 46:29
  entities.
• 46:30
  Yeah.
• 46:31
  They can make you think that you can change the weather and find a girlfriend and get
• 46:33
  buried treasure.
• 46:34
  All of these texts include buried treasure, by the way.
• 46:37
  Um, because why?
• 46:38
  Because obviously they should everyone knows buried treasure, but at the end of the day,
• 46:42
  you're only going to get this stuff, get this stuff.
• 46:44
  If you make a deal with them, make a pact with them.
• 46:47
  And the pact includes your damnation.
• 46:49
  And you're going to spend eternity in hell.
• 46:52
  You know, despite the fact that you found a bucket of gold coins, who cares?
• 46:57
  Yeah, this is that that's the danger of it all.
• 47:00
  But again, never, never doubt.
• 47:01
  I mean, how many people would sell their soul?
• 47:03
  How many people have made deals with the mob for a couple thousand dollars?
• 47:08
  Um, and now you have to go like kill somebody because you, you did that.
• 47:12
  People make deals with the devil with a variety of devils all the time, all the way down into
• 47:18
  the, into the, into the contemporary times.
• 47:21
  Yeah, it's super easy to judge, but your illustration earlier about, you know, desperate people
• 47:28
  in medieval times who have like sick kids and, and nowhere else to turn paints a different
• 47:33
  picture.
• 47:34
  So it's, you know, it's easy to understand.
• 47:36
  Yeah.
• 47:37
  This is part of what I have to do as an educator.
• 47:39
  You know, my job is never, I don't believe in this stuff.
• 47:41
  I'm not a cultist.
• 47:42
  I'm not a magician.
• 47:43
  I'm not whatever.
• 47:45
  But what I dislike is this sort of enlightenment positive, uh, like you said, making fun of
• 47:50
  these people, mocking them, all the soup, stupid superstitious medieval people.
• 47:55
  And one, we're not better than them at all.
• 47:58
  We still do the exact same stuff they do just at different ways.
• 48:02
  And secondly, there's, there's a logic to what they're doing.
• 48:04
  There's a reason there's a, there's a deep thinking that goes on here.
• 48:08
  This is not just a silly superstitious people doing random stuff.
• 48:12
  This all is completely reasonable within the system of thought that existed at that time.
• 48:17
  And in the same way that we make stupid, short-sighted decisions that all make sense within the,
• 48:24
  within the horizon of where we are as contemporary people.
• 48:27
  I think that part of what I do as an educator and what I want to do is never convince anyone
• 48:31
  of any of this being true, but to convince everybody that these people are people, that
• 48:37
  they made decisions based on what they knew.
• 48:39
  They made reasonable decisions, that there was a logic to all this and that they're reasonable.
• 48:45
  And we should not think of them as backwards and silly, but we should look at them in their
• 48:50
  historical consequence, in their historical setting and sympathize with them.
• 48:54
  We should humanize them.
• 48:55
  We should look at them and empathize with them because the more that we can empathize
• 48:59
  with people who made those kinds of decisions back then, admittedly, perhaps bad decisions,
• 49:04
  the more we can recognize that same behavior in ourselves now, because we're not fundamentally
• 49:09
  better.
• 49:10
  We're not fundamentally smarter.
• 49:12
  We're not fundamentally wiser to be sure.
• 49:15
  We're still making the same decisions, the same logic.
• 49:18
  We still live with a lot of the same mythologies.
• 49:19
  I mean, the UFO stuff is just sort of low rent demonology.
• 49:25
  The idea that there are secret people from space coming into your house and kidnapping
• 49:29
  you and doing stuff, weird stuff to you.
• 49:32
  That's just like contemporary demonology.
• 49:36
  And the fact that like, oh, we're like, oh, but that's demon, that's superstition.
• 49:39
  We're talking about aliens from space.
• 49:40
  I'm like, do you have any evidence for any of this?
• 49:43
  Like, oh, you underwent hypnosis.
• 49:45
  That sounds a lot like the kind of confessions that people went through in the middle ages.
• 49:50
  We're just rehashing a lot of the same mythologies, a lot of the same ideas.
• 49:55
  We paint it with a scientific brush.
• 49:57
  Oh, this is their spaceships and not demons coming from space.
• 50:02
  But it's always just demons coming from space.
• 50:05
  So we're not different than them.
• 50:06
  And again, this stuff goes to, we're in Congress in the United States.
• 50:12
  There are congressional hearings about aliens.
• 50:15
  There's virtually no evidence for any of it, aside from some blurry photographs and some
• 50:21
  FLIR footage that's highly contestable.
• 50:24
  And the idea that we're better than them and the fact that we're having congressional hearings
• 50:27
  about space guys, I don't think that we're, I don't think at all, there's not a lot of
• 50:34
  light between us at the end of the day.
• 50:36
  And the more that we believe there is, the more we repeat that kind of stuff.
• 50:41
  It's odd because we're all carrying like HD cameras in our pockets these days, but we
• 50:45
  still don't have like a clear video of any of it, even though there's like a million
• 50:49
  alien sightings.
• 50:50
  Oh, of course.
• 50:51
  And again, you know, in the same way that, you know, there's a thousand stories of demons
• 50:55
  in the middle ages.
• 50:56
  And I think very few people are going to say that's good.
• 51:00
  That's good evidence for the existence of demons.
• 51:02
  Some people will, I'm sure.
• 51:03
  But I trust, you know, again, we all have, we're all carrying around HD cameras and yet
• 51:08
  we've still not got a good image of the Loch Ness monster or a ghost or a demon or a UFO
• 51:14
  or whatever.
• 51:15
  And yet these ideas persist and persist, again, not just persist, but persist at the
• 51:21
  level of congressional hearings.
• 51:25
  It's extremely important to not denigrate the past.
• 51:31
  William Faulkner, William Faulkner, who's from Mississippi, my state, said that the
• 51:37
  past is not dead.
• 51:39
  It's not even past.
• 51:41
  And the more I studied the middle ages, the more I started the ancient world, the more
• 51:46
  people seem strange at that time.
• 51:50
  To other people, the more I see the same behaviors, the same thoughts, the same kind of mythology.
• 51:56
  Of course, it's been renovated.
• 51:59
  It's got a new fresh coat of paint, you know, the QAnon with the elites summoning, kidnapping
• 52:05
  children to get their adrenochrome.
• 52:07
  I'm like, yep, I've heard this one before.
• 52:09
  This is just the blood libel.
• 52:10
  Like, this is just a new version of the blood libel.
• 52:13
  It's no longer the Jews, although sometimes it is the Jews.
• 52:17
  But it's, you know, it's not the Jews, it's the elites or the globalists, you know, kidnapping
• 52:21
  children and doing terrible things to them to extract their adrenochrome.
• 52:25
  I'm like, yeah, we've heard this story before.
• 52:27
  And we know what it leads to.
• 52:29
  We know what these kinds of mythologies lead to.
• 52:33
  And whether it's the Jewish blood libel in the middle ages, the satanic panic of the
• 52:38
  1980s and 90s, or these modern versions of these conspiracy theories now, we live in
• 52:45
  a world deeply penetrated by mythology.
• 52:48
  And the more that we think that we're not engaged in mythology, the more certain we
• 52:54
  make it that we will be.
• 52:55
  Yeah, I'm from Slovenia originally.
• 52:58
  And you know, Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher is also from there.
• 53:03
  And he has like a similar thought about ideology.
• 53:06
  The more you think you're outside of ideology, the more deeply entrenched in it you actually
• 53:11
  are.
• 53:12
  Yeah, I think that, what was it, Jean Baudrillard said that he has the best comment about the
• 53:19
  film, The Matrix, that the matrix is the kind of film The Matrix would have made.
• 53:23
  Yeah, the more that you think, yeah, and to Zizek's point, and to Marx's point, and this
• 53:30
  is also true of Guy de Borde, the Society of the Spectacle, the more that we are an
• 53:36
  observer of the spectacle, the more that we are spectacular.
• 53:40
  And that's true for me too.
• 53:43
  You know, I'm a YouTube person.
• 53:45
  I have hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
• 53:48
  At some level, not only am I exposing the history of this stuff, but I'm also entrenching
• 53:55
  it.
• 53:56
  I'm doing both.
• 53:58
  There's no way that I'm not also, there's no way I can guarantee you that me discussing
• 54:03
  all of the things that historically underlie, you know, for instance, the summoning of demons,
• 54:10
  there's absolutely no way that I'm also not inspiring someone to go pick up one of these
• 54:13
  books and go try it.
• 54:16
  I know at some level that I'm both a dispeller of ideology, but also an inspirer of ideology.
• 54:26
  And that's true of every educator.
• 54:29
  The moment you teach a class on how bad the Nazis were, there's always going to be one
• 54:33
  student in the room who's like, fascism, that kind of, you know, maybe.
• 54:39
  So sobering and frightening thought, but I think you're right.
• 54:44
  I don't think we get to do that.
• 54:48
  We don't get to enjoy the ideology that somehow education is liberation.
• 54:52
  Education is always empowerment.
• 54:55
  Empowerment is a very neutral thing.
• 54:57
  And insofar as we live in a network of ideology, it's always going to do empowerment in a certain
• 55:02
  direction.
• 55:03
  And that direction is never something we get to control.
• 55:07
  Okay, if we bring it back to these occult traditions, were mystical experiences an integral
• 55:15
  part of these?
• 55:18
  So yes and no.
• 55:20
  It always depended, it depended a great deal on when and who had those mystical experiences
• 55:26
  and what were the result of them.
• 55:28
  So if you had a mystical experience that in some sense was, was containable and made sense
• 55:35
  within the cultural framework, then fine.
• 55:38
  You have someone like Hildegard of Bingen.
• 55:39
  You know, Hildegard had a wide variety of mystical experiences and she became a pillar
• 55:45
  of the church.
• 55:46
  She's a doctor of the church.
• 55:47
  She's like Thomas Aquinas now.
• 55:49
  And her works are widely celebrated and you can go, you know, Hildegard interacted with
• 55:53
  some of the most important Christians at the time.
• 55:57
  Bernardo Clairvaux and popes and stuff were all about that Hildegard life.
• 56:03
  Other people like Marguerite Perrette, Marguerite Perrette had mystical visions and her mystical
• 56:07
  visions did not line up with the official position of the church.
• 56:11
  The Inquisition had her arrested, basically told her to stop teaching the things that
• 56:14
  she was teaching.
• 56:15
  She said, I can't, this is what God showed me.
• 56:18
  I have to tell the truth.
• 56:20
  And they burned her alive.
• 56:22
  So it all has to do with the horizon of what is acceptable and in some sense of what is
• 56:28
  acceptable within the context of the church.
• 56:30
  So some mystics did very well.
• 56:32
  The mystics became ashes.
• 56:35
  Now when it comes to magic and stuff, some forms of magic were about mysticism.
• 56:40
  We think of Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy.
• 56:43
  That was a book ultimately that was all about using magic as a vehicle to have a mystical
• 56:50
  connection with God.
• 56:52
  That's very controversial and controversial now, it was controversial then.
• 56:56
  So someone like Agrippa was very much interested in the meshing of magic and mysticism.
• 57:03
  Other magicians were just like, you know, they were just mercenaries.
• 57:06
  It was the idea that if you pay me enough, I'll summon a demon to find you some treasure.
• 57:11
  Sure.
• 57:12
  But it had nothing to do with mysticism whatsoever.
• 57:14
  So mysticism intersects with a lot of this stuff.
• 57:19
  But mysticism could exist on its own as a completely orthodox thing.
• 57:22
  But also it could go off the rails and get you killed and it could have nothing to do
• 57:26
  with magic whatsoever.
• 57:29
  Although I will say again, mysticism is always a bit tinged with danger in the medieval time,
• 57:34
  but even now, because the church at the time, we have to remember, the church had religious
• 57:39
  hegemony.
• 57:40
  In fact, it just had hegemony in spiritual matters in general, sometimes in political
• 57:44
  matters.
• 57:46
  The church is the mediator between you and God.
• 57:49
  Because insofar as you had a mystical experience, you cut out the middleman.
• 57:55
  You were having a direct connection with God.
• 57:57
  And there is a dangerous game.
• 57:59
  And there's no business, there's no hustle in town that wants you cutting out the middleman
• 58:04
  if you're the middleman.
• 58:06
  And so the church always had to keep, you know, sometimes a tight leash, but sometimes
• 58:12
  they give you a long chain.
• 58:14
  But the leash was always there.
• 58:16
  And so if you're a Hildegard, yeah, you had a leash on, but you know, you would get a
• 58:20
  long chain.
• 58:22
  Sometimes they couldn't keep you on the chain and they had to get rid of you.
• 58:25
  And so there's always a push and pull when it comes to mystical experiences, because
• 58:30
  like I said, it cuts out the spiritual middleman.
• 58:34
  And that of course was the medieval church.
• 58:37
  And ditto, right?
• 58:38
  If you're a necromancer, and I could promise that you could get all kinds of powers by
• 58:41
  doing X, Y, and Z, well, why go back to the church?
• 58:46
  If you have a sick kid and I summon a demon and the demon develops a cure and your kid
• 58:51
  gets cured, the saints did pick the phone up.
• 58:55
  Mary didn't pick the phone up.
• 58:56
  Jesus didn't pick the phone up.
• 58:58
  The church didn't pick the phone up.
• 59:00
  Why go back?
• 59:02
  You have an immediate access to power.
• 59:06
  That's pretty tempting.
• 59:07
  And the church knew that.
• 59:08
  And so that's part of also what's militating the church is that they're like, yeah, we
• 59:14
  don't want people shopping outside of Amazon.
• 59:19
  You need to come to Amazon to get what you...
• 59:21
  You need to come to Amazon.
• 59:23
  We don't want any competitors.
• 59:24
  And so no teamu.
• 59:25
  No one go to that.
• 59:27
  And so that's also what's militating with the church is that they have a spiritual monopoly.
• 59:33
  And that spiritual monopoly comes with political and economic power, and they don't want people
• 59:37
  upsetting it.
• 59:38
  And demons apparently could upset that monopoly.
• 59:45
  On the other hand, people who were practicing these things, do they account for it in their
• 59:51
  manuscripts on how they were achieving these mystical experiences?
• 59:55
  Do we know anything about that?
• 59:57
  Or is that always just plopped there as a matter of fact?
• 1:00:03
  So we get some sense of how they're doing it.
• 1:00:07
  So one of the things that's important to know that the word for spell in medieval Latin
• 1:00:12
  often was the word experimenta.
• 1:00:16
  And in many of these manuscripts, these manuscripts were meant to be used.
• 1:00:19
  They weren't pristine, beautiful, illuminated manuscripts that were just meant to be read.
• 1:00:24
  These were working notebooks.
• 1:00:25
  And many of them are garishly marked up with all kinds of notes in the margins and notes
• 1:00:30
  in the middle of the line, because they were actively tinkering.
• 1:00:33
  They were like, oh, I tried to summon the demon at this time and it didn't work.
• 1:00:36
  And I tried it with Saturn in the Ascended and it worked.
• 1:00:41
  I heard the demon talk to me or whatever.
• 1:00:43
  And so we actually see the working notes of some of these necromancers in their notebooks.
• 1:00:48
  And in that way, they're really, really fantastic glimpses into what this was.
• 1:00:52
  Now, I don't know what that means metaphysically, whether they really heard a demon or not.
• 1:00:59
  They thought they did.
• 1:01:00
  And this is, by the way, just true of in general.
• 1:01:02
  In the Middle Ages, people saw ghosts, they saw saints, they saw trolls, they saw dragon.
• 1:01:08
  This was just ubiquitous.
• 1:01:09
  And so much so that in medieval records, you'll see things like I went to visit my cousin
• 1:01:14
  and then I did this and I came back over here and then I saw a troll under this bridge.
• 1:01:19
  And then I went over to the market and I got, and modern people are like, huh?
• 1:01:24
  Go back to that troll part.
• 1:01:26
  And they mentioned the troll part just as like they went to the market and saw their
• 1:01:31
  ghosts.
• 1:01:32
  The world of supernatural was just a part of supernatural, was just part of their world.
• 1:01:38
  People saw ghosts and apparitions and demons all the time in the Middle Ages.
• 1:01:43
  It was just a fact of life that we don't experience in the same way.
• 1:01:49
  This is also true, by the way, in many parts of the world.
• 1:01:51
  I was in Egypt once and I was in a village in Egypt and I was asking people about gins
• 1:01:56
  and people were like, of course there's gins.
• 1:01:59
  So and so is married to a jinn.
• 1:02:02
  Married to a jinn?
• 1:02:03
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:04
  Muhammad, he's married to a jinn.
• 1:02:06
  And so I went, can I meet Muhammad?
• 1:02:07
  Sure.
• 1:02:08
  Went over there and met Muhammad.
• 1:02:09
  I was like, I heard you're married to a jinn.
• 1:02:11
  He's like, yeah, it's Aisha.
• 1:02:13
  She's right there.
• 1:02:14
  And there was no, I could not see anyone sitting there.
• 1:02:16
  But everybody in that village was like, I've seen Aisha.
• 1:02:19
  You don't see her all the time.
• 1:02:20
  But sometimes I've caught a glimpse of her and she's really a jinn.
• 1:02:24
  And far be it for me to judge anybody and get anyone's metaphysics and look down my
• 1:02:29
  nose at people.
• 1:02:31
  That's not my job and I don't want to do that and I won't do it.
• 1:02:34
  But people's interaction with the supernatural world to this day in the Middle Ages, especially
• 1:02:40
  is much different than ours.
• 1:02:42
  And so we ask of things like, sometimes people leave comments on my channel, like, how could
• 1:02:47
  people believe in that?
• 1:02:48
  It never worked.
• 1:02:49
  Why would anyone do that?
• 1:02:51
  And my response is, there are billions of people in the world right now in churches
• 1:02:57
  and mosques and in synagogues and temples, all praying.
• 1:03:03
  There are billions of people right now somewhere praying for something.
• 1:03:07
  And I don't know that God has ever answered any of those prayers because I'm not sure
• 1:03:10
  there is a God.
• 1:03:12
  But the idea that those people were stupid for practicing magic because it never worked,
• 1:03:20
  I got news for you, man.
• 1:03:22
  There are billions of people who are religious, intensely religious their entire lives.
• 1:03:29
  And it works.
• 1:03:31
  They believe it works.
• 1:03:32
  They believe that their prayers have been answered.
• 1:03:33
  The kids have been cured, whatever.
• 1:03:36
  It's just as reasonable for those religious people to believe it works as it was for medieval
• 1:03:41
  people to believe they were summoning demons and doing things like that.
• 1:03:45
  So or rather, I could say it's both equally reasonable and reasonable at the same time,
• 1:03:49
  I suppose.
• 1:03:50
  But again, this is the weird historical myopia that we have, that we look back at the Middle
• 1:03:55
  Ages and say, why would anyone do that?
• 1:03:57
  Because that clearly doesn't work.
• 1:03:59
  All the while, they're like standing inside of a church, you know, praying to a saint
• 1:04:05
  to help them find their car keys or whatever.
• 1:04:09
  There's not a lot of light between those positions.
• 1:04:11
  But we're it's hubris that militates the idea that we're different.
• 1:04:17
  It's just hubris, but we're not we're not fundamentally we're not fundamentally different.
• 1:04:21
  And this is also true of atheist, you know, Marxist, for instance, right?
• 1:04:24
  Marxists love to pretend that they're materialist and they have this materialist theory of history
• 1:04:27
  and all this.
• 1:04:28
  It's apocalyptic beliefs.
• 1:04:30
  You believe that the bourgeoisie are the bad guys and you're the persecuted minority good
• 1:04:34
  guys.
• 1:04:35
  And there's going to be a climactic final battle between the good guys and the bad guys.
• 1:04:39
  And after that, after the apocalypse, there'll be heaven forever and communism.
• 1:04:43
  This is just Christianity.
• 1:04:47
  This is just like the Book of Revelation.
• 1:04:50
  It's just like the the Marxist version of apocalypticism.
• 1:04:54
  But that kind of apocalypticism goes back to Wachima Fior, and it goes back to the church
• 1:04:59
  and it goes back to the Book of Revelation.
• 1:05:00
  It goes back to the war scroll, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• 1:05:03
  This is just a new version of apocalypticism.
• 1:05:06
  It has some some new paint on it.
• 1:05:07
  And I say this as a Marxist, I am a Marxist.
• 1:05:10
  But I also again keenly aware of the fact that we have to be a bit more white knuckled
• 1:05:15
  and a bit more transparent about the fact that we are not discontinuous from history.
• 1:05:23
  We are we are part of the continuity of history.
• 1:05:25
  It's the most Marxist thing that one can possibly say.
• 1:05:27
  You are part of the continuity of history.
• 1:05:29
  And the continuity of history means we never escape the trajectory, the intellectual trajectory
• 1:05:34
  of the world that we're born in.
• 1:05:35
  And I say that even as a Jew, Jewish Pachalipsis is a huge part, Messiah and all this stuff.
• 1:05:44
  We're never outside of it.
• 1:05:45
  And so, again, to go back to Jidzik's point, we should admit our incitedness.
• 1:05:52
  And that's true for materialists, but also looking back on the past and thinking somehow
• 1:05:58
  that they're fundamentally stupid or backwards or something like that.
• 1:06:05
  It's a position militated by hubris, not militated by actually studying history.
• 1:06:11
  Yeah, I'm a lefty myself, but I'm completely...
• 1:06:17
  What's the word I'm looking for here?
• 1:06:20
  Enchanted by a whole host of superstitions and stuff.
• 1:06:25
  And I've just given in.
• 1:06:26
  I think it's the first line from Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground.
• 1:06:32
  I'm far too intelligent to be superstitious, but I'm superstitious nonetheless.
• 1:06:37
  Yeah, I think that...
• 1:06:41
  The question is not whether we're superstitious or not.
• 1:06:43
  The question is, what did Lacan say?
• 1:06:47
  It's not a question of alleviating the symptom.
• 1:06:50
  We must learn to enjoy our symptoms.
• 1:06:53
  And I think Lacan is right.
• 1:06:57
  The curative ideology is not to get outside of it.
• 1:07:00
  The cure is to define the cynical, ironic kind of jouissance, the enjoyment of ideology.
• 1:07:10
  And we have to learn to enjoy our symptoms because all we are are symptoms.
• 1:07:15
  And there's a lot of those.
• 1:07:17
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:07:18
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:07:19
  That's true.
• 1:07:20
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:07:21
  I mean, psychosis, perversion.
• 1:07:25
  You're somewhere on these... again, my Lacanianism is coming out, but yeah.
• 1:07:32
  And learn to come to enjoy your symptoms because there's no outside of the symptoms.
• 1:07:37
  Personality is symptomology.
• 1:07:38
  Yeah, I agree 100%.
• 1:07:42
  Now you have so much, such a wealth of knowledge on your YouTube channel and you go really
• 1:07:47
  deep on a lot of these thinkers, a lot of these esoteric traditions.
• 1:07:52
  What is the most genuinely mind boggling school of esoteric thought or philosophy that you've
• 1:07:57
  ever come across and that has left an impression on you?
• 1:08:02
  I would say that without doubt, the most mind boggling moment for me in the history of Western
• 1:08:06
  esotericism is the conversations between Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly and angels.
• 1:08:12
  He was at the court of Elizabeth the first.
• 1:08:15
  Is that the astrologer?
• 1:08:16
  Yeah, the astrologer.
• 1:08:17
  Yeah.
• 1:08:18
  He was one of the probably the smartest guy in England at the time, 1580s.
• 1:08:23
  Okay, so not just some con man who was...
• 1:08:26
  No, no.
• 1:08:27
  His scryer might have been a con man, and he was.
• 1:08:30
  In fact, he had his ears cut off for previously engaging in fraud.
• 1:08:35
  But yeah, John Dee, this incredibly brilliant astrologer and mathematician, he coined the
• 1:08:41
  term British Empire.
• 1:08:42
  I mean, he was really the smartest, one of the smartest, he had the biggest library in
• 1:08:45
  England at the time.
• 1:08:46
  In fact, his library came the cornerstone of what became the British Library.
• 1:08:49
  So this guy was a no joke intellectual.
• 1:08:52
  And he basically exhausted what he could find out in the world with books.
• 1:08:57
  And he was like, if I'm going to find what he called radical truths, I'm going to have
• 1:09:01
  to talk to the angels.
• 1:09:02
  And he tried and the angels didn't respond.
• 1:09:04
  And so he brought in what is called a scryer.
• 1:09:06
  It's like a medium.
• 1:09:08
  That scryer was one of them.
• 1:09:10
  He had three of them over the course of his lifetime, three or four.
• 1:09:13
  And that scryer was a dude named Edward Kelly, and Kelly was admittedly a con man, but also
• 1:09:20
  he had a weird talent.
• 1:09:22
  As much as one can say this is a talent.
• 1:09:25
  And over the course of the next seven years, we have documentation where Kelly and Dee
• 1:09:28
  talked to angels and demons.
• 1:09:32
  And that wouldn't be so weird, aside from the fact that at one point, the angels began
• 1:09:38
  to reveal to them a language, a distinct language called what we now call a Nokian, but they
• 1:09:44
  never called it that.
• 1:09:45
  They called it the celestial speech.
• 1:09:48
  And you would expect this language is to be a bunch of gibberish in the same way that
• 1:09:51
  people talk in tongues and it's glossolalia.
• 1:09:53
  And we know glossolalia has, it's nonsense.
• 1:09:56
  Meaningful.
• 1:09:57
  It's also a bit funny, to be honest.
• 1:10:00
  It is.
• 1:10:01
  Yeah, it's a bit strange, but it's semantically meaningless.
• 1:10:05
  And that would be fine if it were glossolalia.
• 1:10:07
  The problem is that the Sanokian stuff has grammar and syntax and vocabulary, and it
• 1:10:13
  was revealed backwards in reverse order, letter by letter over the course of weeks.
• 1:10:19
  And as a young person, when I discovered this, I was, I was learning Latin at the time and
• 1:10:24
  I had my taste of, you know, grammar.
• 1:10:26
  I knew grammar was hard and also knew that you couldn't fake grammar.
• 1:10:30
  You could fake a bunch of nonsense, but you couldn't fake conjugations and declensions
• 1:10:34
  and you couldn't fake that backwards in reverse order with like no cribs.
• 1:10:39
  And this like fired my imagination.
• 1:10:42
  I was just like, look, I'm not sure if I believe in any of this, but something's going on here.
• 1:10:48
  Like this is not just like people knocking on a table in the dark and saying they're
• 1:10:52
  talking to spirits.
• 1:10:54
  You can fake that this something, something's happening here.
• 1:10:57
  And that I learned about this when I was 14, I think.
• 1:11:01
  And I ultimately ultimately ended up going to graduate school studying Western as a terrorism
• 1:11:05
  partially inspired by this whole thing.
• 1:11:08
  And it's easy to believe that this was a con and, you know, but Dee and Kelly made decisions
• 1:11:14
  that you would never make if it were just a con job.
• 1:11:17
  Dee was told by the angels to go call out in court, the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph
• 1:11:22
  II.
• 1:11:23
  And he went in front of the court and called off, called out Rudolph II to his face, called
• 1:11:29
  him a sinner and tell him to repent.
• 1:11:31
  Like that is not a smart thing to do.
• 1:11:35
  Edward Kelly took a wife that he didn't want to take because the angels told them to do
• 1:11:39
  it.
• 1:11:40
  They swapped wives at one point, had sex with each other's wives because the angels told
• 1:11:46
  them to do it and they did it.
• 1:11:49
  And it's, you know, these poor women, of course, in the midst of all this is nightmarish.
• 1:11:54
  And that these records are preserved.
• 1:11:56
  We have the exact records Dee in fact hid them in a chest and then they were discovered
• 1:12:01
  a little bit after Dee died and they were published subsequently.
• 1:12:04
  And the main scripts I'll survive.
• 1:12:05
  I've worked with the main scripts.
• 1:12:07
  That's the strangest moment.
• 1:12:10
  And it's strange because there's this language aspect to it.
• 1:12:14
  There are these angels talking to these guys.
• 1:12:17
  It lasts over the course of seven years.
• 1:12:20
  There's just so much going on there that whether you believe in the supernatural or not, it
• 1:12:27
  just cries out for some kind of explanation.
• 1:12:30
  It cries out for some kind of investigation.
• 1:12:31
  It cries out for what in the hell is this?
• 1:12:36
  And I went to graduate school and wrote several papers on studying it.
• 1:12:39
  I've written, I think with the authoritative paper and trying to give an idea about what
• 1:12:41
  went on there.
• 1:12:44
  And yeah, I think that's to me the strangest, the strangest in all of this.
• 1:12:48
  But there's other stuff, Alistair Crowley and his weird stuff.
• 1:12:52
  There's a bunch of very strange.
• 1:12:54
  Sorry, did you say Alistair Crowley?
• 1:12:55
  Yeah, Alistair Crowley.
• 1:12:57
  He had very, you know, those strange instances of him summoning demons and things like this.
• 1:13:06
  And there's very strange Gnostic texts that have...
• 1:13:09
  So this is kind of like the modern occultism, right?
• 1:13:12
  Right.
• 1:13:13
  Alistair Crowley's early 20th century, up to the mid 20th century.
• 1:13:18
  But you know, I look at texts like, he also summoned some of these spirits that John Dee
• 1:13:22
  allegedly did when he was in the desert in Tunisia and Algeria, either Algeria or Tunisia.
• 1:13:28
  And you know, the records of his texts are extremely weird.
• 1:13:31
  And you know, I don't, again, like I said, I don't believe that there are spirits and
• 1:13:37
  angels and demons.
• 1:13:38
  That's because I don't have evidence for them.
• 1:13:40
  But it also might be the fact of like, imagine a person born deaf telling you there's no
• 1:13:44
  such thing as music.
• 1:13:47
  I might just be deaf.
• 1:13:48
  I might just be the spiritual equivalent of, you know, again, a person born blind telling
• 1:13:53
  you that colors don't exist.
• 1:13:55
  You'd balk at that.
• 1:13:56
  You'd be like, what are you talking about?
• 1:13:57
  You just can't see them.
• 1:13:59
  You can't hear them.
• 1:14:00
  Well, Alistair Crowley or John Dee or whoever might tell me, yeah, you're just blind and
• 1:14:04
  deaf.
• 1:14:06
  Don't tell me this is not real.
• 1:14:07
  I'm experiencing it.
• 1:14:08
  I'm seeing it.
• 1:14:10
  And it could just be the case that this is a limitation.
• 1:14:14
  This is about my limitations and not about what's true.
• 1:14:17
  But all I can say is I don't believe it because I've never experienced it.
• 1:14:20
  I'd be happy to experience it.
• 1:14:22
  But I'm also, I also try to cultivate some degree of humility that yes, science hasn't
• 1:14:27
  detected these entities.
• 1:14:30
  I haven't experienced them.
• 1:14:32
  But is that the end all be all the things I try to, I try to be open to the possibility
• 1:14:37
  that the world is certainly stranger than we have ever thought that it was.
• 1:14:44
  And I'm not going to get in the business of saying what isn't there.
• 1:14:47
  My job is to be open to the possibility and to look at the data.
• 1:14:52
  And if I can find reasons to believe that it's not there, if Edward Kelly is a con or
• 1:14:57
  Alistair Crowley was high or something, fine.
• 1:15:02
  But also, I think that we have to run out, we run into a moment where people experience
• 1:15:06
  things.
• 1:15:07
  And I have to say, I can't tell you what was there or not there.
• 1:15:11
  What I can tell you is they experienced something.
• 1:15:13
  And as a historian or as a philosopher, I have to be honest about the fact that I'm
• 1:15:17
  going to run up to a wall.
• 1:15:19
  And once I hit that wall, the only intellectually respectable thing to do is say, I don't know.
• 1:15:24
  I just don't know.
• 1:15:26
  And I think any philosopher or historian who wants to tell you they've, they've cleaned
• 1:15:30
  up all the mess and that everything makes sense and that their worldview is fundamentally
• 1:15:35
  supported by all of the data, you're not dealing with an intellectually serious, intellectually
• 1:15:42
  honest person anymore.
• 1:15:44
  The data is, I think, very much in contest and very much debatable and highly inconclusive.
• 1:15:54
  To be completely honest with you, my first instinct when you were recounting the story
• 1:15:58
  of Alistair Crowley going to the desert and what was it, seeing angels was, yeah, dude
• 1:16:06
  was probably high.
• 1:16:07
  He just took some mushrooms or something.
• 1:16:10
  And he did.
• 1:16:11
  I mean, we do know that he was experimenting with all kinds of psychedelic drugs and stuff.
• 1:16:14
  But again, in the same way that psychedelic drugs might be ways that we alter consciousness
• 1:16:21
  and they cause hallucinations, it could just as well be the case that, you know, in the
• 1:16:26
  same way that lots of people take DMT and lots of people see like machine elves.
• 1:16:32
  Is the DMT causing them to see the machine elves or the machine elves there and DMT gives
• 1:16:35
  them the ability to experience them?
• 1:16:38
  Again, I'm pretty skeptical.
• 1:16:40
  There are machine elves.
• 1:16:41
  I've seen the machine elves and I've done DMT.
• 1:16:42
  I've seen the machine elves.
• 1:16:44
  And I remember looking right at them and being like, I don't know what to do about this because
• 1:16:49
  I don't believe in you.
• 1:16:50
  And yet there you are.
• 1:16:54
  No conversations there?
• 1:16:55
  No, you know, it's always the case.
• 1:16:58
  The few times I've done DMT and seen these kind of entities, they don't really take much
• 1:17:02
  notice of me.
• 1:17:03
  And I've heard this too, that a lot of cases people will sort of be in the hall of the
• 1:17:09
  machine elves and they'll see them, but the machine elves are kind of like, you know,
• 1:17:13
  doing their own thing or whatever.
• 1:17:15
  So yeah, I've seen them.
• 1:17:16
  And again, I've taken lots of different psychedelic drugs and I've seen God on big doses of LSD.
• 1:17:22
  And you know, they always the same.
• 1:17:23
  I always tell God the same thing.
• 1:17:24
  I'm like, like God, you always show up when I'm on LSD.
• 1:17:27
  You never show up otherwise.
• 1:17:28
  Like you got to do a brother a solid and show up on like Tuesday at three.
• 1:17:33
  Let's have coffee and let's talk.
• 1:17:34
  But you keep showing up when I'm on 500 micrograms of LSD.
• 1:17:39
  This is, this is the kind of, it's not fair, dude.
• 1:17:42
  And all I can say is God's never shown up, you know, when I'm not on, you know, LSD or
• 1:17:48
  whatever.
• 1:17:49
  But you know, at the same time, are I going to tell someone who's had a profound experience
• 1:17:53
  in psychedelic drugs or not just meditating that they've not experienced fundamental reality
• 1:17:58
  or Brahma or whatever?
• 1:17:59
  I'm not going to tell them what they haven't experienced.
• 1:18:01
  That's not my job.
• 1:18:02
  I don't have the intellectual ability, spiritual ability to do that.
• 1:18:06
  What I can say is, um, experience is not always a predictor of reality.
• 1:18:11
  Um, you know, I'm, I look out my window and that house over there looked really small.
• 1:18:16
  That's because that's the way vision works.
• 1:18:18
  The house is not actually small.
• 1:18:20
  I walked over there to it.
• 1:18:21
  It will get bigger.
• 1:18:23
  The moon looks bigger, closer to the, you know, closer to other buildings.
• 1:18:27
  Right.
• 1:18:28
  Uh, when you take your phone out, take a picture of it.
• 1:18:29
  Everyone's always disappointed that it's not as big in the picture as it is in your site.
• 1:18:33
  That's because we have, you know, visual hallucinations about size.
• 1:18:37
  We've all felt our phone vibrate in our pocket and checked it and nothing happened.
• 1:18:41
  You know, this is a very contemporary, very ubiquitous form of hallucination that we all
• 1:18:45
  experience all the time.
• 1:18:47
  And um, you know, I think experience is not always a great indicator of, of what's true
• 1:18:53
  and what's not true.
• 1:18:57
  Justin last question.
• 1:18:58
  Um, I'm a big fan of Taro and I don't even know if that is in the domain of the esoteric.
• 1:19:05
  And I don't know.
• 1:19:06
  I'm just like trying to ask you as many different things as possible that I'm interested in.
• 1:19:11
  You can tell me to, you know, piss off or whatever.
• 1:19:15
  But if you do know anything about where it comes from, what the deal with Taro and you
• 1:19:21
  know, the present form that we have, how did we get here?
• 1:19:25
  If you can give me anything on that, I'd be super grateful.
• 1:19:27
  But if not, yeah, I'm not an expert in Taro.
• 1:19:30
  This is one of the places where I don't know a lot.
• 1:19:32
  I can say this, you know, that, uh, Taro began as a, as a, as a game, uh, there, there are
• 1:19:39
  lots of tarot decks.
• 1:19:40
  Now there are lots of different tarot decks that existed primary.
• 1:19:43
  Primarily they developed in Italy and there are half a dozen, maybe a dozen different
• 1:19:47
  kinds of tarot decks and different games that people played.
• 1:19:51
  And the relationship between games and divination has always been very, very thin games and,
• 1:19:57
  you know, games and divination have always had a very close relationship, whether it's
• 1:20:01
  throwing dice or, or whatever, and, you know, throwing knuckle bones and things like this.
• 1:20:06
  So there's always been a relationship between games and divination.
• 1:20:09
  This is true actually worldwide.
• 1:20:11
  And what ends up happening is that, uh, the various games that ultimately are associated
• 1:20:16
  with the tarot cards, as we know them, those games have largely fell out of, uh, focus.
• 1:20:21
  Although some of them still exist in, in, in places, but ultimately what ends up happening
• 1:20:26
  is that the tarot deck becomes associated primarily with divination.
• 1:20:30
  And then it becomes, um, the foundation along with Kabbalah and the golden dawn where the
• 1:20:36
  various tarot cards and the, and Kabbalistic stuff like the tree of life, uh, along with
• 1:20:41
  itching and lots of other things become sort of all mapped onto each other.
• 1:20:45
  And that becomes a grand system of magic developed primarily in England in the 19th century.
• 1:20:51
  And it's through those mechanisms that the tarot becomes extremely popular.
• 1:20:55
  Um, and the rider white deck and other kinds of decks that develop, uh, are also just popular
• 1:21:00
  divination tools.
• 1:21:01
  But divination has always been associated with, with, with games and, um, and, um, maybe
• 1:21:08
  we should be on surprise that that's how it developed, but I'm not an expert in tarot.
• 1:21:12
  Um, although I will say that I had my, I had, I, I never had someone read tarot cards to
• 1:21:17
  me before.
• 1:21:19
  And it just so happened that, uh, last summer or summer before last, summer before last,
• 1:21:24
  I was at the written li, Ritman library, which was the largest, most important, uh,
• 1:21:29
  library of hermetic and occult literature in the world.
• 1:21:32
  It's an amazing institution in Amsterdam and they have, they had an original copy of
• 1:21:37
  the rider white, uh, wider white tarot deck and original.
• 1:21:43
  And um, there was a person there who was an expert in, in tarot and, uh, they asked me,
• 1:21:48
  would you want a tarot reading?
• 1:21:49
  Uh, and I was like, well, I don't know if I believe in it, but I'm not going to pass
• 1:21:52
  up an opportunity to, for my first tarot reading to be done with an original copy of that deck.
• 1:22:01
  And um, the librarian said, yeah, it's fine.
• 1:22:03
  And you know, feel free to do it and be careful with the cards.
• 1:22:06
  And so that was my, uh, my first tarot reading.
• 1:22:10
  So I don't know if I'll do it again.
• 1:22:12
  And then the person who read it was very lovely and did, you know, I don't know, again, I
• 1:22:16
  don't know what I believe about that, but it was a fantastic experience and, you know,
• 1:22:21
  a real honor to be in such a prestigious institution.
• 1:22:24
  If you're going to have something, you know, if you're going to have a moment, have a moment.
• 1:22:30
  And that was certainly a moment.
• 1:22:32
  I am certainly jealous.
• 1:22:34
  Justin, thank you so much.
• 1:22:35
  This was such a fantastic conversation.
• 1:22:37
  I could take like 24 hours of your time and still not have enough, but please everybody
• 1:22:43
  go check out the Esoterica channel.
• 1:22:46
  Fantastic stuff.
• 1:22:47
  I'm sure in the future, you will not be able to stop, I'm afraid to say.
• 1:22:52
  But yeah.
• 1:22:53
  Do you have any other social media that you're on where people can follow your work or is
• 1:22:57
  Esoterica?
• 1:22:58
  I'm just on YouTube.
• 1:23:00
  Yeah, just on YouTube.
• 1:23:02
  Social media, like I said, scares me more than demons do.
• 1:23:04
  I'd rather deal with the devil himself than deal with Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
• 1:23:12
  The modern demons are more scary than the ancient ones.
• 1:23:14
  So I just deal with the ancient ones.
• 1:23:15
  So beware of Andrew Tate.
• 1:23:18
  Yeah, Andrew Tate and Elon Musk and all the, I'd rather deal with Belial and Beelzebub
• 1:23:24
  than deal with those guys.
• 1:23:27
  So yeah, you can just find me on Esoterica on YouTube where I talk about this stuff,
• 1:23:33
  again, from an academic perspective.
• 1:23:34
  I take an academic take on this.
• 1:23:36
  And so what you can be guaranteed is on the channel, we take a look at this from an academic,
• 1:23:41
  scholarly, data-driven, evidence-based point of view and not, you know, I took a bunch
• 1:23:46
  of LSD and I sold them, the demons, which might've also happened, but it's not part
• 1:23:51
  of how I do my channel.
• 1:23:53
  Well, it's fantastic stuff.
• 1:23:54
  And you're close to like a million subscribers almost.
• 1:23:57
  Yeah, we're like 800,000, no?
• 1:24:00
  That's insane.
• 1:24:01
  I think we're somewhere in the 700,000.
• 1:24:02
  Yeah.
• 1:24:03
  So it's a successful channel.
• 1:24:04
  I'm really grateful that it's successful.
• 1:24:05
  And it also just goes to show that people really want to learn about this stuff, whether
• 1:24:09
  it's spiritual seekers want to learn about it.
• 1:24:13
  People just are interested in history who are total skeptics and atheists.
• 1:24:17
  But also, people writing novels also use the channel for research, writing novels and people
• 1:24:22
  doing Dungeons and Dragons.
• 1:24:24
  DMs, who really want to make magic really historically accurate.
• 1:24:28
  I have people all the time reaching out from Dungeons and Dragons world who are just really
• 1:24:32
  interested in getting magic right for their video game or for their novel or for their
• 1:24:37
  movie.
• 1:24:38
  So it just shows you there's a huge range of interest in this material and people want
• 1:24:42
  accurate, scholarly, rigorous presentation of this material.
• 1:24:46
  And it's really, I'm really lucky that it's my job that I'm able to basically have a classroom
• 1:24:52
  that reaches tens of thousands of people and provides what I always hope to be accurate
• 1:24:58
  information on these topics because so much of this stuff is not presented accurately.
• 1:25:02
  It's presented by crazy people and racists and conspiracy theorists and stuff.
• 1:25:08
  And I'm really glad to be able to present the information without, hopefully without
• 1:25:13
  a lot of my bias and really present it accurately in a way that is accessible to people.
• 1:25:19
  Do you sometimes get people who are like, I've knocked on Andrew Tate's door.
• 1:25:24
  He couldn't get me a girlfriend.
• 1:25:25
  So I'm going to try with the demons and do you have a spell for me or something like
• 1:25:29
  that?
• 1:25:30
  Yeah, I get it all the time.
• 1:25:31
  I get emails.
• 1:25:32
  I get emails all the time.
• 1:25:33
  I thought this was going to be a joke, but it's actually happening.
• 1:25:34
  No, yeah, I get emails.
• 1:25:37
  You could imagine religion attracts its own degree of mental health problems.
• 1:25:42
  You can imagine that occultism attracts a specific kind of mental health stuff.
• 1:25:49
  So I deal with, I have to get a lot of emails from people who are clearly suffering from
• 1:25:52
  mental health problems, but also I get emails from just sad people who are in desperate
• 1:25:57
  situations.
• 1:25:58
  I get emails.
• 1:25:59
  I got an email just a few days ago from a guy.
• 1:26:01
  My wife is divorcing me.
• 1:26:02
  Can I use a spell to get her to not divorce me?
• 1:26:10
  I got nothing for you, man.
• 1:26:12
  Counseling.
• 1:26:13
  And the fact that you're looking for a magical spell tells me that, I mean, again, I'm not
• 1:26:19
  a psychologist or a relationship person, but the fact that you're turning to a random guy
• 1:26:24
  on the internet on YouTube to fix your marriage tells me that you need some help, dude.
• 1:26:31
  But yeah, I don't have, yeah, I can't.
• 1:26:33
  And people, I always make it clear that I'm not a practitioner.
• 1:26:36
  I'm not a believer.
• 1:26:37
  I'm not a doer.
• 1:26:38
  I'm not a guru, but I always get emails who are like, I know you say that in public, but
• 1:26:43
  now that I'm your Patreon supporter, give me the goods about Kabbalah or whatever.
• 1:26:50
  And I'm like, I don't got the goods, man.
• 1:26:52
  I hate to tell you, but I'm glad you're supporting me with your $5 a month donation.
• 1:26:58
  Thank you very much, but I hate to tell you that I don't have any, and people are like,
• 1:27:01
  what if I give you $20 a month?
• 1:27:03
  I'm like, I have the same answer for you, man.
• 1:27:05
  I don't have, I don't have, dude, look, if I had magical powers, I will go win the lottery
• 1:27:11
  and I wouldn't be on YouTube.
• 1:27:14
  Like, there's, again, like think about this a bit more like logically, I wouldn't be asking
• 1:27:20
  for Patreon donations on YouTube if I had magical powers.
• 1:27:23
  If I had magical powers, I'd be kicking it in a castle somewhere.
• 1:27:28
  I'm clearly not the guy with the magical powers.
• 1:27:31
  You're knocking on the wrong door and you're not even thinking that clearly about why you're
• 1:27:35
  knocking on my door.
• 1:27:37
  You're just desperate and I got, I got no solutions for you.
• 1:27:41
  I'm sorry.
• 1:27:42
  So yeah, I can give you scholarly access to this information, but I can't give you magical
• 1:27:46
  spells.
• 1:27:47
  Sorry.
• 1:27:48
  Well, Justin, you're not the guy with the magical powers, but you are a guy with a magical
• 1:27:52
  channel, which I again recommend to everybody.
• 1:27:55
  I couldn't stop watching when I started.
• 1:27:56
  So and thanks again for taking the time.
• 1:28:00
  This was, this was outstanding.
• 1:28:01
  So thanks again.
• 1:28:02
  Thanks for having me on.
• 1:28:03
  Hey, thank you for listening.
• 1:28:05
  I really appreciate it.
• 1:28:06
  This podcast has no sponsors, no production team and no editors.
• 1:28:10
  It's just a little me and as such, I'm at the mercy of you lovely folks watching and
• 1:28:13
  listening.
• 1:28:14
  So please do subscribe on YouTube, click that little bell thing, follow on Spotify and Apple
• 1:28:19
  podcasts.
• 1:28:20
  Also, I don't want to sell you an ugly t-shirt that you don't really need.
• 1:28:24
  So if you can, and most of all, if you want, please support me in Patreon.
• 1:28:27
  And at this point I have to express my eternal gratitude to my patrons on Patreon, AKA the
• 1:28:32
  producers of this show as always without your comrades.
• 1:28:36
  This podcast simply wouldn't exist.
• 1:28:37
  So massive, massive thank you to Ole, Marin, Ferrara, Alias, Strole, Aida, Mancian, Micheal,
• 1:28:43
  Medved, Medinjo, Goran, Gordon, Lorenzo, Yurechuk, Mila, Carmen, Veronica and Taichi.
• 1:28:49
  You guys are the best.