Transcript
Speaker: The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and Ian Denteth.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. On this, the 27th day of August, now notable as being the day Tim Curry died and the day after Dolly Parton died.
Speaker: It's been a crap week all around the week that we're recording this episode. It's true, and if we were suspicious people, and given that we're doing an episode on people who acted suspiciously and had suspicions, you would kind of think that tomorrow is going to be the big one who's going to die next who will complete the triptych of death because you know these people have all been 80 when they died josh and there are questions who's the next 80 year old who might decide to to move on from this life to another life do we get rewarded tomorrow do we get rewarded tomorrow or are we punished
Speaker: You'll find out because this episode will come out after the event. It will, yes. And I just want to remind everyone, Henry Kissinger lived to be 100 years old. On the other hand, so so so has Mel Brooks, and he's still kicking. So who knows? it And Mel Brooks has a film coming out.
Speaker: So, you know, yeah he's he's still doing. I mean, whether Mel Brooks should still be making films at the age of 100 is another matter entirely, but he does have East Baseballs film coming out soon. Same um same age as Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker: If she was still alive, she would be 100 years old this year as well. and so I mean, I'm i'm glad if you put the if she was still alive, because still because I was about to break it to you, Josh. But Melvin Monroe died quite some time ago that she was born.
Speaker: Same year as Mel Brooks. Anyway, I was going to say we're not here to talk about famous people. we're We're not here to talk about famous people. We're here to talk about significant people or at least significant to some.
Speaker: we we We have a topic. It was a topic that Em said, hey, let's do ah an episode about this last time we spoke. And I said, sure, let's do an episode about that. And then thought, I have no idea what that is. So how about we play a chime and then you can join me on my journey to find out what the hell we're talking about. And Em can also tell us what the hell we're talking about.
Speaker: Yes, because Em said, why don't we do something about the Ascended Masters? That's an interesting story. I've been meaning to talk about that. And I was like, I assume that's a good thing to do. And so then I went in and Googled Ascended Masters. The first result for Ascended Masters is the Wikipedia page about Ascended Masters. And then everything else on the page appeared to be websites about who lists of them, lists of people who are Ascended Masters, and maybe a little bit of why they're going to save us all.
Speaker: ah the first one i looked at said ascended masters are high vibrational enlightened beings beings with a capital b by the way of love and light they are the highest evolved beings still a capital b in the spiritual hierarchy surpassing guardian angels and spirit guides because they have lived as human beings Lowercase b. Lowercase b, yes. you know that they They were regular lowercase b beings, but they have ascended to being highercase b beings. So so straight off the bat, okay, they're important people. They used to be regular humans.
Speaker: They've ascended to something better, hence ascended masters, I suppose. It's all making sense. I went to one page that listed the ascended master lords of the seven rays. Do you know who the lords of the seven rays are?
Speaker: I mean, I'm looking at a list right here, but I don't know why they're the seven raised lords. ah Each one of them is ah is a different one. some of them Some of them seem to be associated with a colour. I thought they were doing a rainbow thing, but then some of them aren't, but I don't know. The so the but the first is El Moria.
Speaker: The second is Lord Lanto. The third is Paul the Venetian. I thought they were doing something biblical, but no, Venice wasn't around when in biblical times, was it? It was not. The fourth, Syrapis Bay. The fifth, Hilarion. The sixth, the Lady Master Nada. The seventh, Saint-Germain. Nice to see the ah that old Comte de Saint-Germain. He gets around, doesn't he? People like to just suck him into the air. I was having coffee with him the other day. He's so astounded the fact that people still talk about him at this present day.
Speaker: he And then also Maha Chohan is an ascended master lord. But that's that you'll notice that was the eighth person. he didn't He didn't get a number. He was just another one. So there's a bunch of ascended masters.
Speaker: I don't know about you. I'm not a lot closer to understanding what's going on other than, okay, these are important people who apparently were human beings now now are more than that.
Speaker: more than that ah So I went went to the good old Wikipedia page. they The Wikipedia puts it, Ascended masters, also known as Mahatmas, are believed in several theosophical and related spiritual traditions to be spiritually enlightened beings who in past incarnations were ordinary humans. Through a series of spiritual transformations or initiations, they are said to have achieved a higher state of being. And I say, oh, theosophical. Okay, okay. We're in the realm of theosophy. I'm starting to find my footing here.
Speaker: This is beginning to make sense. So looked down the page and sure enough, there is a bit about theosophy. There's a bit about Madame Blavatsky, because you can't have theosophy without Madame Blavatsky. Oh, I mean, you can, but we'll get into that towards the end. yeah ah Jesus shows up. He was one of them, apparently. Then I got to a section called The Great White Brotherhood and thought, oh, this might be going in a direction. not sure.
Speaker: But yes, but so so ascended masters are an idea that come out of Theosophy as started by Madame Helena Blavatsky, who we've mentioned before. We've mentioned Theosophy before, but we've never really had a look into them. So maybe maybe we should do that now. Do you want to kick things off with a bit of a but of a potted history of Madame Blavatsky?
Speaker: Yes, so before we can talk about theosophy, we should talk about the originator of theosophy, or at least the populariser of theosophy, because if you treat Blavatsky seriously, all she's doing is telling people about an existing system. But we'll get into whether she's telling people or just making stuff up on the spot, very soon. Yeah.
Speaker: So she was born in 1831. She's from Ukraine originally. She ended up dying in the UK in 1891. And she ended up traveling the world, getting involved in a whole bunch of esoteric traditions and being successful in the creation of one in particular, which is known, as we've said, as theosophy.
Speaker: Theosophy is claimed to have been inspired by enlightened masters from around the world. Interestingly enough, in the early phase of Barovarski's career, the masters who inspired her all come from the Western occult canon, particularly the Egyptian egyptian masters. so Fans of Barovarski will talk about how there are hidden chambers in the Sphinx holding a secret library that we need to get access to to achieve world peace and the like.
Speaker: Later on in her career, the influence for Theosophy ends up becoming Tibetan and not Egyptian. We'll get into that slightly later on. But no matter what we think about her inspirations, she was by all biographical accounts very clever and very well read and had an awful lot of correspondence although some of that correspondence is a little bit suspicious and that some of the letters she claims to have received it appears have been written in her own handwriting
Speaker: That seems slightly odd, but she had lot of correspondence, and she was at least very well read. ah She was also a superhuman smoker. Now, Josh, who else was a superhuman smoker?
Speaker: I believe Ayn Rand was. i don't know I don't know how the two compare. I i have heard that Madame Blavatsky would would just be have a cigarette in her mouth from the moment she woke up in the morning to the to the moment she fell asleep at night.
Speaker: i It sounds like if she could have smoked several at a time, she would have. And lived to be 60 years old, which I guess wasn't bad for the the late 19th century.
Speaker: But yeah, i just heard that that's in reading or hearing about her in the past, that was one thing that had come up. she However many cigarettes you think is a lot of cigarettes to smoke, she smoked more than that. Yeah, I'm not quite sure how many Ayn Rand smoked. I know she was also a chain smoker and it was of the firm belief that one should smoke, not just that one could smoke. One should smoke because it showed your superiority over fire, which is a kind of odd aspect of libertarian thought, which I don't know that many modern libertarians adhere to.
Speaker: No, no, not as far as I'm aware. But yes, Rand believed that you were weak if you didn't smoke. But anyway, that's a side matter. We're not talking here about Ayn Rand and her her strange views, talking about a Ukrainian and her strange views instead. Blavatsky was described as an adventurous. This is largely because her father tried to marry her off to an elderly Russian russian noble. Blavatsky enjoyed this. I probably should put that in quotes. She endured this marriage for a few months, and then she left him to travel in Europe and the Near East.
Speaker: So that's why she was an adventurist. She was wandering around the world on her own, getting up to all kinds of mischief. According to her own account, this period of travel in Europe in the Near East ended up with her going to Tibet, where she was tutored by the Tibetan masters.
Speaker: Most biographers think this is a fairly dubious claim, because most of the evidence indicates that actually her travels were related to being a circus performer and also acting as a fraudulent medium. a topic we'll be coming back to later on in this episode.
Speaker: Yes, a fraudulent medium, unlike all the all the genuine mediums. that Oh, yes, yes. I mean, no i mean we're not we're not bemir we're not besmirching mediums in general, although we could. But in this particular case, she doesn't ah appear to have been the genuine article. And this is going to be important for the development of theosophy, as we're going to see.
Speaker: Now, before we talk about Theosophy, we should also mention that she did try to set up a whole bunch of esoteric society. Before Theosophy, she ran the Spirit Society, a spiritualist organisation, but that fizzled out in the 1860s.
Speaker: But Theosophy, which was founded in 1875, was not a lone This is not simply a prophet who was simply writing books. She had students, she had a promoter by the name of Colonel Henry S. Alcott, who ended up being her benefactor, helping her in New York City, the UK, and eventually India.
Speaker: And she also claimed early on in her career that she had support from the Brotherhood of Luxor. Is that a real thing? No, or at least if it was a real thing, the only source of information we have for the Brotherhood of Luxor comes from her writings. Now, please stop put a I'll put a side note here. There was a UK-based Brotherhood of Luxor, but that was the Hermeneutic Brotherhood of Luxor, who are quite...
Speaker: Definite in their claims, they're not the Brotherhood of Luxor that Bladwalski was writing about. But she did claim early in her career that she had the support and the inspiration of this particular Egyptian fraternity.
Speaker: Right. but The esoteric occultist type fraternity, I assume. Yes. And the problem is I mean, they could have existed. a lot of these societies existed and left no trace elements in history whatsoever. But it is also kind of interesting that no one else mentions them in correspondence at all. And given that it does appear, as we're going to see, that Vladvarsky was a bit of a fabulist, quite possibly the Brotherhood of Luxor is one of her fabulations.
Speaker: It's entirely possible, yes. Yes, so we have someone who's been, from from what we suspect, had been doing a bit of occultist medium sort of stuff, interest in the occult, tries to start up a few spiritualist organizations, doesn't have a lot of access, but then hits pay dirt with theosophy.
Speaker: which comes with so so it's sort of constructed from Greek, Theo meaning God and Sophie meaning knowledge. So it's all about thiss this divine knowledge, very similar to what we'd call New Age style movements and the more in the more recent era.
Speaker: But that that happened when she when she got to New York City, right? Yes, in 1875. Now, 1875 is a popular time for occult societies, both in the UK and the US. So there are a plethora of these occult societies operating on both sides of the Atlantic.
Speaker: And like most occult societies, they're centred around one central figure, in this case, Badovarskyi. And like most occult societies, they become really big when their cult figure releases a book. Bedavarsky releases a book called Isis Unveiled in 1877. And this book really catapults the Theosophical Society into, for an occult society, mainstream success.
Speaker: how How mainstream are we talking? I mean, I guess the fact that that we know Madame Blavatsky's name a hundred odd years later, that's that's definitely something.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, mainstream in the sense that they do make quite a lot of money, and I mean, enough money to eventually set up a society in India. We'll get to that in just a minute. But also enough to get wealthy patrons to start forming chapters in different parts of the world. And becoming a kind of, not a mainstream name in the sense of, say, a Charles Dickens, but mainstream enough that if someone mentions theosophy, someone's going to go, oh yeah, I read about that in the paper or heard about that on the radio.
Speaker: Right. So what was Isis Unveiled about? so Isis Unveiled, which is the first of two books that she wrote, criticized religious and scientific orthodoxy, which is probably actually why it was so popular at the time. It challenged scientific materialism, and this is around about the same time a large number of psychic societies and also psychic investigators were becoming popular both in the UK and the US,
Speaker: It also challenged the notion of Christianity as being the one religion that people should adhere to. So it also comes out at a point in time where people are looking to the religious movement in other parts of the world and going, not every everyone's Christian.
Speaker: I wonder what we can learn from them. So this book basically has a kind of co-dressing of things. Yeah, I have heard that um the sort of the the occultism around this time being a bit of ah a bit of a countercultural movement. It was people looking into this stuff kind of as a rejection of Victorian society, in particular people who'd sort of go to the East and um like convert to Buddhism. That was quite ah quite a statement if you're making a vow to never kill another living thing.
Speaker: at time at the time when and sort of it was one of a man's duties to like join the army and go kill living things for Mother England. And so there was a real... There there was almost a political dimension to getting into this. Yeah. I mean, movements like this indicated to people there were other ways to live your lives. So they ended up being kind of textbooks and saying, oh, i I don't have to be a good Victorian.
Speaker: I can act in a completely different way. And that's legitimate because there are lots of other people in the world who aren't Victorians as well. And actually, this is going to tie into some of the things she did in India when she was living there.
Speaker: Yes, I don't want to perhaps at this point put forward the idea that Madame Blavatsky was a particularly progressive in her views. As we'll see in a bit, there's don't forget i I've already brought up the Great White Brotherhood. Just, yeah, bear that in mind.
Speaker: Yes, i mean, we're getting to that kind of awkward thing about talking about historical characters who had views were which were at odds with the mainstream at the time. And very few, actually, I'm about say very few people are going to defend Victorian culture. Actually, we now live in an age where fascism is becoming very popular again. There are lots of people who are now defending the Victorians, colonialism and the like.
Speaker: But for the enlightened listeners of this podcast, who are not going to be such people, it's possible to go, look, Bedavosky was resiling against Victorian norms.
Speaker: That doesn't mean the new norms that she was proposing were all by definition good. Okay, so we're in New York. She's published a book. She's getting some press. Where does it go from there?
Speaker: Well, I mean, due to the influx of interest in the Theosophical Society and presumably also an influx of money from wealthy patrons, things take off in New York such that...
Speaker: Blavatsky ends up moving to Mumbai, particularly in the region called Aida, running what's called the Society of Aida. Now, when she's in Aida, aside from writing theosophical articles, performing small miracles, she also ends up supporting movements which are against British rule.
Speaker: Right, we as we said before, what what what sort of movements? Just anti-colonial stuff? or So she's involved pro-nationalist movements in India, which at that time meant movements where...
Speaker: Indians wanted their own self-governance free of British rule. When we talk about nationalism, of course, we have to be very cautious because, of course, there are quite a lot there's quite a lot of talk of Indian nationalism at the moment, and much of that talk about Indian nationalism is not exactly politically progressive. But at the time that she is agitating encouraging india Most of her work is devoted to opposing British rule, basically opposing the Raj.
Speaker: And then this is when this is when she makes the shift to sort of centering a lot of her views around Tibet, as I understand it. She a lot of these she starts stops talking about the Brotherhood of Luxor, starts talking about these masters who, i think I think she sort of did sort of say, there were these masters, they were kind of around the world, but they were concentrated in Tibet, mostly from Tibet. this is This is where all this divine knowledge was really coming from. And again, as we said at the start, she's presenting all of this as stuff that's been revealed to her by these masters in in her travels in Tibet and through her correspondence and presumably through through more sort of spiritual revelation.
Speaker: So we where where where does this take her? but say She stops talking about the Brotherhood of Lakso, and starts talking an awful lot about Tibetan masters in general.
Speaker: Given her growing popularity, in 1884 she takes a trip to the UK to talk to members there and also to promote the Theosophical Society.
Speaker: This turned out to be a little bit of a mistake on her part. When she's in the UK, an investigator from the British Society for Psychical Research travels to Aida to investigate the claims of miracles that Bledovalski has been performing there.
Speaker: And in the course of his investigation of Bledovalski's purported miracles, he finds out from her housekeeper that these miracles are just parlor tricks.
Speaker: Yes, it was lots of making things falling off shelves and stuff like that through a little bit of trickery. There was a lot of that going around at the time, wasn't there? Have you have you seen the the um the photo of the supposedly levitating man who's clearly just jumping off the ground?
Speaker: No, although I'm fairly sure i can i can imagine exactly what it is. yeah's Yeah, there was one there's a guy, I think he was in Britain, who claimed to be able to mid uter to levitate, but he could only do it in a pitch-black room. And he was like, okay, we're going to turn off the light, so I'm going to levitate. You won't be able to see me, but but just to prove it, we'll we'll do a single flash photograph of me levitating because that's that's the only amount. You need any more light than that and it won't work anymore.
Speaker: And so they have this photograph, and clearly what has happened is the guy's time. But, you he said, okay, take the photograph, leaped into the air the flash goes off, he lands again and goes, yep, that's right, i was I was in the air the whole time.
Speaker: i don't think her her miracles were that energetic, but, yeah, I do. I have heard stories of just all these all these spooky things that were just caused by by hidden strings or or knocking stuff over while people were looking in the other direction and stuff.
Speaker: Which is basically how most psychic mediums were operating at the time anyway. so And this all seems to relate back to her time as a circus performer and fraudulent medium. She probably learnt this on the job back in her youth.
Speaker: So this this gets out then, does it? That her her miracles are not as miraculous as they seemed? And this actually is interesting because this ends up disappointing Colonel Orcott.
Speaker: So it seems that Colonel Orcott really was a true believer in theosophy and a true believer that Bladavatsky was a sincere medium and person providing revelations from the masters. Because when he finds out that she's just been doing parlor tricks to fool the people in Mumbai,
Speaker: He forbids her to return to India. And so she ends up spending the rest of her life living in London instead. And is it because he was the money man, i assume?
Speaker: yes yeah. I mean, yeah, he was the person with the money. He was the person who was doing the promotions. And yes, he seemed to be very disappointed by these revelations.
Speaker: Okay, so we so as we said before, she dies in 1891. It's now the mid-1880s. It doesn't seem she has a lot left in her. Not that she knows that, of course. So what happens in the last few years of her life?
Speaker: Right, well, in London she starts the Esoteric Order of the Theosophical Society, and in 1888 she writes her second book, which is taken to be her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine.
Speaker: Right, is this the one that gets all the different occult traditions and and staples them all together into a single sort of timeline? Right. Yes, this is where we're going to get our Root Races, our Aryans, our White Brotherhoods. This all comes from the second book.
Speaker: Now, unlike her earlier book, which lent on Western cultism, this book is entirely inspired by Hinduism. Now, we say she writes this in 1888. She dies in 1891. So she only has basically two and a half years between the book being released and then her own death.
Speaker: But her influence lives on well after her death. ah So Theosophy ends up influencing what's called co-masonry. Co-masonry is a Masonic order which had the gall, in a Victorian sense, to permit women as members as Freemasons.
Speaker: Shameful. And this is in part because Theosophy also ends up being... Well, ends up having an interesting relationship with the Fabian society as well. They're seen as progressive movements where women should be allowed to have equal standing. So it ends up influencing the Fabian society to a certain extent. It influences co-masonry.
Speaker: It also influences a ah little character called Rudolf Steiner. Josh, who is Rudolf Steiner? Well, I'm going to assume he's the person who started the Steiner schools.
Speaker: He did indeed. now Steiner was a yeah he was a member of the German chapter of Theosophy, but due to a schism in that chapter, he eventually leaves to found, and I have to work out how to pronounce this properly, to found Anthroposophy.
Speaker: Anthroposophy? Anthroposophy? Anthroposophy? It doesn't roll off the tongue, no. No, no, theosophy is actually well constructed. Anthroposophocy does not.
Speaker: And what's he even getting at there? theosoy If theo Theo is God, so theosophy is sort of this divine knowledge, and Thropo is just about man, so it's just the knowledge of humans. Isn't that just ordinary knowledge?
Speaker: no Not for the Steiners it isn't, but the Steiners are another another thing entirely. yeah Now, the Theosophical Society collapses in 1929, so we're talking almost 40 years after the death of Blatwarski, and it collapses because the person who succeeded Blatwarski, one Annie Besant,
Speaker: named someone as the next world teacher. So she names Jiddu Krishnamurati as the next world teacher. The problem is he ends up disavowing the claim and everything kind of collapses for the society as a consequence of the world teacher going, but ah i'm I'm not the world teacher. I don't know what you're talking about. Actually, not that he know what talking takes the title and then eventually goes, I'm not really comfortable with this I think you've got the wrong man Right, that was always and I have to confess I'm quite ignorant about this but by my limited understanding of Rastafarianism is a weird one like that where they're like okay this guy Haile Selassie takes the coronation name Ja Rastafari he's the next well he's the second coming of Christ wasn't it
Speaker: And this this guy, this this Ethiopian, I think, noble is like, am I? ah that's weird. But he never he never played into that, did he? he just They just kind of started a religion around him yeah without him having anything to do with it. but yes yeah Well, he was totally bemused and oh, that's very interesting. I'm going to have cornflakes at breakfast. yes Right. So, but okay, so so the society collapses, but its ideas still hang around a bit?
Speaker: Well, yes, I mean, a lot of the New Age movements that we think of from the 60s and 70s are heavily influenced by theosophy. So even though the formal theosophical society collapses in 1929, theosophists continue to exist. They start forming their own sects and organisations, and In the bonus episode, we're going to talk about one of their modern incarnations. But the actual philosophy behind theosophy continues to resonate in sometimes quite dark and dangerous ways.
Speaker: Yes, because the the the doctrine it talks about ah sort of a cycle of reincarnation, or the cycles and as we see in terms of your naming your successes as being the next world teacher. But we yeah we have this idea of of of progressive steps, and in particular, this is where we get to talking about the root races, which are sounds ominous right from the start, but in Blavatsky's and in In her, and again, this comes out of out of her her second book, but her in her view, there are these different realms of creation that have occurred throughout the Earth's history.
Speaker: And each each race that appears sort of supplants the one that comes before it, although in some cases, the the the one that came before it ends up getting destroyed by some sort of cataclysm.
Speaker: So we're apparently on the fifth race. The first root race were these sort of ethereal energy beings who kind of coalesced into existence back while the earth was still cooling.
Speaker: But the second race were the Hyperboreans who lived in Hyperborea, which was up somewhere near, mythical and up somewhere near the North Pole. And this was an idea that predates theosophy. This was sort of one of these occult traditions.
Speaker: Hyperborea, I always got that confused with the Conan and the Barbarian stuff, but that was the Hyborian age, although, of course, he he was basing that on these stories of Hyperborea and Hyperboreans. And a fun fact, the reason why Howard, the author of the Conan and the Barbarian Stories, did that was that he wanted to set things in the past, but he didn't really want to have to do any historical research. So he went, I'm just going to deal with a prehistoric age in Hyboria. It's much more convenient to not have to worry about fitting things into European history in any way, shape or form. Yes. Didn't he believe, didn't he sometimes claim that that Conan sort of appeared to him and dictated his adventures to Howard to write down?
Speaker: Yeah, but there was a lot of drinking and drinks going on that time. He drink very heavily, yeah. Anyway, okay, so you have the Hyperboreans. They're then followed by the Lemurians, who live in the continent, the lost continent of Lemuria, which is the one I always like. Again, this is an idea that had been around before Theosophy. She's just sort of sticking this one on after the Hyperborea.
Speaker: The continent of Lemuria was originally proposed by by a scientist. That was a scientific proposal. Back when we had no idea of plate tectonics, the idea that continents could actually move around, scientists were faced with the problem of how to account for the fact that you can find fossils of a certain type of animal worldwide. on the other side of the world from where we know those animals live now with no obvious way of them to have got there. And in particular, they were trying to account for the fact that you get fossils of things like lemurs in Asia when in the modern age, lemurs only live in Madagascar off the coast of Africa.
Speaker: And so the the the idea, there are lots of cases of this, and in lots of those instances, the proposed solutions like land bridges. And I mean, we know it used to be possible to walk from the the top of Russia to over to what's now Alaska. And it is actually true that there have been continents that have sunk under the water. i happen to be living on one right now. New Zealand is the last bit of the continent of Zealandia, which is still sticking up above the water.
Speaker: But they, according to older scientists, the world at one point was lousy with continents, and a whole bunch of them have have sunk below the waves. One such one was Lemuria, which is supposedly this continent somewhere between Africa and Asia, which is how these species were able to migrate, and then eventually it sank away, and then that's and that's why we have... fossils over here but like except extant ones only over there so it's always interesting to me that this guy says hey here's this completely imaginary thing that i i've just sort of made up hypothesized and then you get a bunch of occultists saying ah yes that's the ancient continent of lemuria populated by the lemurians but then sunk beneath the waves and guess who was followed uh after after the lemurians go under guess who was next
Speaker: Was it the Atlanteans? It was the Atlanteans. I saved looking at the notes. Yep, so you have the Hyperboreans, they go away, replaced by the Lemurians. The Lemurians go away, replaced by the Atlanteans. And I believe the idea is that sort of one of the, like, I think each of these races was supposed to be sort of sired from a single vaguely divine progenitor. Yes, progen yeah so yeah Yeah, so one of the the surviving members of Lemuria end up moving to Atlantis, which actually indicates that maybe they're cursed, because everywhere the surviving root race goes to progenate a new race.
Speaker: The place ends up with a collapse. Frankly, these people... I'm i'm not against closing our borders, Josh, but i do think that maybe Atlanteans should not be allowed into human society. Well, yeah I've got good news for you, because the Atlanteans also went away, but the one surviving Atlantean went on to found the fifth root race, which is the Aryans.
Speaker: And this is where we should put in a...
Speaker: Yes, the race Aryans. That's a phrase that has some unfortunate connotations these days. But that that supposedly is where we are now. And I should say, she breaks down each root race, apparently has a bunch of sub races. So i I mean, it kind of sounds like under theosophy, we're all Aryans.
Speaker: we are all We're all descended from the Aryans. There's nothing a Victorian likes more, even when she's residing against Victorian norms, of categorizing people by their skull shape or race. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. So the fifth race is the Aryans. Other works, I don't think this is, i'm not sure if this is from Blavatsky's writings. I think it's from the people who came after her. talk about the theyre the prophecies of of the sixth race, for when that comes about, the sixth race.
Speaker: Apparently there's going to be about, there's going to be sort of 10,000 years worth of theosophist eugenics. Oh, that sounds great. Yep, good bit of eugenics. So they're going to breed into existence as sort of people who who will be suitable to then receive this this progenitor. One of the masters apparently is going to reincarnate.
Speaker: and then become the progenitor of a new ray. i I mean, are they just saying he's goingnna he's going to knock up a whole bunch of eugenically perfected Aryan women? I'm not quite sure what's going on there. But apparently apparently the sixth race, there'll be a sixth race that'll have a progenitor. He'll show up.
Speaker: um The theosophists full of will have eugenicised their way into ah providing suitable breeding stock for him. ah and and And humanity, as it exists now, I guess, will go away and be supplanted by this new race. And then eventually in a few million years, we'll all move to Mercury and live there, I guess, for the sun.
Speaker: i mean i mean i mean you get I mean, depending on where on the, you get a lot of sun a lot of the time. Yeah, yeah. i know that' So that's where it's all going to go. So I really do like that she's basically doing what we would these days refer to as cannon welding, where she takes, you know, okay, so we've got we've got Hyperboreans, we've got Lemurians, we've got Atlanteans, we've got this Arian stuff, all separate traditions in separate times. today But then she comes and says, ah, but they're all one thing. They all come one after the other. They're all layered on top of the other.
Speaker: Theosophy is basically alien Romulus. for a call You saw Alien Romulus, didn't you? I did, yes. It was It wasn't bad. I really don't think they needed to bring back that actor with a CGI recreation. No. Because it never really ever quite worked.
Speaker: But it did at least do a creditable job of taking the Alien franchise and the Prometheus franchise and sticking the two together in a way that kind of made sense.
Speaker: most Kind of. I mean, you could see the joints. You could see the joints. And you could also go, i would have enjoyed that film slightly better if they just left that plot point out. But, you know, congratulations on at least trying to make sense of Ridley Scott and also Ridley Scott. Although I did read it earlier today, Ridley Scott hasn't given up on making a third Prometheus film.
Speaker: So he might just manage to ruin things. yeah He might manage to ruin it again anyway. a Good for him. Have you seen Species 3, though? let's Let's go for a slightly deeper cut. I have not.
Speaker: I know Species. What do Species 3? Okay, so so Species, the film that that that made Natasha Henstridge famous, for a while at least, all about about as an alien alien signals sending us a message to to make a to stick DNA into a person and then she turns out to be an alien and wackiness ensues.
Speaker: Then along came Species 2, which is a classic case of a Hollywood producer saying, hey, I'd like to make a sequel to to Species. Grab me one of those science fiction films off the shelf that sounds a bit like Species. we'll We'll put some of the original characters into and make it. And so there's another film about sort of aliens, aliens,
Speaker: coming to Earth and rewriting people's DNA and stuff, which doesn't really have a hell of a lot to do with the original film and seems to contradict a lot of it. But then someone went and made the straight-to-DVD Species 3, which actually does quite a good job of sticking the weird aliens from Species 2 and the weird aliens from Species together in a way that kind of makes sense. It also features a woman who's named after Pi.
Speaker: The food, not the number. She is a scientist who who said it looks after this girl who's one of these people created with with alien DNA, and he calls her Sarah after looking at it the wrapper of a Sarah Lee pie, which warms the heart.
Speaker: Hmm. Does the heart then get ripped out by an alien monster? i it was it was ah It was a bit... I should look it up again. It has a particularly weird ending that I cannot remember the details of, but it's it's suddenly right in the last shot, it pops something up that that doesn't make a lot of sense. Anyway, the point is the point is that the Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky is essentially Species 3 or Alien Romulus, if you prefer. That's all I'm saying.
Speaker: i See, I thought you'd go for the Amalgam universe where they combine Marvel and DC properties to make something which is the lesser of all parts. ah Some of them are a bit of fun, but yes.
Speaker: But anyway, so we've got we've got a bit of race science. We've got a bit of eugenics. we um We've got the Aryans in there. These are some heady ideas. i I guess we're just lucky the Nazis never heard about this.
Speaker: Really dodged a bullet. Actually, sorry, i'm mine I'm getting a message in my in my ear here, which is, oh, actually, no, they did, Josh. They did. They did hear all about it, yes. No, so the Volkisch movement, which I think that predates the Nazis, but sort of led into it. It does, yeah. These are the blood and soil people.
Speaker: they they they were They were influenced by theosophy, then especially once you get into all that wacky occult, Ananiaba stuff that the Nazis were up to, that that all the Indiana Jones things are based on and stuff like that, they were...
Speaker: that that That leaned heavily into the the bits of theosophy that suited their their particular viewpoints. Yeah, Ananaba was all about. So Indiana Jones, did you play the new Indiana Jones game? Indiana Jones and the Great Circle? I've not played an Indiana Jones game in a very long time.
Speaker: The only thing I'll say is that Troy Baker's impression of Harrison Ford is remarkable by how good it is. and Maybe I should look at it. No, I haven't played one since the old Lucasfilm point-and-click ones on the Amiga 500. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: ah so so But but but the young never at least they the whole project was all about how the Germans in particular were descended from these racially superior Aryans and they were all going around the world to try and find find evidence of these this race as as as brought about is brought brought brought into light by Madame Lovatsky and her theosophy.
Speaker: And then, yeah, then this, from what I can tell, the Great White Brotherhood doesn't seem to be, we when they say white, I think they mean white in the sense of Gandalf the White more than the the racial thing. I believe the Great White Brotherhood is a numberna and another name for these ascended masters who are all around the world doing wacky things.
Speaker: So that... um That's kind of the story. That's the story of Madame Blavatsky and the story of Theosophy. and that tells us where ascended masters come from.
Speaker: Where do we go from here? Knowing that the answer is to a bonus episode. Yeah, we go to a bonus episode because the reason why i wanted to talk about the Ascended Masters is because I attended a talk, actually attended two of these talks, back in Auckland over a decade ago. These talks were presented by two members of Shere International. They were talking about the Ageless Masters.
Speaker: And the Ageless Masters is, what if we take... the ascended masters, and we set them in space. and So in the bonus episode, we're going to talk about where things went next. We're going to talk about a person called Benjamin Krem. We're going to talk about the space brothers, and we're going to talk about the ideal ratio of capitalism to socialism.
Speaker: And that's all in a bonus episode, which is available to you if you become a patron of the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. And it is ridiculously easy to become a patron of this podcast.
Speaker: All you need to do is give one currency unit in your local currency to us a month. And you'll get access to all of our bonus episodes. Josh, where can a person go get all of that goodness? Well, they can go to pacharian.com slash podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, which is a bit difficult to type out. So you can also just go there and search for it. Indeed, I found the easiest thing to go to do is go to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and search Denteth, because your name is just that unique and distinctive that yours is the first one that pops up. I hate it. You should go to the Podcaster's Guide to the... I think you mean you should go to Patreon. Patreon slash Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy.
Speaker: Yes, and just search it, or however you get there, you'll get there. And once you are there, signing up is a literal piece of cake. actual pastry. mean, it's on, it' it's not it's actually a literal piece of cake. Literally cake through the wonders of modern technology signing up involves, you know, you know how the the TV show, is it cake? Well, you're not sure. And it it turns out it is.
Speaker: It all is. Patreon is cake. That would explain the problems that I've been having doing uploads to Patreon recently. because Even though click on things, it just kind of disintegrates slightly. oards You need to get your sharp knife and slice down and then it goes apart and goes, oh, it was cake after all. I didn't even know. yeah Anyway, this episode is done. The bonus episode is yet to come. ah And that's all we have to say unless you happen to be one of our patrons, I think.
Speaker: Have we anything else to say? Indeed, and if you then goodness is coming your way. Well, at least, yeah, we expect goodness to come your way. Who knows? Who knows? Maybe badness will come. It's hard to tell. But it won't be bad, it'll be good. That is Josh's personal promise to you. Not mine, Josh's personal promise to you. stand by it 100% all the way to the bank. Yep, including his statements about cake. Exactly.
Speaker: So with that resounding in your brain meats, I don't know what was more mind-blowing, quite frankly, the the works of theosophy or my revelations about cake, but whatever gets you going, I'll leave you to it and simply say goodbye.
Speaker: cake
Speaker: The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy features Josh Addison and Associate Professor M.R. Extentis. Our producers are a mysterious cabal of conspirators known as Tom, Philip, and another who was so mysterious that they remain anonymous.
Speaker: You can contact us electronically via podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or join our Patreon and get access to our Discord server. Or don't, I'm not your mum.
Speaker: And remember, it's not the fall that kills you. this time...
