Part One: Helena Blavatsky: the woman who inspired the Nazis, and Gwyneth Paltrow

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Helena Blavatsky.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Uh Man oh Man Behind the Bastards, the podcast about
people who aren't good by people who are good. This week,
our person who are good is Jamie Loftus. How are

(00:24):
you doing? I'm doing good. It's real hot. I'm excited
for the episode. But you know what a random lady
told me once in Georgia, What when you feel the
sun on your back, that's just Jesus smiling at you. Wow,
that's a that's a good positive spin for global warming.
Like us, there's a good chance that lady didn't believe

(00:48):
in global warming. So she was a white lady in
rural Georgia, so there's there's not a lot of ways
that story is gonna end super happy. You know what
a white lady in rural Georgia told me once I
tried to special order a hot dog? What was that?
She said, this isn't burger king. You don't get it
your way? Fuck off. I love that lady. I love

(01:11):
her too. Hot dog. She gave me a really nearly
hot dog. It was wet. That's what you get for
bringing your goddamn big city bullshit to her wholesome, small
town hot dog. Whatever it was, I came hot. I
was swinging my dick around exactly. You're swinging your dick

(01:33):
around at a hot dog shop, which is basically full
of dicks already, so nobody's impressed. Yeah, I I it
was disrespectful and I go swinging. You go swinging your
dick around at a euro place. Well, that's pretty much perfect.
Because the hero is basically a pocket. You know, it's
the most it's easy to start having sex with the hero.

(01:56):
It is very it's incredibly easy. A hero or a hero,
both of them very easy to fuck. Yeah. Yeah, although
you have more opportunity to get like some hip working
with the hero because the hero it's just going to
come out the sides. You know, wait, I'm trying to
visualize this. It's going to come out the sides. As

(02:16):
long as you're fine with penetrating the gero, right, pushing
through that that back. Uh yeah, that's not then it'll
it'll stay, especially if you like hold the edges up.
Whereas the hero it's just kinda because it's an open
sided sandwich, right, So that okay, the open sidedness of it.
You're not gonna you're not going to punch your dick

(02:36):
through the bread of the hero though, because you can
just suck straight through and they're usually longer than anybody.
But you know what, what's that guy? What's that the
guy who was really Will Chamberlain. Unless you're Wilt Chamberlain,
then you might wilt. What the fuck? I learned your
Will Chamberlain was through a cartoon Network cartoon only because yeah,

(03:00):
Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Oh, I think I learned
about him from an episode of Wasn't he was a
guest on Scooby Doo right, Yes he was. Yeah, yeah,
it was the Mystery of the Man with the Enormous Cock.
Okay that script Okay, once again, the script is really long.
It is almost six words. Yes, just birthing there. I'm

(03:24):
not I'm I'm down to fuck a hero sandwich with
a with a strap on, for sure, absolutely doubt absolutely,
And and I think it's just like about finding the
right shop in the right and there in the right hero.
You know, you know, you don't want to be like
pressured if you're not feeling it in the moment. Maybe
somebody puts like like the like like uh, halapenos, but

(03:48):
not like the pickled kind that that go really good
with lettuce, and you're like well, I don't really want
like just a straight up hallapeno on this. I want
like that texture change you get when they're pickled, you know,
and there's just some food you don't want on your crotch.
It's like, have you ever accidentally have you ever accidentally
put Dr Brauner's soap on your private absolutely? Oh my god?

(04:12):
After shaving for a party once horrible. No one told
me I didn't the bottle. The bottle famously has too
many words. I'm not going to read that, but there
are a couple of very important words. Don't put them
directly onto your it burns. Like, yeah, I stopped listening

(04:35):
when Jamie said it was wet. I was showering with
someone Robert, and I did that, and then I had
to play it off like it was humillion. And then
it's like he absolutely he saw what I had done,
but I couldn't admit my mistake I was doing. Know,

(04:57):
this feels good, It feels like I want to stay here,
let's have breakfast. Yeah, I enjoy the feeling of my
my junk getting burned by a schizophrenic man soup. I
once again, if it just feels nice just to say
it out loud, before I'm glad we're having this five
minute long conversation before I had introduced the topic of

(05:19):
the episode. But before you get to that, I just
want to say that somebody please clip this out for TikTok,
for me, for me, Yeah, let's become TikTok stars. Jamie,
how do you speaking of burning Genitalia, do you think
about Goop often? Yes, I've been thinking about Goop quite
a bit, layeah. Not the Gwyneth No, not the Gwyneth flame.

(05:42):
I was speaking of the Gwyneth one, but yeah, goog
Gwyneth Paltrow's like like snake oil brand or about Q
and on a lot. Q just came back on right
after the appeal of Roe v Wade started posting that's
not great. Yeah, on your mind a little bit, a
little alarming and and literal not sees. Those are probably
on your mind occasionally, right, They're on my mind far

(06:04):
more than I'd like to admit. What if I were
to tell you that the ideas behind all of these
groups have a single origin point, and in fact an
origin point in a single woman. They can all trace
their lineage back to one broad What if I were
to tell you that Jamie I would say, I know
exactly who that broad is and I can't wait for
you to tell me. Yeah. Yeah, we are talking today

(06:26):
about Helena Blovotsky Um, a woman so influential that the
only way to start her episode was by spending five
minutes talking about burning Genitalia as the result of a
variety of mistakes and fucking sandwiches. And I honestly don't
know where she would fall on any of those issues,
to be perfectly honest. Well that's interesting. We're going to
get into this. But she would claim most of her

(06:47):
her life as a prominent figure that she was utterly celibate,
but her biograph at least one of her biographers claim
she was just like as as the kids say. She
was balls deep in that year row, you know. Okay, Okay,
so she she was in the in the hero. Okay,
I'm excited for this because she has I mean, I
know we're going to talk about it, but she has

(07:08):
a jumping off point of the that directly intersects with
the show I was just working on Ghost She's she
started with some spiritualism stuff and then and then she
really took it to an a level. She the least
pleasant way. What's interesting. So because your show is about
spiritual specifically American spiritualism, because there's different strains of it,
she was kind of you know what a magpie is,

(07:30):
that bird that like lays its eggs in another bird's nest.
She was that for spiritualism. She was never a spiritualist.
She just snuck in there to sell her own thing. Um,
it's a very cool story. I'm very very excited because
I started researching her for the show, and then it
just quickly became apparent that not only is there at
least a sixteen thousand words script if he had about it, Yeah,

(07:53):
and also that like like you're saying, like she wasn't
actually and she was just interested in the eyes and
ears that spiritualism had. Yeah, And it's one of those things,
the religion she creates, theosophy. I'm sure there's going to
be some theosophus that are just going to be livid
with us that the things we leave out. It's I
read two biographies about this woman. Both of them were

(08:15):
very long. Both of them have so much detail no
one would ever need unless you're interested in specific arguments
that weirdo occult people were having in eight like, and
it's interested and of course you all know who this
guy is. He wrote that, like, Um, I'm trying to
boil most of that out. It's also worth noting both

(08:37):
of the biographers I read are like believers. So no,
there are no credible sources for most of this. There
are a few facts that we can say for certain.
And then it's like, here's one story, here's another story.
Because she's like, she's an Elron Hubbard figure. She she
she never told the same story about her background twice. Basically, UM,
So we're gonna do our best here. But first we're

(08:57):
going to start um before the birth of Helena Blobotsky
UM by talking about the concept of orientalism. UM. Now, today,
Oxford Languages describes Orientalism as quote, the representation of Asia,
especially the Middle East, in a stereotyped way that is
regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude. UM. I think today

(09:18):
when people use the word, they're mainly thinking of like
specifically China. UM. But this includes a lot of colonialist
atitudes towards India and obviously towards the Middle East, towards
Northern Africa. UM. And this is a bad thing if
somebody accuses you of being an Orientalist, they're accusing you
of a very specific kind of white supremacy. Right, But
back in the sixteen hundreds, Orientalism was still a thing,

(09:40):
but it wasn't necessarily white supremacist. You could definitely say
it was racist, although even that's a little off to me. Basically,
it's it was based on stereotypes of Asia, many of
which were wrong. But the stereotypes weren't based in hate
as much as the fact that it was the sixteen
hundreds and it was kind of hard to get good
information about out India if you were like living in France, right,

(10:02):
So like people just like believed things and didn't really
have any way to confirm them. Um. Now, specifically, Orientalism
in the six hundreds would have actually centered more around
Cairo in Egypt than it would have because that was
the East, right, that was the that was the the like, um,
that was the kind of old world to people in
that period of time, this Enlightenment period, and it was

(10:25):
it was the center of historic knowledge. Right Cairo had
had had the Library of Alexandria. This kind of mythic
I mean, it did exist in some form, but this
like also very mythical library that supposed to contain all
of the knowledge human beings. That it's this, it's this
place where you go to find the secret truths of
the ancients. Hey, I misspoke here and said Cairo had
the Library of Alexandria. I meant to say Egypt had it.

(10:47):
Obviously the Library of Alexandria was in Alexandria. It is
so fascinating, like whenever you look at texts from that time,
like I know that we're absolutely skull fucked when it
comes to the proliferation, like the proliferation of all info now.
But just like people in the West, their perception of
Egypt would have been formed by only just like a

(11:07):
couple of random Western people, And it's just so incredibly
vague and entitled, and it's just it's also I mean,
one of the things that's interesting. So again in the
sixteen hundreds, Um, Egypt is kind of like the occult
center of Western conceptions of like magic and stuff. Um,

(11:27):
the same as kind of true for the ancient Romans.
That's for how fucking old Egyptian civilization is two thousand
years ago, and like Caesar's day, like hip Romans are
going to Alexandria Cairo to like do some of the
same ship because they're like interested in this like ancient
mystical tradition and stuff and like multiple gods. Yeah, I

(11:47):
can't believe it. Yeah, it's it's I mean they had
multiple gods too, but um yeah, it's even the Romans did.
But I'm talking about once once we get to just
one one big guy. Yeah, it haines. This kind of
there's has always been this fascination with with Cairo and
with with Egypt in particular as this kind of like
center of occult traditions. Um. And it's also worth knowing

(12:11):
than the sixteen hundreds like ship, like the pyramids, like legitimately,
they couldn't imagine how they could have been constructed. Um.
They addressed that in the first scene of Despicable Me.
Oh good, I'm glad. Yeah it was well, no, it
was inflatable, oh okay, okay, and then the minions and
it was the minions. The minions put it there. They
used all their little minion breath and then they went

(12:33):
to sleep while Hitler was doing his thing. Huh. You know,
it's funny the minions. The other massacres, like where the
minions during Rwanda, Like were they helping out with that ship?
Like were the minions aiding slobadon moloss of it and
the massacre? It's Rebernitza like canonically, canonically the minions serve
the most evil person. I want to recut that documentary

(12:55):
the Act of Killing for when that like Indonesian fascist
is talking God, well, there's like an elderly minion behind
him with the wire. Who are not putting minions in
the act of killing? Someone needs to Jamie Loftus. So, look,
the way in which Europeans during the Enlightenment treat Egypt
is not very different from how a lot of New

(13:15):
Age truth seekers treat India today, right right down to
the fact that like people from Europe would move there
to like get do fancy spiritual stuff. Now, obviously it
is kind of like India's kind of the spot for
that today, right, particularly a couple of cities like Rishikesh,
for like white people love to go to like learn

(13:36):
different sort of like Eastern uh spiritual traditions and whatnot. Um, yeah,
and and Cairo is not so much, right, You don't
hear of a lot of Westerners going to Cairo to
like get involved in spiritual stuff today. And the reason
why that switch happened, why kind of the capital of
I guess what you'd call Western Eastern spiritualism, uh moves

(14:00):
from Egypt to India. Has a lot to do with
the dude you've probably heard of named Voltaire um And
and Voltaire is real into this, this idea that there
are sacred truths in like kind of Eastern and Asian
religion and mythology that Westerners have forgotten um And specifically
in a way that, like he thinks, gives them kind

(14:21):
of moral superiority over Westerners. In Candide, he gives kind
of the final word in the book to a Turkish dervish.
In The Princess of Babylon, he depicts a Golden Age
civilization on the banks of the Ganji's. Um Voltaire was
probably are classic Voltaire. I know so much about him,
I I know every word. Yeah, you're you've you've famously

(14:42):
got Voltaire's face tattooed across your lower back. Um. Voltaire
is not mainly something I associate with one line in
the Princess Diaries one definitely so Um. He was probably
the best known influence and most influential orientalist of his day,
which was like most of the seventeen hundreds, this guy
lived for fucking ever. He was born in six and

(15:03):
died in seventeen seventy eight. Pretty good run for that
period in time. I think he had a lot of
civilist by the inn there. But who didn't does he?
Did he not go outside? How do you how do
you achieve that he did all right for the day?
I mean, that's pretty pretty good for now. Um. So
one of the things that he wrote during his very
long life was an essay on the Spirit of Nations um,

(15:27):
which listed China and India. He's kind of going through
in a list what he uses like the oldest civilizations,
and it lists he lists China and India as as
the very oldest of civilizations. Um. Now, Voltaire was not
making any kind of archaeological argument here, um, certainly not
in the sense that you or I would talk about today.
He was instead arguing in favor of a concept in

(15:48):
vogue at the time called diffusionism. Now, today we map
cultural inventions, like say, de Phoenician alphabet, back to specific
origin points. Right, at some point a person or persons
in Phoenicia made an alphabet and it became popular, right
in the same way that like, at some point some
motherfucker's made an iPhone and it became popular. But diffusionists
didn't think that that's how inventing stuff worked. They believe

(16:11):
that there had been some great civilization in the past
in which all great cultural inventions came from. Right, there
was some golden age. Yeah, like an ideological Pangaea situation,
Like that's exactly what they think. That's exactly what. Well
that that's that's an interesting idea. I think diffusionists believe
there had been kind of like a couple of civilizations

(16:32):
in the past that everything came from. Radical diffusionists went
that all believe that all human culture and technology had
like a single origin point. Um. Now, one of the
things that was cool about Voltaire was that he argued,
and this is what he was doing by listing China
and India as like old because basically, if you believe this,
the older a civilization is that the closer it is

(16:53):
to like the human original ideal civilization, you know, like
the further back you go. So by arguing that in
in China were older than like any of kind of
the Judeo Christian civilizations, he was arguing against the primacy
of Judaeo Christian beliefs in the broad sweep of human history,
which is a pretty cool thing to be doing at
the time. Um So, when he listed India and China

(17:15):
as coming before Judaism in his essay, he was making
the claim that Christianity and Judaism we're kind of copying
or descending from older belief systems. Now, a thing that
doesn't rock about this is that Voltaire also described the
Jews as basically stealing their culture from other people. Um
that does seem exactly there's probably it's good that, like,

(17:36):
okay on the six hundreds, Probably Christian people needed a
little bit of like, hey, you're not the center of
human development, right. That's parts they don't like. They don't
like hearing that round, They hate that ship. And the
bad part is that Voltaire focuses a lot on the
Jews and and specifically them as stealing their culture from
older cultures and not inventing anything of their own, which

(17:57):
is a central pillar of anti semity and particularly Nazi ideology,
focuses a lot on like Jewish cultural theft. It's like
a huge thing the Naziser, which for a bunch of
Christians is very funny. But anyway, whatever I mean outside
outside of like just like bald faced anti Semitism, is
there a reason that he does not accuse Christians of

(18:17):
the same thing like I think he kind of does,
but he really just focuses on Jewish people. Um, he
I'm not an expert on Voltaire, but he's but he
does spend I think most people will agree he was
a bit anti Semitic. Now anti semitic for the time.
That's probably too much to say, because it was everyone like,
there's regular programs and ship in this period, you know,

(18:40):
so he's he's pretty in line with a lot of
Europeans in this moment um. I want to quote now
from a fascinating right up by Dan Edelstein titled Hyperborean Atlantis.
Quote the Jews as well as every other people that
succeeded the er civilization, which is like the the Golden
Age civilization. Everything comes from merely actuated a complete cultural

(19:01):
system which they inherited from the prima genitors of human society.
At a time when polygenetic theories about the origin of
human races were rampant, radical diffusionism was further bolstered by
the notion that only certain select peoples could have had
would have had the requisite qualities for inventing culture. According
to Voltaire, these prima genitors of all human knowledge were Indian.
This hypothesis was particularly seductive as it could be extended

(19:24):
to the most sophisticated aspects of human culture, namely the sciences.
The belief in the super sophistication of Brahmanic culture grew
stronger after Sir William Jones's discovery of Sanskrit grammar, but
even before the Asiatic researchers saw the day, Brahmanism was
being hailed as the original science. And this is you'll
see bits of this today if you listen to like

(19:46):
people talk about the Baga bad Gida, there's a lot
of focus, particularly in the West onlike passages that could
be talking about witnessing a nuclear weapon and stuff. And
right this even goes both ways because famously, um was
Oppenheimer quotes from the Baga Bodh when he sets off
the first atomic bomb. Right now, I am become death,
such and such destroyer of world's YadA YadA um. But

(20:07):
there's these like you can find a lot of conspiracies
about like, oh, these these things from the Vetas or whatnot,
are these like bits of Indian art kind of look
like they could be like a spaceship or something, And
so maybe like the maybe maybe these these ancient Hindu
texts are talking about some like prehistoric war between advanced
with an advanced human civilization that tow itself apart and

(20:29):
we're all living in there. It's a thing people talk
about today, right, And that's not a particularly common Hindu belief,
but it's like a thing particularly Westerners will talk about today.
So that's that's kind of like my that's kind of
my big question so far as like when Voltaire and
and the Voltaire adjacents talk about India and Egypt, are

(20:50):
they talking about the Western perception of Egypt is anything
they're saying based in actual fact? Yeah, there's usually ten
or fifteen percent actual fact. You'll get, like you know, people,
a lot of it is like some road for for
the Egyptian stuff. Some Roman or some Greek like spent
time in Egypt and like wrote about religious and half

(21:11):
of what the writing is like maybe they saw some
like worship, and half of it is like some dude
at a bar told them about a ritual and that
all kind of gets like mashed together into like herodotus
writing about like what the Egyptians believed, and then a
thousand is a couple of thousand years later, some like
European in fucking Paris or London reads that and like,
you know, off to the race as we go. Um,

(21:33):
you know, I'm hanging out at the wrong bars. The
bar I went to last week said that overturning Roe v.
Wade was good for me. I just didn't know it yet.
Oh well, that's it sounds like a bar in Florida
UM or or Orange County um or parts of San
Bernardino Atwater Village. Shout out at Water Village for having

(21:56):
some anti abortion old men. Continue sounds right, So speaking
of old men, Voltaire argued strongly that India, not Egypt,
should be considered the font of civilization. So he's saying,
like even the Egyptians are just kind of like copying
off of this great original Indian civilization. Um. And as
you probably has occurred to a couple of people listening

(22:18):
right now. Um, the things that he's arguing about and
that other argument are like writers in the same vein
are arguing about mesh is pretty well with like the
most popular myth in Western mythological canon, Atlantis. Right, yes,
there's there's like this perfect Golden Age civilization with advanced

(22:40):
technology that that's like somehow got destroyed and we're all
descended from them. Um, Like that's not that far off
from how a lot of people interpret Atlantis. Now, the
original myth of Atlantis comes from like Plato, as written
by some other dude, right, Like, it's not not like
Michael J. Fox movie. Yeah no, this is like, this

(23:00):
is like when Plato got played by you and McGregor
um twenty years later, or when Salvador Dolly got played
by Robert Pattinson. I feel like, people, oh my god,
that did happen. What a bad ship thing to do,
especially absolutely unhinged if you are casting Dolly, fucking pedro
Pascal is right there, and he has proven his willingness

(23:22):
to grow a mustache. Oh he's and he can actually
do it. You know who did do it the role
Robert Pattinson. Baby, it's that and remember me iconically bad
Robert Pattinson rum absolutely outstanding shit good movie night vibe
as continue, according to Plato, was written by some other dude,

(23:43):
Atlantis was the home of a very advanced people. Modern
writers always take that to mean like spaceships and free
energy in Plato's day and advanced civilization, but like their
aqueducts worked better, right, Like that's what he was not
advantaging imagining starships. He was like, yeah, and they're really
good at making water, incredible at it. In time, Atlantis

(24:09):
mutated as a myth into a pre Egyptian globe spanning
civilization that had colonized the world in a manner similar
to how Europeans has started to colonize it in the
sixteen hundreds. Right, the Atlanti Smith kind of transforms to
ape what Europeans are doing at the same time. Right,
Europeans see themselves conquering the entire world and colonizing it.
And because these myths, like they kind of adapt the

(24:31):
Atlantis Smith in media rez to be oh, this happened before,
and confirmation bias when people manufacture their own confirmation bias myths. Yeah,
galaxy brain shit. There's a lot of guys who are
like super hard for this or a good example, Sir
Francis Bacon gets his like like it's just coming constantly

(24:52):
over fucking Atlantis in the early sixteen hundreds, and um, yeah,
in the late seventeen hundreds, near the end of Voltaire's life,
a s astronomer named Jean Sylvain Bailey decides to find Atlantis,
right this, like because it's all it's this they've decided
there's because of folks like Voltaire. They don't really believe
that Atlantis is this like Greek Island anymore. Um And

(25:14):
in fact, a lot of people are like placing it
in the east, but nobody knows where it was. So
they all very much believe in this place that kind
of its existence, especially if you if you imagine that
you're going to find some artifacts that like maybe have
some writing and stuff that looks Latin or something in there.
It's existence could kind of justify what you're doing and
colonize in the world, right if some previous civilization had

(25:37):
ruled the world and you're kind of descended from them.
You know, that's how what a lot of people are thinking, right. Um.
So it's so funny to me. It's like the fact
the fact that there are people looking for Atlantis back
in the day and people like it. They are just
like the Bigfoot hunters of their time, basically, and people
act like it's the most uncivilizing in the world. I
was like, dude, this used to be a thriving industry.

(26:00):
It's a dying industry. If I were at the point
I am in my career now, in like the early
nineteen nineties, which was famously a period in which there
were no problems, I would be doing nothing but looking
for Atlantis in Bigfoot, Like, Yeah, the thing is, it's
not the silliest thing you could do. I don't like
when it's trained in that way. The silliest thing you

(26:22):
can do is right, a book about how history has
come to an end. Um, That's right, Fuku Yama, Go
look for Atlantis, motherfucker. So Jean Sylvain Bailey decides I'm
gonna find Atlantis, and because history is actually not as
cool as fiction, he does not put together a badass
steampunk expedition with hot air balloons and ship, which is

(26:43):
part devastating Jamie, absolutely devastating. So he's not doing the
steampunk cartoon movie that I used to know it is.
It wrenches my soul in Twain. But he writes a
bunch of really boring books trying to use math and
logic to like figure out where it would have been
and um, you know, fuck you, Jean Sylvain Bailey like

(27:04):
go to suck a home. I want to go to Atlantis,
bitch anyway. Whatever. In Bailey, we see the synthesis of
the diffusionist trend with a new eighteenth century appreciation for
the value of myths previously rejected as being the beliefs
of pre rational civilizations, which is the fund up term.
But that's what they're talking about, right, They view civil

(27:27):
earlier civilizations as pre rational. I don't believe that's the case,
because you can't survive as a hunter gather if you're
not pretty rational. But whatever. And also they are even
arguing that the West was rational at this time. This
is this is how they were talking about it scholars
in this period. Um though, this is actually kind of

(27:47):
kind of in some ways of positive trend, where like
they're there's a lot of scholars are going against this
attitude that earlier civilizations have been like just fundamentally irrational
and there's nothing to learn about their mythology. Scholars start
to argue that, like, well no, there's actually a lot
of truth in in certain myths. That's why, like they
spread um and the good the aspect of this is healthiest.
And so we should like study and appreciate the different

(28:10):
mythologies and whatnot that human beings have embraced over time,
because they can teach us a lot about ourselves. Instead,
a lot of scholars decide, like, well, this must mean
that all of these myths are like branches of some
great historic truth that has been corrupted over time. And
if we can figure out like a secret set of
codes that allow us to like peel away the parts
of the myths that have gotten corrupted over time, you

(28:31):
could unlock a sacred discourse that reveals the truth about history. Um,
so that's not discord And that was a very funny.
There is a special discord board that people are doing
that there is now. Uh So, Dan Edelstein writes, quote
Hercules is twelfth and last labor in the traditional sequence

(28:51):
led him beneath ground to capture Cerberus, just as Persephone
and other solar figure had disappeared underground for half the year.
These episodes and others Bailey surmise, symbolize the complete disappearance
of the sun. The inventors of the myth must therefore
have lived in a latitude where the sun periodically vanished
from the sky. Dismissing earlier theories about the location of Atlantis,
Bailey thus reached the surprising conclusion that Atlantis Lane near

(29:13):
the North Pole, roughly where the Novaya Zimilia archipelago is situated.
So you see what he's doing there, He's being like
number one, he's saying that, like, well, because all of
these myths have a common origin point and it's much older.
It can't be like Greece, like it has to be older. Um,
the Hercules myths can't have just been something some Greek
dudes came up with when they were drunk as around.

(29:34):
It has to originate from somewhere. So let's well, let's
pinpoint within the story. They're talking about an eclipse, which
must mean that they live near the North Pole. I
in some ways you gotta handed to it. It's very funny.
It's very funny the way logic works, Like and you're Africa,

(29:55):
Africa is also here, like there, there's other places we
can explore and then trace the myth, I mean, not exploit.
But again it is funny that like this is one
of those cases where the people earlier and who were
generally wronger about a lot of things, were right about
the origin of civilization or writer when they like proposed

(30:17):
that it was in Egypt because like, yeah, it did
start in like North Africa. Like that's more and more
or less, it's only Egypt that is worth exploit. So
they go to the Hercules myth too. Yeah, they go
the I mean Hercules clearly grew up in the North
Pole Jamie, I don't know if you've read Hercules. Look,

(30:39):
would I watched that movie? A million percent? I would
watch that movie there. I I like to think. I
was like, what would be the like popular current myth
that people could that once society collapses, that future cryptids
can assume is based on truth? And like, is it Aragon?

(31:01):
Is it? Yeah? Let's let's let's have it be the
rip off of Ja or Token, Like, let's have it
be Aragon or my favorite vampire story, Cirque to freak.
Let's have it be served to freak. There you go, Jamie,
Let's yeah, it'll be cirrud to freak. Um, that's our
our foundational myth um. Also, I think that Santa Claus

(31:23):
should start traveling around with Hercules. But but specifically young
Arnold Schwarzenegger Hercules where he can't really talk like in English,
like he's just like he's just like pronouncing words fonetically
because he doesn't know what he's saying. I want that
Hercules hanging out with Santa Claus, just hucking people into

(31:43):
the East Bay. Um North Hercules is a strong idea
for a franchise. Free ip folks, come on, Disney, money
on the table. You know what else's money on the table?
Jamie Loftus, tell me what the products and services that
support with this podcast money we're taking, which is why
you're about to hear these ads. I hope they're about

(32:04):
to try. I hope Quinny is about to try to
sell you a jade egg. Wouldn't that be amazing? Fingers crossed, well,
other times crossed. We're back. Oh, so have you ever
have you ever seen a jade egg, Robert, I've seen

(32:25):
jade eggs. I haven't seen anyone the kind that you stick.
I've seen some people put some things inside them. I'll
tell you that much. Oh my god, friend, who can
put one of those metal coke straws all the way up? Anyway? Um?
I used to use I used to use one as
a stage prop where I did a show where at
the end, like I would have the jade egg in.

(32:47):
I would put it in at the beginning of the show,
and then people would totally forget I had done that,
and they would also assume I never actually did it.
And then at the end and at the end I
would they would watch me pull it out and then
and and people hated it. They did not like it.
But I had a great times a kid. I had

(33:09):
great parties that only happened because somebody was able to
hide a bag full of pills inside themselves in a
similar way and drive across Dallas when there were a
checkpoints set up. That's a good comrade. That's that's a
good buddy. Um. So we're talking about Bailey and his
conclusion that Atlantis lays near the north pole, right, and

(33:31):
this this is what brings us the concept that is
called today like Hyperborean Atlantis. Hyperborea is this like mythical
in some myths, it's like it's it's like a whole
like Pangaea style continent way back in the day. But
the Hyperboreans are like this mythical people who had supposedly
existed somewhere in the far north of green like far
north of Greece and worshiped Apollo and these kind of Hyperboreans.

(33:55):
Kind of that Hyperborea becomes kind of the word for
the civilization, the great civilization that anything it originated from.
It's also the civilization that Conan the Barbarian comes from
in the Robert Howard novels. But that's because Howard is
specifically a fan of this like mythology. He's like growing up.
This is all still very like when Robert Howard, the
guy who creates Conan the Barbarian, is like writing the stories.

(34:15):
This mythology is incredibly common because of Helena Blovotsky. Um.
But yeah, so hyper boring Atlantis is the concept that
kind of comes up out as a result of Bailey's work.
Um and Bailey argues that the Hyperboreans had been real
and that they've lived up near the Arctic back when
the world was warmer. Um. And again it's face failure.

(34:36):
That's just another silly myth theory. There's a bunch of
different myths about early human beings that are all very fun,
very fun, but not literally true, literally true. I mean,
for example, the the opening of the movie Minions offers
some really interesting ideas about how Minions came to be. Well,
you know, and and Jamie. Actually that's based heavily on

(34:57):
Catholic doctrine that's been buried beneath the Vatic for centuries.
But minions do believe in in dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are a
thing for minions. There is for Catholics. Yeah, really Catholicism.
They've always been shitty about abortion, but like they've been
good about evolution for a long time. Um, okay, well

(35:20):
that's good to know. I lapsed. What they're bad about
is strong molestation. Um, which the Minions probably helped with.
You have to assume, right, Okay, No they didn't, Robert Jamie.
They're helping all of the villains. What's more of a
villain than the Catholic Church in Ireland and like fifty
years Ireland over the last time you do see them,

(35:42):
I believe, unless I'm unless I was misreading who they were.
You see them help at the beginning of the movie.
You see them help. Then you see them help a
t rex. You see them help the meanest cave man.
Why is the t rex a bad guy? It's just
an animal. I hate this fucking show. You see you
see them help Napoleon Bonaparte. Oh, Napoleon was not a

(36:05):
bad guy. He was the only hero in European history. Look,
that's my opinion. What happens in the movie that and
then they find Grew who is um Steve Correll and
he's Hitler. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna take that as
as given. So Jamie he is Hitler. Yeah. Again, At

(36:25):
face value, this idea of like a hyperboreing Atlantis just
sounds like another silly myth. But as Edelstein continues, the
impact of Bailey's conclusions here was significant. Quote Bailey dissociated
Atlantis from the Atlanteans, the place from the people. He
thus mobilized the myth, tracing its progress from the North
Pole through Asia via Mongolia down to India, and from

(36:47):
there from east to west. Atlantis became a floating signifier,
an indicator of cultural superiority and originality that could be
affixed to any place in people with whom the migrant
Atlanteans might have come into contact. By situating their original
homeland beyond the scope of empirical inquiry, under the concealing
lid of polar ice sheets. He turned the Atlanteans into

(37:07):
what would soon become the nineteenth century myth par excellence,
the myth of race, and more specifically the white of
the white races pere peregrineation. I don't know how to
say that word. Um. So basically, what he's doing, let
me let me tell you, let me explain it. So
basically what he's doing is he's saying, like, the Atlanteans
came from this area near the North Pole, which is

(37:28):
now under ice. You can't find it, so there's no
documentation of it. And after this great calamity, the Atlanteans
migrated down like through China and then into India and
then through the Middle East and then eventually to Europe. Right,
So that number one, there's elements of like actual history
that jels with. Right. You have like the Indo Arians,

(37:50):
we're not coming from the North Pole. But you have
these like different groups of people primarily defined by their language,
that do migrate from vast swaths of like of the
globe over period of time. And so there's bits and
pieces of like evidence that shows like, oh, these people here,
you know, originally like uh came from or at least
people migrated down from this area and like you can

(38:11):
see evidence of that, which when you just have bits
of it kind of seems to confirm, Oh, there's this
like migrating race that's bringing civilization in its way, right,
So basically a lot of white supremacists will eventually this
will evolve into like the Aryan myth, right that there's
this like ancient Areyan race that brought civilization to Europe
and it's being corrupted now. But there is this like
original pure race that you can trace and like the

(38:33):
Nazis do trace back around to that. Yeah, I mean,
and it again there's bits of actual because there there
is like an Indo Aryan like people that travel up
from India and eventually make it into Eastern Europe and stuff. Um,
but it's not like what the Nazis you're talking about.
But the Nazis do they sit The Nazis sind researchers

(38:54):
to India to like, um, the fucking Himalayas and shipped
to talk with um people that they leaved are like
the ancestors of the Arians. Like there's a lot when
they when are they doing that? And like the in
the thirties and there's an SS well in the thirties,
particularly once the Nazis gained power. There's an SS division
called on an Air Bay, which is like the SS

(39:15):
kind of occult history division. A lot of like historians
and researchers are funded by the Nazis to go over
into India and find evidence of the ancient Arians, because
the Nazis believed so strongly in this idea that there's
this er culture that are our ancestors that traveled through
the world and they've just been kind of like corrupted
by mistakenly breeding and like the Jews come into this

(39:38):
at a certain point. Um, so you just have to
like send someone to find a scrap of information to
create your confirmation by a smith. Yeah, and we can. Yeah,
I'm going to continue that quote. Now we can now
fully fathom the political thrust of Bailey's gesture. Rather than
orientalized Atlantis, which is what Voltaire had done, he atlantic
sized the orient making a snow white northern Europe and

(40:00):
people the Hyperboreans responsible for the cultural achievements and splendors
of the East. He did not deny Oriental achievements. On
the contrary, he'd been over backwards to concur with Voltaire
that Asian civilizations were truly awe inspiring, but a Hyperborean
Atlantis allowed him to credit a European stock with the
foundation of these ancient cultures. So well, tears like obviously,
like we we we in Europe are not so fancy

(40:22):
and we shouldn't be as proud of ourselves. Look at
how much like grander these civilizations in the East were.
And Bailey comes along and he's like, yes, and it's
because these white Hyperborean Atlanteans brought them civilization before they
brought it here, when their civilization was like closer to peer,
and that's why they had all these achievements. But it's
still like white people, right, yeah, yeah, it's definitely yeah. Okay,

(40:47):
So Bailey's ideas did not gain tremendous ground in his time.
Jules Verne actually mocks it. The whole book twenty tho
Leagues under the Sea is Jules Verne making fun of
this guy pretty much. Um, it's one of those things
you don't catch now because like it's this argument between dudes.
We've been dead for hundred Yeah, but Verne is kind
of like mocking Bailey specifically in that book. I always

(41:08):
enjoy something like that. Where you're like, yeah, you could
read the like when you find out the Wizard of
Oz is an allegory for something that you're like, well,
I didn't know about these agrarians, Like what this is
not relevant to me. But at the time people were like, oh,
he got their asses well, and that is the mark
to me of like great like like you know, shitty political,
shitty fiction. It's very obvious that like this is just

(41:30):
some like stupid political rant, and if it's really good fiction,
you know there's probably some dumb political rant there, because
all authors do that kind of ship, but you don't
notice it. It's like Taking was actually extremely angry about
about Tory fiscal policy, and that's really what he's talking
about when he discusses the delineation of the different orci

(41:50):
Ish people's from the elves, um, it's all. It's all
that was Tory economic policy. To continue this joke, that
was a lie. I've not found the patients in this
lifetime to to dive into Tolkien and Laura. I don't
think it's going to happen for me. Oh, it's funny.
He really hated the idea that anybody would read anything

(42:11):
into his books, but like but like he the man
lives through a battle of the psalm in which thousands
of his comrades are like sucked into mud and drowning
it like while he watches. And then he like writes
in his book about this battle where thousands of corpses
are like trapped forever in a bog and people are like,

(42:31):
was this about, like you like writing about World War
One at all? And he like hits them in the
face with a beer bottle like, fuck you, p assuming
um exhausting, what a king? So Jamie, Yeah, this somewhat
meandering discussion. Um, you know, Bailey think it's been very
on topic. Yeah, thank you. So Bailey is kind of

(42:55):
ignored in his time, mocked by guys like Jules Verne.
But about sixty years after he publishes his work, aman
is going to be born who will take his ideas,
expand them, and carry them forward into a new and
bloodier age. Her name is Helena Petrovna von Hahn, and
she's born on August twelfth, eighteen thirty one, in a
Katarina slav Now she's a leah so a little bit

(43:19):
showy Robert and her her whole childhood is in in Ukraine. Specifically,
it's in like a lot of the parts of Ukraine
that are people are fighting and dying over right now.
Her hometown, um, Katerinoslav was a very modern city by
the standards of the Russian Empire. It had been built
just a century before um, and it specifically was like
a city they had established in like honor of Catherine

(43:42):
the Great, um, who is uh, the ruler of Russia
for quite a while. Very interesting lady, also a good
friend of Voltaire. Just interesting note. Um, now you may
have noticed that she is there's a Vaughan in her name, right,
she's she's Helena Petrovna von Hahn. Um. This means that
she's nobility. But you also might not like v is German,

(44:04):
right Yeah, if you're a Vaughan, is like a marker
that you're a member of, like the nobility in in
German culture. Umm. Yeah, I feel like I should have
known that. Does it does everywhere? Not? Yeah? I think
like the guy who assassinated Hitler close von Staffenberg's was
Prussian nobility, right um. Yeah, it's why a lot of

(44:24):
grifters put Vaughan in their name, and like the eighteen hundreds,
nineteen hundreds, it's because they're like pretending to be European nobles. Um.
And obviously von Hahn is a German name. She's German,
but she's Russian because a huge chunk of the Russian
aristocracy are actually German. This is going to cause serious
problems for some of them in about a century. But
at the time everybody's fine about it because like their surfs,

(44:46):
and they don't have any choice but to be fine
about it. So anyway, she's German, but she's Russian, and
she lives in Ukraine. This is the Russian Empire, not
weird at the time. The first great event of her
childhood would have been a cholera epidemic, which killed so
many people that coffins piled up in the streets of
her hometown unburied. Um. Now, her mother was seventeen when

(45:07):
she had her, which, um, we're gonna be talking about
that quite a bit. Her mom is also named Helena,
and she is not in particularly good health. Uh. She
and her new baby both catch cholera and nearly die. Um.
And in fact, young Helena the baby was so sick
that her godparents and a household called for a priest
to baptize her immediately. As a newborn infant because like

(45:29):
they thought she was going to die. Um and according
to family legends, Helena's aunt, who was actually also a
child at the time, accidentally set the priest's robes on
fire during the baptism, which is a pretty cool thing
to have happened at your baptist That's pretty funny. You
have to you have to hand it. There is something,
there is something about a near death experience as a

(45:51):
baby that will just like set you on the most
bizarre life paths. And unfortunately, I am thinking about an
Elvis Presley and how his twin died and now they're like,
you have to live the life of two men. And
then like you just if something happened, if you almost
died as a baby, you're going to have a very
fucked up life due to the baggage that you're like

(46:14):
constantly reminded of. Yeah, that's why we should hollow out
the center of the country and make it a giant
child prison. But that's a story for another day. So
Jamie the Old Tidings, Helena and her mom both survived
the epidemic. You may notice that I have not mentioned
her father yet. This is because he was a captain
with Russia's horse artillery with some fancy royal unit, and

(46:37):
he was generally not at home. He first meets his
daughter when she's six months old, um, and this is
going to be like the pattern for her life. He
is away all the time. Um. Now for US horse
artillery is like an elite military unit in this period,
like you're you're dragging like it allows you to like
drag cannons around and move them a position quickly. And

(46:59):
Peter on Haunt is kind of like an elite military
commander for Zar Nicholas the First, he wins awards for
helping to suppress a bunch of different uprisings. He's a
shock trooper for the empire. UM. And Nicholas the First,
who is like the Czar at the time, is one
of the most brutal and effective tsars in the history
of the Russian Empire. So while Peter's daughter is struggling

(47:19):
with her seventeen year old mom to survive cholera, he
is helping to crack down on an uprising in Poland,
and they kill thousands of people like stopping this uprising.
It is nat blood running through the streets. Ship Now
the primary impact that all this has on young Helena's
life is that they move constantly. Um. Also her dad
is thirty four and her mom is seventeen, which is

(47:42):
not cool. Uh, Elvis parallel not at all uncommon for
the aristocracy. At the time, this would have been kind
of cheered, I think for like normal people, but for
aristocrats not uncommon. Were they were they vaguely related? Do
we know? I mean probably right, but I don't don't specifically. Now. Yeah,
I'm not gonna we could get into their genealogy. I'm

(48:05):
sure a lot more if we wanted to, But who's
got that kind of time. So the primary impact again,
they move constantly, and they're generally because he's like a
military officer whose job is to help put down rebellions.
They're not saying in the good cities in Russia right
there in backwaters. You know, they're far from famous all
art like from the art and cultural scene in Russia. Um.

(48:25):
And this is a problem for Helena's mother, who's again
also Helena, because she becomes a celebrated novelist. Um, she's
a really interesting lady. Actually again she's she marries her
husband when he's like she's a child. Um. But she
as a young adult, she starts writing novels that become
actually very popular in Russia, and they're all about women
who are in unhappy marriages to brutes. Um, so like

(48:48):
a part of her history that I was like, this
is very cool, Like her mom is a really interesting person. Um.
I want to quote a passage from one of her books,
titled The World's Judgment, which I found exerted and exerted
in a Gary Lachman's biography of Madame Blovotsky. The fine,
sharp and fast mind of my husband, as a rule,
accompanied by a cutting irony, smashed every day one of

(49:11):
my brightest, most innocent and pure aspirations and feelings. All
that was sacred to my heart was either laughed at
or was shown to me in the pitiless and cynical
light of his cold and cruel reasoning. Oh so, I
think you can grasp a lot about their relationship from
that passage. I love, I mean as I just always

(49:34):
I don't know. My my favorite areas of history are
women with no rights finding the way to to subtweet
their oppressors into fucking oblivion. Like that is so fun,
And not to draw another minions parallel. Robert but the
man who is at least the co creator. One could

(49:56):
argue the creator of the Minions, co director of the
Despicable Me franchise, Pierre Coffin, raised by a very famous
Indonesian feminist who wrote novels when she was still working
as a flight attendant that became very famous, very influential.
She marries a French guy. They have a uh, you know,
a little Pierre Coffin, and what does he do to

(50:17):
thank her creates the minions? Huh, an entire bunch of
from two generations of a family. Or you can interpret
it as all the minions are are men. They're all
men doing evil things, and you're like, where where is
he going with this? Does he realize it's all connected
in the way that I I do when I go

(50:39):
on my long walks. You know, we don't know, we
don't know. So Jamie, that's uh, that's that's pretty. And
I think we can assume from that passage also sex
probably wasn't great. Uh no, probably not very good. Probably
probably I'm gonna guess Peter worse at sex than say

(51:00):
hears him a foot a foot long subway sandwich, one
of the ones on the the the herbs and spices bread. Well,
that's the best bread to fuck. If you're gonna fuck
some bread, you want to be sucking that herbs and spices.
You know, that's the best bread. But I feel like
it might have a doctor Brauner's kind of effect on. Yeah,

(51:21):
it's it's gonna be a little peppery. That's why you
have him at extra mayo. You really need to wash
right away? Yeah, you want to and wash with mayo? Right,
It's it's like washing your eyes out with milk if
you get don't do that. If you get tear gast,
I'm sorry. I don't even want to spread that. Um
funny though, right. So anyway, Helena, the mom was never

(51:42):
in because again they're both named Polina, was never in
good health. Uh so she doesn't ever fully get better
from getting horribly sick, and they move constantly, which is
bad for her health. They live in army housing, which
isn't good either, although she and her baby still have
like again, they're rich. They have a small army servants
at their back and call. So it's it's like hard

(52:04):
but not hard compared to how most people in Russia
would be living at the time. Um. When she was
too when Helena the Baby are Helena was to her mom. Also,
Helena has another baby named Sasha who dies immediately, which
was tradition for roughly half of babies at the time.
And you know who else kills babies roughly half the time?

(52:25):
Is it the people who sponsor this show on their
special child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. Um,
that's been leaving a chicken with its throat slid on
my front porch every week for six years. I can't
pay them to stop. That's right, Jamie. You know why
they're doing that, So you keep your mouth shut about

(52:47):
the child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. You're right, anah,
And and here we are. It's never gonna end. Uh.
We're back after making Sophie mark a bunch of places
in the episode to bleep out the name of Cool.

(53:11):
So like how you keep calling her Helena the baby, Um,
it does make her sound like a TikTok rapper. Deathmakers
sound like a TikTok She would have Oh my god,
I have to say, of all of the bastards we've
talked about on this show, easily would have had the
best TikTok. I do see what you're saying. Unfortunately, we'll

(53:34):
get to that she would have done. I mean, her
legacy lives on on TikTok unfortunately. But now Saddam Hussein,
that's a Twitter head. You get Saddam on Twitter. Ain't
nothing else happening on Twitter. Oh man, that would have
been a good time he would be making. He would

(53:54):
be using the threat emoji for oh my god. It
would have been a bible. So after this, the family
moved briefly to St. Petersburg. Right, they get like stationed
there for a year or two, which thrills Mom Helena
because St. Petersburg is like the cultural center of Russia.
She's this is when her her literary career starting to
take off, and she's able to like go to art

(54:16):
galleries and fancy parties and and sit at salons with
other adults who aren't like drunken soldiers. This is like
her dream life. She finally gets to live for like
the only two years or a year or whatever that
she will actually get to be anything close to happy. Um.
When baby Helena is six, Peter tells them that they're
going to have to move again to the middle of
nowhere to brutalize people. And this time mom Helena says no. Um.

(54:41):
She refuses to move with her husband and like go
with the army basically. Um. So she stays in St. Petersburg, awhile,
and then her father comes to her and asks if
she and her daughter want to go on an adventure. Um. Now,
Helena's maternal grandfather father had been made a trustee for
the Kalmuk, which was wandering tribe of horse riding warriors

(55:02):
who like part of the area that they lived and
they had like a moving city and stuff that they
took with him, and like part of the area that
they they live in is in is in Russia. Um.
I think they go to a number of places, but
like they live like within kind of the bounds of
the Russian Empire because it's big and there's different kind
of rules for tribal peoples. And one of the things

(55:24):
is you've got like this guy who's appointed by the
government to be the intermediary of the tribe and the
Russian government. And Helena's maternal grandmother gets that job for
this this group of like horse riding warrior nomads who
are also Buddhist. Right. So again Russia is very fucking
big um. So he takes his daughter and his granddaughter

(55:46):
on a journey to a city called Ostra Khan in
the very distant steps, where the Kalmuk are like camping out,
and young Helena, as like seven something eight years old,
gets to spend time in direct contact with Buddhists. This
is her first experience with Eastern religion, and this legitimately happens.
Gary Lachman writes quote here, the young Helena Blovotsky was
exposed to the Mongolian lemaic system and had her first

(56:09):
taste of Tibetan Buddhism. Her mother, too, was inspired by
the meeting and later wrote a novel about Calmuc life,
which was translated into French. The prince spent his days
in prayer in a Buddhist temple he had built himself.
The colors, the images, the incense, the strange words murmured
in an unfamiliar tongue must have made a deep impression
on the six year old. I guess she was six,
who had already led a remarkably adventurous life. Bulovotsky would

(56:31):
later say that her interest in Tibet began at that time.
So and again Tibet is this kind of mythical place.
It is a real place, but like you can't go
to Tibet if you're like a Westerner. It's it's pretty,
it's it's closed. Um. But you know this guy, Tibet's
you know, obviously like kind of one of the centers

(56:51):
of Buddhism. And so this like horse Nomad prince is
like talking to this little girl about Tibet and she
kind of falls in love with with, you know, East
during religion and mysticism. Um. And after this period of time,
which legitimately sounds like a pretty rat experience to have
as a six year old, the family all wind up

(57:11):
back together with Peter in Odessa Um, mainly because Helena
the mom is really sick again and Odessa has these
mineral baths that are thought to be good for her health. Yeah.
Like I love old school rich people. It's like you
just just go sit in some salt water. You'll be fine,
It'll be good. You just do rich people ship people.

(57:33):
It's back then, so they just go sit in baths
when they could take simple prescription medicine any of us
could get from a pharmacy today, like go to walbrafool, dumbasses,
I'm sorry, did you not consider going to CVS? Yeah,
motherfucker's loser. Your death's on you. I don't even care
like it takes. We're about to We're about to get canceled.

(57:54):
Yeah we are. So she probably had um what's the thing?
Uh uh, it's like consumption. UM. I think is generally
like what people assumed she had. Right, They just kind
of described her as sickly. So she had some sort
of like chronic lung illness that eventually kills her. Um
that again, you could probably knock out in like ten

(58:14):
minutes today. Anyway, she dies in eighteen forty two. Her baby, Helena,
now the only Helena, was eleven at the time. Um.
Her mother was twenty eight years old when she died. Wow. Yeah,
so that's has her kid at seventeen. She's got her novel,
her novels done before. That's impressive. Ship, that's impressive ship. Um.

(58:38):
And probably what killed her ultimately was the fact that
her doctors kept taking all of her blood um, because again,
medicines not great. In eighteen forty two, she dies in
her mother's arms, which is one of the saddest ways
of year old can die. Um, yeah, yeah, that's not
not great. Her mother, who's probably like forty eight. Um,

(59:02):
so Helena was presumably like, you know, the daughter, Helena
was presumably pretty devast. Life goes on, though, and soon
she and her siblings she has two siblings now are
all sent to live with her grandparents because army guy, like,
Army Dad's not gonna take care of him. Like, he's
not going to be a single Army Dad Like, no,
they're gonna go grew again, desiably in fairness, these are

(59:25):
all rich people. So they're staying with their grandparents at
like basically a castle, you know, like they're they're living
in like a mansion type palace deal. Uh, you know,
in in in kind of like the eastern e well
not east for Russia, but East for Europe, part of Russia. Um.
Gary Lachman writes quote. She was, according to her sister Vera,

(59:47):
the strangest girl one has ever seen, with a distinct
dual nature. One side of her was mischievous, combative, and obstinate,
while another was mystical and metaphysically inclined, characteristics that those
who got to know the mature Helena Blovotsky would agree on.
Her aunt Nadia, just a few years older than her,
tells us that from an early age she was sympathetic
to the lower classes and preferred to play with the

(01:00:08):
servants children rather than those of her own class, and
often made friends with ragged street boys. This solidarity with
her social inferiors wasn't uniform, and she once had to
apologize to an elderly servant whom she had slapped. Again,
Lachman likes and defends her. So it's very funny that
he's like, she loved the poor. She didn't slap that guy,
she loved the poor. Well. I also like how it's

(01:00:31):
included in texting. Well, she apologized, so you know she
must have just been having a bad day. Jesus Christ. Yeah,
I mean she was made to it. He does say
she had to apologize, right, so we're not okay, she
didn't mean just that. I mean again, this is why
the servants are a bad thing to have, because any

(01:00:53):
kid who has a chance to slap an adult and
get away with it's going to try. You know, that's
just being a child. I mean that is true. Yeah,
so uh yeah, um. Again, Lachman claims a lot that
she like deeply loves the poor and the lower class.
I I don't see any actual documented evidence of that
at all. And the fact that even he is like, yeah,

(01:01:14):
she would slap around the servants makes me I wonder
maybe she wasn't playing with the servant kids just because
they had to do what she told them, because she's
the noble girl. I don't know. I do appreciate that
he that he left it in any ways, even though
it directly undermines his point. I'm like, Okay, not the
worst journalism, but I mean, the logical thing to do

(01:01:36):
would be to just simply omit that. But yeah, i mean,
like all of these by people who write about Blovotsky,
he's like enthralled by her, but there's a there's so
much shady ship. She don't like. He can't keep it out.
So there's these moments where you can tell like he
just he has to include something negative about her even
though it hurts him. Um. Anyway, it's very funny all

(01:01:58):
of these books about Blovotsky or a little like that. Um,
So there is some ample evidence so that she was
kind of a pretty what I would call a fun kid.
The most detailed stories about her, it makes her sound
like the proto Wednesday Adams right like she she's she's
constantly hearing spirits and ghosts the family manner like that
she grows up on. There's the subterranean basement system that

(01:02:19):
she spends her time exploring. She's often found down there
by man servants, like sleepwalking or talking to invisible companions,
so like servants will find her wandering ghosts. Yeah, that's dope.
That's a cool kid, I like. Um. She frequently played
with beings no one else could see, who she called

(01:02:40):
the hunchbacks, and sometimes she would threaten other kids to
like sick her invisible friends on them if they didn't
do what she said. Um, and I bet they totally believed.
Ah man, witchy kids are so funny. It does sound
pretty cool. Yeah, that's that's that's a great use of
child ghost power. That sucking rocks absolutely, Her sister later

(01:03:02):
recalled quote. Helena used to dream aloud and tell us
of her visions, evidently clear, vivid, and as palpable as life.
To her, it was her delight to gather around herself
a party of us younger children at twilight and after
taking us into the large dark museum to hold us
there spell bound with her weird stories. Then she narrated
to us the most inconceivable tales about herself, the most
unheard of adventures of which she was the heroine every night,

(01:03:24):
as she explained, so she was like telling them lies
about going on adventures with her. I was in the
I got taken by like a spirit to this place
and like I had to do this and you know,
fought this other spirit or whatever. Like she's you know what,
you know what Helena Blovotsky really would have thrived with
is some friends to play D and D with when
she was like eleven. It does it just yeah, it's

(01:03:46):
it's a big imagination kid thing. And it just sounds
like she didn't have anyone matching that level of imagination
around her, which just means that you'll be we finally
gets it. It's going to be with adults. But like, also,
this is a period in which you're into that there's
not like a fictional outlet like today. A lot of
the bad stuff maybe wouldn't have happened. Maybe she would
have gotten really into fan fiction and eventually started writing

(01:04:08):
around ship um and stuff like well, I think it's
interesting because her mom was a novelist. So you think
that there would have been that like baseline of like
game write some of the ship down. You know, there's
bits of that happening here, but especially like it's this.
I mean again, we're kind of like in the period
where like Mary Shelley is going to invent the concept
of science fiction. So there's not a lot of there's

(01:04:29):
not a ton of role models in terms of like
taking your weird dreams about ghosts and spirits and turning
it into a mythology. Um, learning that Mary Shelley lost
her virginity against her mother's own grave was really just
like I think maybe the highlight of my well, well,

(01:04:51):
well we'll do Mary Shelly in behind the Ladies who rocked. Um, yeah,
behind behind the unimpeachable women. Uh god. So okay, so
she's she's yeah, so she's making up stories about spirits
and ghosts, hanging out in the catacombs scaring kids. Um,
pretty dope. So while she's living with her grandparents and

(01:05:13):
this isn't a town on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan.
She she claims, Now we're getting into the things that
I don't think happened. She claims during this period, she
discovered her great grandfather's massive occult library. Um, now I
want to read you how one reasonably credible account written
for an unpronounceable Polish magazine by Thomas Stalwartsinski describes it quote.

(01:05:35):
There she found hundreds of decaying books by the sixteenth
and seventeenth century masters of alchemy and her medic philosophy,
such as Paracelsus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and Heinrich Kunrath. Helena's
great grandfather, a high ranked freemason who in the seventeen
seventies was initiated into the Rosicrucian mysteries, selected the books
for his meticulous kid. We're talking about that crucious we'll

(01:05:59):
talk about it. Collected the books for his collection with
meticulous care. Helena devoured them with passion, and it wasn't
long and until she became an expert in the field
of occultism. The only other person she could tell about
her spiritual adventures was Prince Alexander Golitzen, a colorful character
and a frequent guest at Helena's grandparents house. Glitzen was
a freemason and a practicing maige who searched for ancient

(01:06:20):
occult secrets had led him to travel to Greece, Iran, India, Egypt,
and numerous other places. We don't know much about his
relationship with Helena, but without doubt it is Glitzen who
instilled the yearning for faraway travels in her. Helena wanted
to seek out the unknown, the magical, the mysterious. Now
there is a lot going on in those paragraphs. So
that is as like a fifteen year old girl her

(01:06:45):
best friend is a prince wizard um the wizard Prince Golitzon,
which is pretty cool. That's again very cool, there is it.
I know that Bolotsky goes in a wildly different direction,
but it's like, I don't know, just like imagine it
of kids creating going on to create, uh, controversial religions
huge in this time because that was also how spiritualism started,

(01:07:08):
was with like and there's two sisters playing a prank
more like yeah, like, So Glitzen is a legitimately interesting guy.
He was in the circle of a lot of major
Masonic and spiritual proto gurus in in the day. One
of his good friends was a Christian mystic named Carl
von Eckerthhausen. Um who was like like one of the

(01:07:29):
major dudes who inspired Alistair Crowley. Um. Again, Crowley is
like a generation later basically, So that's the set that
Helena is hanging out with as like a teenage girl.
These weirdo occultists who are like a generation back from Crowley.
Um now Glitzens circle of dudes are all just super
obsessed with secret societies. Eckerchausen's wrote about a secret interior

(01:07:51):
church and they were all very into the Rosa Crucians.
Now you had a reaction to that. You probably you
don't know who the Rosa Crucians are, right, I don't
know who the Rosa Crucians, but most the first thing
about them is that they didn't exist. Probably didn't exist.
So when she claims your great grandfather was one, that's
her myth making, right. But I'm gonnacote again from Stalazinski

(01:08:11):
about the Rosicrucians. In sixteen twelve and the German city
of Castle, an anonymous brochure was published. It was a
manifesto of the Rosicrucian Order, an organization nobody had ever
heard of before. The manifesto claimed that medieval occultist Christian
Rosencroy had founded an order that gave its members access
to the universal mystical truth about human nature and the
ways of the world. Two years later, another manifesto was

(01:08:33):
released called The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencroy. Rosencroy, it's
cruts rousing, crutz. I don't know r O s e
n k r e U t z, I don't know
ROSENKROI yeah, Rose Lacroix. The hero of the story is
presented as Hermes tris tri majistice, a god of Hellenic
and Egyptian origins, and Hermes is the alleged author of

(01:08:58):
the Emerald Tablet, which is like a European alchemical text
um and definitely like a central mystic document of the
Renaissance era um. And both of those books had been
written by a guy named Johan Andrea, who was a writer,
a mathematician, a theologists and a cabalist um. So the
history of the Rosicrucian Order and its founder were like

(01:09:21):
books written by this by by Johan Andre. This like
mystic theologist and cobbalist who like invents this guy rosen Croy,
who isn't real and a mysterious order. It's like, it's
not it's it's a it's a it's I don't know
if it's a prank because I don't know the degree
to which this guy writes a fake manifesto that he

(01:09:41):
that he he credits to a guy who doesn't exist,
who's based in part of like Hellenic and Egyptian mythological figures.
It's a little too it's a little bit too calculated
to be classified as a prank. Yeah. So basically in
six twelve, this like Rosa Crue manifesto gets like posted

(01:10:01):
up in Germany. And again there's not real Rosicrucians as
far as anyone's ever been able to prove. But because
this thing it gets goes kind of viral, this like
manifesto being published, they become like a conspiracy theory, right,
Like people are like, oh, the Rosicrucians are behind this,
or that they're the secret Order and they have all
this influence here and this influence here, and it's like
a popular belief or is a kind of a little necessary.

(01:10:24):
Dudes are fucking writing conspiracy theories about the Rosicrucians um
into the twenty first century. Um, it goes very viral.
So Helena is hanging out with dudes who are super
into the idea of the Rosicrucians in this period with occultists,
and she has another entry point um into uh weird
occult conspiracy theories from the seventeenth century. Um anyway, So

(01:10:48):
so she has another entry point into kind of like
occult conspiracy culture, which are the books of her favorite author,
Edward Bulwer Lytton. Now this guy number one. Her mom
had translated a number of this dude's books into Russia.
This is like one of her mom's side jobs. Bulmer
Litton publishes a very famous book in eighteen seventy one

(01:11:08):
titled The Coming Race. And now it's about an underground
master race. Yeah, yeah, The Coming Race, Baby, I've watched
that one. Um. It's like the Great American Bake Off,
but less horny. So The Coming Race is about an
underground master race who have a secret energy called real

(01:11:31):
that they used to like. It's they're kind of occult
electricity almost. Um. And yeah, this book, it's not Bulward
Letton obviously, this is published eighteen seventy one. Not a Nazi.
I don't even think he's particularly a white supremacist, but
his book is going to become extremely influential to the
weirdest kind of Nazis. Nazis loved talking about real today

(01:11:52):
um and secret underground Nazi bases in the art tech.
All of that has its origin point in Bulwer Lytton's
The Coming Race um So Buller is a Edward Bulwer
Litton is a very popular author. His books has been
translated again his Helena's mom translate them when she's a
little girl. Um And one of the books that Helena
would have grown up loving from this guy is Zononi,

(01:12:13):
which is about a secret order of rosa Crucians who
had psychic powers and lived forever. This is probably why
Helena later claimed that her great grandfather had been a Rosicrucian,
because she loves these books as a kid, and she
wants to like tie herself and her family to them
so that she can claim to have some connection with
these like Rosicrucians from her favorite book that become part
of her like conspiratorial belief system about the world. Right.

(01:12:37):
It's like she's making her own occult superhero origin story
right by tying herself and like, no, my grandfather was
with the Rosicrucians, and like you know these these fiction
books by Bulwer Lytton aren't fiction. They're him telling the
real story. But he has to keep it secret because
it's like a conspiracy. You know, God, I mean this
is such fantasy, kid, behave still still? I mean you see,

(01:13:03):
there's variants of this this basic art, like a lot
of secret knowledge conspiracy grifters in the modern era have
similar stories. Bill Cooper, who's the father of modern conspiracy theories,
the first Alex Jones. His whole backstory is that like
he when he was working at the Pentagon, he snuck
into his boss's file cabinet and he like saw evidence
of all the conspiracies. Who had spend the rest of

(01:13:23):
his life talking about Keith Rawnieri claimed that he had
like interviewed all of this most successful people in the
world and had like synthesized the secret information about how
to have success from their backgrounds and stuff. Right, this
is like well trod guru grifter ground the idea that
like at some point, as a younger person, you came
across like the font of all secret knowledge, and so

(01:13:45):
you got it directly from the source and you can't
show anyone else for like whatever reason. Right, you don't
have it anymore, but you remember it all and that's
why they should listen to you. Okay. So that that
brings up an interesting point to which is like, it's not, yeah,
it's not just like fantasy fan behavior, because most fantasy
fans don't have the access and like wealth to take it.

(01:14:07):
As far as what you just described and like what
Blovotsky would have had access to, it's like, oh, yeah,
you can like try to attempt to make it happen
because you have more influence and power and money and
all that. Yeah, And this brings us to the last
well documented part of her early life, her marriage at
age seventeen, just like her mom, to a middle aged
as man named Nikophor Blovotsky. He was the vice governor

(01:14:31):
of aravan Uh in modern day and also within day Armenia. Um,
like I think today it's the capital of Armenia. So
he's like he's like the second guy in command of
basically that of Russian art like Russia controlled Armenia in
the period um of their marriage, Lachman writes, quote. One
story is that she did so to spite her governess,

(01:14:51):
who said that no man would have so unruly ill
tempered and unpredictable a woman for a wife, not even
the old gentleman she had recently taunted and laughed at
so much. Faced with such a challenge, the teenaged Blovotsky
cast her spell, and her plumeless raven was quickly netted.
Another story is that hearing of the plan to run
away with Prince Golitzen, the family felt duty bound to
protect her honor and its own, and hastily shanghaied the

(01:15:14):
old by their standards Nikophor into making an honest woman
of her. A third possibility is that she married Nikophor
out of anger at her father, who had recently remarried
to a Countess von Lane. Yet Blovotsky herself tells a
different story. Prince Prince Golitzen, it seems, wasn't the only
one who took her mystical passion seriously. In the letter
to her friend Prince Alexander, I'm not going to try

(01:15:34):
to pronounce that last name mentioned earlier, she wrote, do
you know why I married an old Blovotsky? Because whereas
all the young men laughed at my magical superstitions, he
believed in them. She explained that her suitor had so
often talked to me about the sorcerers of Aravan or
the mysterious science of the Kurds and the Persians, that
I took him in order to use him as a
latch key to the latter. Right. So Number one, there's

(01:15:55):
a myth that like or some people will argue she
and Prince Golitzen had like a thing, which by the way,
would have been him molesting her because she would have
been like sixteen. But whatever that, her family marries her
off to another middle aged man in order to get
her away from this, this this prince. Um. She claims that, no,
I took advantage of this guy. I married him because

(01:16:18):
I wanted to get over to like these these Armenian
and these Kurdish and Persian mystics, and he was a
powerful man in that area, and I knew he would
like open the door to me getting into there. I
actually think she's probably telling the truth about that she
has this guy kind of wrapped around her finger for
most of the time that he's alive. Um. I don't
have trouble believing that she this was a calculated move

(01:16:38):
on her bath she he's good at that, Um. And
obviously you're a fucking seventeen year old Russian noble girl
in this period of time. You don't want to grow
up like your mom did married to some like miserable
ass fucking soldier. Dude. If you want to take some
autonomy in your life, you have to scheme a bit, right,
So maybe that's what she does. Um now, Madame Blovotsky,

(01:16:58):
as she becomes known later with aim for the rest
of her life. That quote I never was his wife,
by which she means that the marriage was never consummated.
They did not fuck. This is a topic of heavy
debate which I see no reason to wait to the
two biographers that I hey, I mean, of course the
biographers who are followers and fans of hers are going
to want to heavily speculate about who when she was

(01:17:22):
exhausting it is. We will talk about it more because
it is relevant because a big part of the religion
she makes is like a staticism, and a lot of
it involves sex denial, and there's credibility issues that like, well,
she was fucking the whole time, and obviously that does
matter if you're like right, because there was the celibacy thing. Right. Anyway,
this is a topic of debate. Gary Lackman just takes

(01:17:44):
it as like, takes her word for it. It's like, no,
she was celibate, she might even have been. Lackman kind
of described her as possibly even a sexual. Um. Meanwhile,
the other biographer I use for this Mary and Meade,
who is more both way more into woo. She describes
herself as like a PSI practitioner with side powers, but
also a much more critical biographer of Blovotsky. Um. We'll

(01:18:06):
note that she has at least two husbands at one point,
she has two husbands at the same time, I should
say she has numerous lovers. She may have had some kids. Um,
And that basically she she fucks. And one of the
fun things is that like later again, later in her life,
when she's a guru, sorry to skip ahead a little bit,

(01:18:26):
but she gets like a doctor's uh to examine her
her bits, and the doctors like, it doesn't look like
you've had a kid, And she takes that little bit
and she strong arms him into writing a note that
says quote, I hereby certify that Madame Blovotsky has never
been pregnant for with a child, and so consequently can
never have had a child, and then she she uses

(01:18:46):
this note to claim that also she's a virgin, even
though that's not really what the doctor says. But she
gets a doctor to write something and then like uses
that as part of it. Okay, that is kind of funny.
That is kind of funny. I do I made it,
Like any any like information about how doctors treated vaginas
at this time is just like so hysterically wrong, Like

(01:19:07):
this was at the same time where you would possible that,
Like she had that doctor looking at her foot and
he was like, this seems like a vagina to me.
I'm a man in the eighteen seventies, none of the
seventies you could be like, okay, like you can examine me,
but the lights have to be off, like and then
you're like, okay, ghosts are coming out of my vagina.
And if you don't believe me, um, you hate women.

(01:19:30):
It's the best, it's the best, good time to be
got to bring back or a vagina. So, for her part,
Blovotsky claimed quote, never physically speaking, has there ever existed
a girl or woman colder than I. I had a
volcano when conscient constitucent eruption in my brain and a
glacier at the foot of the mountain. Okay, that's kind

(01:19:50):
of sexual icon I've had. I've had ex boyfriends who
have said similar things about me. Yeah. So again the
to the two arguments here, either she was basically a
sexual or she was fucking constantly. Um. I don't know
the truth, but there's a lot of fun stories. So

(01:20:10):
she was about to hit the world like goddamn bomb, right,
She's she's basically an adult. She's she's wants to get
out there and travel to all the different mystical centers
of the world. But she has to do one thing first, Jamie,
and that's get away from her dorcass nerdi of a husband, Right,
you can't have that dude hanging around. Um. So she
claims that, like she warned her husband he was making

(01:20:32):
a big mistake before the wedding and begged him to talk.
She escaped before the wedding briefly and then got caught. Um,
and after they were married, she escaped. Fun indication of
things to come the sed of your own wedding. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Right before their honeymoon, she like bribes some Kurdish warriors

(01:20:53):
to smuggle her out and she gets caught. Um, I
think she might have made it to Iran. UM hate
that she was put in this position, but I love
her tactics to not she is, it's pretty fun. It's
pretty fun. She's like, she's like bribing these like nomadic
warriors to like help her escape and like getting caught
and it's this, it's this, she's she's like dealing with

(01:21:14):
massagy with a real dramatic flair. She is, it's pretty
pretty wild stuff. So she gets caught again. For a while,
she's under constant guard in her husband's palace, but Helena
keeps her focus and she eventually, yeah, she escapes to
Tiflis in Georgia, where she gets caught again and her
husband sends her back to her family so that they

(01:21:36):
can send her and her servants to St. Petersburg to
try to like keep a lock on her while they
figure out what to do about her. Um. So, like
she's basically going supposed to be traveling with her servants
to St. Petersburg to be like locked up somewhere until
they can break her spirit. But while she's on her
way back home, she bribes the captain of an English

(01:21:56):
boat to help her, and with the help of an
escape kayak. She kayaks to safety, evading her servants, and
like gets on this boat and gets taken to Constantinople.
I know in that dope, that's a pretty cool story.
This is cool, This is goddamn and it's like, I
know where this story is going, but I didn't know
these details and they're all cool, and that's dope as hell.

(01:22:19):
And that's what we're going to end for today. All
Blotsky has escaped on a kayak to Constantinople, which is
pretty cool. I mean, she kayaks a boat and that
takes you to Constantinople, but still pretty cool, really impressive.
All right, Jamie, have you ever had to kayak away
from a bad marriage? No, I've I've kayaked towards a

(01:22:40):
bad relationship. Yeah, baby, Um, have you ever had to
paddle away? I have had. I've had. I've had some
adventures while kayaking that involved a sunken kayak um. And
I've definitely had some some strenuous arguments while kayaking with

(01:23:00):
a part. Oh. No, I don't like kayaking. I'm gonna
be honest with you. I'm not a big fan. Sorry,
I got so upset about your kayaking. Anecdote that I left. Yeah,
you have. You have a tattoo of a kayak on
your bicep that says yeah, it says, do not tread
on me. Right before you came in this morning, you

(01:23:21):
were drilling holes in canoes. Um, because kayakers hate canoeists. Yeah,
I mean you don't feel like you're in a safe
womb like space in a canoe. I like to feel
like I'm being born when I get out of the
little boat. Okay, that's that's right. That's right. Like like
Jim Carrey in the second Aman Share a movie, It's like,

(01:23:42):
where is this going? Yes, exactly? Do you want to
plug your ship? Yeah? I guess that the best plug
for this is listen to Ghost Church. It's the limited
series I just finished that is Blovotsky Adjacent, which I
think will become clearer in the next episode. But it's
about American spiritualism and a bunch of time I spent

(01:24:03):
with some psychics and mediums in Central Florida. Roberts in it,
Paul left Compkins is in it. Sophie produced it and
edited it. It's just it's just a cool zone jamboree,
and uh, it's all. Every episode is out now. So
you can listen to all of it and if and
then follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Uh that if

(01:24:25):
you want listening to Ghost Church. It personally hurts my feelings. Yeah,
if you don't listen to Ghost Church, I will find
you and I will put your children on the Blue
Apron Iron Island where they'll be hunted by Elon Musk
for food. Yeah it's Elon Musk and all of his
his kids. Go. Somebody's listening with his kids, their kids

(01:24:46):
right now. And I want you to know, children, that
was a threat there. Your parents better listen to Ghost Church.
I feel Look, it's it's high, it's high octane ship.
I just got I do what I would. I I
still cut and check Apple podcast reviews sometimes, and I checked.
I checked them, and I had one that said, uh,

(01:25:10):
I liked the whole show, but I'm going to stop
listening now because Jamie wants the Supreme Court to be abolished.
But they still gave me four stars. I just lost
one star incredibly based. I think. Look, yeah, it's like
you know, that's pretty fair and balanced. Yeah, I have

(01:25:30):
to give credit where it's due. Look, they understand that
this isn't the content for them. But they're not going
to punish your show for it. They're like, look, I
enjoyed the whole show, but we have we have a
personal disagreement, and I have to dock you a star.
I'm like, all right, you know what, yeah, look, you
know what. Good for you, good for them, Good for them,