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October 9, 2020 12 mins

Holly and Tracy talk about Madame Blavatsky's shocking level of cigarette smoking and the surprising amount of Mother Shipton material Tracy was able to find.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Casual Friday.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. I told
Tracy during one of our breaks while recording are Madame

(00:21):
Blovotsky episode that there was a detail about her. I
was withholding for this because it's not that important to
her life story, but it's kind of gross and fascinated
me a little bit. I kind of braced. I was like,
what gross and exactly what sensor we're talking about. She
allegedly smoked a hundred cigarettes a day. That's a lot,

(00:45):
that's play five packs. Wow. Now, I will say this,
I may have grown up in a household with an
adult that smoked about that much. It was yucky. Even
when I was a smoker, which is a long time ago,
I still found that yucky. Yeah, because everything just gets
covered in smoke and it all yet like the whole

(01:06):
world has a yellow sheen on it. Yeah. Um, but
it just was fascinating to me. I was like, I
don't know how someone who does that travels as much
as she does, because you would think like her loan
capacity would be diminished. Well, and like when do you
have time to eat? Right? I mean I picture her

(01:28):
smoking while eating. And in fact, all Cott is said
to have met her before that seance started on that
farm in Vermont. They had had like a meal first,
like they served lunch first, and he waited for her
to go outside to smoke, to go approach her and
speak to her for the first time. And I'm like,
I'm surprised she made it out the door, like yeah, well,

(01:50):
I'm like, I mean, I know we're talking about like
modern manufactured cigarettes versus whatever, like something was probably needing
being rolled by hand. But like the people I have
known that characterize themselves as chain smokers were smoking more
like three packs a day, so five just seems like

(02:12):
so many. Yeah yeah, I mean that's like four cigarettes
an hour, presuming you didn't sleep, so obviously she did sleep,
so that means like probably more like six and ow
it is a lot. But I know she is so fascinating.
I feel like I could see there's a part of

(02:35):
me that completely understands how her world unfurled. Being that
sort of clearly. The part of her that I kind
of identified with was the descriptions of her when she's
younger where it's like, on the one hand, she's very
stubborn and a little bit braddy and really saucy and
talks back to everybody, but she also was like an

(02:56):
academic achiever and you know, book ish and nerdy. And
I was like, oh, yeah, I understand all of this. Yeah,
and then how someone like that would long for more
than what the world offers them in terms of interestingness
and starts to unfur all along list of things that
are probably untrue, some of which got backed up by

(03:19):
her family enough, like it became family lore enough that
I think she probably started believing it. And then after that,
like once you're once you believe your own life, the
rest gets real blurry, and you begin to make a
world of your own design, whether it's rooted in reality

(03:39):
or not. Fascinating. Yeah, anytime we have somebody, let me
talk about on the show whose focus we might find
in like a new age bookstore today, Like, I'm always
reminded of various people I have known in my life
who at the time, like when I was in my

(04:01):
twenties or or or you know, teens or whatever, I
was like, Wow, that person really has some kind of
key to another mystical doorway. Um. And then later I
was like, did they though right? Well? And it's interesting
you mentioned that because there are plenty of modern historians
and also just people who study um religion and philosophy

(04:25):
that will say, like, you can see how New Age
was seated, like these ideas, the more kind of watered
down New Age ideas that are kind of rooted in
Eastern religion or Eastern beliefs but have gotten really like
westernized in ways that don't really understand the actual basis

(04:47):
of those beliefs. Like a lot of people attribute that
to Blovotsky, like she brought these ideas over in a
way that was not really completely understanding them, not completely
respecting them. I mean, as I said, she was so
problematic about being like I need to go to this
place and learn about you know, a higher sense of

(05:10):
purpose and reality and the things that we cannot understand
in our world from these people who clearly have the key.
Oh they don't have the key. They're stupid and they've
been ruined in some way. I will move on to
the next thing. Like it's very um, it's very problematic,
and so you start to really realize that in some
ways she was rewriting things to suit what she wanted

(05:32):
them to be, not really taking them from the sources
in a way that respected them for what they were. Oh,
Madame Blavatsky in your fringe E long loose robes. Uh yeah, yeah,
she's an interesting one. We talked about Mother Shipton this week.

(05:56):
We did so. I mentioned in the episode that I
had sold you that I was going to do this
episode if I could find enough, and then I was
surprised by how much I wound up finding. In addition
to that, my process was basically to go through bookmark
a bunch of stuff, grab various papers, start going through it,

(06:19):
and take a bunch of notes. And I had taken
a bunch of notes that were based on, uh, that
second edition of the first book that included Mother Shipton's
whole biography, not really realizing that it was like a
second printing of something that had come earlier, and having

(06:39):
no concept at all that the earlier works than that
had no reference to her biography in any way. And
I realized relatively late in the game that all of
my notes were in entirely the wrong order, and I
was gonna have to like go through and move literally
every piece of it or round to somewhere else to

(07:01):
make it make any sense. Whoo, that's always fun. That's
always a fun moment when you go, oh, it's but
it worked out. Yeah, it was funny. Thank you. I
love that. It's just a it's a funny topic inherently. Yeah. Yeah.
One of the things that we did not mention that

(07:23):
I I I was trying to figure out whether to
mention a lot of the stereotypical tropes that were used
to signify whiches are also used in like anti Semitic caricature. Yes,
absolutely so. They're like there has been some discussion about

(07:43):
like what the order of that is and and whether
it's that these markers, these like physical markers on people's
faces that were considered to be unnatural and wrong in
some way, we're used to create like caricatures of witches
as well as caricatures of Jewish people. Um or whether

(08:09):
one of them followed the other. Um And as far
as I can fine, it seems like these same tropes
used on multiple different groups of people. Uh, not so
much that one of them fed into another, right, It's
more just like uh, a shorthand way to convey otherness

(08:32):
in a manner that is ugly and not to like
the standards you yourself would identify. Yeah, um, there there
was a phrase in this outline that I did not
comment on while we were talking because it would have
taken us way off course. But there's this line that
you wrote about the baby doing mischief, which is unseen

(08:55):
hands pelted the neighbors with rotten apples and garbage. And
I had this flash back. Okay, when I was a
kid and the David Letterman Show began one I didn't
have a bedtime like I just never did my parents.
Everyone in my family has sleeping issues, and so my
parents were never hardcore about it. Um. But even when

(09:17):
they did try to send me to bed, I would
just like stay up late and like sneak to the
back of the living room and watch David Letterman. But
one of the great things that they did, or I
thought it was great and it stuck with me forever,
is when Chris Elliott used to appear on David Letterman
in the early years as this sort of random character.
But one of the lines he would say all the
time which has always stuck with me, was they pelted

(09:37):
us with rocks and garbage, And so when I read this,
I was like, it's it's Chris Elliott. Chris Elliot wrote
this a lot, and that's all I could think of.
They pelted us with rocks and garbage. That whole that
whole lengthy biography that he made up, that just includes
so much that's just fantastic and strange and clearly not

(10:02):
a real thing. I don't know, it's it amused me
to read it. Well, we know that he loved poetry
and gaming, so it makes sense that he would want
to make some stuff up to maybe support the problems
created by the other one. Yeah. Yeah, it also was
it was more fun to me to read all of

(10:24):
these just they were. They were fun reading for me,
and a lot of them, in spite of the like
intense misogyny of one of them in particular, I had
a good time reading them, which was a nice breath
of fresh air, because when I got into the one
that was about um John Cleve Sims and the Hollow Earth,
I was looking forward to reading like all of the

(10:48):
weird documents of that, and I actually found specifically like
the book that had detailed all of his theories to
be fantastically boring. Um uh. And I also did not
realize getting into it that his son had lifted a
bunch of the same text. So when I was reading

(11:09):
his son's writing, I just I got into this part
that was the same as the boring thing I had
already read, and I was like, wait, am I making
this up that I really read it all of this before?
Or is it just so not captivating to me that
I have invented the idea that I read it already
double barreled boring. I don't know why it did not

(11:31):
strike me nearly as delightful and interesting as I hope
that it would, but it did not. This one, on
the other hand, did so. Thank you for your poetry
and gaming problem. Yes, mr head, you've made us giggle today.

(11:52):
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Holly Frey

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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