#245 | Rosicrucianism Unveiled with Ronnie Pontiac - Juan on Juan

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:41):
Welcome back to another episode of the Horn one Podcast.
I'm your host.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
As always, make sure to follow the show on social
media at the one on one podcast on pretty much
all social media platforms, www dot t j, o JP
dot com, Patreon dot com, slash, the one one Podcast
all that good stuff links down at the description. And
today we have a returning guest after almost two years, Ronnie.
It's been way too long, dude. We got to do

(01:06):
this more often and hopefully we will. Welcome back to
the show, Ronnie.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
How you doing.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
I'm good man, Thanks for having me back.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Absolutely, and can you give us a brief overview of
who you are? You're mostly well. I came across your
work because you worked with mainly p Hall for a
little while and you did you did lectures there and everything.
Can you for those that haven't heard of you before?
First of all, tell them where they can find your book,

(01:36):
your books, because you got several books and your wife
as well. American metaphysical religion and it's about this amalgamation
of this emerging uh new religion, I guess you could
call it something or other.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Where can they find that? And also tell us a
little bit about yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
That's a lot of questions that I don't like answering
for the most part. So the book American Metaphysical Religion.
It could be about a religion that's slowly forming in America,
but it's also about the oldest tradition in the West
and also influences from the East that migrated here and

(02:15):
became hybrids and have multiplied into all sorts of amazing
new modifications of what they originally were, while keeping for
the most part the original teachings intact. That book is
published by Inner Traditions. You can get it pretty much anywhere.
Any bookstore can order it, or it can be ordered
from Inner Traditions or any online book merchant. I like

(02:39):
people to support small bookstores if they can, so if
you're patient, you can ask them to order it for
if they don't have it, some of them have it.
There's also a book co authored with my wife, Tamra
Lucid that's called The Magic of the Orphic Hymns, and
that's about the history of the hymns, and it's a
new kind of loose translation, uptively simple. We did a

(03:01):
whole lot of research on it, intended for reading pleasure,
but also for practice for those who want to experience
going there, because the orphic Hams were described by Agrippa
as being none more powerful when it came to magic,
and Facino, one of the founders of the Renaissance, described
the orphic Hams as the most powerful magic. They are

(03:24):
pretty amazing to experiment with. And then there's Tamra's book,
which is Making the Ordinary Extraordinary about the seven years
that we spent with Manley Hall working with him when
I was his research assistant, And there's a lot of
humor in it, but also a lot of insight into

(03:47):
the quiet and wholesome but very inspiring life at that
time that Manley Hall was living near the end of
his life. And let's see, there's two more books coming out.
There's one coming out I think in fall, called The
Unobstructed Way, about the most amazing exploration of the after

(04:10):
death state that I've ever encountered in all my research
stored Edward White and his wife Betty and who lived
in amazing lives and in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties,
wrote these books that were worldwide best sellers that were
very different from any other spiritualist books. These had a
real depth to the philosophy of what they were trying

(04:32):
to get across. And it wasn't about like was there
in Atlantis or who was I in a past life?
This was about what am I really? What's the meaning
of life? You know? What does it mean to die?
What does it mean to live? And then there's another
book about the Rosicrucians called The Rosicrucian Counterculture that will
be published by Inner Traditions that is coming out around

(04:55):
Christmas of this year. So all those should be available
in all sorts of different places if anyone's interested. It's
for me aside from working with Manley Hall when I
was a kid, incredible circumstance, his generosity and I mean
changed my life, changed me from a criminal to a

(05:16):
civilized human being, and it kind of launched me out
into the world on a different path than I otherwise
would have followed. And since those days, I was in
a band. I'm still in a band, but I think
of it as was because we used to tour and we
had our own label. We don't really do much of
that anymore. It's not very practical since the whole thing

(05:36):
fell apart. Out there, there's like no all ages gloves
and our whole scene died out, and our band started
out as one of the original riot girl bands in
the mid nineties, and we morphed into kind of deconstructionist
exploration of rock and punk and just about every genre,
sometimes mixing them all into one song. And all of

(05:59):
it was done with a highly rebellious streak and a
lot of hilarious criticism from Tamra, who's the singer and
who's a credible lyricist. So we had a blast doing
that for quite a while and met all kinds of
amazing people. We've also done films. We've done documentary films

(06:20):
about Let's See the Gets, an incredible band who's singer,
miyaz Apota, was murdered in Seattle, and she was kind
of the reason the Seattle scene busted up because no
one knew who killed her, and everybody became suspicious of
everybody else. It's kind of a tragic story, but it's
beautiful because the band is incredible, she was an amazing woman,

(06:41):
and the band is still kind of this brotherhood wrapped
around her memory. So we did a doc about that
with Joan Jet and Kathleen Hannah in it, remembering Mia,
and then we did a doc with Edward James almost
about Obama's really cruel policy for people who were born

(07:06):
here in America but never got citizenship and who didn't
have relatives in Mexico who were just deported and wound
up living in the sewers of Zona Norte next to
the cartel zone, and it was just a horrific scene,
and this very brave filmmaker, Charles Shaw went down there
and documented everything. And then several other docs went about

(07:30):
Los Algianos, this incredible hip hop group that used to
just rule the underground in Cuba. And then we also
have been involved in for instance, Tamra was the associate
producer on an Emmy nominated documentary about Standing Rock about
the women who were the leaders, called End of the Line,

(07:53):
The Women of Standing Rock. And we're working on some
really interesting things right now too. We've done different sorts
of things in the world, but trying in everything that
we do to bring truth to people, to bring inspiration
to people, whether we're trying to make you laugh, or

(08:13):
we're scaring you with history that that people are trying
to cover up, or we're telling you about history like
we'll be talking about today, which we wish more people
knew about.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
Yeah, definitely, that's a lot of stuff there and music.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
And I was talking to somebody about the the murder
of Dineback Daryl a couple of days ago, which you know,
pretty crazy too. This schizophrenic guy just jumped on stage
and Dinebag was a crazy guitarist that the my first
ever guitar was a showdown.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
So oh yeah, yeah, well they were the they were
the man Pantera, I mean, and you know, unfortunately, it
reminds me of the Rolling Stones in a way because
it was like there was the singers fans, and there
was the guitar players fans, and unfortunately, you know, I mean,
Mick Jagger would never say somebody should go kill Keith,

(09:04):
you know, but but in Pantera that was okay until
this guy took it literally, and you know, I didn't
get it. So it's a tragic story.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
And that's the thing, right, people who take things literally
instead of intermining them interpreting them a different way, and
a lot of people when they say things. That's why
the whole conspiracy culture is kind of dangerous in a way,
because you feed into the delusions of certain people and
they do act on it, like I always tell people about,
you know, we're chatting about the homunculus. Well, there's an

(09:35):
actual person right now probably doing those texts the grim
War's word for word when it probably more than likely,
probably ninety eight percent, meant something completely different, and you're
not initiated, so you're not gonna know what it is.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
And so.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
The I wanted to get into Rosicrucianism because it's one
of those things that I've stumbled.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Across in my research.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
John d is involved in there in your book even
talk about da Vinci and a whole bunch of other
people who might have been involved in it. I've also
heard Descartes might have also been a rosa Crucian. He
was hanging out with Christina Sweden and a whole bunch
of other alchemists and their whole alchemical circle. But I've
never really been able to pinpoint the pulse of what

(10:22):
it is.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
And speaking of being uninitiated.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
A Max Heidel I actually read the book, wrote of
the Cosmoconception is that the one.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
Yeah, that book.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
It's a pretty short book, but that.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Book actually changed a lot of the way I see things.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
And one of the things that stood out to me
the most in that.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Particular book was the part where he's like, hey, to
the uninitiated, when they're reading these texts, they mean something
completely different to the initiate, who is able to see
within of, you know, the writings, he's able to see
the true meaning, the true essence of it. And that
always stuck with me because again, the world to stage

(11:07):
and and I think a lot of things happen sometimes
for a reason.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
People say, no, right.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
That's that's how you get We always have the end product,
and the conspiracy is how do we get there?

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Right?

Speaker 3 (11:21):
Yeah. And also conspiracies overlap with apophenia unfortunately a lot,
because they're both ways of coping with extreme stress. When
human beings are dealing with the kind of stress that's
threatening to the very stability of our lives or our
continuing existence, or we feel that way, we will reach

(11:43):
out to try to explain. You know, the brain just
runs away and tries to find facts and dig deeper.
And if you can just figure out what's going on,
you're going to feel better, even if you can't change anything,
and not that that really that's not the most effective
way to try to protect oneself or to create chan
change and an apophenia is a psychological term for a

(12:06):
state of the psyche where you become so stressed out
that you start seeing messages everywhere. Often it's religious, of course,
and you can be anything. You can be Christian, you
can be a ceremonial magician, or you can be qan On.
But you start to see these messages and everything gestures
that somebody makes, or a billboard you drive by, and

(12:28):
they're either directed straight at you or there signs that
your ideas about what's really going on are true. And
this is such a slippery slope because anybody who has
gone down the mystical path has had experiences the synchronicity
as a meaning where you have I mean, it's not
even the mystical path. I mean when we were in

(12:50):
Riot Girl and I used to always watch this and
experience it myself, and the Riot girls would get together.
I was one of the few males that was in
this scene. They would make zines and posters and all
kinds of stuff that was going to be at the
next show or was going to be sent out in
the mail. And when they would make zines, it was

(13:11):
amazing how somebody would be make a zine on some
obscure topic and like all the things they needed would
just fall into their hands. They'd open up a magazine.
We used to laugh about it. We'd say, you could,
you couldn't do anything without it relating to your zine.
You know. So those mystical experiences, that's not apophenia. That's
something very real and happening, you know, meaningful coincidences, let's

(13:35):
call them. But it's also easy to slip into that
extra level of it where fear and anger take us
and then all of a sudden, you know, everything has
double and triple meanings, and it hollows out the meaning
of words. And I think that Rosicrucian is one of

(13:55):
those words that has been used in so many different
ways that it almost doesn't have meaning when, like you
were saying, to try to pinpoint it and to say
this is what a Rosicrucian is, which I'm going to
attempt to do right here, by the way, but that's
really difficult to do because there's so many different kinds

(14:16):
of Rosicrucians out there. And let me give you some
examples of this, because it's mind blowing to me how
this thing stretched out into so many different places. So
on the one hand, you've got Rosicrucians as they are
seen by the Roman Catholic Church, okay, who called them
the Devil's Jesuits. This was the devil bringing together crazy

(14:42):
heretics in the name of science, which was really a
trick of the devil, and they were trying to do
this to break the power of the Pope, which they
admitted to readily. And so they were simply evil, and
there were many people who were terrified of the Rosa Crucian.
To give you a little background about them, I want

(15:04):
to give context to everybody so they get a sense
of where this came from.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
And what year are we in, Ronnie when this is happening.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
The actual well, even that can't be pinned down very well.
But we're looking at the early sixteen hundreds. But let
me go back even further and you all can see
the timeline that we're talking about here, because one of
the most important moments I think is the life of
Ficino mentioned earlier. Basically because this man in Florence, through

(15:35):
Cosmo de Medici's interest in Plato and in the Hermetic writings,
was given the ability a place to live and to
support and all these priceless manuscripts to spend years and
years translating materials that had been unavailable to Europe for
hundreds of years, and this revolutionized Europe slowly. This is

(15:57):
really the source of the Renaissance, because people da Vinci
and Michelangelo and Pico dela Morendola, and they were all
there while Ficino was strumming the hymns of Orpheus on
his Lira de Braccio and being inspired by these pagan
ideas and this pagan philosophy that was so deep. They

(16:20):
didn't see any difference between that and Christianity. They felt
that they were all reaching out to the same God,
and that all the different Greek gods were really just
facets of God. And so he dies in fourteen ninety nine.
Agrippa is operating by that time, and of course he

(16:42):
is the most plagiarized writer on Western esotericism and the
history of magic. Ever, he's an odd writer because, as
alifus Levi pointed out, he didn't really have a full
mastery of the material, and he is writing at a
time when he needs to kind of fake that he's

(17:03):
not into it. So his most important book about magic
he's spending a lot of time saying this stuff is
all fake. You know it's bad. You shouldn't waste your
time on it. I regret the time I wasted. But here,
let me tell you every single detail about it and
how to do it. So I mean, obviously he's sharing
it with you, but he's trying to do it in
a way so he can deny that he's really The

(17:24):
Church didn't buy that.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
By the way, obviously I forgot what he said to
Oh goodness, he said something to somebody. They were going
back and forth, and he said something about the bird
to keep the birds away or something or other. Trithemius
I think it was, or Trimetheus. I always get him
mixed up. They were going back and forth and they
were talking about keeping the donkey at bay or something

(17:45):
I talked about on an episode a while back. So
that's interesting because I covered recently the pseudo Monarchia by
John Veayer, who was a living student of Agrippa, and
that is what inspired the Goetia essentially, and it was
supposed to be a troll like it was supposed to

(18:09):
be a fake. But but this is ryan because this
is one of the questions I want to ask you, so,
magic and the occult right is a conspiracy in and
of itself. Are there higher powers, you know, that are
running the universe, that are running reality. Can you control
set powers?

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Right?

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Can you manipulate set energy and powers? I mean that's
a conspiracy. Like we're still trying to figure out if
it works or not. And here we have a Grippa
presenting it as a as a joke, as a larp.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
Yeah, it repeatedly is presented that way by some of
the best minds. But I think that the hymns of Orpheus,
which Facino was so dedicated to, are a great way
to understand this question. In the Hymns of Orpheus, and
he said, this is the most powerful magic. Agrippa agreed.

(18:58):
When you're using the hymns of orph you are not saying, hey, Zeus,
I want a new car aphrodit, he send me a
hot girlfriend. You are attuning to the gods, to these
different facets of creation, these these master spirits, whatever you
want to call them, and you were trying to bring

(19:21):
yourself up to the perspective that they have so that
you can see the wisdom and the mercy and the
harmony that is usually invisible for us in the world,
and when you do that, magical things can happen. So,
for example, for Ficino, he knew he wanted to translate

(19:41):
Plato and spend his life bringing back the pagan wisdom,
but he was poor and he had no way to
do it, and in desperation, he did the hymn to
the Cosmos just to ask the universe to help him
to achieve this goal. While he was doing the hymn,

(20:02):
the letter from Cosmo de Medici arrived, telling him, I've
just given you a house to live in and support
because I want you to spend the rest of your
life translating this stuff. Well, you know this blue Facino's mind,
and he had many experiences like this, so you could
describe it this way. When you do the hymns of
Orpheus and you become attuned and magic happens, it's because

(20:24):
your will is now attuned to the will of the gods.
The gods wanted Ficino to spend his life translating everything,
and so they facilitated it. But the hymns will not work,
as far as I know, if used for purely selfish purposes,
especially if they're meant in some way that could be

(20:46):
harmful to somebody else. So I have asked people who
use our book ritually to get back to me if
anything interesting happens. And I myself had interesting experiences when
Tamer and I first did them. When we first did them,
we were doing them as this kind of symbolic ritual
goodbye to Manley Hall and PRS. When he asked us

(21:06):
to leave, and we felt that this was just sort of,
you know, we couldn't really go back and tell our
friends at PRS. Manley Hall just asked us to leave
because he says that you're all going to die soon
and we shouldn't be here when that happens, you know,
So we kind of disappeared. So we did this ritual
in order to like kind of just say goodbye we

(21:28):
love you in some symbolic way. And the Hymns of
Orpheus was one of the last things that I worked
on with Manley Hall. When we did them, weird things happened,
like when we did the hymn to Athena in the
mid afternoon, i mean broad daylight in the Hollywood Flats,
a great horned owl showed up and sat on the

(21:49):
nearest telephone pole sat there watching us while we performed
the Hymn to Athena, and right when we finished, jumped
down off the pole, swooped right at us and then
up in over the ceiling.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Isn't she to Atheno?

Speaker 3 (22:03):
Yeah, that's her sacred animal. And we had several experiences
like that, I mean quite a few that were subtle
in a sense but also strange. Even for instance, we
had when we did Zeus the Thunderer, there was a
cloudless sky, but there was some kind of thunder that occurred,
you know, didn't sound like it was machinery. We weren't

(22:25):
after any of that. It just kind of spontaneously happened
as we did these things quietly singing them at the
window of this apartment in Hollywood. It was weird. And
people who have used them since have told us things like,
you know, one person who has always had a terrible
time with travel, just somebody's luck always seemed to go

(22:45):
toward delays and detours and started to do the Hymn
to Hermes before they begin any journey and haven't had
any problems since. So there were these these kind of
that's a personal use, but it's it's it's not a
use for selfish reasons like desire or competition or these

(23:07):
more human kind of drives. This is just somebody who
wanted to be able to do what they needed to
do in a more peaceful and less chaotic way. So
now these traditions go back to different forms of paganism.
When you're doing magic like sex magic to get something right,

(23:27):
you're going back to a tradition that it really resembles,
you know, what came to be called witchcraft or aspects
of shamanism, where you're trying to get the spirits or
the gods to do something for you. And there are
the beliefs, you know, drawing down the moon that the witches,

(23:48):
for instance of ancient Etrusca, the Etruscan witches used to
be able to, you know, literally draw down the moon.
You know, maybe they had a good sense of astronomy
then you when the moon was going to be huge
in the sky or something. But they were known for
this gift and for being able to affect nature. Shamans

(24:09):
of indigenous America were known to be able to produce
ice in warm water on hot days. All these small
forms of magic, some of which got people burned for
allegedly hurting crops or hurting animals in farms and such

(24:30):
through their magic. That's I think a very maybe even
dating back to Neolithic times, right like the hunter magic.
And this is a very primal form of magic that
you have whole books of root magic, for example from

(24:51):
the South in America, and how people would collect things
like fingernails and bones of certain animals and they would
mix them with certain earth herbs. And as you were
saying earlier, it's hard to know what they're talking about.
They may call something, you know, the thumb of a corpse,
and that's actually a plant that was a name for
an herb back in the day. And so the other

(25:13):
form of magic that's being harkened back to is theorgy,
which is the art of the gods. And this is
something that was really developed strongly by the Neoplatanists, but
I believe goes all the way back to Egypt, ancient Egypt.
And it's.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
Pardon I Amblicus and the Neoplaanists and Plainus and all
these guys.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
You know, yeah, so you know that you know, there
was this idea of being able to put life, put
a god into the statues. The Egyptians were practicing this,
and the Neoplatanists also picked up on this, and Neoplatonists claimed,
I think they were right that the Egyptians were also
doing this as people. If they were trying to tune
themselves to be proper servants for the gods and so doing,

(25:58):
they were lifting themselves and finding their true sells, because
according to them, we're all children of the gods. So
we're actually divine beings who have completely forgotten what we are,
and we're tumbling through creations and tumbling through life after life,
and eventually we remember what we are through all those experiences.

(26:20):
So these are both forms of magic and my experiences,
I mean, I've interviewed a lot of people, I mean,
like Tamer and I did a lot of research on
the goddess segment, because we were blown away by this
emergence of this ancient Egyptian lioness headed goddess who was
like the ultimate war goddess in a sense, but she

(26:44):
was like coming to life. I mean, she'd been completely
invisible for hundreds and hundreds of years and suddenly she's
everywhere and people are having experiences with these so called
living statues I've talked to many people who have spontaneous healings.
People walk in front of one of these statues, they've
never seen segment, they don't know her name, they're in
a museum, and they fall to their knees and start

(27:06):
weeping and just these strong reactions. And so something's going on.
And it's it's common amongst people who practice especially chaos magic,
but forms of magic, to believe that this is only
in our own minds, that our own minds have this power.

(27:27):
Or youngians will tell you that this has to do
with the unconscious and that this is the contents of
the collective psyche of humanity, and that it can create
these these archetypes that we can have experiences of that
are like hallucinations. A lot of very complicated descriptions of
what it might be, and I certainly wouldn't pretend to

(27:47):
know what it is. The difference maybe between myself and
most people is that I like to know all the
potential explanations while committing myself to none of them. But
from my own own experience and experimentations and from my research,
there's definitely something powerful going on here and that I

(28:10):
think is at the core of a lot of what
the tradition is. Now you put that tradition into a
situation where it is struggling against the most extreme censorship
and persecution, things get pretty twisted. And you've got, you know,
the winners writing history. People are writing about things that

(28:35):
they believe in deeply, as if they don't believe in
them because they can't say that they believe in them
or they'll be killed and so on. So I think
that that really muddies the waters when we look at
all this stuff. So having said that, now let's go back.
So we've talked about the Tino. We mentioned Agrippa and
then Paracelsus who comes right after Agrippa, and both Agrippa

(28:57):
and Paracelsus are deeply influenced by the Grippa is three
books right well, Ficino had three books on the meaning
of the Book of Life. And Paracelsus was deeply influenced
by Ficino's ideas about medicine. When Paracelsus was in Italy,
and they took this stuff back into Germany and the

(29:19):
ideas of the Neoplatonists and are already Agrippa is already
constructing this story that we'll see over and over again
that we now call Western esotericism. He's already saying ancient Egypt,
and then the Greeks, and then the troubadours and alchemists,
and then you know, just on up the history ladder,

(29:42):
showing us how this has always existed, this tradition that
has very similar ideas, even from very different places. All
these people Ficino a grip of Paracelsus, very influential but
kind of working in the world of Luther. Agrippa and

(30:02):
Paracelsus are. Agrippa is a Catholic. Agrippa when he's asked
what is the secret of magic? And this is what
really kind of lets the air out. I think of
the Fourth Book really being him. The fourth Book, which
has a lot of black magic and kind of more
magic for more human ends. Agrippa tells us that the

(30:25):
secret to magic is Christ. That's why the magician is
safe when he's dealing with these issues. That's why Agrippa
feels that he's a good Catholic. Agrippa is simply saying,
on a level, you know, the wisdom of the Neoplatonists
is nowhere near, you know, dismissable. It's every bit as

(30:47):
good as Christian wisdom, it's the same God. And as
long as I realize that that, you know, Christ is
my savior, I'm okay. That was not how the Church
felt about it. They actually they tortured him a lot
of his life. They imprisoned him, and they banned the book.
But that book became a huge influence going down the

(31:11):
line for generations. Paracelsus huge influence on medicine would become
a huge influence on Rosicrucians, and it was a huge
influence to this day on pharmacology. I mean, he had
many inventions that are amazing, even named zinc for example.
And now let's go to John d because now we're

(31:34):
really getting close. So in the fifteen fifties onward up
into the early sixteen hundreds, the sixteen oughts, you've got
a lot of stuff going on in the heavens. You've
got comics and a supernova and just lots of excitement,
and the telescope is just beginning to become something that

(31:55):
people can use. The very primitive telescopes are in use,
and people are seeing these things and they're being interpreted.
The Catholics believe that these comics mean that the Protestants
will all be converted soon and be defeated. The Protestants
think that they mean that the Roman Church will be
destroyed and they would be the last pope. So they're

(32:18):
all kind of feeling war without saying so. But everybody's
real excited about this. You know, something big is about
to happen. John d is in the middle of all this.
This is Queen Elizabeth's you know, court wizard, her astrologer,
a spy for her, a diplomat, really one of the

(32:39):
premier occultists of that era. He's born in fifteen twenty seven,
so about thirty years after Facino dies, right after Agrippa dies,
and then he lives till about sixteen oh eight, sixteen
oh nine, somewhere in there. And John Dee is at
one point going around Europe trying to say, look, the

(33:02):
hermetic teachings, that's the real stuff. You know, astrology works,
alchemy works. We need to have a church and a
government that understand that and that allow us to explore
science further. We need a universal reformation. Everything needs to

(33:28):
work better. Now. What is very interesting about this, given
the timing right now, is that with Ai and everything,
is that at that time, there was something similar to
AI in a way, which is that the ultimate surveillance
state that's ever existed as far as I know, was

(33:50):
the Catholic Church, and is the Catholic Church, but the
Catholic Church when it ran all of Europe, because in
the confessional there could find out anything from anyone, and
all of that was ultimately reported back to the pope
if it was important enough to be and you had
to do this or you were going to hell. It

(34:13):
was a very powerful motivation for people to avoid going
to hell. And this was a stranglehold on European culture.
I mean, the Church could do whatever it wanted, enriched itself,
took all the art that it could grab, and I
mean just you know, controlled everything. And even though there
were monks who were copying over Aristotle and ancient wisdom,

(34:34):
people couldn't read. You weren't even allowed to read the Bible.
If you could read, unless you were a priest, you
weren't supposed to. I mean people were really kind of
made to be the peasants that people always kind of
hold in in disregard because those who were in power
didn't want them to be thinking or reading the Bible

(34:57):
or getting ideas they shouldn't have. And these people Ficcino, Agrippa, Paracelsus,
John de Giordano, Bruno, they are teaching that the wisdom
is within you, that you don't need the pope, you
don't need priests, that is your heritage to realize who
and what you are, which is an eternal being filled

(35:21):
with infinite creativity and wisdom. They're very inspiring ideas and
it's no wonder that these people wrote a bunch of
books and changed Europe in many ways. Bruno one of
the single moments of the I mean, he's a genius.
You know, this guy is in Europe saying we should
have we should be uniting everybody in these big colleges.

(35:41):
We're all working and science is great. And by the way,
the sun doesn't go around us, We go around the sun.
And he gets burned at the stake for it, but
his books remain a powerful influence, being secretly passed around
amongst those with esoteric interests, university professors and others. And

(36:04):
having a grip of book, by the way, at one
time it could be a death sentence. There were people
killed for having a grip of book or for selling
in a grip of book to somebody. One guy was
drowned in the river. So now this all comes to
a head around a character by the name of Rudolph

(36:24):
the Second, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was born in
fifteen fifty two. He dies in sixteen twelve. He's right
there for all this. He's a fascinating character. I write
about him at length in the Rosicrucian Book, because he
is the Hermetic king in a way. This is somebody
who loved alchemy, loved the Hermetica, loved the occult. He

(36:48):
kept alchemists. He had a huge hall of alchemists where
they all had their own labs, and he would every
morning go see what the alchemists were up to, and
he had his own alchemical lab. He was friends with
Rabbi Low and Prague, so he studied kabbala with him.
He was somebody who loved art, so he also had

(37:11):
a hall of painters, and he would every morning go
visit the painters and give them suggestions about their paintings.
One of the interesting things about him was that he
was He had a very rivled sense of humor, Like
he had a back door that you would go into
his quarters through and that's where the ladies would be
shown in. And he had a door knocker that was

(37:35):
it was this gold woman, naked woman with her mouth open,
and the knocker was a penis that you would knock
the door with through her mouth. Right, So he strikes
us as kind of modern, right, I mean, he's that's
who we'd want to be in a way if we
were around back then doing all those things. And he's
even more like us because he moves away from Vienna,

(37:59):
not just because it's being threatened by the Turks, but
because he wants to get away from his mom, and
he wants to get away from the pope and the
Pope's agents, and he can't stand the Catholic Church. Part
of this is because when he was a kid, his
dad was an awesome holy Roman emperor actually, somebody who
really fought for peace, was great in culture, such a

(38:22):
charming person that when at times when they were at
the verge of war, he could meet with the enemy
and convince them that he was right because he just
had this wonderful kind of presence. He was also a
huge drinker, drank himself to death at a young age.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
And have you ever been to Prague running.

Speaker 3 (38:43):
No, I haven't. I would love to, though, I yeah,
it would be so Rudolph moves well. First of all,
when Rudolph's a kid, his father has him sent to
live with his uncle, the King of Spain. And this
is the King of Spain whose dad established the Spanish

(39:05):
Inquisition and who himself expanded the Inquisition. This guy was creepy.
He was one of those Catholics that had, like, you know,
finger bones of saints, and he would make his children
and he would make Rudolph kiss these old bones and stuff,
and he would make the kids sit in on the

(39:27):
inquisition and on executions ordered by the Inquisition, so they
would become tough and they would know how the stuff works.
And it was brutal, you know, to live there. And
then some terrible things happened that I talk about, but
we don't have time to go into here. And so
when he comes back to Vienna, he's all in black,

(39:49):
he likes to speak Spanish, he's kind of acts like
a Spaniard. He's kind of arrogant, and the Austrians are like, well,
we don't like this guy. What happened? And his mother's
trying to get him married and he doesn't really want
to marry. He wants to have a lot of different girls,
and so he moves to Prague, just picks up and
takes the capital of the whole empire to Prague, so

(40:10):
he's further away and he has more control, and he
turns Prague into a city that has freedom of religion.
The Jews are free to have whatever they want to practice,
the alchemists are free to do what they're doing. Everybody's
free to do what they're doing. There's dialogue going on.
It becomes this amazing hotbed of creativity. Really an interesting time,

(40:33):
and the result is that some of the people who
will become known as Rosicrucians get really excited about him.
And John d is very excited about him, and John
Dee visits him and he says that the angels that
he and Edward Kelly have been talking to through their
Enochian method, that they are telling him to tell this

(40:58):
holy Roman Emperor that he is possessed and that if
he must accept his fate to be the Hermetic Emperor
and to unite all Europe with a new religion based
on the truth, which is the Hermetic teachings and alchemy
and astrology and science, and that if he doesn't do this,
he'll have some terrible fate. Well, of course, as far

(41:21):
as I mean, Rudolph doesn't like either the Catholics or
the Protestants when they come up with ideas like that.
I mean, he wants to be left alone so he
can walk around. He had a pet lion, by the way,
you like, walk around his castle with his lion and
talk to the alchemists painter too.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
There's records of him paying people off because the line
would attack people.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
Yes, exactly so, so he never sees John d again
after that. And meanwhile, the Rosicrucians are these so called Rosicrucians,
he's mostly teachers, students, noble people who have the time
and money to be concerned with these things and to
read Girdano Bruno and to have these rare books. And

(42:04):
they're thinking, there's still gotta be a way to do this.
There's got a way to convince this man to stand
up and unite Europe against the Turks and to give
us all the freedom to open up the world and
have this universal reformation that we all want. And so
now the story really gets going because around sixteen fourteen

(42:25):
there's a publication of a book called The Fame of
the Brotherhood RC Fama, and then one year later the Confessio,
the Confession of the Brotherhood of RC, and then one
year after that the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. These
are the three so called Rosicrucian manifestos, and they create

(42:48):
a revolution. And what were these books? In most of
the story of esotericism, you'll find them referred to as
kind of holy books, sacred texts alchemical philosophy, and that
maybe the people who wrote them were masters, invisible masters,

(43:12):
ascended masters, a secret brotherhood of people who could live
for one hundred two hundred years and who had the
secrets of alchemy, and that's how they extended their lives.
And they were all working for the benefit of humanity.
And see where a lot of these kind of Blovatskian
manly hall ideas about secret brotherhoods working for our benefit

(43:33):
came from in part this period. But we've had in
the last twenty years or so amazing amounts of new
research on this, as academia has finally opened up to
studying this. And it's been a blast for me to
talk to academics who are doing this, and to get
hold of these books and articles and these new materials

(43:54):
and see what really amounts to a whole new vision
of what was going on there and what it looks like.
Is basically, it's not all that different from you know,
Kerouac and Ginsburg, or from any time that a small
group of young, inspired, talented students with radical professors were

(44:18):
moved to make these bold public statements that horrified the
status quo. And so in the case of the Fama,
the Confessio and the Chemical Wedding, these books when you
look at them and we don't know who wrote them, Okay,
it could have been one author. They don't seem to
be one author, could have been multiple authors, Different academics

(44:40):
and different traditions have different groups of people or individuals
that they say wrote them. We know that someone like
Johann Valentin Andrea was probably in the center of it
in some way. He's the only person who ever admitted
to it. He said that he wrote The Chemical Wedding
when he was eighteen years old in sixteen oh five.

(45:02):
So we get a glimpse here that eleven years before
its publication, this thing was written and was circulating in
manuscript form, and some of this Rosicrucian material was certainly
circulating amongst free Masonic circles and others interested in esotericism
in those early sixteen oughts before these books came out,

(45:24):
and when they were just doing that, they were inspirational.
But when they became public published books, which was never
the intent of the authors, it created a massive reaction.
Part of it was the timing, because there was a
new technology and printing presses that made books available to
more people, and hundreds of pamphlets and books were written

(45:49):
in reaction to these three manifestos. Many of them were saying, yes,
they're right, we got to get rid of the church.
Science is great, we need a universal repfs. I want
to be a Rosicrucian. Please, Rosicrusians, come find me. I'll
be you know I have plenty to offer you. And
then there were people who wrote books saying these are
the devils Jesuits, this is all an evil plan of

(46:12):
the Church. Look, their initials are RC Roman Catholic. Isn't
it obvious? And more panic happened than good responses. So,
for example, in Paris, at one point some smart ass
put up posters saying the rosicrusions have come to town. We're
looking for new members. Don't contact us. We'll know that

(46:35):
you're right if you are well. This was taken as
my god Satan is running loose in the streets of Paris.
These are obviously some kind of you know, Satanists and
black wizards practicing magic, and they're invisible and they can
appear wherever they want, you know, And it really caused
a panic. I mean, wow, right, but that's apple Fenia
in a way too. That's people were looking for apocalyptic

(46:58):
things and they react suddenly these ideas. Not to mention
the fact that they were saying in these manifestos, let's
kill the pope, you know, we really need to, and
they didn't say it in a nice way. They were
like one of them said, you know, let's use nails
and scratch or stab him to death. Right, and probably
a metaphor for the nails that were used on Christ.

(47:21):
I mean, it's you know, but maybe it's even an
alchemical formula that's being referred to metaphorically. But it read
like we're going to take over the Vatican and drag
the pope out and hammer him up. And so they
were talking about how important sciences and how we have
to open up the world to education. They talked about

(47:42):
the Invisible College, and they were a huge inspiration to Comenius,
who we call the father of modern education, a guy
way ahead of his time. He saw this whole debacle happen.
But he stayed influenced by a lot of these ideas,
and he had the idea, for example, that we should
have a College of Light where all the geniuses from

(48:06):
all around the world should be brought together so they
can work together for the benefit of humanity. Another one
of his ideas was that every single human being should
be taught to read and write, women, Aborigines, indigenous people, everybody.
I mean talk about a radical idea and as opposite
as the Catholic Church that you could get. The Church

(48:27):
is saying, no, you shouldn't even read the Bible because
you're a moron and you won't understand it. You know,
you need a priest to explain these things to you
or you're going to wind up doing dangerous things. And
he also had the idea that there should be the
creation of a language that everyone could speak, so you
could keep your own language, but there would be a
universal language that everyone would be taught so that we

(48:49):
would no longer have this terrible barrier of different languages
that causes so many misunderstandings. And these were Rosicrucian ideas
that Comenius was expressing. So now we're at a fever pitch, right,
you know, people are like, there's a Resicrucian brotherhood. There's
a lot of us. I think the impact was not
unlike when Ginsburg's Howl came out, which many people alive

(49:16):
then who got that book, They felt, oh my god,
I'm not alone, you know, like like this is how
I see the world. You know, the city is Molloch,
the government is corrupt, and Howell combined, you know, for
everybody that suddenly they realized there's a lot of us.
It's not just me by myself out here being a freak,

(49:38):
and freak became a good word eventually. And so the
the influence of these manifestos becomes political. The Catholic Church
decides it has had enough of Rudolph. Rudolph is not
doing what he's supposed to be doing. He's not handing
the handling the Turkish situation. Well, he's an obvious fornicator.

(50:00):
He's not getting married. He's it's just wrong. And his brother,
who's a devout Catholic, his younger brother is ready to
step in and does. The Pope removes Frederick, sorry, removes
Rudolph and puts in his brother. And his brother immediately
goes to Prague with an army and says, no more

(50:21):
freedom of religion. Now you all have to become Catholics,
or else you live as lesser beings. Prague put up
with it for a bit, and then they decided that
they were going to have none of this, and they
famously took the officials of this new Holy Roman Emperor
and threw them out the upstairs window of a government

(50:44):
office onto garbage heaps, and said, get out of here.
He'll get worse. Well, of course this was this meant war,
but everybody was waiting to see what are we going
to do next? And the Bohemians and Prague decided, let's
invite a new king of Bohemia. And they picked Frederick

(51:05):
the fifth of the Palatinate, who was from a very
ancient noble family that went all the way back to
a Roman general that I think worked for Augustus, and
the Palatinate was very wealthy. He was an elector of
a high level, so he was one of the people
that helped to elect the Holy Roman Emperor and he

(51:26):
might have a chance of being the Holy Roman Emperor.
He was a very young guy, but really deeply into
the esoteric, so people were excited. You know that he loved,
for instance, building moving statues that would make sounds, and
stuff based on Vitruvius for his wife to enjoy in
a garden, and of course the Catholic stuff. This was

(51:46):
black magic, not science, and Frederic unfortunately took the throne
when he was offered it. He felt that this was
a calling that God was giving him, that he had
to go defend the people of Prague from the Catholic
Church's tyranny. So he doesn't realize that the Prague is

(52:07):
filled with Catholic spies. He gets in there, he's trying
to be a good king, but immediately the Catholics move
against him with an army and he's barely there for
a winter. They wound up calling him the Winter King.
Part of the reason that he took the gig was
that he was married to Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of
King James of England, and people thought well, Frederick in England,

(52:31):
they call it the Rhine and the Thames, and it's
you know, they're going to unite together and defeat the Catholics.
But James had no intention of doing that, and the
German princes had no intention of doing that. But it
seemed like a good idea on paper to these radicals
who had these ideas about universal reformation. A battle happens,

(52:51):
called the Battle of White Mountain. Of course, it's a
terrible defeat for Frederick because they know exactly what he's
going to do. The spies have turned over all plans.
His army is just decimated. He has to flee with
with whatever you can carry. And that's the end of
the King of Bohemia and the beginning of a long
period of suffering in Prague. That's right, and so now

(53:20):
what do these Rosicrucians do well. Andre is an interesting
character because even before Frederick becomes the Winter King, Andre
is seeing, he sees the writing on the wall. He's
looking at the hysteria around the Rosicrucian manifestos and he's saying, no, no, no,

(53:40):
no no, this is not what we were going, this
is not what we wanted to do. And he starts
disassociating himself, even admits I wrote the Chemical Wedding. He
calls it a ludibrium, a Latin word for a joke,
a satire, a lampoon, and he says, you know this
this stuff, you know that was just kid stuff. And

(54:01):
he writes a book called a Description of the Republic
of Christianopolis, which is something like the Republic of Plato,
but it's a Christian version. And he's taking the same
ideas basically that we're in Rosicrucianism, but now he's making
the mainstream Lutheran Christian kind of you know, let's do

(54:23):
it this way. So it's interesting that he saw what
Frederick did not see. So he's already backed out before
the disaster happens. But there are many other Rosicrucian fans
or possible actual Rosicrucians, And now there's all these books
being written about Rosicrucianism. But a good example of this

(54:44):
would be Michael Meyer, a German writer who wrote a
book called The Laws of the Rosie Cross, the Fraternity
of the Rosy Cross. And you would think, well, he
must be a Rosicrucian, right, But we actually have as
signed val from him that was found saying I am
not a Rosicrucian and so, but then again, this is

(55:05):
the beauty of Rosicrucianism one. This is why it's so confusing.
But wouldn't a Rosicrucian say that, right, You would say
I'm not a Rosicrucian because that's his job is to
be invisible. So it becomes this kind of playground for speculation.
Now the story starts to take off again because six

(55:27):
years later, after this huge defeat and now the Thirty
Years War is raging, the Rosicrucians have realized we're not
going to turn Europe into a hermetic paradise, right. The
Catholic Church is going to fight this to the bitter end,
and we don't have a very good prospect of ever

(55:47):
having a Protestant Holy Roman emperor. Six years after the
Battle of White Mountain, Francis Bacon publishes the New Atlantis.
Some people think that this was influenced by Christianopolis, the
Republic of Christianopolis, and that this is the kind of
a metaphorical plan for America to colonize America and make

(56:11):
it this new republic that's away from the Catholic Church,
and now we're going to actually be able to have
the kinds of freedom that we want and the kind
of freedom of religion that existed in Prague. Okay, so
let's go back now for a minute. We're going to

(56:32):
tie this all into America. So the Rosicrucians wind up
some of these people that are associated or written Rosicrucian
e books wind up associated with Sir Walter Raleigh in England. Now,
Raleigh has been trying to colonize America since fifteen eighty five.

(56:53):
He's really early there. I mean, that's the year that
Andrea is born. This is pre Rosicrucian, although modern Rosicrucian
societies will argue that there already were Rosicrucians, that the
Rosicrucians were a secret society went back into the fourteen
hundreds or even to the twelve hundreds. But Raleigh was
a friend of John Dee. And if there's any doubt

(57:17):
about Raleigh's esoteric interests, he wrote a book called The
History of the World, which was this very cheeky bestseller
that was eventually banned by King James. And in it
he defends magic. He explains that the magicians were sages,

(57:38):
and that every culture has had them. He says, the
Magi of Persia, the Kaldians of Babylon, the Greek philosophers
and the founders of the Greek mystery schools, the Jewish Cabalyists.
Every culture has had these sages who understood nature and
had wisdom that helped them to heal the sick and
even to guide nations. Well, James is I mean, there's

(58:02):
the king James Bible right, he wrote the Demonologia. I
mean he is very hostile and actually has rally be
headed for an alleged scheme to dethrone him. And so
but in sixteen eighteen, the last Virginia Colony happens, and
by sixteen eighteen the Rosicrucians who were all worked up

(58:25):
by the Fama and by the other manifestos, and who
saw this hope that there might be a king that
could step up, which turned out to be Frederick, but
he failed. They are hooked in with Raleigh, and they're
already starting to say, let's look at America as a
place where we can establish this freedom of religion, where

(58:46):
we can have a universal reformation, where we can practice
science and Raleigh sends to Virginia people like Thomas Harriott,
who are early scientists, really brilliant. I mean, there's actually
the ruins of our chemical lab were found on a
beach in Virginia not all that long ago. And those

(59:07):
are the people that wind up getting Rally in trouble
because they're they're like questioning things about the Bible. The
dates don't line up, and you know, these are people
are applying science and ways to move water efficiently, or
to redesign navigation for ships, and these wonderful steps forward

(59:30):
that Harriot, for example, invented. But they are seen as
Satanists by the average English Christian. And even worse is
that they have a sense of humor about the Bible.
So they found people who were willing to testify that
they would like rip out a Bible page and like
roll a tobacco joint with it, right, and or they

(59:53):
would dry fish with a Bible page, or you know,
and that was considered high treason, you know, practically at
that point. So now we've got the new Atlantis, We've
got Rally's already, you know, got the Virginia colony going,
and we're about to get the John Winthrop the Elder

(01:00:14):
is going to show up and start the Boston, Massachusetts
Bay Colony, and this brings us to maybe what a
Rosicrucian is. In my opinion, his son, John Winthrop the
elder son, John Winthrop the Younger, such an interesting character.

(01:00:34):
He shows up when Rosicrucianism has begun to already be
considered a joke. So like in English drama, there will
be Rosicrucian characters who are feckless old men who know,
you know, it's the kind of thing, you know, he's
he's he's thinking so much about the astrology. They happens
he walks into a ditch, those kind of jokes, and

(01:00:56):
they're they're considered to be completely clueless. But despite that,
John Winthrop the Younger, who's a Puritan like his father,
runs into the manifestos when he's studying in London, supposed
to be a lawyer, but he gets into alchemy instead,

(01:01:17):
and he and his roommate go around looking for Rosicrucians,
not just in Europe. They go to all the way
to Constantinople, following Father CRC's footsteps in the hopes of
finding a real rosicruci and John went with the younger said, well,
I never found one. I never met at what I

(01:01:37):
would consider a real Rosicrution, just.

Speaker 1 (01:01:38):
People who, as a Rosicrucian would say exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
And so he's called to join his father in sixteen
thirty one. So now we are, like, you know, about
twenty years barely like fifteen years after the manifestos, and
he shows up, and this is such an amazing thing,
so different from the America we've been taught. The Pilgrims
were not the way we were taught that they were.

(01:02:06):
And you have this image that they were, you know,
super strict Christians and that anything as astrology, anything occult
would be despised. Well, the truth was that when John
Winthrop the Younger arrived in the United States, he had
barrels and crates that were filled with alchemical equipment and

(01:02:28):
with many of the books and manuscripts of John D.
And John D's famous symbol, the Monus Hieroglyphica, was put
on all of his luggage and on his barrels that
contained this stuff. Unbelievable. I mean, you know, I always
use the example that's like the son of a Southern

(01:02:48):
Baptist minister coming back from summer camp with pentagrams all
over his luggage. No one said a word about it.
In fact, he set up an alchemical laboratory in his
father's house. So the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony had
an alchemy astrology lab going on in his house, and

(01:03:09):
John Winthrop he had a very interesting approach. He decided
that if he couldn't meet a Rosicrucian, he would just
be a Rosicrucian. He liked the Rosicrucian ideals. He liked
the idea that you should fit in where you are,
You should learn to heal people and do it for free.

(01:03:30):
We should support the innocent and the weak and defend them.
All these ideas, and he did this. He spent his
life as a famous alchemist who created all kinds of
medicines that were famous in the early colonies. He was
basically the doctor for the whole Connecticut territory. He was
in so much demand that he had to come up

(01:03:52):
with his color coded packet system for his medicines. And
he trained women who are nurses or midwives or cunning
women how to recognize simple symptoms and then give the
right colored packet to people. He protected the pea Quot
tribe from the Mohegans who tried to enslave them, a
great danger to himself and to the Pequots, and he

(01:04:15):
actually won, and he got them to get their status
as a tribe reinstated, and their original names were restored
to them, and he really did something wonderful there. He
kept the people that lived in Connecticut Territory who worked
with him safe from having to go serve the English
crown in wars all over the world. He would get

(01:04:38):
the order you need to send men to serve in
the army, and he would ignore it, and they would
send another order. He'd ignore it. Then they would send
somebody to say you need to send somebody, and he
would say, wait, wait, wait, but tell the King that
I need all these guys to keep this iron factory
that I'm building, and the King wants the iron right
for the wars, so I need these people. Well, the

(01:05:01):
guy would have to go back to England to ask
the King what he wanted to do, so these people
would be safe for a long periods of time because
of him. He was famous for making gold in Connecticut.
There's a hill that that used to be called the
Governor's Hill, and it was supposed to be the spot
where he would make this very pure gold. They say

(01:05:23):
he came back with these golden rings that he would
use to pay for his all these these these science
projects he had, like he had a desalinization plant made
to make salt to purify water from the ocean. And
he was really into science. He was one of what
they used to call the celestial intelligencers. These were what

(01:05:47):
we would now call I guess scientists. But these were
renaissance men who were interested in what became chemistry, what
became astronomy, who built telescopes, and they were all in
touch with each other. They would write each other and
send instruments to each other so that they could kind
of combine their knowledge. And he tried to put together

(01:06:09):
in a college in America, a college of light in America,
where everyone would be able to, you know, come with
the great geniuses, and then they would greatly benefit the
world by being able to practice science freely in this
territory that he was in control of. But unfortunately, there
were some indigenous uprisings that scared the Europeans out of

(01:06:32):
wanting to come to America, and so it did not
happen here, but this man winds up being one of
the earliest governors of Connecticut. He's really an amazing story
of trying to live out Rosicrucian ideals. And I happened

(01:06:53):
to have a conversation with Manley Hall very near the
end of my time with him. I asked him, if
you had anything to do, oh, if you could do
it all over again, what would you do differently? And
he said that he felt that in the beginning he
glamorized the Blovatskian kind of you know, masters and the

(01:07:17):
superpowers and this stuff, and he regretted it. And in
the book he was working on at that time, which
was about the Rosicrucians, he said that he thought that
now at this point in his life, that if we
want to understand what Rosicrucians are, what they really are
are the people most devoted to humanity during any time period.

(01:07:45):
And he said, the people who live their entire lives
to help other people, who have breakthroughs and ideas, and
who become exemplars of how to be a good person,
that those are Rosicrucians. So he's stretching the metaphor into
this completely different place that really you know, it hadn't

(01:08:06):
been taken into and going back to our stories, so
Winthrop in part had to live through the era of Cromwell.
So first he had to kiss the king's ass, and
then he had to deal with Cromwell, and then he
had to kiss another king's ass, King Charles, when the
monarchy returned. And he did this all in, you know,

(01:08:30):
in very positive ways. So for example, when Charles said,
you know what, you're not the governor of Connecticut anymore.
I'm bringing in my people, but I want you to
negotiate the surrender of the Dutch and give us New York.
John Winthrop just went, okay, you know when he went
and he negotiated New York, and and still tried to

(01:08:52):
figure out how to improve the territory and and bring
the tribes back into some kind of cooperation. And Cromwell
was influenced by the Rosicrucians too, and the great poets
of his era, Marvel and Milton, were influenced by Rosicrucian ideas.

(01:09:14):
There are some people who say that the idea of
Satan in Milton, where he says I would rather rule
in hell than serve in heaven, was a reaction to
the Rosicrucian rebellion against the Catholic Church, right, and Cromwell
saw on the Rosicrucians this whole other thing. So he's militaristic.

(01:09:35):
He's using scientific ideas to create the new modeled army,
which was so modern that it was devastating to the
cavaliers in the English Civil War. And he's he's thinking
that he's applying Rosicrucian ideas while he's killing people, and
he's beheading the king and running the United Kingdom as

(01:09:57):
a dictator. Really, but he thinks, so what he's doing
is he's fighting the Catholics, he's liberating education, he's encouraging
people to read the Bible for themselves. So there are
ways in which he is representing Rosicrucian ideals. He sends
those troops to areas where Protestants are trying to survive.

(01:10:19):
Catholic onslaughts and sees this as defending the true faith,
the Protestant faith. A lot of people say that the
Rosicrucians were influenced by Arabian thought, by Islam. In fact,
and Father CRC was said to have gone to Constantinople,

(01:10:41):
where he learned the secrets of alchemy, and of course
a lot of neoplatonism and of alchemical experimentation was done
in the Arabian countries, and a lot of materials were
preserved there that were not preserved in the West. And
when you look, there are similarities. And elifis lee By
points this out when he talks about the Rosicrucians. He says,

(01:11:03):
he says, look at the Protestants and look at Islam.
So in the Catholic Church you can you know, you
want big golden statues and paintings of Jesus and all this.
Protestants they're not supposed to have that. They're not supposed
to to have idols, right, neither is Islam. In fact,
in Islam it's so strong you can't really even have
depictions you're supposed to have. Writing used the idea that

(01:11:27):
that each of us has an individual relationship with God
and that we have to to you know, there's practices
that we must do. So it isn't a priest saying
you do whatever you want, but you come to church
once a week and I absolve you have whatever bad
things you did. You don't get absolved if you don't
live a good life. There's no easy forgiveness, there's no indulgence.

(01:11:50):
You you must do the hard work. And there's other
stuff that too much detail to get into, but there
are similarities between how Islam approaches religion and the deity
and how the Protestants do. And so after Cromwell is gone,
we get a fruition I think of the Rosicrucian impulse

(01:12:13):
and certainly of Francis Bacon's ideas with the creation of
the Royal Society. And now we have sort of this
invisible college. We have a group of scientists who get
together and they share information and knowledge, and we also
have this idea of universal reformation, that we're going to
improve the world through science. So as this progresses, now

(01:12:37):
that the Masons have absorbed a lot of Rosicrucian ideas,
and there's rosicruc degrees in some of the free Masonic organizations,
and there were literally you know, we are Rosicrusis, but
we're really free Mason groups like the sr AA in
the United Kingdom that had some of the Golden Dawn
members involved in it, the max Heindel Rosicrucianism, the so

(01:13:03):
max Heindel and the Rosicrucianism that really derives from Beverly Randolph.
He's an interesting example because he comes out with a
whole Rosicrucian idea with sex magic worked into it in America,
claiming that he was initiated in Europe. He later writes,

(01:13:28):
now that was all bullshit. They wouldn't listen to me
because I was, you know, a colored person, and so
I decided if I said it was from the Rosicrucians,
maybe they would, and they did. But I never I
never was a Rosicrucian. These are my ideas. That's what
often happened. Max Heindel was supposedly initiated in Europe and

(01:13:49):
that's where he got the information. But then if you
dig into his story, there's an interesting moment when he
goes off to encounter Rudolph Steiner, and his comment about
Steiner is that the stuff is wonderful, but it will
never go across in America the way he expresses it,
so that suggests that there's a good bit of what

(01:14:10):
Heinel was doing. It was probably adapted from Steiner. Steiner
was calling himself a Rosicrucian or appealing to Rosicrucian tradition
because of his strong feelings about the Universal Reformation and
about how education should he was resonating with that current.
It was what they used to call it. But as

(01:14:32):
Arthur Edward Waite wrote, a very early scholar, not a
bad one. He's got kind of a bad reputation, but
he was actually the first really careful scholar in this area.
And he once wrote that all of these modern public
Rosicrucian societies have zero connection with the original Rosicrucian movement.

(01:14:54):
Now can he be sure of that? No? Is it
accurate to say that? Not really, because certainly one of
the main connections they have is that they're very inspired
by it, and they are using ideas that they encountered
through the Rosicrucians and developments of Rosicrucianism. So you have,
for example, you mentioned Descartes, and he's been kind of

(01:15:19):
thrown in there along with Abraham Lincoln and all kinds
of people as a Rosicrucian, and he was interested in Rosicrucianism.
He actually did explore Rosicrucian ideas, and he was very
good friends with one of the daughters of Princess Elizabeth King,
James's daughter, and so this one was a brilliant philosopher

(01:15:42):
in her own right, and she helped Discartes to develop
his ideas. But Discartes wasn't a secret rosicruci initiate as
far as we know. He didn't really have a whole
lot of sympathy for Rosicrucian ideas. And yet what he
wound up doing was influence by the Rosicrucians because they
were such a liberating thing, you know that they came

(01:16:03):
out of nowhere and said, fuck the church, let's do science,
you know, let's learn everything we can. Ironically, part of
that was because they believed that the world was going
to end soon, and they believed that the Bible told
them that when the world ended, human beings would first

(01:16:25):
reattain the knowledge that Adam lost. So they got the
bright idea, and this really shows you something about them, Well,
what if we work really hard to get all that knowledge,
that way, the apocalypse would come that much faster. And
they wanted the apocalypse because then they'd be free, you know,
they'd be free to be with God and there wouldn't
be any more of this nightmarish world that we're dealing with.

(01:16:47):
Satan and all and the Catholic Church. And so that's
in a nutshell why it's so hard to pin down,
you know, what a Rosicrucian is something that has been
used so often. It has such a an aura about
it that when somebody comes out and they say, oh,

(01:17:08):
I'm not a Rosicrucian. You know, my initials are RC
my first and last name, I mean, my first and
middle name. And I've had people go, oh, come on,
you know, I mean look at you know, clearly, and
then other people go, no, no, that means he's Roman Catholic,
don't you see, you know, And it's like, I don't
know why my parents picked two names that we had RC.

(01:17:29):
But you know, I can tell you I'm neither a
Rosicrusion nor a Roman Catholic. But what I tell you
if I was, you know, it's just this incredible, you
know mess. So that's that's why I see it as
is take the inspiration, you know. So let's talk about
universal reformation for a moment, because to begin with, what

(01:17:51):
we're seeing right now in America is a little bit
like this the Cromwell disconnect right where Trump and family,
you know, and cohorts are trying to do a universal
Reformation as they see it. Now, we may be you know,
we may be like, well, whoa, you're not You're going backwards.

(01:18:12):
That's not you know, this isn't freedom of religion, you know,
equal rights and all these things that have been fought
for by you know, the Rosicrucian current and the esoteric
current in America and such. You're you're actually kind of
going backwards to white men rule and it's the church
or else and that's not, that's not our tradition. Well,

(01:18:33):
it is for them, and they are just like Rosicrucians
are going for that universal Reformation by God, and they
don't care who gets in the way. And so that
is part of this this impulse, this Rosicrucian impulse. My
my argument is that the universal Reformation is intended by
the Rosicrucians, was meant to be personal individual right, how

(01:18:59):
do you create a universal reformation. You don't do it
by getting out there and forcing people to act in
certain ways and banning things or such. You do it
by changing your life, your world, your little corner of
the world. If Wan and Ronnie can have their own

(01:19:21):
universal Reformation, and they can bring that to their lives
and to everybody in their lives and to their work. Well,
now we have a possibility, because if you're doing universal
reformation where you are, I'm doing it where I am,
and there's people doing it in a bunch of other places,
it doesn't even take that many people, because the ideas

(01:19:42):
are so inspiring. And if this is true, that our
spiritual anatomy as human beings is such that actually within
us is this infinite, potentially divine source of intelligence and creativity,
and that we're here to learn and to learn to love.

(01:20:06):
Facino said that love is the most powerful magic, and
that love is the key to magic. Then we can
have a powerful influence in our in our world, and
that that can spread to other people, and then life
improves for many, many people because of each individual reformation,

(01:20:28):
not these top down reformations where you're trying to force
everybody to do things in a certain way that you
think is right, but instead doing it in a way
that is more nuanced and more connected to what's happening
in the world, and not to these grandiose, intellectualized concepts,

(01:20:49):
because that's where so much I think of whether it's
you're talking about metaphysics or any form of spirituality and
religion or politics. It's people get up in here, man,
and they they forget the simple things. They forget to
be decent, They forget that that you know, they're breaking
their mom's hearts, you know what I mean. It's it's

(01:21:11):
like there's there's there's a level to to go out
there and turn into I don't want to pick on
Elon Musk, but he's he's kind of the guy right
now everybody's picking on if you if you're going to
be an Elon Musk and you're going to go out
there and you're going to get kicks out of you know,
did I did I do a Nazi salute or didn't I?
And you know, ship like that, man, you're up in

(01:21:31):
your head. You know, like you there's nothing cool about you.
It's like that, that's you know, that's not being a good,
powerful human being. That you may be the richest motherfucker
in the world, but but you don't know how to act.
And so we're looking for a reawakening in the world.
And and when I'm seeing like this, it's mind blowing,

(01:21:55):
you know. It's the amount of hatred. I mean, these
two sides of just throw into this like death grip
with each other, and they don't believe anything the other
one says, and they they think that the other one
should be wiped off the face of the earth. And
this is the old story man, there is the capital. Yeah,
exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:22:15):
So with all with everything you've said, I kind of
see Rosicrucianism under a different light now, and I kind
of want to say that they're still around.

Speaker 1 (01:22:28):
I'm I'm not a rosicrusion.

Speaker 2 (01:22:31):
I'm not a rosicrusion, but sure, but sure you aren't.

Speaker 3 (01:22:35):
You and me are.

Speaker 1 (01:22:37):
No, we're not.

Speaker 2 (01:22:38):
But it feels like it's almost like a sort of
it's a force of some kind that wants to prevail
on its own, and there are just people assuming the
position and not so much something that you would think of,
like because when I was reading through your book and
and kind of looking around, like you know, this secret

(01:23:00):
order that's trying to bring forth this this new world order,
like a lot of people like to talk about all
the new world Oh my goodness, you know, the new
Atlantis and all these other things in Plato's Republic, like
this unification, and it's like, are these were the rosicrucions
the Illuminati too.

Speaker 1 (01:23:17):
Like are they the Illuminati? Like what is that? Or
is it again?

Speaker 2 (01:23:21):
I'm looking at Rosicrutionism like this force and you can
slip into that role if you'd like and help full,
But then you get the whole ascended Master's white brotherhood
and it's like, what is that? Is that just another
interpretation of Rosicrucianism where sure, you know this guy had

(01:23:41):
a vision from the the invisible Masters or whatever he
called them. It's like, is that something individual to that person?
But its court still has those resicution ideals where it's like, hey,
the betterment of humanity And it seems like we're how
you're saying, we're so stuck in this left right paradigm

(01:24:01):
that were we all want peace, we all want you know,
the betterment of humanity, but we just can't seem to
get there. Is that the devil that holds us back
from being able to achieve that? And maybe it is
the light in the dark right like this, these two

(01:24:22):
lodges that fighting with each other.

Speaker 3 (01:24:23):
Different ways to see this. I'll give you two that
I've found to be helpful. One was told to me
by an alleged spirit talking to me through a taus
Puebla shaman, and he was asked what is the purpose

(01:24:44):
of life on earth? And he said that Earth is
a combination of the Devil's island of space and a kindergarten.
And he said it's we're all the little hitlers from
all the different worlds come to learn some basic lessons.
And if you look at the world at ourselves, even

(01:25:08):
good people, I mean, we've got that strain. You know,
we're all little hitlers. We're all dictating what we think
is right and go on your social media, and especially
if it's politics. I mean, everybody knows exactly how it's
supposed to be and what's going on, So that could
be I love that description. I thought that that goes
a long way. Another one can be found in the

(01:25:29):
Secret of the Golden Flower, which is that when we
incarnate the soul, it doesn't literally divide, but in a
sense it becomes the lower soul and the higher soul,
because the lower soul is what's keeping your body sustained, harmonized,
working the life force, knowing how to talk, remembering things,

(01:25:51):
having consciousness and dreams and memory and family and all
that stuff that's being busy with all that is your
soul in claustrophoe be a right like like that feeling
people have, which Aristotle described as being like the etruscan
pirate torture of tying a corpse face to face with
a captive. Are angst in the body, according to this

(01:26:15):
point of view, So you know, we're we're sitting We're
sitting here in our bodies, going you know what, you know,
why are these things happening? You know, the higher soul
is not like that. The higher soul when it views life,
when you can waken it, you can reach that consciousness.
While you're embodied, you have a completely different view of life.

(01:26:38):
If you're in the lower soul. According to this teaching,
you're going, I'm afraid, I'm angry. The world is this big, scary,
permanent place. It's going to roll over me. I'm going
to disappear. I'm impermanent and something horrible could happen at
any second and no one would care. There seems to
be evidence of that all around us. And you will

(01:27:01):
be loving death right, You'll be loving you know, gory
scenes in movies or playing games when you're killing people
or and the reason for that is because whenever it
sees death, the lower soul is going, oh, someday that'll
be me and I'll be out of here.

Speaker 2 (01:27:17):
Society nowadays, Ronie, a lot of people relax to true
true crime.

Speaker 1 (01:27:21):
They like to relax. Yes, what is that, dude.

Speaker 3 (01:27:25):
Same thing. It's the lower soul seeing that there will
be an end to this torment, that there will come
a time when I will be free, and there's a
comfort in it. And the higher soul, when it's awakened
in a living person, then you approach life completely differently.
You realize that you're not transgent, that the world is trangent,

(01:27:49):
that the world is impermanent. The things that you love
are going to disappear, and you cherish them. You cherish
every day. And I've worked with this practice and it works.
Even you wind up even feeling kind of empathetic.

Speaker 1 (01:28:04):
I know it is.

Speaker 3 (01:28:05):
Empathy's the right word. But even your enemies are sort
of people traveling with you through this time and space,
and you feel it, and you feel like, oh, we're
all here together for just a moment, and you know,
isn't it beautiful. I don't know what it means. I
don't even you know, but look at this miracle of life,
and we're all creating it together. I mean, that's the

(01:28:28):
difference between the higher and the lower soul and the
secret of the golden flowers. So why is there all this, Well,
this is the lower soul, hatred, anger, fear, power mongering,
no faith, right in the harmony of the universe. And
you can also look at it from the hymns of
Orpheus or the Orphic mythology, where you're told that we

(01:28:48):
are the children. What the origin of humanity is is
that when Zagrius, the baby Dionecius, is born, Zeus loves
him and puts him on his own throne, saying, essentially,
this is the future king of the gods, and he's

(01:29:09):
going to be as much better a king than you know,
than I am, than I was than over Kronos. And
the Titans see this, the original gods and the natural
forces gods, and they're angry. They hate Zeus because Zeus
lock them up in Tartarus and now here's Zeus coming
up with another god, and they want to do something

(01:29:31):
about it. So they lure Zagrius away from the throne
using toys, a little fluff of cotton, like a little
it's similar a ball, and these are images of the planet,
of the meshing of the human organs and such, and
draws baby Zagrius into Tartarus, into a dark space away

(01:29:54):
from the consciousness of Zeus. They kill him, they make
a stew out of him. They're going to eat him
because they're going to get the power of the god
that way. And it's very primitive kind of thinking. And
Zeus finally finds out what's happened. He's horrified. He throws
lightning at the whole mess is to stop it, and
it all burns. And in that ash that's partially divine

(01:30:17):
Zagrias and partially the Titans. Human beings are born. So
we are half Titan and we are half divine, actually
parts of Dionecius. So therefore the Titanic part of us
hates the gods, hates harmony, wants to fight, thinks it

(01:30:41):
knows everything better, thinks it should be in charge, it
should have everything. The other part of us is the stars,
is divine. And so the great orphic formula was, I
am a child of Earth, the Titans, and of Heaven,
of Dionecius and the gods. But my race is of Heaven.

(01:31:01):
And so when you can claim this. When you were
initiated into the orphic mysteries, you woke up that that
side of you that is divine, and you lived a
completely different life. You were no longer somebody whose dream
was to be a warrior and kill a lot of people,
or to you know, have many women or you. Suddenly
you were you were living for the gods, right, You

(01:31:23):
were living for the harmony of the universe, the very
Pythagorean kind.

Speaker 1 (01:31:28):
Of an approach to life. Were the Pythagoreans following this
line of thought.

Speaker 3 (01:31:32):
I think they may have created it. You know, my theory,
no one no one assured. There's a lot of interesting
origin possibilities for the orphic stuff, but but my favorite
is that it was a literary creation, a hoax basically
by the Pythagoreans trying to create a new culture, a
city culture, a kind of They felt that this whole

(01:31:56):
idea that you know, the best thing in the world
is to die in war, and we're killing anne animals
for the gods. They didn't. They thought that was all wrong,
and they should you should take out these primitive ideas
and give us a religion for the city where what
the gods want is us to be good people, to
create beauty, to to to heal the sick and such.

Speaker 2 (01:32:16):
Theres right exactly, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:32:22):
The force, the force the way right.

Speaker 3 (01:32:26):
It's the rose cross, right, even the symbolism of it
that the rose is the soul, the cross is the body.
But you could also see it as the cross, you know,
Jesus on the cross is the consciousness trapped in the body,
the four dimension you know, the north, southwest, east, and

(01:32:48):
the rose is the spiritual blessing, the divine quality. So
we were a combination of the divine and the material.
So the material side is tructive and kind of dumb
and and and inquisitive and filled with urgency and but
the divine side is outside of time itself.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
And uh something interesting, right, speaking of the rose and
the cross, Michael Meyer was actually the first or mayor
was actually the first person to give a Christmas card
to James the car really yeah, and it's got it's
actually got a rose on It's really interesting, right because
we're talking about the rose and it just made me
think of that.

Speaker 1 (01:33:30):
Yeah, let me shore my screen here, because it's.

Speaker 2 (01:33:32):
Got a rose on it. And allegedly it was the
first ever so here it is. It was the first
ever Christmas card that King King James got for Chris.

Speaker 3 (01:33:47):
Wow, that is so cool. I did not know about that.

Speaker 2 (01:33:50):
Yea so fun, fun little fact there that thatchem is there.

Speaker 3 (01:33:53):
Just look at that. That is so cool.

Speaker 2 (01:33:56):
Gave the first Christmas card and then Christmas cards weren't
invented until way ter on.

Speaker 3 (01:34:00):
But yeah, you know here he is awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:34:03):
Kind of I'm not a Rosicrucion right right, And James like, no,
you're not. This kind of looks like a cross though.
But Ronnie, where do you see Would you agree with
me that maybe there's still this I don't want to
call it a brotherhood, but it seems like a lot
of the things that you talked about are going on today.

(01:34:24):
Like we have a universal database that intellectuals are able
to tap into and share knowledge. I mean, the Internet
itself was essentially invented for that, for the sharing of
knowledge between scientists. Invisible college, right, the invisible college. So
would you say that the Roscicruciers are still going strong

(01:34:45):
till this day?

Speaker 3 (01:34:47):
Well, I certainly think their ideas. I mean, it's amazing
how much of what they wanted to have happened happened
in terms of the adoption of science and the way
that the invisible College which was on wheels and is
everywhere but nowhere, right, that's I mean, it's the Internet,
and that there was also the book in which contained

(01:35:08):
all knowledge of everything in the world, right, And that's
what we're trying to do with AI. And so yes,
I think Rosicruci ideas continue to be influential, and I
think that that people continue to try to live up
to them in good and bad ways. I think that
there there are people who are elitists who are drawn
to Rosicruci. The atmosphere of it, if you will, the

(01:35:35):
sense of these these religious elites, whether they be invisible
masters or or they be kind of this political, uh
spiritually motivated elite that that wants, as you said, a
new world order, a universal reformation according to their idea
of it, which I don't really think is the Rosicruci
you know, the Rosicrucian thing kind of hearkens back to

(01:35:57):
the orific thing about you're serving God. You know, this
isn't you know, for you're a greater glory. This is
for the greater glory of humanity and of the divine,
and I think there are good people. I mean I've met,
of course, a number of people who are practicing Rosicrucians
from one of the public orders that still exists, like

(01:36:21):
Max Heindels, and they tend to be great people. I mean,
I really lovely people, and so certainly they are very
motivated by the rosicruci ideals. And I think there are
probably people who in fact, I know of people who
are scholars and who are trying to understand the uh,

(01:36:44):
you know, what it really means to be a Rosicrucian
and to try to embody that in their lives. But
I think that ultimately I always talk about, you know,
we're in this unique moment in history now where we
have access to almost all the spiritual knowledge, the systems

(01:37:04):
of transcendence of history, the ones that have survived. Think
of them as ladders, and we have some of us
have collected, you know, who are really into this stuff,
like yourself or me, have collected dozens or even hundreds
of ladders. We get excited, we go, oh my god,

(01:37:25):
there's another one, you know, and we compare them to
the other ladders. And there's whole industries of people that
do nothing but compare ladders or condemn one ladder for
not being as good as another ladder, or that ladder
has too many steps in that one, but nobody's climbing
the freaking ladders. So, you know, Max Heindel's approach of
Rescrutionism may not have been recognizable by Andre, but it's

(01:37:50):
still producing good people who are who feel good about life,
and who have faith in the harmony of the world
and as many Hall said, and the rational soul of
the world. And so I think from that point of view,
there's no doubt that the Rosicrucian impulse continues out there.
And it's I think it's ironic that it does seem

(01:38:12):
that some people will like draw a line at rosicrution,
like there's a lot of people who are just say,
the Masons are out, you know, like that is the evil.
The Rosicrucians are sort of as gray area. They're not
as well known and people, and yet they do constantly appear,
just like the Bavarian Illuminati, right, who were nothing like
what their reputation is. I mean, they were essentially a

(01:38:34):
mystical quasi political order who again trying to create some
form of universal reformation from their viewpoint, but not in
the sense of you know, dictatorship and and you know,
forced order. But we cannot underestimate Catholic propaganda. Okay, That's

(01:38:54):
that's one thing about the Rosicrucians. I also have to say,
I think that we saw the power of a Catholic
church in the last election. And they they are big
and rich and powerful, and they have written a lot
of history and they have demonized everybody that is not
them for the most part, even though there were popes

(01:39:15):
that were into alchemy and astrology and even though you're wealthy,
Persianism not a good look. Yeah. So instead of joining
the human race and sharing all that amazing stuff, they
have packed away in the basement, you know, they sit
on top of it like a big spider or a
Tolkien dragon, and they don't share it. And they continue

(01:39:37):
to try to legislate. And I would say that they
were a significant portion of how women lost the right
to choice in America, and they want to impose to
some degree this dominionist concept. And the evangelicals are right
in there with them, and they get it. And so

(01:39:57):
these people have worked for a long time to come
up with story about how the Freemasons eat babies and
they you know, they're all pedophiles, and the Rescrutions and
the Jews, and I mean, it's anybody that you're fighting.
This is an old tactic. You know. Rome used to
do that. I mean, you know, Rome used to always
say whoever they were fighting, they were you know, eating
babies and things. Yeah, exactly. So that's something that one

(01:40:21):
of the things that I think is exciting about the
rosicrutionis historically is that that they kind of rose up
and challenged that, and they did it in a way
where they said, no, you know, science, nature doing things
for the right reason. God wants us to discover ways
to live better lives, and we shouldn't be living in

(01:40:44):
abject poverty, and we shouldn't be suffering from plagues, and
all the answers to these problems are there if we'll
just stop fucking around with the things that we think
are important and really get in tune with inspiration and
go about making this better world. That impulse, you know,
I think is something that is not unique to Rosicrucianism,

(01:41:07):
but in Western esotericism. I think it's hard to find
a big movement like that that so clearly dedicates itself
to that idea of you know, this this reformation of
the world, not based on what you know, the law
of God says this the way I interpret it, you

(01:41:28):
have to do it, but based on trial and error, experimentation, intuition, tradition,
handing down these ideas. And the other thing I'd mentioned,
as I mentioned handing down the ideas, is that part
of the reason we don't know what's going on here
is we don't know that there wasn't some form of Rosicrucianism,

(01:41:51):
maybe calling itself something else, that existed for a long time,
because it just went from student from teacher to student. So,
for example, I happened to be lucky to live at
a time when Manly Hall had the PRS and he
could talk to everybody about this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:42:06):
He was influenced by the Rosicrucian right though the first
very much Yeah, ary a lot from what I was
reading in your book, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
Yeah, very much so, and so he you know, if
we had lived, you know, two hundred years earlier, three
hundred years earlier, he might have had to have taught
me in private and sworn me to secrecy. So we
don't know about those traditions because they don't leave records.
And you see, so for example, Lewis Spencer Lewis of

(01:42:39):
one of the founders of one of the other Rosicrucian
public schools in modern times. He believed that Rosicrucians came
to California, to the Monterey area before the FAMA and
the other manifestos, that there were already Rosicrucians, and they'd
already infiltrated the Catholic Church, and they'd infiltrated the Spanish

(01:43:04):
Conquista doors, and that they came to America with them
to establish some kind of beginning on the West coast.
Now there's no solid proof of any of that. It's
really only found in Lewis and he claimed to have
found some roses, some crosses with carved roses. But that's

(01:43:24):
the rose of Sharon, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean
that it's Rosicrucian. That's one of the problems. I mean,
people go rosicrution crazy, and you know that everything looks
rosic it's got a rose on it's rosicrution, you know,
And so I think that that it's it takes us
back to Wickenstein ultimately right, like what do words mean?

(01:43:48):
That when you abstract a word from what it's really
pointing to, then the mind gets tricked into all kinds
of weird activity. So he used the example of time, right,
That is, you don't have to explain time when you
go it's three o'clock, But when you start talking about time,

(01:44:08):
what is time? That now you've got a playground for
all kinds of stuff to happen. And that is what
Rosicrucianism is. It's a playground for the imagination. But it's
a nice one, I think, you know, Like I said,
most of the people I've met involved. I've met a
few people who were kind of, you know, snooty and
stuff they were drawing to that that's okay, you know,

(01:44:30):
but but I've met some wonderful people who were inspired
by ros Crucianism.

Speaker 1 (01:44:36):
I love it, Ronnie.

Speaker 2 (01:44:37):
I really enjoyed our conversation. I feel like I know
less now than I did when we first started. Not good,
because it's it's I'm still it's gonna take me a
while to process it. But I love being able to
want when I break something down, have a chronological order
of the events and how it goes. And I always
thought that Rosicrucianism, and it could very well be was

(01:45:00):
a troll. You know, we mentioned John Veayer earlier in
the Pseudo Monarchia and a Grippa kind of sort of
putting out stuff hey as a joke.

Speaker 1 (01:45:08):
Crowley did that as well.

Speaker 2 (01:45:09):
You know, here's a joke to kind of shock people
and things like that, and then we have the guy
who wrote the stuff was like, actually, no, no, wait a minute,
it was a joke, was it.

Speaker 3 (01:45:18):
I mean, yeah, I think there's a lot of truth
in that. Like I think they're saying these days in
academia that when you look at the manifestos that they
they've been compared to science fiction, they've been compared to surrealism.

Speaker 1 (01:45:33):
I mean, the chemical wedding is psychedelic. It's so bizarre,
and it's.

Speaker 3 (01:45:38):
Got jokes in it, you know. I mean, you know,
the naked girl going, hey, wouldn't be you know, the
old man wouldn't be so oppressed if he got laid,
you know, all that kind of so, I mean, it
really reminds me of college student kind of literature because
that combination of bodiness reality but also radical, you know,
idealism and fuck the pope and all the authority figures.

(01:45:59):
You know, it's it just fits perfectly in that it's
it's rock and roll, you know what I mean. It's
like this weird like kind of rebellion against the status quo?
Who made you? You know, Andre, who the hell are you
to stand up and say that the pope is no good?
And that you know that's the essence is that rebellion, right,
that Rosicrucian is. It's saying, we don't believe that you

(01:46:22):
have a monopoly on God.

Speaker 2 (01:46:25):
It's a brokered experience. And I've always said that that's
why I believe in God. I don't believe in religion
because it is a brokered experience and they just want
to tell you what to do, how to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:46:36):
And I don't think it should be like that.

Speaker 2 (01:46:37):
I think it should be again the nosis that you
find on your own. How you're saying, in order for
us to bring forth change, you have to change yourself.
You can't force change upon other people, because it's just
it's it's never gone well throughout history. It's been repeated
over and over again when they try to force something
on people, and it's like back up and let it happen.

Speaker 1 (01:47:00):
But you need to maintain order as well. Right, I'm
not saying it's going to be.

Speaker 3 (01:47:03):
Yeah, there's a balance any type. But extremism from either
side only invokes extremism from the other side. Yes, and
you be pushed too hard before people are ready. You're
too arrogant in your approach to how you want to
change society, and you will invoke the opposite reaction. History

(01:47:24):
shows us that so in the middle ground isn't necessarily
good either, because then sometimes things don't get addressed that
have to be because nobody wants to rock the boat.
You know, they're trying to just keep everything nice and pleasant,
and sometimes you can't be pleasant and as you have
to take drastic actions. So it's really the human predicament

(01:47:47):
of trying to live together, to find a way that
we can all respect each other and not be so
dismissive of each other. And unfortunately, right now we're at
a time where we have this you know, mania almost
of dismissing each other.

Speaker 1 (01:48:04):
Yeah, that's the way I see it too, Ronnie.

Speaker 2 (01:48:08):
Thank you so much for talking to I want to say,
that's a sick dresser behind Is that a dresser behind you.

Speaker 1 (01:48:13):
Man, the thing looks awesome. What is that?

Speaker 3 (01:48:15):
I don't know what to call that. It's a piece
of Tibetan furniture, but it's like the sort of a
chest of drawers, but you know, not really.

Speaker 1 (01:48:24):
It looks gnarly.

Speaker 2 (01:48:25):
Man, it looks like it looks Egyptian almost in a
sort of way. I want to share a synchronicity that happened,
I mean recently. You know, we were talking about the
hymns earlier and I have that book here somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:48:37):
Uh the I did.

Speaker 2 (01:48:39):
A a tarot pull when I was on I got
invited to a podcast they call it Pigos Esoteric Hour.
It was a name shout out to those guys and
they live in California.

Speaker 1 (01:48:54):
I think they I think you're on their show. I
think they Yeah, I think you're on their show.

Speaker 3 (01:48:58):
Sounded familiar yea to others, they Oh, yeah, they're great.
I know those guys.

Speaker 2 (01:49:04):
Yeah, they've been to the PRS and everything, and you
know they were I think one of them was a
rescruition or something or other at the M.

Speaker 1 (01:49:10):
A M r C.

Speaker 2 (01:49:11):
And then I did a terrot pull on air and
it was the reprint of the of the Augustus nap
or outside the Naphul deck, and I did a poll
and he was.

Speaker 1 (01:49:23):
Kind of reading me, like, I'm like, hey, I pulled
this card, you know, what does it mean?

Speaker 2 (01:49:27):
He was explaining it to me, and it was kind
of aligning with my life at the time.

Speaker 1 (01:49:31):
I'm like, Okay, that's kind of weird. Whatever, who cares.
I don't. I don't really believe in this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:49:35):
So I did, I think a four card pull, and
on the when I went to go pull the fourth card,
He's like, well, you know you, in order for it
to fit, you'd have to pull the fool right, And
I'm like, I identify with the Fool. That's my favorite card,
especially in that particular deck, because you know, the Fool

(01:49:56):
is standing at the threshold, he's looking out into the
abyss right with his companion. You know, he's like this
this ready to take on reality in some sort of way.
And I was like, and I caught this all on
an episode. I was like, how crazy would it be?
Of The next card I pulled was the fool Boom.
I pulled the Fool live, you know, essentially on a recording,

(01:50:17):
and I was like that it freaked me out wrong.
I was like, I'm putting these away. I'm never touching
these because I was literally talking about how I don't
believe in.

Speaker 1 (01:50:26):
That sort of stuff, and he's like, I told you.

Speaker 2 (01:50:29):
I mean, He's like, that's the way it works, and
I'm like, man, reality is a lot stranger than than
we've been more magical.

Speaker 3 (01:50:38):
You know, people dismiss magical thinking and such, and for
good reason, but there is I've experienced way too much
of that stuff. I mean, things that are just inexplicable
and they show you that something's going on. It's not
the everyday world.

Speaker 1 (01:50:55):
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:50:56):
It bleeds through every now and again, and I'm here
for it.

Speaker 1 (01:51:00):
Ronnie one more time. Do you have a website or
do you have anywhere you want to direct the people link.

Speaker 3 (01:51:06):
I have a YouTube channel just Ronnie Pontiac that has
a lot of different kind of content on it. It's
also there's over one hundred interviews now, so there there's
playlists for that on different topics. And I'm on Instagram, Facebook, threads,
blue Sky, all the stuff. I don't even know, but

(01:51:27):
but I'm on social media. Find me as Ronnie Pontiac.
I'm happy to answer questions.

Speaker 2 (01:51:33):
Get a link tree, Ronnie, so that way, whenever you
do a show, you just post a link tree.

Speaker 3 (01:51:38):
I have one, actually, but I never updated once I
got up into that one hundred different interviews thing. I
was just I used to update each once. I wanted
each podcast to get you know, and then I realized
that this isn't going to happen. Yeah, and now I've
got two books to finish this year. So I was like, yeah,
it's good, well running stuff out there.

Speaker 1 (01:51:57):
I appreciate you coming on talking to me. Let's do
this sooner than later.

Speaker 3 (01:52:00):
Let's start wait two years.

Speaker 1 (01:52:02):
And uh, let's stay in touch.

Speaker 2 (01:52:04):
And thank you so much for talking to us today
about this very fascinating topic.

Speaker 1 (01:52:09):
And I look forward to our next episode.

Speaker 2 (01:52:11):
Everyone make sure to follow the show on social media
at the Hoe on one podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:52:15):
Make sure to check out Ronnie. Check out his books.

Speaker 2 (01:52:17):
He's already got three books working on more right, so
make sure to check that out links down in the description.
As always, everyone take care of each other and I'll
catch you on the next one.

Speaker 1 (01:52:27):
Goodbye.

Speaker 2 (01:52:27):
No

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#245 | Rosicrucianism Unveiled with Ronnie Pontiac

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