WEBVTT - Part Three: A Complete History of the Illuminati 0:00:02.560 --> 0:00:09.160 Oh, it's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is opened 0:00:09.840 --> 0:00:12.240 in a radically different way of pretty much every week, 0:00:12.360 --> 0:00:16.400 but usually one that involves me making sounds with my mouth. 0:00:16.600 --> 0:00:19.840 I don't understand how you're this successful of a podcast. Now, 0:00:21.480 --> 0:00:25.080 No one does, Garrison, nobody does. But they can't. They 0:00:25.120 --> 0:00:28.040 can't stop it. They can't, they can't stop the signal. 0:00:28.160 --> 0:00:31.760 You know. I'm like, I'm like the Rolling Stones of podcasting, 0:00:31.960 --> 0:00:35.920 the Andrew Tate of podcasting. Thank you, Margaret, thank you 0:00:35.960 --> 0:00:39.640 for that. That's what everyone's saying for that unalloyed compliment. 0:00:41.400 --> 0:00:45.760 So we have, we have. We started this episode by 0:00:45.760 --> 0:00:50.400 talking about Adam vy Shopped and the Bavarian Illuminati UM, 0:00:50.440 --> 0:00:54.800 which started out as a nerdy kid kind of trying 0:00:54.840 --> 0:00:58.160 to find a way to smuggle cool books into Bavaria 0:00:58.240 --> 0:01:01.680 that we're banned um and doing so, he created a 0:01:01.720 --> 0:01:04.920 fake religion so that rich people would feel like wizards 0:01:05.560 --> 0:01:07.720 and he could use their money to buy more books, 0:01:08.000 --> 0:01:12.000 and it ended up with him funding illegal abortions until 0:01:12.000 --> 0:01:14.959 a lightning strike exposed to society to the cops, and 0:01:15.000 --> 0:01:16.560 then he had to flee and spend the rest of 0:01:16.560 --> 0:01:19.840 his life having the equivalent of an extended Twitter argument. 0:01:20.840 --> 0:01:24.480 This sounds so fake, This sounds like such a fake story. 0:01:25.360 --> 0:01:28.320 It is. It's both sad and funny, and I've continued 0:01:28.400 --> 0:01:32.120 my reading on this. One of the troubles here is that, 0:01:32.200 --> 0:01:37.520 like there's an actual paucity of good historical books about 0:01:37.560 --> 0:01:41.440 the Illuminati who are not written by cranks. I picked 0:01:41.440 --> 0:01:43.560 the one of the Charles River editors are not usually 0:01:43.600 --> 0:01:46.160 my ideal source, but they do a decent job of 0:01:46.160 --> 0:01:50.160 like summarizing all of the actual facts that are known. 0:01:51.360 --> 0:01:53.560 I found another book that I have been reading through 0:01:53.560 --> 0:01:56.400 that is one of the crank books. It's called The Illuminati, 0:01:56.440 --> 0:01:59.320 The Secret Society That Hijacked the World by Jim mars 0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:05.600 Um with with two rs. And mars is absolutely a crank. 0:02:06.160 --> 0:02:08.960 That for an idea of what a cranky is his 0:02:09.000 --> 0:02:12.440 book on secrets or in the chapters on the Illuminati, 0:02:12.720 --> 0:02:15.720 part what is Germany? And part two is Zionism. So 0:02:17.080 --> 0:02:22.200 we're going some good directions in this book that's gonna bridge, 0:02:21.880 --> 0:02:26.720 but we're gonna have to talk about today. Isn't that? Um? 0:02:27.120 --> 0:02:30.040 I want to read. There's some wild quotes in here, um, 0:02:30.160 --> 0:02:33.600 and most of them will not be most relevant until 0:02:33.600 --> 0:02:35.400 we get later on in here, but I want to 0:02:35.400 --> 0:02:40.320 read a portion of something that I cannot speak entirely 0:02:40.360 --> 0:02:43.760 on the veracity of um. But this is a chunk 0:02:43.960 --> 0:02:46.040 of his book when he's talking about the formation of 0:02:46.080 --> 0:02:50.280 the Illuminati. In seventeen seventy nine, two years after Bishop's 0:02:50.280 --> 0:02:53.680 initiation into Freemasonry, he wrote his Wacken Hurdle, suggesting the 0:02:53.800 --> 0:02:57.120 order be renamed the Society of Bees. The bee connection 0:02:57.160 --> 0:03:00.320 again demonstrates the close ties to the Illuminati of the 0:03:00.320 --> 0:03:03.080 Illuminati to Masonry, as the beehive has long been an 0:03:03.080 --> 0:03:06.520 important Freemason symbol. Today's Masonic lodges were once referred to 0:03:06.560 --> 0:03:10.040 as hives, and any internal disputes are called swarming. One 0:03:10.120 --> 0:03:13.480 eighteenth century Masonic ritual stated the beehive teaches us that 0:03:13.520 --> 0:03:16.359 as we are born into the world rational and intelligent beings, 0:03:16.440 --> 0:03:18.840 so what we also be industrious ones, and not stand 0:03:18.880 --> 0:03:21.600 idly by it or gazed with listless indifference on even 0:03:21.639 --> 0:03:23.640 the meanest of our fellows in a state of distress, 0:03:23.680 --> 0:03:25.480 if it is in our power to help them without 0:03:25.520 --> 0:03:28.680 detriment to ourselves or our connections. The symbol of bees 0:03:28.760 --> 0:03:32.520 also connects to the aforementioned ancient Greek Elucinian mysteries in 0:03:32.560 --> 0:03:34.600 which honey was thought to be a divine product of 0:03:34.639 --> 0:03:41.320 the gods. So that's kind of cool. Now, yeah, I am. 0:03:41.600 --> 0:03:46.920 I'm all for beehive. I like the discussion of arguments 0:03:46.920 --> 0:03:51.200 within Masonic temples as swarming. Yeah, yeah, it's it's all. 0:03:51.400 --> 0:03:54.680 So much of this story is extremely twitter, like almost back. 0:03:57.720 --> 0:04:00.600 It's nice to know that radicals have always been more 0:04:00.680 --> 0:04:03.480 or less the same kind of people. Nice isn't the 0:04:03.520 --> 0:04:08.720 word I would use. Yeah, it's it's reassuring. It's a 0:04:08.840 --> 0:04:15.280 thing that's that's undeniable. Yeah, so that's good stuff. So, um, 0:04:15.360 --> 0:04:17.680 we should probably get back into the story. When we 0:04:17.720 --> 0:04:19.840 had left off, we had just been talking about how 0:04:21.160 --> 0:04:25.640 the conspiracy theory about the Illuminati started up after the 0:04:25.680 --> 0:04:29.920 French Revolution and kind of merged with existing fears about 0:04:30.000 --> 0:04:32.640 Masonry in the United States to be part of this 0:04:32.680 --> 0:04:35.880 big anti Masonic movement. You've got guys like Abigail Adams 0:04:35.880 --> 0:04:41.000 and even George Washington himself who bought into this conspiracy. 0:04:41.320 --> 0:04:43.240 And this would be this would be like one of 0:04:43.279 --> 0:04:45.480 the funny things about Jim or about I don't know 0:04:45.560 --> 0:04:48.560 whatever Mars's book is that like when he talks about 0:04:48.600 --> 0:04:51.480 American connections to the Illuminati. He just says that, like 0:04:51.720 --> 0:04:54.640 we know that. You know, multiple members of the Founding 0:04:54.680 --> 0:04:57.320 Fathers were aware of the Illuminati, and it's like, yeah, 0:04:57.360 --> 0:04:59.480 they believe the same shit you did, Like they all 0:04:59.520 --> 0:05:04.440 added the same conspiracy buddy. Um, so far the bastards 0:05:04.520 --> 0:05:07.680 is the people who believe in the Illuminati, not the Illuminati. No, 0:05:07.800 --> 0:05:11.520 the Illuminati are not bastards. Although again, perhaps if you 0:05:11.960 --> 0:05:15.200 create a fake cult in order to do a good thing, 0:05:15.520 --> 0:05:18.400 you might wind up causing more problems than you solve. 0:05:19.279 --> 0:05:21.919 Maybe that maybe a lesson from the Illuminati that we 0:05:21.960 --> 0:05:25.640 can take into us today. That's true. You know what, Sophie, 0:05:25.720 --> 0:05:28.599 let the initiates out of the cage. I think maybe 0:05:28.640 --> 0:05:31.279 we've been we've been going down the wrong the wrong, 0:05:31.800 --> 0:05:35.160 the wrong road. You couldn't even get that sentence out. 0:05:35.800 --> 0:05:39.160 Yeah I would. I would never tell you to let 0:05:39.160 --> 0:05:42.160 the initiates out of the cage. That's where they live now. 0:05:42.800 --> 0:05:48.760 So overtime, over time, the Illuminati conspiracy theory died out 0:05:48.760 --> 0:05:51.800 would be the wrong word, but it kind of faded. Um. 0:05:52.000 --> 0:05:55.880 But America's public obsession with conspiracy theories never quite did, 0:05:56.279 --> 0:06:00.280 and politicians learned over the decades that' stoking these conspiracy 0:06:00.560 --> 0:06:04.880 was an easy way to get VOTs. After the Mason's popular, 0:06:04.920 --> 0:06:08.640 American conspiracy culture pivoted to obsess over the Jesuits and 0:06:08.640 --> 0:06:12.200 then the Communists, which, despite the fact that they are 0:06:12.320 --> 0:06:16.440 kind of diametrically opposed and fundamental ways, often got looped 0:06:16.440 --> 0:06:19.440 in together as like a Jesuit Communist conspiracy. That was 0:06:19.480 --> 0:06:21.320 a whole big thing in the early half of the 0:06:21.320 --> 0:06:25.200 twentieth century. And of course every time you would have 0:06:25.240 --> 0:06:28.440 sort of a new era in American conspiracy culture, the 0:06:28.520 --> 0:06:32.080 trappings of prior manias would roll forward into each new 0:06:32.120 --> 0:06:36.280 conspiracy that enraptured the voting public. It's you know, it's syncretism. 0:06:36.400 --> 0:06:39.280 This is a thing that umberto Echo talks about when 0:06:39.320 --> 0:06:41.800 he talks about like one of the key attributes of fascism, 0:06:42.160 --> 0:06:44.240 and I think it is kind of worth noting and 0:06:44.279 --> 0:06:46.359 a little bit beyond the scope of this episodes, but 0:06:46.440 --> 0:06:49.920 to talk about how American conspiracy culture has always been 0:06:50.040 --> 0:06:54.719 proto fascist in many ways and this is the syncretism 0:06:54.800 --> 0:06:56.440 of it. And we've we've really seen this come to 0:06:56.480 --> 0:06:59.359 roost with Donald Trump and qwan on and sort of 0:06:59.360 --> 0:07:01.160 this is why you get a lot of liberals who 0:07:01.200 --> 0:07:03.719 are very surprised when they see these kind of people 0:07:03.760 --> 0:07:06.719 who had been sort of formerly crunchy, granola hippie types 0:07:07.200 --> 0:07:09.760 get into the hardcore right wing king On stuff and 0:07:09.760 --> 0:07:12.800 it's like that syncretism, baby, That's exactly what Echo was 0:07:12.840 --> 0:07:15.120 talking about. This. This this also ties into like the 0:07:15.160 --> 0:07:20.040 idea of like the cultic milieu and how the shared 0:07:20.160 --> 0:07:23.400 stays were all these types of conspiracies operate, feed off 0:07:23.440 --> 0:07:26.640 each other and do and do kind of coalesce into 0:07:26.680 --> 0:07:32.000 this weird like a crypto or quasi fascist politic. Yeah. 0:07:32.040 --> 0:07:34.040 And if you if you want to, if you want 0:07:34.080 --> 0:07:35.960 to look at this as like I don't know, if 0:07:35.960 --> 0:07:39.200 you wanted to like diagram this as like a soil 0:07:39.360 --> 0:07:43.240 or something like that, or sedimentary layers. The base of 0:07:43.280 --> 0:07:45.760 it all is the Illuminati, right, that is the er 0:07:46.000 --> 0:07:51.960 conspiracy and American political culture. Um so. Yeah. Meanwhile, the 0:07:52.040 --> 0:07:53.400 end of the eighteen hundreds in the start of the 0:07:53.440 --> 0:07:56.400 nineteen hundreds saw another surge of interest in the occult. 0:07:56.720 --> 0:07:59.160 It seems like this kind of happens once every century 0:07:59.280 --> 0:08:02.120 or so, that's been pretty consistent for the last three 0:08:02.200 --> 0:08:05.680 hundred years something like that. And over in Europe, a 0:08:05.720 --> 0:08:09.600 pair of wizards resurrected the Illuminati. The founders were tied 0:08:09.640 --> 0:08:13.480 to the Oto and Alistair Crowley, and the Second Illuminati 0:08:13.840 --> 0:08:17.480 was never really much more than a side shows. It's 0:08:17.560 --> 0:08:20.680 primary contribution to kind of occult history in Europe was 0:08:20.720 --> 0:08:23.200 that in nineteen o two had allied itself with the 0:08:23.320 --> 0:08:28.000 Order of the Golden Dawn. Now the Golden Dawn had 0:08:28.040 --> 0:08:32.880 also been founded on shall we say shaky his shaky 0:08:32.960 --> 0:08:36.640 grounds truth wise, by a Rosicrucian named Wentworth Little, who 0:08:36.679 --> 0:08:38.800 claimed to have come into the possession of a coded 0:08:38.840 --> 0:08:41.720 manuscript that led him to a woman named Anna Sprangel 0:08:41.800 --> 0:08:45.680 in Germany who was in touch with unknown superiors who 0:08:45.720 --> 0:08:49.280 had taught him about a secret organization behind the secret 0:08:49.360 --> 0:08:53.280 organization behind the myth of the Rosa Crucians. And you 0:08:53.320 --> 0:08:55.920 can see shades of kind of what of aishapped was 0:08:55.960 --> 0:08:59.160 doing with the Illuminati here. I've you know, this organization 0:08:59.240 --> 0:09:01.960 has a history. It's actually much older than people know. 0:09:02.080 --> 0:09:04.920 There's this group of unknown folks in addition to me, 0:09:05.000 --> 0:09:08.800 who are actually running things. Yeah. I want to quote 0:09:08.840 --> 0:09:12.800 here from our old friend pro cult activist Massimo entrophying 0:09:12.880 --> 0:09:17.040 again because he saw again, if you're going to write 0:09:17.040 --> 0:09:19.320 it's detailed history of this ship. You're going to wind 0:09:19.360 --> 0:09:21.839 up quoting a lot of crikes and weirdos. It's mostly 0:09:21.920 --> 0:09:24.599 going to be crips and weirdos. This is just a 0:09:24.679 --> 0:09:28.319 fact of the matter. Westcott claimed to have found Sprangle's address, 0:09:28.360 --> 0:09:30.040 to have written to her, and to have obtained the 0:09:30.040 --> 0:09:32.560 authorization of the Unknown Superiors to found an order in 0:09:32.559 --> 0:09:35.440 England placed under their authority, the Golden Dawn. In spite 0:09:35.480 --> 0:09:37.720 of the great influence it exerted on art and literature, 0:09:37.880 --> 0:09:40.480 the Golden Dawn rested on a mystification. There was no 0:09:40.559 --> 0:09:43.280 Anna Sprangele and Westcott had simply invented the whole story. 0:09:43.520 --> 0:09:45.800 It was Alister Crowley who had been initiated into the 0:09:45.840 --> 0:09:48.679 Golden Dawn in eighteen ninety eight and had immediately engaged 0:09:48.720 --> 0:09:51.400 in trying to overthrow its leaders, who in nineteen hundred 0:09:51.440 --> 0:09:58.640 revealed the deception. Crowley is a very complicated surist, and 0:09:58.880 --> 0:10:01.720 he I think in a lot ways qualifies as a 0:10:01.760 --> 0:10:04.960 bastard um. But one of the cool things that he 0:10:05.080 --> 0:10:08.800 did was completely overthrow every magical community that he that 0:10:09.440 --> 0:10:13.640 he went into. Into your Wizard Club, he's going to 0:10:13.640 --> 0:10:17.679 take over. He will take over your Wizard Club stop 0:10:17.760 --> 0:10:21.280 him and make you admit that you made the whole 0:10:21.320 --> 0:10:23.960 thing up. It's yes, and then have a lot of 0:10:23.960 --> 0:10:26.760 gay sex in the desert. So you know, Okay, I 0:10:26.800 --> 0:10:29.960 am certainly the least knowledge about knowledgeable about Crowley in 0:10:30.000 --> 0:10:33.719 our organization. But the thing that I always took from 0:10:33.760 --> 0:10:35.920 readings about him is that he was able to do 0:10:35.960 --> 0:10:38.840 that in all these organizations because he had He's got 0:10:38.880 --> 0:10:41.920 some jock energy to him. Yes that like most wizards, 0:10:44.600 --> 0:10:47.199 he just kind of had that confidence to let him 0:10:47.200 --> 0:10:52.320 bully his way. Is this kind of like when punks 0:10:52.360 --> 0:10:55.559 go to like nerd conventions, We're just in charge because 0:10:55.600 --> 0:11:00.120 I actually have social skills, and we like, yeah, it's 0:11:00.160 --> 0:11:03.280 gonna this is gonna be very controversial on the subbreddit. 0:11:03.800 --> 0:11:10.040 Margaret Kiljoy just got canceled. Yeah, Crawley was really the 0:11:10.080 --> 0:11:13.800 first punk, is what you're trying to say? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 0:11:13.960 --> 0:11:17.320 I'm gonna take a stand and say that I absolutely no, 0:11:17.400 --> 0:11:20.040 I actually don't know that much somewhere underground and the 0:11:20.120 --> 0:11:22.640 Vault Vault of the Golden Dawn is the very first 0:11:22.679 --> 0:11:28.920 battle jacket into it. Yeah, But also, but you keep 0:11:28.960 --> 0:11:31.959 talking about this thing where it's like it seems like 0:11:32.040 --> 0:11:36.400 the cultists are the okay ones, and the conspiracy theorists 0:11:36.440 --> 0:11:39.000 are the ones who do the Nazis shit. Yeah, I 0:11:39.000 --> 0:11:41.920 mean because these these guys, the people forming this new 0:11:42.040 --> 0:11:43.760 order of I mean the people who kind of form 0:11:43.880 --> 0:11:47.280 this new Illuminati and marry it to the golden dawn. 0:11:47.360 --> 0:11:49.960 I haven't come across any evidence that they're bastards like 0:11:50.000 --> 0:11:51.960 they were there were people who wanted to dress up 0:11:51.960 --> 0:11:54.800 and do magic like. There's nothing harmful about what they're 0:11:54.800 --> 0:12:00.880 doing here. Um, it's just it's not wildly influential. Ingle, 0:12:01.120 --> 0:12:02.840 who was one of the people who winds up in 0:12:02.920 --> 0:12:05.640 charge of this new Illuminati, funds it. I found this 0:12:05.720 --> 0:12:08.440 interesting by writing a series of like short stories for 0:12:08.559 --> 0:12:12.440 dime novels under a shitload of different names. He kind 0:12:12.520 --> 0:12:14.760 of does an l. Ron Hubbard, but in reverse, where 0:12:14.800 --> 0:12:17.600 Like Hubbard writes all these dime novels and then creates 0:12:17.600 --> 0:12:19.800 a cult because he wants to get out of that industry, 0:12:20.040 --> 0:12:22.800 whereas Ingle funds his little cult by writing a bunch 0:12:22.840 --> 0:12:24.640 of like shitty weird fiction. I don't know if it 0:12:24.640 --> 0:12:26.559 was shitty. Actually I haven't read it. I shouldn't be 0:12:26.640 --> 0:12:29.160 judgmental like that. It might have been good weird fiction. 0:12:31.280 --> 0:12:34.800 His Illuminati limps on into the nineteen seventies when they 0:12:34.840 --> 0:12:38.520 fall a foul of Germany's militant post war anti cult movement. 0:12:38.920 --> 0:12:42.679 There is we talk about this in the episode Sorry, yeah, 0:12:42.800 --> 0:12:45.520 that's really funny. Yeah, well, we talked about this in 0:12:45.559 --> 0:12:50.200 the episodes titled The School That Raped Everyone, which is 0:12:50.480 --> 0:12:53.679 a dark episode about how there was an element of 0:12:53.800 --> 0:12:57.080 kind of the progressive left in post war Germany that 0:12:57.200 --> 0:12:59.720 embraced free love politics to such an extent that they 0:13:00.280 --> 0:13:03.920 justifying the molestation of children. And this is a big 0:13:03.960 --> 0:13:05.960 part of what gets the Illuminati in trouble. I have 0:13:06.040 --> 0:13:08.640 not found any evidence that they are molesting anybody, but 0:13:08.679 --> 0:13:11.800 they are teaching sex magic. And because there are a 0:13:11.800 --> 0:13:14.920 lot of problems with other kind of people in who 0:13:14.920 --> 0:13:18.520 are broadly in the same sort of cultic milieu, you 0:13:18.600 --> 0:13:21.360 might say as the Illuminati in this period who are 0:13:21.520 --> 0:13:24.760 molesting children, they get caught up in I don't even 0:13:24.800 --> 0:13:26.200 want to call it a moral panic. A lot of 0:13:26.200 --> 0:13:29.280 people were actually harmed, but the Illuminati does not seem 0:13:29.320 --> 0:13:32.760 to have been justifiably targeted here. They were just like 0:13:33.040 --> 0:13:36.760 adults who were doing satanic orgies, which is fine, yeah, 0:13:36.800 --> 0:13:40.200 I mean like, but like this, this complaint continues on today, 0:13:40.240 --> 0:13:42.199 how a lot of yes, a lot of like sex 0:13:42.280 --> 0:13:46.560 cults are specifically the OTO is just kind of a 0:13:46.600 --> 0:13:50.640 sex cult for its for its like older male members. 0:13:50.880 --> 0:13:54.520 This is this is this is something that is is Yeah, 0:13:54.720 --> 0:13:58.520 very very much a continuing critique, And there's nothing inherently 0:13:58.559 --> 0:14:01.040 wrong with making a sex for you and your friends. 0:14:01.040 --> 0:14:04.680 I've been in a couple of sex cults. It's fine. Yeah, 0:14:04.720 --> 0:14:08.400 they always end great. It's what everyone says about sex calls. 0:14:08.400 --> 0:14:12.880 Some of them do, yeah, and the Illuminati doesn't end 0:14:12.880 --> 0:14:15.720 all that terribly, but it just kind of peters out 0:14:15.800 --> 0:14:19.440 after this point. The last leader of the Second Illuminati, 0:14:19.520 --> 0:14:23.400 a guy named Metzker, dies a lonely alcoholic in nineteen ninety, 0:14:23.520 --> 0:14:25.560 which is a pretty common way for things to end 0:14:25.600 --> 0:14:29.640 for the leaders of sex colts. While Metzger's Illuminati was 0:14:29.680 --> 0:14:32.960 limping through the last arthritic stages of its life, events 0:14:33.040 --> 0:14:35.280 over in the United States were about to bring the 0:14:35.280 --> 0:14:38.120 Illuminati to a level of fame it hadn't enjoyed even 0:14:38.120 --> 0:14:42.240 in the days of Adam I Shopped. Carrie Windell Thornley 0:14:42.440 --> 0:14:46.800 was born on April seventeenth, nineteen thirty eight, in Whittier, California. 0:14:46.880 --> 0:14:50.680 Whittier is today a suburb of Los Angeles. It is 0:14:51.200 --> 0:14:53.200 back then it was kind of just like its own 0:14:53.440 --> 0:14:57.440 little town in the middle of southern California. If you 0:14:57.560 --> 0:15:00.440 google the neighborhood that Carrie Thornley grew up in today, 0:15:00.640 --> 0:15:04.360 you'll immediately be shown a map that depicts the unincorporated community, 0:15:04.480 --> 0:15:07.640 boxed in by bold blue pins that indicate a Costco, 0:15:07.960 --> 0:15:11.280 a home depot, a savers, a Target, and a Trader Joe's. 0:15:11.600 --> 0:15:15.040 They surround East Whittier like a capitalist pentagram, almost as 0:15:15.080 --> 0:15:17.560 if her medic capitalist wizards were trying to keep some 0:15:17.600 --> 0:15:20.680 sort of dangerous energy contained within. These are the things 0:15:20.720 --> 0:15:23.080 you think about when you spent sixteen hours writing about 0:15:23.120 --> 0:15:30.880 the Illuminati late at nights. No one fuck up those stores, 0:15:31.200 --> 0:15:35.840 or all hell will be based upon the world. Yeah, 0:15:35.960 --> 0:15:39.760 these are will crawl from underneath the Costco and start 0:15:39.840 --> 0:15:43.920 taking over the suburb. This is the Seven Seals of Neoliberalism. 0:15:44.440 --> 0:15:46.800 This is John Darnell novel, and I would read it. 0:15:49.040 --> 0:15:52.040 Carrie was raised Mormon, and for much of the first 0:15:52.120 --> 0:15:55.240 seven years of his life his father was overseas fighting it. 0:15:55.320 --> 0:15:57.040 A little thing he might have heard of called the 0:15:57.080 --> 0:16:00.120 Second World War. Most of the context we have for 0:16:00.240 --> 0:16:02.960 his childhood comes from a letter his brother wrote decades 0:16:03.040 --> 0:16:05.640 later that I found reprinted in a zine published by 0:16:05.680 --> 0:16:09.760 Carrie's ideological children. Most of the good history on Carrie 0:16:09.840 --> 0:16:12.760 you find scattered in zines that are like thirty years old, 0:16:12.800 --> 0:16:16.040 so it is a whole thing piecing it together. I'm 0:16:16.080 --> 0:16:18.120 going to read a quote from that letter now, though, 0:16:18.320 --> 0:16:20.960 and this is his brother talking. We were living behind 0:16:20.960 --> 0:16:22.960 my grandparents when I was born and what is now 0:16:23.000 --> 0:16:25.520 called watts on seventy seventh Street in la and our 0:16:25.600 --> 0:16:28.080 dad was in the navy stationed in Okinawa at the time. 0:16:28.400 --> 0:16:31.000 When Dad had returned from World War Two, Carrie was 0:16:31.040 --> 0:16:33.160 waiting to welcome him, dressed in a sailor's out that 0:16:33.280 --> 0:16:35.200 my mom had gotten him, and I was a newborn 0:16:35.200 --> 0:16:37.520 in a cradle. Dad came in the door and rushed 0:16:37.560 --> 0:16:40.160 over to see me before he hugged Carrie. Carrie got 0:16:40.200 --> 0:16:41.840 so pissed that he ran out the back door and 0:16:41.880 --> 0:16:44.080 climbed up the walnut tree and refused to come down. 0:16:44.480 --> 0:16:46.240 That event, more than any other, set the tone for 0:16:46.320 --> 0:16:48.680 Carrie's relationship with me. The rest of my life is 0:16:48.720 --> 0:16:50.800 punctuated with events in which Carrie did his best to 0:16:50.840 --> 0:16:53.120 get even with me, from what I called his intellectual 0:16:53.200 --> 0:16:55.640 muggings when I was in college to writing parodies of 0:16:55.720 --> 0:16:57.960 letters that I would send him later in life. Our 0:16:58.040 --> 0:17:01.800 father was a raging alcoholic, so by necessity Carry became 0:17:01.880 --> 0:17:04.560 like a father figure to me and Dick. So he's 0:17:04.600 --> 0:17:07.840 like a complicated guy. He's the fact that his dad 0:17:07.960 --> 0:17:10.400 is absent, I think has a big impact on him, 0:17:10.440 --> 0:17:14.439 and he feels this sense of like jealousy for his 0:17:14.560 --> 0:17:17.720 father's attention because it had been so absent, but also 0:17:17.800 --> 0:17:20.920 because his father is this violent asshole, he sort of 0:17:21.040 --> 0:17:23.359 acts to protect his younger brothers. You know, it's a 0:17:23.400 --> 0:17:26.200 complicated thing I think he does. You know, he's obviously 0:17:26.359 --> 0:17:28.480 he's a kid, so there's sometimes he does shit out 0:17:28.480 --> 0:17:31.040 of spite to his brothers. But you get the feeling 0:17:31.080 --> 0:17:33.560 that he did the most that he could to try 0:17:33.640 --> 0:17:36.400 and fill that gap that was left by his dad 0:17:36.440 --> 0:17:39.960 being a non functional person, Like he did hit the 0:17:40.000 --> 0:17:41.840 best job I think you could have expected of a 0:17:41.880 --> 0:17:45.760 kid in that circumstance. It's a difficult way to grow up. Yeah. 0:17:46.200 --> 0:17:48.800 Carrie met Greg Hill, who was three years younger, in 0:17:48.880 --> 0:17:52.160 high school in nineteen fifty six. The two were members 0:17:52.160 --> 0:17:55.400 of the very first generation of their nerds. They're big 0:17:55.440 --> 0:17:58.439 fucking nerds, and they were sometimes mocked by it. I 0:17:58.440 --> 0:18:00.720 think like George McFly from Back to the Future, that 0:18:00.880 --> 0:18:03.439 is exactly the kind of kids that we're talking about. 0:18:03.800 --> 0:18:07.320 They were huge into Mad Magazine, which was kind of 0:18:07.359 --> 0:18:09.959 like that was a lot of people who wind up 0:18:10.080 --> 0:18:13.600 very radical in the sixties and seventies start by reading 0:18:13.680 --> 0:18:18.479 Mad Magazine and in the early sixties or whatever, and 0:18:18.520 --> 0:18:21.439 they were interested in radical political ideas much like the 0:18:21.440 --> 0:18:24.880 ones that had animated Adam Bishopped centuries before. They were 0:18:24.920 --> 0:18:27.919 also again big sci fi nerds, with what one biographer 0:18:27.960 --> 0:18:32.320 describes as a fondness for crackpots. Their childhoods would have 0:18:32.320 --> 0:18:35.399 involved colorful, weirdly horny comic books and the short stories 0:18:35.440 --> 0:18:38.560 of men like Bob Heinlin, Philip K. Dick, and l 0:18:38.680 --> 0:18:41.480 Ron Hubbard. Greg and Carey were so excited by this 0:18:41.520 --> 0:18:44.720 stuff that they briefly attended meetings of a nearby uf 0:18:44.720 --> 0:18:49.680 O cult as adolescence called understanding. Greg later recalled through 0:18:49.680 --> 0:18:52.520 our mutual general interest in wondering just what was going 0:18:52.560 --> 0:18:55.120 on out there in that gigantic world, and are many 0:18:55.160 --> 0:18:59.320 common specific interests in humanism, anti religionism, and enjoyant for 0:18:59.560 --> 0:19:02.880 enjoyment for Omar Khayam, and a curiosity for the bizarre 0:19:02.880 --> 0:19:06.240 like black magic and hypnotism, plus our common warped sense 0:19:06.240 --> 0:19:10.120 of humor. We formed a close friendship. So that's that's 0:19:10.160 --> 0:19:12.760 who these guys are, right, Like, they're they're kind of 0:19:13.400 --> 0:19:16.439 young kids in this boring town and they get really 0:19:16.480 --> 0:19:19.720 into science fiction and fantasy, and that leads them into 0:19:19.840 --> 0:19:22.120 reading about the occult and reading all of these also 0:19:22.200 --> 0:19:24.640 kind of like mystic They're into the Sufis, they're into 0:19:24.720 --> 0:19:27.560 Zinn Buddhism, like they're not just into like kind of 0:19:27.920 --> 0:19:31.919 golden dawns. Yeah, they're they're pretty cool. Actually, yeah, Um, 0:19:32.200 --> 0:19:34.359 I would say, I don't know how it's gonna end up, 0:19:34.400 --> 0:19:36.760 So I'm gonna hold onto them as being real cool 0:19:36.840 --> 0:19:39.399 right now. They're there. It's going to end in a 0:19:39.400 --> 0:19:43.119 couple of different ways, Margaret. Everyone involved in the movement 0:19:43.119 --> 0:19:47.760 we're talking about has a very very different ending. Um. Okay, 0:19:47.840 --> 0:19:51.760 I could choose your adventure novel. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um. 0:19:51.920 --> 0:19:53.959 I do want to talk a little bit about Omar Khayam, 0:19:54.640 --> 0:19:58.440 who is a He was a guy who lived from 0:19:58.480 --> 0:20:02.320 like basically around a thousand ish to eleven hundred a d. 0:20:03.280 --> 0:20:05.680 He's a polymath, one of these guys who's like he's 0:20:05.720 --> 0:20:08.960 doing math and he's a philosopher, and he's writing poetry 0:20:09.000 --> 0:20:13.960 that's still very popular today. And he's one of the 0:20:14.000 --> 0:20:16.600 things about him that's kind of interesting and that's probably 0:20:16.640 --> 0:20:18.880 going to be relevant. That's going to definitely be relevant 0:20:18.920 --> 0:20:21.760 to the way that Kerry Thornley uses him, because Thornley's 0:20:21.760 --> 0:20:24.919 obsessed with this guy. Is that for kind of centuries 0:20:24.920 --> 0:20:28.840 and centuries after his death, it became a tradition in 0:20:28.960 --> 0:20:32.360 a chunk of at least Islamic poetry to attribute your 0:20:32.400 --> 0:20:36.280 poems to Omar Khayam. And this started being done this 0:20:36.440 --> 0:20:41.280 like for whatever reason in the eighteen hundreds, Europeans start 0:20:41.359 --> 0:20:43.320 doing this too, and some of this is tied in 0:20:43.440 --> 0:20:47.119 with like orientalism. I'm not a great person to discuss that, 0:20:47.160 --> 0:20:49.320 because this is a very influential figure. But one thing 0:20:49.359 --> 0:20:51.199 that's important to know is he is a real poet 0:20:51.400 --> 0:20:53.920 who also has become kind of this. I don't know 0:20:53.960 --> 0:20:55.720 if it's calling him a symbol is the right thing, 0:20:55.760 --> 0:20:58.920 but people decided to attribute poems to him that had 0:20:58.960 --> 0:21:01.560 not been written by him. There's a bunch of these 0:21:01.560 --> 0:21:05.080 throughout history, these like shared author names. They're really interesting. 0:21:05.119 --> 0:21:07.800 It may yeah, it is, it is really interesting. Obviously 0:21:07.880 --> 0:21:10.439 Kerry Thornley is very interested in this guy, maybe in 0:21:10.520 --> 0:21:13.159 part because of that. A lot of a lot of 0:21:13.160 --> 0:21:15.679 like a cult authors also also have this. There's like 0:21:15.760 --> 0:21:19.960 Hermes Trismegistus, There's there's a lot of even um even 0:21:20.320 --> 0:21:24.119 the uh oh, I forget the forget the name, let 0:21:24.119 --> 0:21:26.080 me look it up quick. Um. Well, that's why I 0:21:26.080 --> 0:21:29.840 have a new book coming out by um Alistair Crowley, 0:21:30.200 --> 0:21:34.639 um the name under Now see, I'm doing a totally 0:21:34.680 --> 0:21:36.960 different thing. I'm just gonna credit my next book to 0:21:37.040 --> 0:21:40.600 Stephen King and just take that money, you know, just 0:21:41.080 --> 0:21:44.440 just take that cash, baby. I mean. In terms of 0:21:44.520 --> 0:21:46.800 a cult authors who also did this, there was the 0:21:47.400 --> 0:21:51.760 the fourth Book of a Cult Philosophy by Agrippa, probably 0:21:51.840 --> 0:21:55.359 not written by the actual Agrippa, who dead for several 0:21:55.440 --> 0:21:58.880 thousand years. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's just yeah. 0:21:58.920 --> 0:22:02.080 It's it's interesting a trend that that continues because like 0:22:02.359 --> 0:22:04.439 the types of communities that were that were writing these 0:22:04.640 --> 0:22:08.440 occult Texas groups really do get continued by the stuff 0:22:08.480 --> 0:22:13.000 that Greg Hill was actually inadvertently developing. And it's interesting, 0:22:13.160 --> 0:22:16.160 like just how similar this type of stuff is. Okay, 0:22:16.200 --> 0:22:18.520 And then one of the other of these shared names, 0:22:19.000 --> 0:22:24.320 Luther Bliss. It is Italian collective of radicals who then 0:22:24.560 --> 0:22:26.640 lots of people write under this name that put out 0:22:26.640 --> 0:22:29.720 a book called Q that's a conspiracy book that came 0:22:29.800 --> 0:22:32.280