WEBVTT - Mind Games 0:00:04.080 --> 0:00:07.440 Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of 0:00:07.480 --> 0:00:14.440 iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of 0:00:14.480 --> 0:00:18.440 the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all 0:00:18.480 --> 0:00:22.159 of these amazing tales are right there on display, just 0:00:22.200 --> 0:00:28.840 waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. 0:00:36.280 --> 0:00:38.720 Every single one of us, in our own way, is 0:00:38.800 --> 0:00:41.920 passing through history. We have no way of knowing exactly 0:00:41.960 --> 0:00:44.440 who is going to earn their place in a history 0:00:44.440 --> 0:00:47.159 book on the main page, or who will wind up 0:00:47.159 --> 0:00:50.040 as mere footnotes. For those of us who read history 0:00:50.080 --> 0:00:53.000 for a living know one thing to be true. There's 0:00:53.080 --> 0:00:56.080 more life in between the lines than any history book 0:00:56.120 --> 0:00:58.920 can tell us, and it's there that the most fascinating 0:00:59.040 --> 0:01:03.280 questions live. Follow me to the Haymarket Theater in London 0:01:03.360 --> 0:01:06.560 in the year seventeen forty five, an opera called lyn 0:01:06.680 --> 0:01:11.039 Costanza de Luza has just premiered. A lavish spectacle. But 0:01:11.120 --> 0:01:14.280 what made this opera notable was not its content or 0:01:14.280 --> 0:01:17.920 its production, but a little known musician who contributed three 0:01:18.000 --> 0:01:20.880 arias that he'd written. He had just arrived in Europe, 0:01:21.040 --> 0:01:24.160 and writers of the time described him as suave and charming, 0:01:24.440 --> 0:01:27.440 with dark hair and a fine sense of dress. This 0:01:27.600 --> 0:01:31.399 man was arrested in London that same year under suspicion 0:01:31.480 --> 0:01:34.839 of spine, but later released due to lack of evidence. 0:01:35.280 --> 0:01:39.240 Horace Walpole, the famous British author and politician, referred to 0:01:39.319 --> 0:01:41.800 him in one of his letters, he has been here 0:01:41.920 --> 0:01:44.560 these two years and will not tell who he is 0:01:44.800 --> 0:01:47.560 or whence, but professed that he does not go by 0:01:47.600 --> 0:01:52.080 his right name. He sings, plays the violin wonderfully, composes, 0:01:52.520 --> 0:01:56.360 is mad and not very sensible. He has called an Italian, 0:01:56.480 --> 0:01:59.880 a Spaniard, a poll a, somebody that married a great 0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:04.640 fortune in Mexico and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople, 0:02:04.840 --> 0:02:08.839 a priest of fiddler, a vast noblemen. The man who 0:02:08.880 --> 0:02:13.040 fits this intriguing description was known by a single French title, 0:02:13.400 --> 0:02:16.320 the Compe de Saint Germain. He seemingly came out of 0:02:16.360 --> 0:02:20.440 nowhere in the seventeen forties, impressing high society in London 0:02:20.480 --> 0:02:23.800 with his musical talents, but after his arrest in seventeen 0:02:23.919 --> 0:02:27.520 forty five, he did not stay long in London. Instead, 0:02:27.560 --> 0:02:30.720 he traveled to mainland Europe, where he ingratiated himself with 0:02:30.760 --> 0:02:33.799 the French courts of King Louis the fifteenth. By the 0:02:33.840 --> 0:02:37.360 late seventeen forties he had become a close counselor and 0:02:37.520 --> 0:02:42.560 occasional political agent for the French crown. He spoke many languages, 0:02:42.639 --> 0:02:47.680 including French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, and was 0:02:47.720 --> 0:02:50.639 able to converse on a wide variety of topics, from 0:02:50.680 --> 0:02:56.000 politics to science. Although perhaps science might be overstating it 0:02:56.120 --> 0:02:59.440 just a little, you see, one of the count's primary interests, 0:02:59.480 --> 0:03:03.200 according to the stories, was the field of alchemy. It was, 0:03:03.360 --> 0:03:06.760 at this point in history, on the decline in comparison 0:03:06.800 --> 0:03:10.960 to other natural sciences, but there were still many eager practitioners. 0:03:11.320 --> 0:03:15.040 After all, goals like turning lead into gold or achieving 0:03:15.120 --> 0:03:20.240 immortality will always inspire some people. As the decades wore on, 0:03:20.639 --> 0:03:23.600 members of high society pointed out that he barely seemed 0:03:23.639 --> 0:03:26.840 to age. One anecdote tells of an encounter with an 0:03:26.840 --> 0:03:31.280 elderly countess in the seventeen sixties who expressed disbelief at 0:03:31.320 --> 0:03:34.320 seeing him. She said that she had known account Saint 0:03:34.400 --> 0:03:37.840 Germain and Venice back in seventeen ten. She asked if 0:03:37.840 --> 0:03:40.280 it was his father that she had met, and instead, 0:03:40.440 --> 0:03:43.160 Saint Germain said that he had lived in Venice at 0:03:43.160 --> 0:03:46.400 that time, so it was he that she remembered, and 0:03:46.480 --> 0:03:49.160 she was amazed. The man she knew was forty five 0:03:49.240 --> 0:03:51.480 years old at the time, meaning that he would be 0:03:51.560 --> 0:03:56.200 one hundred years old. During their conversation. Saint Germain accepted 0:03:56.200 --> 0:04:00.360 the suggestion proudly, still never confirming what his original name 0:04:00.520 --> 0:04:04.400 was nor where he came from. Later, at various dinner parties, 0:04:04.440 --> 0:04:06.960 he would claim to be over three hundred years old. 0:04:07.360 --> 0:04:12.000 Both Voltaire and Casanova wrote about him with skepticism, referring 0:04:12.040 --> 0:04:15.760 to him as a teller of enormous lies. Voltaire referred 0:04:15.760 --> 0:04:18.760 to him as and I quote, a man who never dies, 0:04:19.080 --> 0:04:23.440 who knows everything, but Casanova conceded that as a liar, 0:04:23.600 --> 0:04:28.080 Saint Germain was an incredibly persuasive one. In seventeen sixty, 0:04:28.120 --> 0:04:30.680 for example, he talked his way into the Hague and 0:04:30.720 --> 0:04:33.640 began peace talks to end the Seven Years War between 0:04:33.680 --> 0:04:36.440 England and France. No one ever knew where all his 0:04:36.520 --> 0:04:39.039 money came from either. He seemed to be wealthy, but 0:04:39.120 --> 0:04:42.520 had no bank account or land to speak of. This observation, 0:04:42.680 --> 0:04:46.120 of course, fueled rumors of him being a powerful alchemist. 0:04:46.240 --> 0:04:49.000 After all, if you can turn any substance into gold, 0:04:49.279 --> 0:04:51.960 then you don't need a bank account, do you. After 0:04:52.040 --> 0:04:56.200 forty years of traveling freely throughout Europe, charming high society, 0:04:56.279 --> 0:04:59.560 and writing music, Saint Germain spent the last few years 0:04:59.560 --> 0:05:03.040 of his life life in Central Germany doing alchemy experiments 0:05:03.040 --> 0:05:06.200 with the Danish Prince Charles Now In his eighties, he 0:05:06.480 --> 0:05:08.880 confided to the Prince that he was the son of 0:05:08.960 --> 0:05:13.400 Francis the second Racozzi, a renowned nobleman from Transylvania, which 0:05:13.400 --> 0:05:17.120 would explain his wealth and comforts among nobility. Like all 0:05:17.160 --> 0:05:20.960 of his stories, this part was never confirmed. Saint Germain 0:05:21.200 --> 0:05:24.400 seemingly died in seventeen eighty four, but that was not 0:05:24.520 --> 0:05:28.560 the end of his story. Sightings of him persisted long 0:05:28.680 --> 0:05:32.120 after his death. After his tall tales, a growing number 0:05:32.160 --> 0:05:35.080 of people believe that he really was immortal. In the 0:05:35.120 --> 0:05:39.360 two hundred years that followed, many copycats have appeared, claiming 0:05:39.400 --> 0:05:43.480 to be the man himself, still alive after all these years. 0:05:43.920 --> 0:05:47.400 The most recent was in the nineteen seventies. Even if 0:05:47.400 --> 0:05:50.480 the original Count of Saint Germain was just an incredibly 0:05:50.520 --> 0:05:54.480 skilled con artist, a talented mister Ripley of the eighteenth century. 0:05:54.839 --> 0:05:58.000 There is still something about him that makes even skeptics 0:05:58.240 --> 0:06:02.480 want to believe the impossible. Through his lies and charms, 0:06:03.040 --> 0:06:20.400 he cast a spell on history. The animal rights movement 0:06:20.440 --> 0:06:23.280 seems like a modern phenomenon. You might think that people 0:06:23.320 --> 0:06:26.239 only started to speak out against killing animals once food 0:06:26.320 --> 0:06:30.160 became plentiful in the second half of the twentieth century. However, 0:06:30.360 --> 0:06:33.640 even in the past, when modern conveniences were still a 0:06:33.680 --> 0:06:37.680 long ways off, there were compassionate individuals begging others to 0:06:37.720 --> 0:06:41.719 think of the animals. One such person was Anna Kingsford, 0:06:41.920 --> 0:06:46.000 a nineteenth century physician with some very curious methods when 0:06:46.040 --> 0:06:49.440 it came to furthering the cause. Anna was born near 0:06:49.480 --> 0:06:53.200 London in eighteen forty six to a wealthy merchant family. 0:06:53.520 --> 0:06:56.920 From an early age, she claimed to receive strange visions 0:06:56.960 --> 0:07:01.120 and communicate with fairies. These communications gave her a profound 0:07:01.160 --> 0:07:04.640 sense of spiritualism and a connection to the natural world. 0:07:05.040 --> 0:07:08.359 Though she initially enjoyed fox hunting with her family, a 0:07:08.480 --> 0:07:11.880 vision where she saw herself as a fox being hunted 0:07:12.240 --> 0:07:15.760 led to her never wanting to participate again. As she 0:07:15.840 --> 0:07:19.360 grew older, her love for animals only increased. She had 0:07:19.360 --> 0:07:22.360 a pet guinea pig named Rufus, who she confided in. 0:07:22.720 --> 0:07:25.720 She became a vegetarian and realized that she needed to 0:07:25.760 --> 0:07:29.120 pursue a medical degree if she wanted to convince others 0:07:29.160 --> 0:07:32.840 that her diet was the healthiest now. Women weren't allowed 0:07:32.920 --> 0:07:35.560 to become doctors in England at the time, and so 0:07:35.600 --> 0:07:38.520 she traveled across the Channel to Paris, but she soon 0:07:38.560 --> 0:07:42.120 found herself in her own personal hell. It was while 0:07:42.160 --> 0:07:45.040 studying at the Natural History Museum there that she heard 0:07:45.080 --> 0:07:48.280 a horrible scream of pain from down the hall. Afraid 0:07:48.280 --> 0:07:51.200 that someone was being hurt, she raced toward the sound, 0:07:51.440 --> 0:07:54.600 only to find a lab where a professor was dissecting 0:07:54.920 --> 0:07:58.640 a live dog. At this time, anesthesia wasn't common and 0:07:58.720 --> 0:08:02.560 it wasn't used on animal These vivisections, as they were known, 0:08:02.840 --> 0:08:06.240 were a horrible thing to behold. Anna was mortified, and 0:08:06.280 --> 0:08:08.880 she continued to be every time she saw one of 0:08:08.920 --> 0:08:12.560 these experiments. As part of her coursework, she began her 0:08:12.600 --> 0:08:15.880 own studies into the chemical composition of both meat and 0:08:15.960 --> 0:08:18.880 plant matter, and was encouraged when she found that they 0:08:18.880 --> 0:08:22.640 can contain the same chemical compounds. It seems obvious to 0:08:22.720 --> 0:08:24.960 us now, but finding that you could get protein from 0:08:25.000 --> 0:08:28.640 both meat and certain plants, for example, was a big discovery. 0:08:28.680 --> 0:08:32.400 At the time, Darwin's theory of evolution was growing in 0:08:32.480 --> 0:08:35.240 prominence as well, and the idea that we are all 0:08:35.320 --> 0:08:38.360 related to every other animal on the planet only further 0:08:38.559 --> 0:08:41.880 encouraged her. She wrote her thesis on the Benefits of 0:08:41.920 --> 0:08:45.800 a vegetarian diet, including some of these discoveries, while also 0:08:45.880 --> 0:08:49.920 including some less scientific assertions. For example, she believed that 0:08:50.040 --> 0:08:53.520 eating meat made someone more violent and lowered their IQ, 0:08:53.960 --> 0:08:56.880 and she also believed that all great warriors in history, 0:08:57.040 --> 0:09:00.720 like the Spartans, were great because they ate bread. And 0:09:00.800 --> 0:09:03.920 her legacy would continue to be a mixture of science 0:09:04.000 --> 0:09:07.280 and superstition. Although she had become a doctor, she would 0:09:07.360 --> 0:09:10.280 never let go of her spiritual side. She continued to 0:09:10.280 --> 0:09:13.600 claim to have visions and believed in frequent prayer to 0:09:13.720 --> 0:09:18.760 evoke God into saving animals. Anna disliked organized religion, though, 0:09:18.800 --> 0:09:21.600 believing that it was corrupt, but she did believe in God, 0:09:21.679 --> 0:09:24.080 and she believed that if he was the divine source 0:09:24.080 --> 0:09:26.600 of life in all humans and animals were a part 0:09:26.640 --> 0:09:30.560 of him. But her compassion didn't always extend to her 0:09:30.600 --> 0:09:34.360 fellow human beings. You see, Anna maated her life's mission 0:09:34.400 --> 0:09:36.560 to put an end to the kind of vivisection that 0:09:36.640 --> 0:09:39.800 she witnessed in medical school. She decided to start practicing 0:09:39.800 --> 0:09:42.880 what she called white magic, which was essentially the use 0:09:42.920 --> 0:09:46.160 of prayer to try and cast spells in the physical world. 0:09:46.600 --> 0:09:51.440 Most famously, or perhaps most infamously, this included directing psychic 0:09:51.480 --> 0:09:54.640 attacks against some of the greatest vivisectionists of the day. 0:09:55.040 --> 0:09:58.000 Among them were names that are still recognizable, such as 0:09:58.160 --> 0:10:03.319 Louis Pasteur, Claude Bernard, and Paul Bert died in eighteen 0:10:03.440 --> 0:10:07.640 seventy eight and eighteen eighty six. Anna took credit, claiming 0:10:07.679 --> 0:10:11.199 that she had used her abilities to assassinate them. Of course, 0:10:11.280 --> 0:10:14.640 no one took her seriously. They had died of natural causes, 0:10:14.640 --> 0:10:17.080 of course, But to be fair, it wasn't as if 0:10:17.160 --> 0:10:20.200 every other scientist of this era behaved rationally all the 0:10:20.240 --> 0:10:23.560 time and that Anna was just an outlier. For example, 0:10:23.679 --> 0:10:26.880 many scientists of her day had the opposite view of hers, 0:10:26.920 --> 0:10:31.320 believing that eating meat actually made someone superior. They used 0:10:31.320 --> 0:10:34.920 this to justify racist beliefs that Asians and Africans who 0:10:35.080 --> 0:10:39.400 ate a mixed diet were somehow inferior to Europeans. Today, 0:10:39.440 --> 0:10:42.080 we know that eating a well rounded diet is best, 0:10:42.320 --> 0:10:45.880 although vegetarianism has benefits when it comes to heart health 0:10:46.080 --> 0:10:48.960 and a carnivore diet has some advantages for those dealing 0:10:49.000 --> 0:10:53.120 with certain chronic diseases. And so Anna's legacy is less 0:10:53.160 --> 0:10:58.040 about accurate scientific discovery and more about compassion and determination. 0:10:58.640 --> 0:11:01.800 She reminds us to remain curious about the world around us, 0:11:02.240 --> 0:11:05.680 to not take anything for granted. In the end, how 0:11:05.760 --> 0:11:09.080 we treat our fellow animals may impact us in ways 0:11:09.679 --> 0:11:16.440 we simply can't imagine. I hope you enjoyed today's guided 0:11:16.480 --> 0:11:20.000 tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created 0:11:20.040 --> 0:11:24.360 by me Aaron Manke in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched 0:11:24.360 --> 0:11:26.800 and written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced 0:11:26.880 --> 0:11:29.560 by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the 0:11:29.559 --> 0:11:34.000 people who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities. 0:11:34.240 --> 0:11:36.600 You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of 0:11:36.640 --> 0:11:40.720 Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well 0:11:40.800 --> 0:11:43.520 as ebook and audiobook, and if you're looking for an 0:11:43.520 --> 0:11:46.840 ad free option, consider joining our Patreon It's all the 0:11:46.840 --> 0:11:50.600 same stories, but without the interruption for a small monthly fee. 0:11:50.760 --> 0:11:53.600 Learn more and sign up over at patreon dot com. 0:11:53.640 --> 0:12:01.440 Slash Grimandmild, and until next time, stay curious.