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

Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus to continue to discuss Helena Blavatsky.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Jamie Jamie loftest queen of the podcast Frontier. Wow, did
you get what that was a reference to? Yes, Davy Crockett.
David Crockett. I never know what you Yankees grow up with. Look,
we we don't really grow up with Davy Crockett, but
we we grow up with Disney movies that age poorly.
So I havena heard it. Well, if you're a Texan,

(00:25):
that also makes you think of Rusty Wallace, who is
a prominent Honda dealer in North Texas. When I was
a kid and had a song about his Honda dealership
that was done to the same tune. Really, yeah, there
you go for people who grew up in North Texas
at the same time that I did. There there is
remember those ads. There are so few things in this

(00:47):
world that can bond two people as quickly as knowing
the same local ad. It is like a rare. It's
the truest bond. It's the truest that exists. Marriage means
nothing next to having both seen. Listened to Jim Adler
the Texas Hammer ads before he killed himself, and it's
a it's a story, Jamie. You don't want to hear

(01:08):
about the Texas hammer and what went down, Um New
England had landscape was was pretty bleak as well. I
guess less cowboy ads not none, probably not none wherever
theyking huh, I'm not. Oh, don't gaslight me. He just Robert.

(01:35):
That was peak asshole blowing smoke into the camera on
your computer as Jamie asked you a question. And I
could and I can smell it, first of all. And
another thing, I'm smoking men falls because I hate me
some Joe Biden hated Joe Biden. Jamie Loftus, Helena Blavotsky,

(02:00):
Oh well, she became aware of him decades before his
birth in her perusal of the she was psychic. She
read about him in in the ethereal library system that
she exists in her theology. The one is one of
the esoteric terms I kept coming in the Akashic records,
the Akashak records. Yes, yes, yeah, we'll talk about them

(02:21):
more much later. Diner in Florida was trying to unpack
the Akashic records for me, and I was like, what
are these like? Can you describ And he's like I don't,
I don't you know, I don't really start talking about
Cairo and like Alexandria and the Library of Alexandria, and
like that. The records are the ethereal equivalent of the
Library of Alexandria, and Helena Blovotsky invinced them. So we're

(02:45):
gonna be talking about that later. Don't worry. I have
I have found that people will attribute whatever vague thing
that they They'll just be like, yeah, it's in the
Akashic Records, and whereas records exists for it's the vague
projection text. Well, I read about it in the Akashic Records.
There's a future book about it or something like how
many how many topics record because it's all over the

(03:07):
places everything, it's everything that's ever been written. So it's
a library outside of time. So like you can read
about the future by just like reading some history books.
Somebody wrote was aware of the fact that Donald Trump
in the future would attempt to strangle a Secret Service
agent to take control of the limousine away from him
on shaker. Yeah, because that's got to be in there somewhere.

(03:31):
So anyway, when we left off, Helena had kayaked her
way to freedom and escaped from her I don't know,
evil husband's really the right thing to say, because spoilers.
He spends the rest of his life like sending her money. Um,
whenever she does not love definitely her husband, she does
not see as as someone she wants to be around.
And he did lock her into castle. So whatever, that's

(03:53):
reason enough to not marry someone. Sure, but he does
keep sending her money. So I don't know. You can
think about it whoever you want. Yeah, definitely some finn
doom energy going off here. Also throughout her entire life.
So she was a scammer. She was about twenty years
she is in the wind right. Um, there are stories

(04:16):
and very detailed stories and both of our biographies about
everything she was doing during this period of time. We
have no way of knowing if any of them are true.
We definitely know a lot of them are false. Um,
there's a bunch of wild ship in here. She's in
like two different boat crashes that kill almost everybody on
the boat. Of her life. I'm more familiar with it,
like the wild stories that are unverifiable, absolutely unbar And

(04:39):
there's a bunch of stories. There's one when she's a
little girl. There's a story that she like partly falls
off a horse and like should have died, but the
spirit saved her. And it's like man, I had like
I had a horse bolt on me when I was
a kid. A lot of kids have a slightly scary
experience with a horse or a car or something else
that moves faster than things should move. It does. It's
not the ghosts, but whatever. No, the horse got back

(05:03):
to like ran back to where it lived and then
didn't want to run anymore. It was just scary because
I wasn't in control. I don't know that. I like,
it's just a horse that decided to run back home.
It didn't want to listen to me. Um, it happens
with horses. I assume I never read a horse, rode
a horse again. Um, well, fair enough, Well not for
any particularly. I just it's not a lot of opportunities
to ride horses. My cousin was riding a horse once

(05:26):
at the Jesus Horse Camp we used to get scholarships
to go to we were kids, and it died while
she was riding it. Jesus Christ. It just kind of
it just it just gave up. She sat on a
horse and it decided life was done. It Sorry, that's

(05:51):
extremely funny. The horse just committed suicide. I have second hand,
really old it was. It was that a camp in
the middle of news that young. So wow, they definitely
worked that horse to death. That's sad. That's actually that
was so formative for me where I don't remember any

(06:12):
of the Jesus stuff, but I do remember that when
my cousins sund on the horse and had died, and
I remember that for some reason, they like, because you
would just be doing Jesus stuff, horse stuff, Jesus stuff,
horse stuff, occasional hearts and crafts, dinner, uh, no contact
with the outside world and you. But there was like
one time where we had to watch a horse dental

(06:35):
procedure and I remember being like, I don't want to.
Can I leave? And they were like, because I like,
you need to watch here's how we shoe a horse
or like, but like, you don't. It's a horse rider.
You're never going to need to learn how to do
dentistry on your horse. That's not your job. That's that's
Christian nine year olds. Do you need to watch a

(06:56):
dental procedure? I bet they taught you more about that
than they did about sex though, um, oh for sure.
But I didn't see a horse get all the canal
to teach you about sex, slam a big fat subway
foot long down on the table and walking out. That go, now,

(07:16):
kids about sex. I know we have to talk about Helena,
but I do. I've seen this opinion circulating more and
it really brings me pleasure to see that people are finally,
you know, kind of coming around to this. The best
food at subway are the cookies. The cookies a subway major,
Are you kidding me? White macadeen? White chocolate macadeen? Are

(07:38):
not heart agree, Jamie Loft is no opinion, But I
do have some opinions about the life of Helena Blavatsky.
And over the next years after escaping, uh, she goes
all over the place. She starts a spiritual society in Cairo,
which like falls apart in like two weeks. What what
what span of years are we talking? This is like

(08:00):
eighteen forty nine to like eighteen seventy or like eighteen
fifties something like that to eighteen, like seventy one or
seventy two per encountering spiritualism or like I mean she
encounters it as a kid, according to her right, she's
talking to Princekal litson. She's reading her Grandpa's a cult library.
She hung out with those horse nomads, right because she's

(08:20):
like because American spiritualism starts in eighteen forty eight. So
I'm just trying to fare out when she she is,
and she is she is. So when she starts a
spiritual and spiritualism society in Cairo the first time, that's
right after she starts her visit, they're doing seances, they're
doing medium ship, they're very much doing America like Spiritualism
like starts in America, gets over to Europe and then

(08:41):
eventually further south later and like they're doing that sort
of ship in um in in Cairo, she's doing the
Fox sister ship. Okay, yeah, yeah, and well again we'll
talk to them. We'll talk about them a bit later. Um.
But it's it is unclear she we We're pretty it's
pretty clear that she attempts and fails start a spiritual
society mainly because the other medians start like grifting people,

(09:05):
um and turning it into a cash thing, and it
falls apart. That's her claim the whole first way this
is spiritualism. Might be more accurate to say that the
grift just got away from her and she wasn't able
to prop But anyway, she goes to Paris, where, according
to her own recollections, she astonished a group of freemasons
with her depth of occult knowledge. There's no evidence of this, uh,
we do know that in eighteen fifty eight, after she's

(09:26):
been nearly at ten year, it's like eighteen four nights
something like that, that she she starts her journey in
like eighteen fifty eight after nearly ten years, because she
comes back home a couple of times for like money
and stuff. She tells her sister that she had spent
the last decade as a prostitute. Um. Now, her sister
is also kind of a grifter, so we don't really know,
like they have a falling out at some point. It
is entirely possible that she spends as her you know, year,

(09:50):
that that's how she finances her travel. There's out we
don't really know how she pays for it, Okay, because
I was kind of what I was like, is she
using sex work as a metaphor there? Or is she
doesn't mean it in the literal? It might be it
might be literal. She may have just gotten the money
from her husband, who she also visits occasionally during this
period and who apparently sends her money. She comes from
a rich family, she probably gets some money there. But

(10:13):
what what is certain is that she travels widely throughout Europe,
throughout the Middle East, and throughout Southeast Asia. Um. And
that she semi regularly receives money from someone. And there's
a couple of it's probably a couple of different people
like her family, and she gets some amount of money. Um.
And yeah, she's she's in. Her claim is that she's

(10:36):
having like a series of wide ranging like mystical adventures. Um.
That kind of the inciting incident for her spiritual journey
and like this period according to her claim of things
is that in eighteen fifty one, she meets a teleporting
Hindu mystic named Master Moria in London. Now, she claims
she recognizes this guy when she sees me in London

(10:57):
because she'd seen him in her dreams and visions which
she had been had again as a little girl. She's
talking about these dreams of this. She claims she's been
seeing this guy for decades in her dreams and visions,
and then she meets him at a hotel lobby in London,
and I'm gonna quote from Stawazinski again. The man told
Blovotsky had been waiting for her. It was planned long ago.
He explained, they kept talking Mr Maria for that was
how he introduced himself to Helena. Explained he had a

(11:19):
special mission for her. Madame Blovotsky had to go to
a secret school in Tibet that Maria ran together with
his friend Master kut Umi. After he said that, he
literally vanished into thin air. Now. Blovotsky later claimed that
this inspired a series of attempts to try and make
her way to the isolated kingdom of Tibet. At this point,
Tibet was independent of China and anyone else, and in

(11:41):
the West it was basically mythic, as almost no Westerners
had ever been there. The kingdom was geographically isolated, and
bandits and border guards would either kill or turned back
people who tried to enter. The first European woman on
record to see Tibet was Alexandra David Neil in nineteen
thirty two. Blovotsky claimed that in the eighteen sixties she
made her way into the country and lived there for

(12:02):
several years, studying with kud Humi and Moria. Now this
did not happen. Again, Tibet is a closed society to
the west at this point. Um. It is occasionally, like
European diplomatic officials and stuff will go to Tibet, but
you really don't get in easily, and it's very dangerous
to do so. Um. There is, however, like weirdly enticing

(12:25):
evidence that she might have gotten close to Tibet a
couple of times. She claimed she tried and failed to
get in twice. Um. Lackman traces a couple of enticing
leads of like, there's a couple of European officials in
India who later will say that they met a woman
matching her description near Kashmir, and like Satin had like
tea with her and hung out for a while and
like hosted her for a while. Um. And we know

(12:46):
those two those Buddhist tribesmen that she met as a
girl she meets again in this period and the Gobi
Desert not wildly far from the Tibetan border. Um. So again,
this definitely didn't happen. But like any good lifter, she
gets close enough, there's a like and because of her
back story, it's like it's not imp of the women
in this period, she's maybe one of the only ones

(13:09):
who realistically might have been able to get to Tibet. Right,
that's so, But it's but so much of her philosophy
depends on this lie being true. Yes, Um. She claims
that during her years in Tibet, she learned she stays
with her kut Humie and Master Maria and this, and

(13:30):
they're like occult compound and she learns all these ancient
mystic secrets uh and the secret history of the world. Um.
And yeah, so this is a very important period of
journey for her. That she's like she's getting uh, this
occult schooling and like and it's also like in the
real Hinduism and Buddhism, right, like this stuff that that

(13:52):
is not actually like she's inventing. When she later brings
knowledge of like Eastern religions to a lot of Americans,
a lot of it ship she invented. But she'll claim
we'll talk about this more later that like, well, no,
they just the Hindus and India don't know the truth.
But I got it directly from Master Maria or from Kudhumi,
who like know the real ship stuff like this. It's
just like, I mean, it's there's certainly another big name

(14:15):
that comes to mind with this ship, but you're just like,
just like be a novelist like your mom, Like what
exactly exactly novel about this ship. It's fine, probably would
have been a little rosist, but it was much better
than you. It's like l Ron Hubbard ship. You're like,
just stick to that. Come on. Yeah, she does not, so,

(14:37):
you know, this is a big part of her story
during that like twenty years. She also will claim frequently
later that she fights alongside Italian revolutionary I think it's
Giuseppe Garibaldi um and gets like shot several times. She
has some scars on her body that sh'll show people
the rest of her life and be like, this is
where I got shot, fighting, you know with Garibaldi UM
in this in this failed revolution against like the Catholic

(15:00):
some king or the Catholics, and like, yeah, basically is
this like revolution to try to gain into U at
least some independence from fucking Catholicism or whatever. Um. She
yeah claims that she learned secrets from mystics all over
the world in the Middle East and to bet she
goes to the United States. Obviously she hangs out with
indigenous people and learns their mystical traditions and stuff. Right, Um,

(15:25):
I'm sure that we don't. Like who knows the degree
to which all of this is true. I tend to
think it's about fIF um, Yeah, most likely bullshit and
that like, yeah, she probably like went to a fucking
the equivalent of a truck stop and like was briefly
like shook hands with a Navajo person and then wrote

(15:46):
lurred stories about how like she was instructed in their
traditions and whatnot. Like that's the kind of person she is,
you know. It's like if that, I mean, if she did,
if it wasn't just someone in fucking San Francisco, oh
bar who had been to Arizona told her a story
and like yeah, well, it's like also if she was like, yeah,
she was fraternizing with like white spiritualists in the nineteenth

(16:08):
century they were just making ship up about indigenous people
while they were massacre, yes, and so it's just possible
that she like talked to them and was like, Okay,
let's just take this at face value, even though there's
like almost everything yeah spiritualist said at that time was
like totally wrong. Yes. Um. And one of so one
of the very few solid things we can kind of

(16:29):
grasp on during this period is that she takes she
moves to Cairo a second time. She attempts to create
this is years later, a second spiritual society. Um. And
this is again an attempt. This is when the spiritualist
craze is kind of at its height. So she's she's
continually trying to cash in on the spiritualist craze in
Cairo because there's a lot of like rich, dilettante white

(16:50):
people living in Cairo, right, Um, because it's you know,
colonizer tithes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um. And she basically seems
to have put together a group of mems and set
them to the task of building rubs for cash. Blovotsky
was said to have used a long glove stuffed with
cotton as a spirit hand, basically puppeting it to like
do things and trick people into thinking she summoned a

(17:11):
ghost that was like, I mean, that was some of
the objects that some of the best of of like
both of the waves of spiritualism. That's like some of
the greatest stuff because it's like, well, yeah, it can
be a terrific grift the physical mediumship phase. It's she
she all, she loves. She was big into having a
physical dimension. We're going to talk about this a lot

(17:33):
over the course of these episodes. Yeah, that is no
longer the case because it was proven false, like just
so many times that most people don't bother. And at
this point I have to note, the long gloves stuffed
with stuff with cotton as a ghost hand was not
a good grift trick. Um, it does not seem to
have worked on many people. Now Lachman claims the woman

(17:55):
who like says this of Blovotsky, that she tried to
con people with a big fake cotton hand, was a
liar herself. Uh. And again everyone who was arguing on
the negative side of Lavotsky's life is also a con artist,
spiritual crifter. So it is it is everyone is questionable
who says anything about this woman. Most physical have been disproved,

(18:16):
but the okay, the best of what I know, because
there were there's like all this I don't know, like
there's all this lore of like there were a few
spiritual like physical mediums who were never disproven, and then
you can like sort of find examples to the case
that like they may have been disproven and then paid
someone off or like the situations like that. But the
most convincing spirit hands, which is covered in uh think

(18:41):
we talked about it in your the episode of Ghost
Richer in if you're using like animal guts, people will
start there. You can't just be a cotton hand, poopy
and wet. And because for whatever reason, I people were
more likely to believe that physical mediumship was real if

(19:02):
it was wet, and there was like this common belief
that like if you went beyond the veil and reached
through to like our dimension, you'd be goopy, and so
women would would um yeah, Oh there was a lot
to do with like yeah, as you talk about in
your show, like vaginal discharge and like ectoplasm and all

(19:24):
this stuff, like it's a whole history. Yeah, And it
became this like this I'm curious of like what Blovotsky
did specifically, But if she's using a bone, dry cotton hand,
people don't. That's not a show people are interested in
going to. And that's where she is. She's a dry
aass medium at this point, but I mean, she's not
gooping it up. Figure out how to get America very wet.

(19:47):
But she doesn't know yet. Also she's in Cairo. Um,
so here's here's Lackman writing about the kind of the
claims of Blovotsky's time and her second Spiritualist Society quote.
Blovotsky's own account has it that although she was against
the idea of contacting the dead, she would allow mediums
to perform. Emma Colombe was apparently one of these, and

(20:07):
then explained to the audience the truth behind the phenomena.
What Bolotsky wanted to show with the difference between a
passive medium, that is, someone who is merely the means
by which phenomena could occur, and what she called an
active doer, someone who could produce and control the phenomena
and not, as with mediums, be controlled by them, in
other words, a magician. That is, in essence, what she
learned in Tibet or wherever she was. Yet, Helena Blovotsky

(20:30):
claimed to be a poor judge of character at least
at this time, or perhaps her generous nature was taken
advantage of something that would prove to be the case
down the line. In any case, while she was away,
the mediums amateurs, according to her account, decided to try
to fleece the members of the society by staging fake seances.
They also drank a great deal, something Helena was decidedly against.

(20:50):
When she returned and discovered what had happened, she closed
the society down, not however, before a Greek madman, who
had been present at the only two public seances we
held she tried to shoot her. She thought he must
have been possessed by some vile spook. Although the society
that lasted only two weeks, the attempt on her life
if it was not an exact weeks weeks. She goes

(21:12):
from starting a spiritual society to a guy trying to
assassinate her in a bunch of mediums like creating a
con artist range. It's amazing this, I mean, this does
all kind of track that she I mean, And not
to say that the spiritualist mediums were like actually pulling
shut off. Statistically they were not, but there was like

(21:34):
I I it felt to me when I was doing
and again I didn't get really far in theosophy research,
but that it was so because there was like such
a huge controversy around spiritualism and people like it was
just it's like the easiest thing to use as like,
well this is fake, what I'm doing is real because

(21:54):
it just had such a bad reputation, And that's what
that's what we're building towards here, because like she will
later claim that this experience and Lackman, one of her biographers,
will claim that, like, this experience is what helps her
to realize that spiritualism is wrong, specifically, like this assassination attempt,
which she believes is like caused by this guy being

(22:16):
possessed by a vile spook. Is there a proof that
the assassination attempt happened? And absolutely not? Okay, okay, just checking.
But this is what Lackman says proves her point. Quote,
what her mediums were contacting. We're not the souls of
the deer departed, but a species of astral hobo psychic
tramps with nothing better to do than hover near the
borderland between the living and the dead, looking for some mischief.

(22:39):
It was the insight that would lead to a lifelong
feud between Helena Blovotsky and the major spiritualists of her time.
And I gotta say astral Hobo fucking good band name right,
that huge in the nineties huge mostly forgotten now, but
really because of that Rhode Island punk scene at one time. Yeah,

(23:01):
they had that concert where fourteen people burned to death.
But yes, really good band. Okay, let's let's ease off
Rhode Island for a second, Okay, because some people are
really sad when they learned about that when they were
tent or whatever. I don't anyway, but yeah, it makes
it especially at this time, getting as far away from

(23:22):
spiritualism as popular was how a lot of movements started, Yes, exactly,
and and that's that is how Blovotsky claims it happens.
Um and she went on to make something way worse
so that she does a bunch of other ship like
again this there's this whole period. You can read both
in Lachman's and meads biographies. You can read many pages
about what she supposedly did in this period. I'm not

(23:43):
going to get into detail on it because it's almost
certainly mostly nonsense, although she definitely went places and did
stuff and it was probably pretty interesting. I'm going to
guess the actual biography of Helena Blovotsky is also quite interesting,
just not very flattering. Sure, so she you know, we
know she like bums around Europe about her precise moments
are unclear, but when she comes up on the historic

(24:04):
next definitive of the historic record next, definitively it's in
the United States, So we were she's pretty sure because
there's you know, government docks and ship that Helena Blovotsky
lands in New York on July seventh, eighteen seventy three. Um,
I've definitely heard some people say it was eighteen seventy two.
I assume Lachman's not wrong here because it's such a

(24:25):
documented basic fact. She's forty two years old. Now, this
is not her first time in the United States, according
to her. I don't actually know that there's documentation that
she visited before. But it wouldn't have been weird if
she had gone through the US on her way to
India because of how travel worked at the time. Yeah,
she claims that she was supposed to ride there on

(24:46):
a first class ticket but gave it up to help
a poor family afford the journey. There's no evidence this
is true. Meads seems to say this is clearly a lie.
Lackman takes it because again he's he's very invested in
her being uh a hero to the poor. Um. So,
she says she arrives with only a few dollars to
her name, plus a massive fortune in cash that Master

(25:08):
Maria gave her, but that she wasn't allowed to spend right,
she couldn't use it at all. She had to give
it to a random guy in Buffalo. Um, there's god
cool because again she's getting messages, these spiritual they told
her to go to Tibet. Now they keep giving her
commands all through her life. So she she gets like
told where to find this package of money and she
has to take it to Buffalo again and again again.

(25:29):
It's like that's there's like huge spiritualists like overlap there
because it was all like almost exclusively in upstate New
York was like where it was populous. Um Now. Next,
Lackman claims that she basically lives the life of like
a stereotypical immigrant to the United States. Quote her adventures
in the next few years are a kind of American
success story in which a penniless foreigner arrives in the

(25:50):
new world and through courage, persistence, and determination makes good. Um. Now,
this is nonsense, in part because she gets a bunch
of family money at some point, but is she well, No,
she seems to have been poor for a while. There
were like issues with her getting her money, and like
if you have like an issue getting money mail to you,
that could be years um. So she is like living

(26:12):
in a working class house. Both Mead and Lackman claims
she becomes like the din Mother for this, like bunch
of immigrants making a hard scrabble living in the late
eighteen hundreds in New York City. Uh Mead notes that,
and one of the worries in which her story difference
from differs from Lackman's. Mead notes that Boat got the
idea to go to the United States during while she

(26:34):
was in Paris in the spring of eighteen seventy three,
and someone tells her about spiritualism and that it's taken
over the United States. This is probably not true because
she would like it's weird. I don't know, it's a
weird claim to make, but she'd probaised to be something
she'd be twenty five years later to I think maybe
the germ of truth in there is that she probably
goes there because somebody in fucking Paris is like, you know,

(26:56):
where people are making a shipload of money pulling off
the grifts that you failed to pull offen C New
York City. That's where that will work. Um, so we
should probably talk about spiritualism. There's some stuff you've been
alluding to, Jamie that maybe our listeners who haven't listened
to Ghost Church because they're cooks don't know legally they are. Yes, um, Sylphie,

(27:22):
what it's time for an at break? But you're on
a roll. Oh thank you? You know who's not cooked?
Okay you cannot verify that. Wow, you're right, you're right.
Honestly find either way, it's all good here. Yeah, get cooked,

(27:44):
get not cooked, be the cuck old. Um, be into
magpie fetishism. I'm not sure what that is, but figure
out what's going to get into whatever. Yeah, yes, surgically
implant an egg into another person. Actually, now that you
say that, that definitely exists in card that's got to

(28:04):
be a fetish, right, that has to be a fetish,
absolutely has to be fetish. God, Yeah, I mean there
are there. There is specifically a sex toy that like
you can pump eggs into somebody with they're made out
of like a gelatin. That's nasty. I don't. Well, that's
a thing that people can do if they want to
do an ad brick my god man, Yeah, here's some ads.

(28:34):
We're back and we're talking about the sex toy that
lets you squirt eggs up in your partner. It's called
the ovipositor. You make the eggs. That is some gelatine thing.
It's a whole, it's a thing. You can look it up.
The name like makes up for how horrible this entire
thing is. It's good ship. It's good ship. Like, I
can't be mad. I have judged, but like, I'm not

(28:58):
mad that I had a physical response to Jamie. Jamie
literally backed off. Wow, Ova, That's that's a gnarly name. Okay,
Well that's good, dope. Dope with the script. Let's move on.
So what's what's going on, Robert? Okay, So after she

(29:20):
innvinced the oviposit no, okay. Like most great movements in
American intellectual history, spiritualism started with the lies of a child,
two children. Actually, I'm looking at the picture of this
of the ovipositor. I don't like it. Well, Jamie the

(29:41):
high Dragon, Ova positor I serpent Aquarius, the kelpie, the
tentacle ovipositor, the dragon del Doll, the sea beast, come back,
come back, He's about to started talking about my girl.
Your girl is the stuff you like? Yeah, my, my,

(30:04):
my foxy ladies. These two liars who start spiritualism are
fifteen year old Maggie Fox and her eleven year old
sister Katie. The Fox family lived outside of Newark and
that blighted hellscape some fools called New York State m
Rochester adjacent. Yeah, they're Rochester adjacent. One assumes. Like most children,

(30:29):
they were little ships, and they decided they wanted to
scare their mom by creating weird sounds that would echo
in their drafty farmhouse. They started by tying strings to
apples and then dropping them on the stairs repeatedly to
simulate the footsteps of a sort of ghost, which is
pretty creative. You gotta give them credit. Um. Maggie and
Katie graduated to popping and thumping sounds, often by popping
their knuckles or snapping their toes together. They could the knees. Yeah,

(30:52):
it's like fucked up ship. And they would do it
with like even their shoes and socks on, and it
was still loud enough that it would like wake their
parents up, and they can do it barely moving, which
is wild. Over time. Again, I have a feeling I'm
going to object to a few of your your broader
characterizations at the Foxes, but I will say this of
the Foxes. If systematic massive discrimination of women didn't exist,

(31:14):
they would have been huge in early Hollywood. Well, see,
I totally agree with you. Or the radio maybe because
it's more sound based, but whatever. There's what There's one
Fox sister that I think is primarily at faultier. We'll
get there. Yeah. I think the only Fox that I
would not blame for this is Fox Molder. He's just

(31:35):
trying to find the truth. Anyway. I'm gonna quote now
from a write up on History Net. Maggie later claimed
that she and Katie planned a final performance for their
mother in which they would talk to the ghost. After
the rapping sounds had begun. In the evening of March
eighteen forty eight, Miss fox Rose lit a candle and
began searching the house. When she reached her daughter's bed,
Katie peered into the darkness and boldly addressed the ghost.

(31:56):
Mr splitfoot, Do as I do, she said, snapping her
fingers in the case of the earlier noises, the appropriate
raps followed. Maggie then clapped her hands four times and
commanded the ghost to rap back. Four knox followed as
if on cue. Katie responded by making soundless finger snapping
gestures that in turn were answered with raps. Taking pity
upon her terrified mother, Katie then offered a hint of

(32:16):
explanation for the sounds. Oh, mother, I know what it is.
Tomorrow is April full day, and it's somebody trying to
fool us, she began, But Miss Fox, apparently consider refused
to consider the suggestion of a prank. The ghost, she
believed was real and terrified those she was, she decided
to test it herself. Initially, she asked the ghost to
count to ten. After it responded appropriately, she asked other questions,

(32:38):
among them the number of children she had borne. Seven
raps came back, how many were still living? Six raps
their ages. Each was wrapped out correctly, as Miss Fox
later recalled that. She then demanded, if it was an
injured spirit, make two raps. Promptly, two knox were returned.
Mrs Fox then wanted to know who the ghost was
in life. Maggie and Katie quickly concocted an answer. The

(33:00):
year it, they claimed was a thirty one year old
married man dead for two years and the father of five.
Will you continue to rapid I call in the neighbors.
Their mother asked that they may hear it too, So
that's the start of all this is right, Like that
is the start. Yeah, and then the whole neighborhood gets
in on it, and it very quickly gets echoes of
the control of these two kids very immediately, and again

(33:22):
like their kids trying to funk with an adult, and
then the adult just doesn't seem to get it, even
when they pull the April Fools thing, and it very
quickly becomes something like, well if you tell the truth now,
like right, well it it's all yeah, it got out
of their hands really quickly. And it's also like at
this time in this area, there were a lot of

(33:43):
like this was like, I mean, this specific thing happening
was unique, but there were a lot of similar cases reported.
So it was like, I feel like it's really often
characterized like they were just fucking idiots, but it was
like this had been reported as news before, so there
was some president for it. And then it's when they're
older sister becomes involved that it really becomes an issue

(34:07):
because I always, I don't know, I feel because like
they were fucking kids. They're kids, like I call them
liars joking. I think their children who had like we're
fucking around and the adults around them, like all adults
are like idiots who are easily led in fanatic directions
and what are you gonna do? Yeah, very yeah, exactly.

(34:27):
They're religious there. It's like it's like the kind of
the opposite of a Satanic panic because I guess people
weren't well, I mean, that does happen to? That does
happen to? There's like a backlash from the church in
their town as well. It's a fascinating story their children.
Obviously it's not their fault that it's almost I don't
I haven't watched South Park in a long time, but

(34:47):
you know a lot of old South Park episodes, like
the plot would basically be all of the adults get
into some like like it do something like get onto
some insane bandwagon, and it causes problems and like the
kids are just kind of caught in the middle of it.
It's kind of like that story, like all of the
adults in this town are just like immediately lose their
minds and the girls just have to keep going along

(35:09):
with it. It's very funny. Yeah, And then when when
their sister gets involved, because they have a sister who's
in her like thirties who comes over. She's a single
mom who's like kind of barely making ends meet, and
like basically sees an opportunity with what they're doing and
like realizes that this is something that she can monetize.
So there's like so many different I don't know. Like

(35:31):
the story as it's later told, was that like the
older sister was able to convince the girls that what
they were doing was real and like to establish like, oh,
well this it's not morally wrong what we're doing. You're
just you're just passing along messages. And then the sister,
the older sister would mostly um profit from it and

(35:52):
was always in control of the money and the tour
schedule and all this stuff. Actually the sister villain. There's
a place I might suggest our listeners go if they
want to know more about this. Um you actually might
really benefit from listening to this podcast. It's called Ghost Church, uh,
and it really has a lot of fascinating stuff about
American spiritualism in it. A friend of mine made it.
You you wouldn't know her. I don't like podcasts, so

(36:15):
they're hard for me to listen to, especially if it's
a woman talking. It really bothers me. Well, the voices
are so hard. Get one of those, like Mafia voice changers,
so that it goes like it makes her sound like
a man. I just hope it doesn't get political, because
I just don't like when podcasts get political. Jamie, you

(36:37):
may be a great candidate from my new device, the
Jocko Willick podcast voice changer. If you want to listen
to a podcast by a woman but you don't want
it to be woke, you just turned this on and
it sounds like that Navy seal guy who started the
grift of Navy seals, writing books and making millions of
dollars and now as a podcast. Everyone like, Look you want,

(36:57):
whoever you want? The lady from Cereal one of the
NPR ladies. Uh you You can make any ladies sound
like Jocko Willick and thus not woke. Wow, Okay, cool,
I'm in. We also have a reverse device that makes
Dr Jordan B. Peterson sound like Kamala Harris, so like
whatever you like. What Sorry, I'm just I am trying

(37:21):
to imagine Sir Jordan Peterson aphorisms smoking in her voice.
It's pretty far. Yeah, exactly, by making it making it
good for whether you're everywhere or an insufferable left winger,
if you want to listen to podcasts that you shouldn't
be listening to based on the things you say on Facebook,

(37:43):
by our voice changing devices. God, what a long, pointless bit.
I'm so sorry the right we got there? So yeah,
it's it's the Fox sisters, you know, get themselves in
a little bit of trouble. Um. The neighbors come over
and one of the visitor suggests, like trying to create
a code for the ghosts that can wrap all the

(38:03):
letters of the alphabet. And this really expands the number
of things you can do in a seyance. Um. There's
a funny moment where like the girls are pretending to
be a murdered peddler buried in the basement, So the
adults try to excavate the basement, but then it rains
just in time to like flood the basement, so they
can't continue the excavation. So like the rumors keep spreading,
and soon the Fox girls are traveling all around I say,

(38:25):
the United States, like the East, but that was most
of the United States at this point. It's why I mean,
like it does get them access to like all these
like educational like ship never would access to if you're
a girl in like this is your best bet. Katie
Fox lived with Horace Greeley for a while, Like it's
like all this fucking wild stuff, like they're They're older

(38:50):
sister gets involved at one point and like, well, that's
what I'm saying. The older sister is the one that's
running the business. Yeah. She turns it into like a
solid grift um and and she becomes a medium as well,
and like now it's a whole production. Yeah. And and
it's a the claim that Laa makes who is their
older sister, like in her version of events, which is

(39:11):
her like claiming that this is all legitimate. Yeah. Seeing
what her sisters were doing made her think about the
work of a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis who was
a best selling author at the time. And Andrew Jackson
Davis wrote The Divine Principles of Nature Um. His work
itself was based on the writings of an eighteenth century
European mystic, theologian and scientist named Emmanuel Swedenborg, who again

(39:36):
that prince that Bolotski was hangings big Swedenborg guy to um. Now.
Swedenborg wrote that all human experience was a fraction of
a spirit larger spiritual universe. UM. In eighteen forty seven,
David Davis had like written his book which kind of
made Swedenborg's theories popular. Um. And this is the first
time we get this. It's kind of like the early
version of the unit of the world is a simulation

(39:58):
thing like his sween words. Idea is that the material
world is like a shadow of the spiritual universe. Um.
And this is how the dead are able to be
in regular contact with the living. Like the dead are
constantly interacting with us, even if we don't realize it
because we can't see the larger spiritual universe. Um. And
he had Davis had predicted that the truth was eventually

(40:19):
going to like become present in the form of a
living demonstration. Right, Eventually there's going to be physical proof
of the spiritual world and of the communication that happens
between those two worlds. So that's what Davis writes in
this book that becomes very popular, and it's worth noting
Davis himself is a pretty good grifter. Um. He claims
to have psychic powers that make him a human X
ray machine, so he would have this was I mean, yeah,

(40:41):
it's like Davis Swedenborg in like Anton Mesmer like all enough,
but yeah, he's a big part of those are like
the guys and there there's still I mean Davis in
particular still like hugely like mentioned in spirit like the
we the place that I took a table tipping like
a spiritualist like demonstration. It's like the Andrew Jackson Davis building,

(41:06):
like it's still super super present. And thing was like
he could see through your body and tell which organs
were sick and could diagnose health problems. Um. And he
would also he would have seance conversations with dead medical experts.
This is exactly the griff that John of God executes
in Brazil direct line of descendant ideologically between Andrew Davis

(41:27):
and John of God, Who's this Brazilian grifter who is
having seances with dead doctors who give him advice on
how to cure people, and then he does like psychic
surgeries on them, right, Everyone after these guys is just
taking apart pieces of the ship, they say, and making
new grifts out of them. Up to the present moment, right,
very little has been invented in like spiritualism and this

(41:47):
like kind of wooy side of it that is new
in the last hundred and fifty years. It's just different
mix ups. It's kind of like, I don't know, if
I knew more about hip hop, I'd probably be able
to make a good hip hop joke here, but I'm not.
It is a lot of like recycled ideas or or
repackaged ideas as new technologies become available, because there's very
few like practicing spiritualists now, but it's more migrated movement. Yeah, exactly.

(42:14):
New Age is modern spiritualism, um anyway, Yeah, yeah, I
mean it's there. Yeah, it's it's like it's like I
don't know, um, it's like the Protestantism of Spiritualism or
something whatever, and I'm into a lot of it. Philosophy
is probably more like the Catholicism of I don't know,
it's useless to try to make these comparisons, but whatever.

(42:35):
Everything that like we're dealing with today, and like the
weird New Age WU movement. The pieces of it are
being invented by these guys. Now, um, and so Leiah
you know, decides and I think again as a grifter
layas like, Okay, this book is a best seller. That's
what we need to like angle this as is like
we're the physical manifestation of the spiritual reality of the

(42:56):
universe that Davis predicted was coming. Um. And the fact
that all of this starts to go viral and local
news stories, um, just sort of causes an eruption of
this very shallowly buried desire for supernatural communication. And again,
people always wish that they could talk with their dead

(43:16):
loved ones, right, That's probably as long as there have
been humans, there has been a desire to like communicate
with people who are gone. Versions of sciences have been
happening for absolutely absolutely Yeah this and so once this
people very quickly and obviously there is a kind of
conservative religious backlash against this. We're not going to get
into that a lot, because that's not the story we're

(43:37):
telling today. Um, but most regular people are pretty happy
to like buy into this, at least for a little while,
and the idea takes off like fucking gang Busters. Uh.
Maggie and her sisters visit New York City in eighteen fifty,
and in short order they were fitted and appeared in
front of some of the most prominent people in the
city doing their medium stick, including James Finnimore Cooper. Uh.

(44:01):
They raised his sister for a post mortem conversation. Um,
and Cooper walks away very impressed. So suddenly spiritualism is everywhere.
Magazines and newspapers launched, the mediums set up or mediums
set up shop in every state. People immediately start copying
the Fox sisters, and most of them are teenage girls
and young women. UM yeah, yeah, which is which is

(44:24):
like a cool that's part of like and and that
happens in the second revival of spiritualism too. Is like
it's a way for like one of the only ways
in America for like a woman to be a spiritual leader.
And I think that the Shakers were kind of one
of the only other movements where that was possible, that
it was like a woman like in this period, there's

(44:44):
a degree to which the Southern Baptists are doing some
of that. Um. But but you know, we we talked
about that this week, Like that was one of the
things that had made them controversial more in like the
sixteen hundreds. Um. But yeah, like and so this is
there's a there's an ability to like gain social mobility
as the one woman by doing this, some control over
your own life, some money, and also it's justified in

(45:08):
like their quote unquote theology. The idea is that uh,
young women and girls have pure souls if they're virgins,
which you have to assume like you're always going to
claim you are. Um, and that makes them easy conduits
for the spirit world, is that they're which also like
it like you know, blows back in the expected way
where it's like, as spiritualism goes on, women are mediums

(45:30):
but like men, right, the theory and the history and
all this stuff. So they're there. It's they're still disfranchised.
And that's one different Um. But yes, exactly, she controlled
the narrative. Yeah. Now, by eighteen fifty four, spiritualists claimed
there were between one and two million spiritualists in the
United States. So obviously that's fake, that's for sure, but

(45:51):
a lot, certainly hundreds of thousands. Um. It depends on
how you like, not necessarily spiritualists, and that this was
the center of their theology because most people don't becomes
spiritualists and that they discard everything else. But but it's like, well,
I'm still Catholic, but I also believe this person can
talk to the dead, you know, yeah, Catholicism or whatever. Yeah,

(46:12):
which is still kind of how it uh functions today,
Like it's most religious for most people. Um My, mom,
I don't think every knew a goddamn thing about Hinduism,
um and was just kind of more or less Christian
all her life, but believe very strongly in reincarnation, just
like people do this, right, This is just how human
beings are. You take bits and pieces of what other

(46:34):
people tell you and you incorporated into your and that's fine.
There's a lot of spiritualism stuff that I'm like, yeah, sure, yeah, sure, whatever, Yeah, yeah,
it's whatever. I don't care. Um, but yeah, there's a
lot of people are into spiritual and again it's probably
useless to say they're spiritualist, but I wouldn't be surprised
if wanted. Two million Americans became convinced that, like you
could talk to ghosts through mediums, right, And a lot

(46:57):
of this also had to do with the fact that
it's like I don't know, I feel that also gets
like loss of the discussion sometimes of like this was
a science or or sorry, this was a religion that
was presented itself and still presents itself as like well,
we're backed by science, and like this was a time
where like yeah it was yeah, which I know, Boski

(47:17):
you know goes not on as well like oh yes, yeah,
um yeah, they which I think is why so many
people were willing to buy into it was because there
was so much science ship they never would have believed
was possible being proven, so they're like, well why not this, Yeah,
we'll be getting that. But that that is a huge
like the fact that this is a time in which,

(47:37):
for the first time in history, people are like starting
to invent things that like you can't imagine some guys
zapping into the world out of like a lightning bolt,
like a sword or whatever. Like you can imagine some
sort of but like once you have like automotives and
electric lights, it does seem a bit different. You're like, okay, yeah,
sure we can talk to GHEs why fucking nut, Yeah,

(47:58):
I can imagine some sucking ancient giant building this big
statue or whatever. But like yeah, now, now things are
gonna anyway whatever. Um so uh yeah. By the time
Bolovotsky makes it to the United States in eighteen seventy three,
spiritualism has passed its first great wave and a lot
of folks probably figured it was dying out. Um, Helena Blovotski,

(48:21):
maybe because of the Civil War. That stuff like peaked
in the Civil War and then defined. Yeah, and so
it's declined. It's it's well passed its height at this period.
And this probably is probably why for the first year
or so she's in the United States, Bolovotsky doesn't really
make any effort to establish herself as a guru uh
legitimately destitute who her first move in the city now

(48:44):
she is still a grifter. So she moves there, and
she immediately tries to like notifies the New York Sun
that she has arrived in the city because she's a
noble woman, right, um. And there is a lot less
happening back then. So the Sun's sensor sends a reporter,
Anna Ballard, to interview Blovotsky at the house where she
lived with several working class immigrant families. Blovotsky claims that

(49:05):
she and a number of other aristocratic Russian women had
been studying medicine in Zurich to become actual doctors, which
is not a thing that a lot of women can
do in this time. When suddenly the Emperor of Russia
changed his mind and forbade women from learning men's trades.
And she was like, and so all of these women
who had learned science, we all had to flee to
the four corners of the world to not go back

(49:25):
to Russia. So I was like, that's the first. Like,
I don't know what her grift plan for this was.
There must have been one. She wouldn't reach out to
the Sun for nothing. Right, this isn't going nowhere? But
where is this going? It doesn't go anywhere, It doesn't work.
The Sun runs this as front page news on July twenty,
but they don't mention her name. Uh. They ended the
story with the words quote these accomplished women, polyglots, travelers, scientists,

(49:47):
nearly moneyless, are able to do much and wants something
to do. But like it's just a human interest story
and they don't name her, so she doesn't. Actually there's
no interesting. She doesn't get shipped from this um. So
she had been hoping this would kind of work as
a want ad and like she would be able to
get some sort of a job or some sort of
attention she could turn into money from it, But it doesn't,

(50:09):
so she languishes for a while. She uses her mystique
as a Russian countess to like she's able to convince
people she is a Russian countess, and she's able to
convince people to like. She gets a job writing advertising
cards and stuff like. She gets a couple of weird
gigs because people are impressed by her background, but she
can't really hack it with any more substantial work. She
like tries to be a leather worker at one point

(50:29):
and just is no good at it. So frustrated, she
lapses into her girlhood habit of telling stories about the supernatural.
Her biographer Mead writes, quote, Apart from spooky stories, Helena
amiably dispensed information about people's pasts to anyone who asked.
Miss Parker, for one, was greatly startled to hear about
incidents in her own life that were she thought only
known to herself. When she asked to be put in

(50:51):
touch with her dead mother, Helena refused. Her mother progressed
beyond reach involved herself in higher matters. Now, since Madam
continually claimed to be under the already of unseen powers,
Elizabeth and the others at too too too, Madison assumed
she must be speaking of her spirit guides and naturally
concluded that she was a spiritualist. So she's doing cold
reading on these people, right, Like whenever someone's like, oh
they knew things about me, it's probably goes okay. Did

(51:13):
they start by asking a series of questions that they
then turn into like a revelation, you know, right, like
leading questions. And then if they start to ask for
things that are too specific and you don't know anything
about you, and you say, oh there you redirect or
you're concerned with high matters. Yeah right, yeah, so that
sounds like a classic like I I didn't know anything
about you before you entered the room. Good thing. Now

(51:35):
they assume she's a spiritualist because of what she's doing
again cold reading. This is like the period in which
it's invented. She's one of the first people doing this,
at least in in a in an organized way. Um,
and well, yeah, I mean spirits, spiritualists. If you were
if you were a medium that didn't get busted. You
were really good at doing that. The voices that she

(51:56):
claimed to hear were not, in her mind, the dead
or spirits of any kind. She insisted that they were
real living men, her Master Moreya and Kote Whomie whose
I guess also her master, but he's always called kut
Whomie and the other one is usually just called the master. Now.
She insisted again that these are real last dudes who
live in Tibet that she had like met and stuff.
They just are keeping up the conversation via psychic phone calls.

(52:20):
Um so Blovotsky again. It's she's assumed to be a
spiritualist by the first people who like meet her doing
mystic stuff. But that's not really what she's doing. Um
And for more than a year she just kind of
runs through friends, fails at a couple of businesses. She
nearly burns down her apartment building because she smokes a
pound a day of tobacco. Um. Like, that's that's probably true,

(52:42):
like literally a pound a day of tobacco. Um. How
it's fucking dope. That's rat as hell. That's just cool.
That's just hot girl shit. It's just a hot girl ship.
That was hot girl ship, Jamie, we need to go
back to the drying. We need to go back to
the drawing board on hot girl, ship isn't it is not?
Now you know what will make you a hot girl?

(53:04):
I'm so disappointed if you enjoy if you start huffing
jewel flavored vaporizer pods. Jewel pods they're like cigarettes, but
more convenient. You can smoke them anywhere, in an airplane bathroom,
in your cousin's basement, on the top of a mountain.
Jewels catch the addiction. You're you're fire, Robert, I'm sorry,

(53:33):
you're fired. Do you not like the delicious taste of
jewel tobacco? The delicious tastes a pound of jewels. Okay?
If he Ky was sunking a pound of jewel pods,
just the little plastics rectangles underneath, I don't know why

(53:54):
that's a more pleasurable just fucking burning through them like
like like, do not influence him. Okay, But if someone
wants to do John Wick with his guns like always
like like like that's Helena Blovotsky, but just with like jewels,

(54:14):
switching out doing like cool moves to pop out the
cartridges and put a new one on fire, Robert, that's funny,
I mean temporarily, but I can't. Okay, Well, here's here's
some more ads for our primary sponsor, the tobacco industry. Ah,

(54:37):
we're back, you know, Jamie. What I like most about
tobacco and tobacco products is their absolute lack of any
health consequences tobacco. It's like medicine. Anyway, back to asked
that hunk of my dad's lung, that's no longer about that. Well,
maybe he didn't need that lung. It was slowing him down.
You think he's about so much. He's so much stronger now,

(55:01):
just like Helena Blovotsky was. Actually she's in terrible health
her entire life. Um yeah, that is one of the
wildest guy's vote because she does so many like a
lot of it is lies, but she does genuinely go
a lot of places and do a lot of things.
And I'm like, but she was like in pain. She's
like nearly losing a limb from gang Green and she Yeah,
she smokes a pound of tobacco a day. Be a

(55:24):
just stay home and be a novelist. My god, what
she's gonna do She's going to be anyway, she gets
an inheritance from her family at one point. Some sources
say she spends a bunch of time living in like
a hotel, a fancy hotel, uh that. Other times others
she apparently like wastes a lot of it on a

(55:46):
farm scam. She gets like conned into investing into a
farm that can't make money. Um whatever, she does a
bunch of ship. Obviously, there's different stories about like her habits.
Lockman says she was a teetotal or obviously lea. She
smoked a lot of cigarettes, but she didn't she wouldn't drink,
didn't do anything else. Spiritualists like they don't drink because

(56:08):
they are always accused of being alcoholics and that's why
they have visions. So they're like, no, we're sober. So
I will say probably true that she didn't drink. But
Mead claims she was heavily addicted to both hasheesh and
opium during this period. Um. Yeah, and it's one of
those things. Actually she becomes in like the seventies and stuff,
like kind of a pot icon like a hundred years

(56:30):
after her death. But like because she's supposedly smoking hash
during this like Madame Blovotsky is like gets involved in
Like she doesn't get involved, but like her image gets
involved in kind of the early marijuana and now as
of today, she's a she's a jewel icon. She's a
jewel that's right. She would have loved jewels, because everyone

(56:51):
does agree. She was a chain smoker with a kind
of dedication that today you only see in Serbia. Now,
in eighteen seventy four, she was interviewed by in their
journalist UM and it's noted by me that she was
scantily clad on the floor of an apartment when this reporter,
Hannah Wolf, starts to talk to her. UM and Wolf
I think right, works for the Post and gets like

(57:12):
fascinated by her, follows her around. She she like Blovotsky
tells her about fighting with Garibaldi and like shows her
her scars. Wolf claims that Blovotsky tells her about the
benefits of opium and hash for insigning the imagination. UM
not inaccurate. Yeah, She she charms this reporter, who's a
reasonably well connected person. Through this reporter, she meets a

(57:34):
friend of Hannah's named Mr. W who the two get
into the subject of spiritualism and Mr W is into seances,
and Blovotsky claims, I don't know anything about stand for
we don't know. In her biography is there's a shipload
of like Mr X and Y and random letters like
it's very frustrating X. She is one of the most

(57:56):
annoying people to read about because like every third page
is a five page age aggression about people from a
hundred and fifty years ago. Yeah, having and having unverifiable
arguments that are central to the point being made by
the biographer but also completely impossible to back up. You
don't raise eyebrows, don't name people. Mr W like, what

(58:19):
the well I think I don't think that's his Christian name.
So Mr W is a fan of spiritualism, and Bolotsky
probably she must be lying, because even if even though
she's certainly full of shit about a bunch of stuff,
she's very well educated on the occult and on religion.
There's no way that in eighteen seventy four she didn't
know what spiritualism is. But she claimed, I've never heard

(58:41):
of spiritualism. Yes, what do you call it? A seance? Yes,
let's go to this seance? And that sounds very exciting. Well,
that just sounds like she's gonna go and then all
of a sudden perform very well, they're interesting. Is that
exactly what happens? Yeah, I'm gonna quote from meat again here.
Soon after that, she met Hannah and Mr W on

(59:02):
the street and animatedly informed them that as a result
of the medium's lecture, she had began to develop occult powers.
Having placed some photographs in a bureau, she found her
astonishment that spirits had tinted them like watercolor paintings. She
invited Hannah and Mr W back to the cheap apartment
she shared with three journalists. Her roommates were two men
and a woman, a decidedly bohemian arrangement for the eighteen seventies,

(59:23):
but at least she had a small bedroom of her
own off the dining room. When Hannah and Mr W
stopped in to see the spirit art, Helena led them
to a sideboard in the dining room, pulled out some
colored pictures and explained that the coloring seemed chiefly to
be done in the night and when nature was in
her negative mood. Hannah did not believe this for a minute.
Speaking privately to the other residents of the apartment, she
learned that they too had been skeptical of Madam's occult

(59:45):
powers and had laid weight for the spirit who worked
in the night Watches and had discovered it materialized in
the form of Maldadam Lavotsky dressed. Um so yeah, like
they had yes, yes, um so. At this stage, again,
she's not good enough to like trick her friends, and
she probably lives with journalists in part because journalists are

(01:00:06):
like bohemian weirdos and more into the living in that
kind of an arrangement. But also she's desperately trying to
get attention for something, right, That's what all of the
first people she starts talking to the US or press,
she like really wants to get her name out there, right.
Um she gets that, you know, no press is bad press.
Um So Hannah Wolf kind of quickly, well not all

(01:00:27):
that quickly, but eventually it does realize what this lady
is may be full of ship and I don't need
to be hanging out with her too much. Um. But
Blovotsky sends her a manuscript which she claims is a
satire of American politics. The way Bolovotsky describes it, she's
basically written Confederacy of like Dunce's um and Hannah Wolf
starts reading it and it's like this is number one.

(01:00:49):
This is very bad, but number two like this seems
really weird, like none of it reads properly. And she's
like hanging out with some mutual friends who like are
also friends of Blovotsky and shows it to them and
they're like, so, like, a couple of weeks ago, we
gave this lady a Russian book and she just translated
into English and replaced Czar with president, and that's what
she's claiming as a satire of American politics. That's a

(01:01:16):
good one. She got their asses. That weird. Yeah, it's
just it's funny because it's like there's a lot of
the way you're describing a lot of her behavior. It's like, Okay,
what's the end game? Like it sounds like she's trying
to like piggyback onto the adjacent movements to what she
was trying to do in other locations, but like, what's

(01:01:39):
the end game? What is the end game? We know
what the end game for us, as Jamie, when the
FDA comes after us for the vast racketeering scheme that
I've I've put together talking about that we are we
are allowed to talk to that uncle Robert's ghost potions

(01:02:04):
I'm selling. I'm selling ectoplasm that stores well in your
crevices and releases on demand. Yep. So by our ghost
potions and crevice gu time for an ad, you know? Anyway?
Uh So she moves after this, you know, things with

(01:02:25):
Hannah fall apart and with those friends. This happens a
couple of times. Early On is like an artist. Yeah,
she's moving around New York City because she's a con artist.
She does at this point grow her hair out into
what Mead describes as a blond afro, which I desperately
want to see a picture of. There do not appear
to be excellent ones, but that sounds christ On how
she looked as an I can't imagine it, neither can I.

(01:02:48):
I don't know what the funk that it doesn't seem
like her hair texture. Okay, if you look up pictures
of Helena Blovotsky and try to imagine her in a
blond afrow, someone will be one of those AI s
on it. Um, God, it's very funny to think about. Um.
And Yeah, so this is again summer of eighteen seventy four,
she sets a new motto for herself. Try right, don't

(01:03:12):
It doesn't matter what you try, and just try quote
to be sure. She had been trying all along, but
efforts had been confined to the realm of the impractical.
Perhaps it was time to attempt something different. Laying aside
her gimmicks, she found a way of meeting the much
advice admired Andrew Jackson Davis, the first important figure in
American spiritualism and a man whose writings were respected throughout
the world. Even through though the Poughkeepsie see or knew

(01:03:34):
nothing about Helena, he accurately gauged her true worth and
extended a generous welcome. So she's somehow managed to like
manages to like kind of get this guy on her
side right like and and she's something that's she's she's
a very charismatic person. She's good at reading people and
manipulating them. Um and media are charismatic. For a while

(01:03:55):
that she's going to plagiarize the hell out of him later,
but for a while, the two our friends. She visits
him daily. Uh, he takes pity on her money troubles,
and he gets her a job writing articles for a
magazine called Psychic Studies. Blovotsky's articles were interesting because she
seems to view she she views very much the seance
and medium stuff as not important and is primarily writing

(01:04:15):
about it to make the case for a larger occult worldview,
where like speaking to the dead is more more like
a piece of a mosaic. That's she's kind of cribbed
together from bits of half remembered heavily manipulated Buddhist and
Hindu mythology. And it was around this time, running out
of money and people who listened to her just say
ship that Helena Blovotsky came across an article in the
Sun by a fellow named Colonel Henry Steele Old Coot.

(01:04:40):
Oh m hm oh sorry, I didn't have any other
That was the end of my reactions. That was that
was That was just that. Yeah, that was a dun
dundone moment. Anyway. So Okt is an interesting guy. He
was a colonel because he had like done some ship
during the Civil War, mainly like organizational ship. He was
like a a legitimately like really talented organizer. He's a lawyer, um,

(01:05:04):
but he's also this guy he like abandons his wife
after he gets bored um. He's like he's searching for
something in his life beyond like being an upper middle
class victorian gentleman um, which is why he abandons his
wife and family. And he cons a newspaper into paying
for him to visit a farmhouse in Chittenton, Vermont, where
a spiritual manifestation had reportedly occurred. Now he writes about this,

(01:05:28):
these guys, the Eddie brothers, who claim their Scottish great
great great grandmother had been a witch and like their
family had the ability to summon phantoms, so they would
like claim they would do seances where they would claim
to to to raise the ghosts of dead indigenous people
um and talk to them. And one of the most sinister,

(01:05:48):
shitty fucking things of that spiritualists do is live on
indigenous land, no nothing about it and then claim to
be it's just and then literally steal their ghosts. Steeler
goes in makeup history that serves their narrative, and it's
also they're kind of doing that. Their contribution to the
grift is they're kind of doing a puppet show, like

(01:06:09):
a shadow puppet things what it sounds like because they
have this like closed cabinet that's like their altar and
the like some of these spirits and you can watch
them like fight duels with swords and stuff like. Again,
I think they're basically doing shadow puppets and claiming that
they're spirits. Yeah, the spirit cabinet became like a really popular,
uh manifestation thing because it's easy to do kind of

(01:06:31):
like magic tricks. Because there was those early spiritualists, the
Davenport Brothers, um, that would do a similar thing. And
then Houdini like talked to one of them towards the
end of his life and he was like, yeah, it
was a really good magic trick that we're tren fucking
We realized we were good at puppets and decided to
make some money. Um. Yeah, so old Cot. He just

(01:06:55):
seems to be one of these guys. He's modest, moderately
successful and it is very talented on like an organizational level. Um,
but I think is also bored of Like again, it's
pretty boring to just like be a dude who works
as a lawyer in the eighteen seventies. Um, So he's
searching for something else and it kind of seems like
he finds it in the old cots like he's a

(01:07:16):
little He's a pretty credulous guy. So he buys this um.
He gets very much on board, and he writes these
incredibly enthusiastic articles for a couple of different moderately large
newspapers about this puppet show out and fucking Crittenden. And
Helena Blovotsky sees these articles and she decides like, well,

(01:07:36):
and I think what her decision. I think her thinking
on the matter is, Okay, this is the first spiritualism
related thing that's gone viral in a while. This is
the first thing that's getting some real attention in the media.
So if I get down there and I can get in,
if I can get face to face with this journalist who,
for whatever reason, he's gotten people to care about spiritualism again,
I can There's probably some way for me to make

(01:07:58):
this work out for Helena, you know. And then he
becomes her Mr. President. Sure does, he sure does. That
is absolutely the way this story goes. So she travels
to Chittenden. She shows up dressed like absolutely no one
else on earth. As Lachman describes quote, the first thing
he noticed was her red Garibaldi shirt, a military tunic

(01:08:18):
and blazing scarlet that had been the height of hout
couture for a season or two and was not yet
out of fashion amid the sober dress of Vermont farmers.
It must have been a site, as must have been
the Mongolian features that may have helped her in her
Tibetan forays Lachman's a little racist. After the shirt, Olcott
next noticed her hair, a thick blonde mop that stood
out from her head, silken soft and crinkled to the

(01:08:38):
roots like the fleece of a Cotswald. You then the
massive kalmuck face full of power culture imperiousness that contrasted
sharply with the dour looks of the other guests. This
caught his eye, as must the fur tobacco pouch, the
many rings that adorned her delicate fingers. So old timey
writing is so goofy, he's less It does say a

(01:09:01):
lot about Lavotsky, that Lackman, this guy writing about her
much later, is like clearly taken in by her spell. Um.
But that's how a lot of like women were written about,
who were a part of like women who had magic
attributed to them, Which is kind of wild because at
this time there were still witch laws, but this was
like a unique moment in history where people were like

(01:09:22):
willing to kind of forego the witch laws for certain.
Lachman writes this in two thousand twelve, and like one
of his the reason he talks about her Mongolian features
there is That's one of the reasons he tries to
convince us he probably she would have made it to
Tibet is that well she looked Mongolian. No one would
have noticed. That's pretty fucking racist, dude, Yeah, like that's

(01:09:44):
what a what a cuc He also says that her
face has like Kalmuck features because she spent so much
time with them, which is also like anyway those are
like is like, oh, it's like a person who printed
on me, so exactly it's something else, simply not but
clearly like Blovotsky has been all over the place, and

(01:10:04):
her her dress is very eclectic. She's got stuff on
her from all around. No, yeah, I gotta run into
anyone else who looks like Helena Blovotsky in eighteen seventy
four and yeah, uh so this journalist guy all called
Olcott who started to get kind of pilled on spirit
is um and stuff is like sees her and it's like, well,
there's probably something going on there. Being the guy I am,

(01:10:26):
I'm going to hang around this lady and Bolovotsky she
knows she basically ceased through the core of this man
immediately um and just takes him apart as a human being,
and and like weaves herself into every aspect of his being.
Henry himself later recalled her manner was gracious and captivating.
Her criticisms upon men and things original and witty. She

(01:10:48):
was particularly interested in drawing me out as to my
own ideas about spiritual things, and expressed pleasure and finding
that I had instinctively thought along the occult lines which
she herself had pursued. It was not as an Eastern mystic,
but rather as a refined spiritualist that she talked. For
my part, I knew nothing then, or next to nothing
of how a Eastern philosophy, And at first she kept
silent on the subject. So she lets him, what do

(01:11:09):
you believe about spiritualism? Now? What are you thinking? What
does this make? She's cold rading him my ideas too,
And what you're thinking is based upon these things that
I read and my grandfather's and YadA, YadA, YadA. You know,
she makes him feel like he's somehow tapped into some
secret like, oh, I know you're just getting into this,
but you're really advanced in your understanding of the spiritual

(01:11:31):
world right right, because she needs something from him and
he needs something from her. It's it's so wild, like
how yeah, I mean her story and and a lot
of people it's like she I feel like, specifically just
really took advantage of how little people knew about anywhere
that was not the West and just sort of inventedge

(01:11:51):
shit and and and the fact that like New Age
leaders still do that ship to this day. Yeah, it's
pretty and for mission is now accessible, Like it's just
wild now, and it's it's interesting when you look at
like what Henry started writing about her in his articles
about her, one of the compliments he pays her is
like the highest compliment a man could give a woman

(01:12:12):
in the nineteenth century, which is that he considered her
androgynous rather than female. Um oh, so he's that's his
way of saying, and I take what she says seriously.
It's also there's more than that, because there's also because
these two become business partners. There's this like series of
rumors that they're fucking for years, and so part of
he emphasizes that, like, I don't even see her as

(01:12:32):
a woman, you know. Um, So there's a lot wrapped
in there. Um. So that first night when they so
by the time she gets to the Eddie brother's house
in Crittenden, um, you know, old cots been there a while,
and it's the medium stick they're doing has started to
wear a little thin for him. Um. But it changes
significantly once she arrives this night. For the first time,

(01:12:54):
they've been summoning different spirits. For the first time, they
channeled the spirit of a Georgian musician, and Votsky excitingly
is like, I knew the man back in Europe when
he was alive, And she has him sing some songs
for her and he answers questions and stuff about the afterlife.
And Olcott finds this this is the first time that
someone has come from far away and been like, no,
they're channeling someone I knew. I've never met these people before.

(01:13:16):
This must be real because I've never met them before. Um. Now, obviously,
Blovotsky sat down with these dudes and was like, hey,
you want to really get this mark roped in, Like
let me tell you what to do, Like you just say,
these things sing the song and like I'll tell them
it's this Yeah anyway, Um, but Olcott falls for it entirely.
He becomes convinced it must be real because Helena is
quote a lady of such social position as to be

(01:13:38):
incapable of entering into a vulgar conspiracy with any pair
of tricksters. Yeah, that's that logic has never gone gone left. Yeah. Now,
this was all incredibly staged, and the piece to resistance
was when the spirit or spirits managed to summon a
medal into Helena's hand, which she claimed had been a

(01:13:58):
military medal that had been married with her dead father,
that like the spirits had brought back for her and stuff.
The reality was that again, it's just a simple slight
of hand trick in a dark room. But all caught,
being the most credulous man in history, bought it all writing.
Was there ever a manifestation more wonderful than this? A
token drug by unknown means from a father's grave and
laid in his daughter's hand five thousand miles away across

(01:14:21):
an ocean, A jewel from the breast of a warrior
sleeping his last sleep in Russian ground, sparkling in the
candle light in a gloomy apartment of a Vermont farmhouse,
a precious pet present from the tomb of her nearest
and best beloved of kin, to be kept as a
perpetual proof that death can neither extinguish the ties of blood,
nor long divide those who were once united and desire
reunion with one another. Woo that perfect mark, perfect mark?

(01:14:45):
And Jamie, you know who else is a perfect mark?
Who our listeners for your content? Wow? Oh that's where
we're leaving today. You want to plug it? Yeah, we
are all right. So I would play especially for this
episode if you ought to know more about the Fox
Sisters and the history of American spiritualism in the nineteenth century. UM.

(01:15:10):
That is contained in my new podcast, Ghost Church. It's
nine episodes. We just finished it. Robert's in it. So
if you produced it, UM, and there's I I have
a I have a very I have a soft spot
for a lot of spiritualists, especially women improving their social station.
Uh through through through chicks and goofs and uh. There's

(01:15:32):
a lot of talk about modern spiritualists as well, and
what they're up to now, um, so check that out. Yeah,
check it out. Check out spiritualism. Go find a ghost,
you know what, find a ghost? I truly am Like,
if you want to talk to ghosts, like that's your business.

(01:15:52):
Just don't hurt other people with it, you know, I
don't know, you know what, it's just hurt the right
people with it, you know. There you go, yes, yes,
like if if, if you've got a good mark, then
go fucking nuts. I'm just I don't know. People get
so mad about stuff like this something and and sometimes
are good and other times with like there are there

(01:16:16):
there are theosophists like foaming at the mouth right now
about about this takedown of Helena Blovotsky. I don't know
enough about theosophy to have an opinion on it. I'm
learning in real time from you spiritualists. You know, live
your life. I don't know. Yeah, go live your life,
talk to ghosts, go create ghosts. Commit murder in a field.

(01:16:38):
You know. I will literally pay you to watch, and
I have and I probably will again. Wow. Wow, Jamie
just offered to pay to murder someone while she watches.
So yeah, that's exactly what I said. Yeah, become a murderer.
That's the message of this episode of Behind the Bastards,
the message of Ghost Church and the message of Ghost Church. Sure.

(01:17:00):
Eight