E203 - Dr. Justin Sledge: The Occult, Witch Trials & the Forbidden Teachings of Gnosticism

Dr. Justin Sledge is a scholar of philosophy and Western esotericism, and the voice behind the YouTube channel Esoterica, which has grown to over a million subscribers. He has spent his career studying the traditions that history tried to erase: Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, witchcraft, and alchemy. What We Dive Into: 1. Classical skepticism is not about debunking or disbelief. It is about bracketing your personal investment long enough to let the material speak for itself. 2. Newton wrote more on alchemy and the occult than on calculus. Descartes arrived at his famous method through a mystical dream. Stripping these facts from the story of modernity has cost us access to some of the most important spiritual technologies ever developed. 3. Every other starting point, certainty, comfort, doctrine, conclusions, has a gutter waiting at the end of it. Awe keeps the garden of curiosity alive. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: https://www.im8health.com/knowthyself code KNOWTHYSELF for an exclusive offer https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off ___________ 00:00 Intro 01:57 What Skepticism Actually Means 06:21 How to Enter Mystical Inquiry Without Collapsing Into Belief 08:03 Religion, Mysticism, and the Margins 11:24 Gnosticism: The World as Prison, Christ as Liberator 14:21 The Nag Hammadi Discovery and the Many Christianities 17:00 William James and the Four Qualities of Mystical Experience 21:50 Perennial Wisdom vs. High-Resolution Differences 26:44 The Limits of Propositional Truth 31:32 Irrational vs. Non-Rational: Why the Distinction Matters 37:10 The Danger of Universalizing Mystical Experience 44:34 The World Is Stranger Than We Assume 51:01 How the Myth of Rational Modernity Was Curated 59:35 Recovering the Suppressed Voices of Western History 1:00:45 Mary Magdalene: Not a Prostitute 1:14:22 The Suppression of the Feminine and the Road to the Witch Trials 1:18:55 The Malleus Maleficarum and the Anatomy of a Moral Panic 1:24:01 Poverty, Not Practice: Who Was Actually Accused 1:26:27 The Books Justin Brought: Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy 1:32:08 Agrippa and the Possibility of Induced Illumination 1:41:32 The Kabbalah and the Sefer Yetzirah 1:46:04 The Hermetic Tradition and Hermes Trismegistus 1:54:22 What Studying These Texts Has Done to Justin 1:59:51 Agrippa's Trilemma and the Limits of Reason 2:04:22 Hermeticism vs. Gnosticism: The World as Divine, Not Prison 2:13:11 Making the Best Case for the Transcendent Realm 2:19:54 Whatever Matter Is, It's Indistinguishable from Spirit 2:26:34 Justin's Personal Satanic Panic: The School Shooting 2:38:03 Generational Trauma and the Suppression of the Feminine 2:44:57 Truth as a Verb: Dialogue Across Difference 2:47:14 Are We on the Threshold of a New Renaissance? 2:58:39 Community Questions: The Most Meaningful Experience of Magic 2:59:15 When Justin Realized the Books Were Real 3:03:51 Finding the Clerical Necromantic Underground 3:04:26 Recreating Alchemy in the Modern Lab 3:07:11 Why We Want Magic: The Very Human Desire for Hidden Power 3:13:00 Modern Mythology and the Meaning Famine 3:20:10 Closing Message: Flourishing Begins in Awe ___________ ✨MORE FROM DR. JUSTIN SLEDGE ↳YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/esotericachannel ↳Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/esotericachannel ↳https://www.justinsledge.com 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00André Duqum?

  How much of early religion is really decided by who won the fight?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  All of it. The world of Western esotericism has been a world greatly diminished, haunted, repressed, suppressed. Books have been banned and burned. We have let those in power, alas, a lie. And that lie has robbed us of some of the most important spiritual technologies of what it is to be human. So we have hermeticism, Kabbalah, Raffia cult, witchcraft, Gnosticism. What brings them all together is they've all been rejected, not just rejected, but suppressed.

• 0:30André Duqum?

  You brought some books with you.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:32André Duqum?

  What is that?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  This book was actively targeted for destruction by the church. It survived unimaginable things. We know that women are being initiated into these mysteries. But there's a long history of the feminine as derivative, as somehow less than. And that has just had catastrophic consequences. I'll give you one example of this. Between 40 and 60,000 people, mostly women, were executed in the 15th century.

• 0:54André Duqum?

  Wild, man.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  This is what happens when conspiracy theories get political power and impunity. And now we're just repeating the same mistakes. But I think that we're going to see more spiritual creativity in the next century than maybe in the last five centuries combined. The books are real. We can translate them and we're now unlocking their secrets. Let's do it.

• 1:15André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:21André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself podcast. Our guest today is the mind behind the channel Esoterica on YouTube and community with over a million subscribers. He is one of the most grounded voices I could find to take us into the mystical, into the Gnostic, into the hidden quarters of religion, without what we often find collapsing into infinite skepticism or collapsing into belief. He's a trained scholar of philosophy and Western esotericism, Dr. Justin Sledge. Thank you for being here.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you, Andre. It's very kind of you to invite me and very kind words and looking forward to our conversation.

• 1:57André Duqum?

  I am so excited to dive in and just like learn from you. I think you're such an incredible mind and I feel the passion through all the videos that you record, how much you actually love the topic and. We'll dive into the witch trials, ancient Kabbalah mysticism, narcissism, how religion and early mystics have, the story and narratives have been shaped throughout history. But where I want to really start, because I feel like we can set the stage really well for individuals. And also, what I've just been exploring personally is like, how to even approach these topics in a way that is actually fruitful? How does reason and logic come into the picture, exploring something inherently non-rational

• 2:42André Duqum?

  at times? When you call yourself a skeptic, you don't mean what most people mean when they say that word online. So how would you define that term? How it relates to you?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Skepticism, in the classical sense of the word, doesn't mean disbelieving in things. And it certainly doesn't mean going out there and trying to disprove what people believe. It's a very petulant way of existing, honestly. But skepticism in the classical tradition simply means withholding judgment. It simply means, take a look at the data, take a look at the history, take a look at the books, take a look at the arguments, and say, you know what? I just don't know. And it's okay for me not to know. And these arguments are compelling in some ways, and strange in others. And so that my task as a scholar is not to come down on one side of the fence about whether this stuff is true or not. My job is to bracket my own desires to know that kind of thing, and simply say, this

• 3:37Speaker 01

  is what we have. And if that's what we have, that's it. And so skepticism, for me, means just simply withholding judgment. And when I can practice that, and when I do it hopefully well, it means that the texts can speak for themselves, the traditions speak for themselves, and I get to be that voice, which is a great honor for me. Because these are, the world of Western Hasitarism has been a world greatly diminished, haunted, repressed, suppressed. Books have been banned and burned. And at this juncture in history, I get to be one of the voices through which this material gets to live. And it's very important for me to lift up their voice, and to put my voice back behind it.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  And that, that part of that process is that skeptical process, just withholding judgment. And when I withhold it, their voice can come through.

• 4:28André Duqum?

  I feel you hold that responsibility with reverence and importance, and you understand the way that you Have and that you carry with being such a trusted voice in the space. That way you define skepticism, is that referring to like epikē, how you how you use that word?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, epikē is sort of the, you know, that that moment where you bracket, right? It's in phenomenology, it's bracketing, but yeah, it's bracketing my own personal beliefs and how those personal beliefs can impose themselves, become a bias, right, that sneak into how I'm evaluating the material. And that's the thing, I just don't, I don't want that happening because I feel like it it makes me the main character. And I don't want to be the main character. I want the material that I studied to be the main character and the work I do at Esoterica or my academic work. I want, you know, I want Cornelius Agrippa or the Cabala or the alchemists or whatever. I want them to be the star of the show and that epikē gives me the chance to take a step back. And I feel like that's, we need less main character syndrome in the world.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  I feel like we could all do with a little, a few less main characters in our lives. And I certainly don't want to be the main character in this story.

• 5:36André Duqum?

  Yeah, to say the least. It feels like it's interesting though, because there is this tension. What really draws people originally into exploring religious, philosophical, mystical inquiry is usually some sort of meaning making in life, right? And so you're almost like looking for an answer, which when you're looking for an answer, you can find and make an answer out of something that maybe isn't. And the way that historians or the mystics were have quoted to have said the thing that is enticing for you. As we dive into this whole conversation,

• 6:11André Duqum?

  is there any other words you have on how to discern without swallowing belief wholesale? Or again, just retreating into continual skepticism that almost is like a death to curiosity?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I think the main way that I approach it is is by letting the texts, which are frankly often very bewildering, just letting them be bewildering. There's there's growth in being bewildered. Aristotle famously said that philosophy begins in awe. And I think that that Greek word could be translated as bewilderment just as well. And so it's just letting this stuff be strange, letting it be unusual. Hildegard of Bingen said that tongues of fire came down and filled her head and she saw visions of castles in heaven. I don't have to, I don't have to sit in a place of judgment about what she experienced. I have to say, okay, let's let's seek to understand, not to judge. And once you shift, because we do a lot of judging. That's kind of like, culture pushes us. You know, I judge you because your political beliefs, or I judge you because of the way you dress.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Or it's a very judgy world that we've built for ourselves. And for me, that's just not gonna work. Because who am I? A 21st century person to step back into a medieval woman's mind and judge what she experienced? I don't, I can't do that, I don't want to do that. So it's to sit with the text, let the text make me bewildered and uncomfortable. And it's in that, that we can actually begin to grow the garden of curiosity. And I think that that's where we begin to get out of this world of, the text needs to mean something specific. There's a dogma to be recovered, there's the one meaning. And if I just get that one meaning, then I'll know the secret tools to happiness or whatever. It's never that simple.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And I think that when I see people peddling simplicity and easy answers emerging from this tradition, I know which direction to run.

• 7:58André Duqum?

  Yeah. Not towards them.

• 8:03André Duqum?

  It's interesting, because maybe we could set the stage. How would you describe to somebody entering into this world, the difference in your conception between religion, Gnosticism, and mysticism? How are those fundamentally different?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  I would say that religion typically, when we use that term, we're thinking about sort of an institution and the institutional set of beliefs that draw a line around what's inside and what's outside. Right? So it's either you're part of the institution, or you're a heretic, or some kind of outsider. And when you think about something like the Western esoteric tradition, which really isn't one tradition, it's lots of disparate things that we've kind of all lumped together. They exist at the margins of those kinds of authority systems, sometimes on the outside of them. And so part of what I'm interested in academically is these marginalized marginal voices, where the institution says, "Look, there should be certain kinds of ways that you experience God", for instance. And they're like, "Well, I didn't experience God that way.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  And you're not gonna tell me that I'm crazy or bad." And so it's the people on the outside of that. Or it's the voices that just lost, you know, the Gnostics of antiquity. Ultimately, they lost when Christianity became an imperial religion, and their voices were suppressed. And to me, it's about recovering those suppressed voices, that rejected knowledge.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  One, making it accessible to people, because I think there are many people out there that are craving alternative ways into spirituality, alternative ways into religion, alternative ways into philosophy. These are very meaningful systems for them. So it's about, for me, it's a question of accessibility. How do I grab the two hands and get them holding hands again? And two, it's about lifting up those suppressed voices, because I think that whether I believe there's fundamental truth in what they were up to or not is completely irrelevant. I think there's important things in there. And I think it's, I think it's wise to say, just because something doesn't speak to me, and something, just because I don't recognize something as true, my tradition is Judaism. Just because I'm looking at Hildegard Abingh, you know, famous mystic,

• 10:09Speaker 01

  just because I'm not Christian doesn't mean that there's something deeply important about what she experienced and what she wrote. And to separate out what I think is true from what I think is important, and say, let's lift this up because it's important. I think there's something worthwhile in that process, and that's the thing that I want to do. So it's, has nothing to do about whether I think something is true or not. It's about this, these traditions have been repressed, and there's importance in them. And my job is to, to lift that up, whether it's Paracelsus, or Hildegard, or John Dee, or the Gnostics, or Hermeticism, or what have you. I don't have to commit myself to any of it. What I do have to commit myself to is radical accessibility through education, and lifting their voices up as important,

• 10:52Speaker 01

  regardless of what I think they're right, or whatever.

• 10:55André Duqum?

  What I appreciate a lot in the way that you share and you teach is the way in which you approach these subjects to avoid a semantic fog and haziness and vagueness in the words you use. As much as we can in this conversation, I would like to define the terms, not presuming everybody listening, tuning in, knows and has the same understanding of what they mean. Maybe we could just start with Gnostics, and the Gnosticism. Etymologically, what does that, what does that word refer to? And

• 11:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, I would love to hear from you.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Gnostics is a troubled history here. A lot of these words are invented by the opponents of the very people they were describing. So, for instance, the Gnostics never called themselves that, not so far as we can tell. Irenaeus, a second-century church father, who said, "Oh, they're the so-called Gnostics. They're so-called Gnostics, and we just cut off the so-called and called the group them all as Gnostic." But the word comes from the Greek just meaning to know, right? And there was a kind of debate in early Christianity about exactly how is salvation achieved? Is it achieved through pistis, through trust, what we now translate as faith, although that's not a very good translation? Or is it a kind of knowledge? Is it if you learn something about reality?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And that learning somehow, like learning the truth about reality somehow has a salvific power? And what we see in the letters of Paul, the theology developed by Paul, both are there. It's the question not of choosing one or the other, it's a question of emphasis. And some early Christians really emphasized pistis, faith, trust. Some early Christians really emphasized gnosis, knowledge. And those two became one of several many Christianities. There was never just a Christianity, they were all Christianities. And the Gnostics, again, the term that I don't think they would have used, they embraced the idea that what fundamentally is salvific about what Jesus did, what Christ did, was to reveal the truth about reality.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And the truth about reality is that all of this is a prison. This is all cosmic prison built by an evil entity or ignorant entity called the demiurge. And what's true is that Christ has sort of come in as a kind of secret agent, revealed the truth about the falseness of this world, such that the divine spark within us can be returned back to the realm of divinity, the pleroma, the fullness. And so the trick was to get out. And so this became a different kind of Christianity, a kind of dualist Christianity that says, no, the physical world's a prison, middle line, evil god, the true god is a hidden god, and Jesus has come to reveal that truth. And so much of the so-called Gnostic literature is wrapped up in, here's the way the universe really is.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  And this is the, here are the various Archons, the prison wardens that keep you here, and here's how the Garden of Eden was a trap. It was meant to trap you in the world of physical pleasure. And it was actually good that we got tricked. The snake was actually the good guy, because he got us out of there. And at least now, we're not, you know, stuck in the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Delight. We can realize that, oh, I'm hurting, my body's, my body's in pain. I'm getting older, you know, like, I can feel that the flesh is bad, and that's at least sort of a prompt for us to get out. And what we're very lucky about with these so-called Gnostics is, in the 1940s, we discovered a huge cache of their books, that otherwise, we only knew through their enemies.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And we're very lucky, called the Nagamati Library, and the Nagamati Library contains dozens of otherwise secret teachings from these sects. So it's incredibly lucky.

• 14:34André Duqum?

  That was the what, the 1960s, 50s?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  So we found Nagamati in the 1940s, or 1940s? So Nagamati was discovered in the mid 20th century. So we have Nagamati and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were the two big discoveries of the 20th century, both of which gave us insight into the sort of the world that eventually produced Christianity as we know it, Judaism as we know it, and others are, I mean, it's just, we're incredibly lucky to be living in the time we live, because there are scholars alive who lived before that. And all of a sudden, now we have all this information about Gospel of Thomas, or the Apocryphon of John, and all this other literature. And what it shows to us is that Christianity and Judaism, there just weren't one, there were Christianities.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  And one of them ultimately triumphed. But just because you win doesn't make you right. You just happen to get an empire, and you get an army. And getting an army and an empire doesn't make you godly, it just makes you powerful. And so, these other Christianities, they were just as much Christians as anyone else. They were suppressed, their voices were culled from history. And now we have their books. So part of my job is to get their voice out there, not because I think they're right, because I have a horse in that race, but their voices deserve to be heard.

• 15:52André Duqum?

  It's so baffling that almost two millennia after a lot of these texts were written or described about events that were occurring and individuals that were living in that time come to the surface in a time where we were, for better or worse, born into centuries-old institutionalized power to contort the story for many different reasons: control, fear, desire for power. And I think a lot of people's awakening into religious inquiry or examining what is the truth of reality and perhaps questioning the religion that they were born

• 16:31André Duqum?

  into, that's a doorway into saying, "Oh, maybe I can live more in accordance with what these individuals who had profound transpersonal, subjective experiences, what was that actually like?" And I've heard you refer to a framework for the four qualities of mystical experiences. What are those qualities? Can you recall the four qualities and the varieties of religious experiences?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  William James, I think, yeah. They're noetic, transient. I'll fail my William James quiz. They're noetic, they're transient.

• 17:11André Duqum?

  Ineffability, noetic, transiency, and passive.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they happen to you. They're not a thing that you can induce, which becomes controversial in the Renaissance because there are philosophers who are going to attempt to induce them in the so-called occult philosophy. So, yeah, what William James argues is that they're noetic, which is to say they have intellectual content. They're not always noetic, but they can be noetic. And they can be noetic in a way that is propositional. So you can have an experience, have an intellectual content, and you can say something like, "Well, the universe is all fundamentally one thing. It's a very common mystical experience, the unity of all being." So that's a propositional aspect.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  They're passive, which is to say you typically can't induce them. They happen to you as opposed to, you know, it's not like you can sit down and go, "Okay, now it's time to have a mystical experience." And it doesn't work like that. You have to meditate and sometimes you get that katsu movement where you're hit with it, but you can't really induce it typically. They're transient, they don't last forever. Mystical experiences typically, you know, they can happen in just a blink of an eye. The most famous example is Yaku Tsurima.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  A cobbler, simple cobbler, chewmaker, saw God and all the universe in a piece of polished pewter and based an entire mystical experience system on this one moment where he saw everything in the gleam of a piece of polished pewter. So you never know where it's going to come from, but he couldn't have manifested that. It happened to him passively. And they're transient, they don't last long, they only last for a very specific period of time. Ineffability. Ineffability. That is often to say that you can't ever grasp in words completely what you experienced, but that never stops mystics. Mystics, if you've ever read any of the famous mystics, they will throw a pile of words,

• 19:05Speaker 01

  you know, volumes and volumes and volumes, trying to get at the thing that they experienced. And they will always happily admit to you, you know, that use the language of St. Thomas Aquinas, who after, you know, if you've ever read the massive works of Thomas Aquinas, he had a mystical experience where the end of his life and famously said, "Everything I've written is straw compared to what I saw." It's just, he's one of the greatest philosophers and theologians in Western history. So in that way, they're ineffable. You can't put into words exactly what it is that you experienced. So these are the qualities that James lays out, and I think that that's a useful typography. I don't think, for instance, that all mystical experiences in history are noetic.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Some of them are emotional. There's no intellectual content at all. You're just feeling something.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Some of them are noetic without being propositional. And notice this is odd because noesis typically involves propositional statements like "all is one" or something like that. There's a propositional statement, which can be true or false, but ineffability goes against that. Because ineffability means by definition, you can't put it into words. And so I think what's nice about the Jamesian typology is it captures what we often notice in mystical experiences, which is some high degree of paradox. And you see in texts like, let's say for Zohar, the foundational text of the Kabbalah, they'll use examples to when they'll call God the shining darkness. It's that they're trying to break your brain. They're trying to break your consciousness. And they're saying, look, whatever you think this thing is, it's not that. Right? And so you use a phrase like the shining darkness.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  You're like, what exactly is that supposed to be doing? And it's, yeah, they're, they're trying to get you to realize that there's something paradoxical about these experiences. And I think that at the heart of the Jamesian typology, there's a lovely kind of paradox where Noesis meets ineffability. And that's just like putting two magnets together that don't want to go together.

• 21:02André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  So in that way, it's, it's, it's a nice manifestation of the paradoxical nature of mysticism at the very heart of the very typology of mysticism itself. So it's, in that way, it's quite poetic.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 21:45André Duqum?

  So individuals who have mystical experiences typically report back, not just they encountered something that was just true for them, but something that was fundamentally true about the nature of reality and true for all people at all times. And that's where the noetic aspect comes in, where it becomes self-evident in my experience. There's obviously some problems with that. It's happening inside of me. You can't really see that from the external end. You can examine the fruits that come from that and make your own judgment on that. But what do you make of that recurrence that throughout millennia, we have had so many different mystics that have had these experiences that make them feel like there is a...

• 22:27André Duqum?

  Fundamental unicity. Obviously, there's a lot of people that have come with different theories that were built on top of that in terms of dual aspect monism. Yeah, so what do you make of that recurrence from the various different mystics throughout the ages?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Well, what all mystics share in common is that we all have the same brain, basically. So it's unsurprising that, given the fact that we all have the same brain, we're going to get similar kinds of experiences, just of the world in general. We're sharing a pretty similar, probably not identical, but pretty similar experience of being in this room. And unsurprisingly, mystics share some degree of similarities. Now, what's interesting is that there's not uniformity across the mystical tradition. So some mystics will posit a kind of fundamental unity about the world. The Gnostics posited a fundamental duality about the world. Now, one of these, both of these can't be true. And importantly also is that there's no mystics who exist outside culture. They're always existing with their backdrop, with their own cultural and religious backdrop.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  For instance, a medieval Christian mystic isn't probably going to see a vision of Krishna.

• 23:32André Duqum?

  Right.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  It's just not their cultural backdrop. You know, a Diatta Vedanta mystic isn't going to see a vision of Quetzicotl probably, because that's just not their cultural framework. And so even the propositional data, we might call it sort of the more pure propositional philosophical data that emerges from mysticism, is always against that cultural religious backdrop. So unsurprisingly, it takes those forms. Also, it's often quite conservative as well. This is a thing that I think many people are somewhat shocked by, is that, I think of some mystic like Bernard of Clairvaux, most important love mystic in the Western tradition, he was enthusiastic about the Second Crusade. He was like, "Yeah, love God and love everybody, but kill the infidels."

• 24:14Speaker 01

  And we look at that and go, "That really is a jarring juxtaposition." Where, you know, God is love, and you experience God and seeing love in another human being's face, and they all have to die. And you're just like, "What?" It's like, "Of course, because he's living in the background of, the cultural background of Christianity at that time." So unsurprisingly has these sort of, what strike us as very shocking things. So. I think what's important is that, again, there are these sort of universal things, but often they're universal only in a very, very low resolution analysis. When you get into a high resolution analysis of them, it turns out they don't agree with each other at all.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Very rarely do we get like a high degree of uniformity across mystical lines. And that's unsurprising because, like you said, it's such a powerfully subjective interior experience. And it's going to be individuated in me and in my consciousness and in my tradition. And therefore, that as you draw that individuation down, you're going to get significant differences, especially at high resolution. I just feel like we often conflate them. For instance, in the perennial tradition, we'll conflate them because we kind of all want them to be saying the same thing. And so we're like really happy not to look at them too closely because then that begins to evaporate. And to me personally, I think it's a disservice to these, to these great mystics because it means that you get to preserve their sanctity,

• 25:41Speaker 01

  but you do that at the cost of not really studying them very deeply. And I think that's a lost opportunity.

• 25:47André Duqum?

  Yeah, I mean, it goes back to the many individuals who have said something approximating the matured intellect as the ability to hold paradox simultaneously or two opposing ideas at the same time. And what you started and what we started with at the beginning of this podcast with bringing humility or really what I feel is just like basic human dignity and decency to not, to not lie about what you think you know, you know, to not say something you don't actually know. And it's incredibly enticing to believe the mystical accounts and create your own beliefs around them. And again, we have that fundamental search and yearning for meaning. When you speak about ineffability,

• 26:31André Duqum?

  you know, these individuals that have experiences that are fundamentally perhaps incompatible with language and the way that we use it. That's

• 26:42André Duqum?

  That's something that is tough to wrestle with sometimes, because we want to make sense and the way we do so is through reason and logic and linguistics. Any other thoughts you have there?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is an interesting thing where on the one hand, the mystics are pretty committed to the idea that what they've experienced is fundamentally extra propositional, which is, you know, from a philosophical point of view and my philosophical training, it's always struck me as strange that philosophers are of the extremely arrogant belief that all truths are propositional. It's just hubris to think that.

• 27:14André Duqum?

  Propositional meaning?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  That propositional meaning that you can put into a sentence and the sentences are true and false and all truths are sentenceable propositions and they can be diagnosed and evaluated through logic. That just seems silly to me, right? Of course, logic is powerful and we can do a lot with it and language is powerful and do a lot with that, but to pretend that all truth is howls within a capital letter and a period is just... It just seems so silly to me. And so I'm maybe perhaps of the strange philosophers where I'm totally open to the idea of non-propositional truths and of which mystical truths are likely at some level non-propositional. And on the other hand, what do mystics love to do?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Write, write and write and write. And if they're writing, they're making arguments. They're trying to convince you of something. They're trying to communicate something to you. And one of the interesting things about that, and I think this is another place where we do these mystics a great disservice, is that they're smart. They're putting their arguments together logically. If you go read especially early Buddhist texts, they're very carefully constructing long series of categories by which to understand the nature of consciousness. And this is clearly logical and a very strong sense of the word. So I think that we have to take them seriously on two fronts. And this is again, this is a place where there's a paradox. On the one hand, we take them seriously in the truth of the ineffinability of their experience and that's non-propositional. Those truths are always non-propositional.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  On the other hand, we have to take them seriously at the level that their writings make sense and that they're actually trying to do logical heavy lifting in their writing. And we should evaluate them about that. If you're telling me that everything is fundamentally one united structure, and you're giving me reasons to believe that, well, I want to take you seriously at the argument that you're making. And one of the things that we've inherited mostly from the Enlightenment, which is, as a child of the Enlightenment, I love the Enlightenment, but some of it went off the rails, is this dichotomy between logic and mysticism, as if being rational and being mystical are to be juxtaposed. And you can only believe that if you've never read a mystic. And if you really get into reading the mystics,

• 29:28Speaker 01

  whether it's, again, all the way from some mystics, like my favorite mystic, the Bhagavad Gita mystic, 14th century mystic, from her to Parmenides, who's also mystic, he's philosopher but a mystic as well. I say, was Descartes in a way. But they're doing both. And we should be willing to accept that they're doing both and not impose upon them a false dilemma between the rational and the mystical, as if somehow one defeats the other, or we have to pick a team. They didn't pick a team. And I feel like they didn't have to pick that, and we don't have to do that either. And so, again, this is a place where I feel very

• 30:13Speaker 01

  happy to put on my logical rational brain. And then, the moment they say, "It's beyond that", we're like, "Okay, okay." Like, I'm not entitled, as a reader and as a studier of this material, to force them into boxes, especially boxes that they didn't build for themselves, and especially boxes that are just modern biases that we've inherited, that aren't really useful for us and aren't scientific. They're not philosophically rich. They're just weird biases that we've picked up over the past couple centuries. And I think it's high time that philosophers, scientists, scholars of this material just get over ourselves and get over these categories, which just aren't that helpful for understanding this material.

• 30:57André Duqum?

  Hey fam, a quick share from something I genuinely love. This is IM8. I know it's very common to hear ads for so many different health products and supplements these days. I actually sought these guys out to partner with and have been drinking their product for a while. I think they're doing something genuinely different. IM8 Daily Ultimate Essentials Pro contains 90 nutrient-rich ingredients and one drink. It replaces about 16 separate supplements, vitamins, minerals, probiotics, clinical doses of CoQ10 and MSM, even saffron extract for focus and mood. It's co-founded by David Beckham, built with Yale researchers, and it's NSF certified for sport, so you know exactly what's going into your body.

• 31:39André Duqum?

  You just take one of these sachets, you tear it, you pour it, you mix it. It tastes delicious and it's actually doing your body favors. If you want to try it out, go to im8health.com/knowtheyself and use code KNOWTHEYSELF for an additional 10% off, welcome kit, and five free sachets. That's im8health.com/knowtheyself. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show.

• 32:03André Duqum?

  It makes me think of many things, from girdle to...

• 32:09André Duqum?

  You know, my love of the eastern traditions and the very sophisticated systems that are propositional, that give you, you know, from the Buddhist to Patanjali Sutras to the Vedantic philosophy in theory that make a whole lot of sense and map onto reality from my lens and from many, in a really clean way. And yet, the paradox is that they'll always infinitely fall short of truth, perhaps, and that there is this distinction, which I'd love to get your perspective on, between something being irrational versus non-rational. What is that?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that non-rational just means that we're not going to be able to put it into the predicate calculus, which is symbolic logic. And... Do logic shopping and get a truth vector out of that. Those are non rational things. We do this all the time. Bach's music is beautiful. It's a non rational statement. Am I gonna prove that to you? Yeah. Give me a theorem or a question that proves the beauty. Here's my deduction. The love of my child. And yeah, I love my child, alright? The view outside is not... We live in a world of non rational. Aesthetic experiences are always non rational. Everybody's totally fine with them until they get to the mystical realm and then people get weirdly upset by it. And it's for the reasons that you said. It's because at that point you've started saying things like,

• 33:35Speaker 01

  "Well, it's not that Bach is good music. It's that Bach should be good music for everybody." And that's a more dangerous claim. Alright, it's a more dangerous claim. Irrational things are simply things that involve logical contradictions. And if something involves a logical contradiction, and I know many people maybe watching will say, "Well, I really don't care about logical contradictions." Well, you just said you don't care about them and you're committed to the truth of not caring about them. You know, it's... Because when you... Ergo, you do. Yeah, you do, right? You're not caring about logical contradictions ensures that you in fact do show that you care about logical contradictions. Because you violate the principle of explosion and there's all kinds of logical problems that go along with that. And it's the thing, by the way, the mystics don't do that. The mystics are not interested in contradicting themselves logically.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  They think they've experienced the truth and they want to tell that truth. And things like paradoxes. Paradoxes are where we use... Where words are used in sort of strange ways and there's real and apparent paradoxes. And paradoxes can be interesting places where we can push language to its limits to show that language has a limit. And the thing I'm pointing to is beyond language. And paradoxes are an excellent way, practically, ritually, linguistically, to like get you to look past the sentence and say, "Look, when I say that God is a shining darkness, what I'm trying to tell you is that whatever you think God is, God's not that." Right? Whatever the Tao is, not the Tao. So I think that this is a...

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Places where we can show that philosophically... Logically, linguistically, the mystics are actually much more sophisticated than often we give them credit for. And they're certainly not non-rational. They're very interested in rationality, but a particular kind of rationality and downstream of non-rational experiences. And again, non-rational experiences are just all day, every day. In fact, most of our experiences are non-rational. And so I feel like this is a place where, again, it's when you go from a non-rational experience to universalizing the propositions that you derive from it, that's where you begin to get the worrisome stuff, like Bernard of Clairvaux saying, "God is love and we should kill the infidel."

• 35:46Speaker 01

  You're like, "Whoa, I need to see some whole, I need to see your, you gotta show your work, Bernard." Because that's really committing us to some pretty frightening stuff. And again, it's like how, it's how he builds that out. And so, one of the things that I have argued philosophically is that mystical experiences might entitle a person to deepen their own beliefs and might allow themselves access to certain kind of propositions. But because of the profound subjectivity and interiority of them, it probably don't allow you to universalize them. So you're probably never going to be in a position to go, you know, like Bernard. "I experienced God as love and what God needs us to do is get rid of those people." That move is typically not, is typically not doable.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  And we all want that impulse, because when we experience the truth, one of the things we want for the truth is for my truth and your truth to be the same. And if I think that your experience of God is wrong and mine's right, I'm gonna want, it's a natural impulse for me to put you on my page. And I think that, again, if anyone's ever had a mystical experience, you really think you're right, because it's transformed your life. But you probably don't get the moral wherewithal to have your life transformed and then demand that someone else transform their life because of your experience.

• 37:05André Duqum?

  It's fascinating, the moral, the moral judgments and claims that individuals with transpersonal experiences...

• 37:14André Duqum?

  can create or that we can put on top of them, right? It's almost like we think that a mystical experience will absolve somebody of their priors and the culture in which they were born into and the personality structure that is happening within or coinciding with. And we know that people with religious fervor and certainty around ideas around the afterlife or bloodlines go on to do the most horrendous things throughout ages.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's, you know, there's nothing more terrifying than Deus Wilt, God wills it. And when you speak for God and you've had the experience of God and God has spoken to you and now you are marching out into the world to do the work of God, you have this sort of eschatological impunity. It's a theological suspension of morality. Now it's whatever God wills is moral and I am the instrument of God. It's not really me. It's God working through me. And at that point, you've abdicated any personal responsibility. And we see it happen over and over again in history. It's happened right now, right? And, um, yeah, it's those moments where, you know, as a philosopher and as a skeptic, I just want to sit down with people who've had mystical experiences and say, let's walk

• 38:27Speaker 01

  the line between what you've experienced, which is no doubt extremely powerful, and what does that actually entitle you to in terms of, you know, your own belief structures, your own, you know, trying to understand yourself now in the context of wider mystical experiences, which is the thing I get a lot on my channel, is people have powerful mystical experiences on psychedelics, on various synthogens, meditation, and now they're bewildered and they're like, what do I do with myself? I can't go back to live my life the way that I would. So what do I do now? And I'm like, well, one of the things that you can do is you can see how other people have dealt with this. And some have dealt with it better than others, morally better than others, I think.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  So that's an important part of, you know, of what I, what I want to be doing is, is giving people access to the accessibility into the history to show what you've experienced is profound. I'm not gonna say it's common, but it, other people have happened. And there are better and worse ways of navigating your life in the aftermath of those mystical experiences. Because what I wouldn't want someone to do is to collapse into nihilism and say, "Oh, my subjectivity is only just me and therefore has no universal bearing whatsoever." But nor do I want someone to go full-tilt, you know, Crusader, you know, and it's sort of, now it's like mystical imperialism.

• 39:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  I think that's a dangerous, I think both of those are dangerous impulses.

• 39:51André Duqum?

  Yeah. Now, my friend Peter has this great saying, "There's none so self-righteous as the newly converted." And you see this throughout ages and to be careful what you wish for. I've been in a lot of circles where people are like with fervor going after mystical experiences. And we see that divine revelation can quickly become distorted from the person perceiving their experience because there is, the way our ego works is so slippery, you know? I see something, or I saw something, becomes I am the one who saw the thing. And there are so many examples of, just throughout history, where that's going terribly wrong.

• 40:35André Duqum?

  So, that, that, that tangent all to say, when we, when we speak about the non-rational, would you say that mystical experiences are fundamentally non-rational?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Speaking in always and every is gonna make you a liar. I think that they, if I had to, if I were a betting man, I would say they're probably, they're probably non-rational, but, right? The ineffable side is a non-rational side, and yet, what flow from them are rational, propositional, noetic content, right? So, it's, it's, it's sort of both and. And this is where I think that, again, this is maybe a corrective that I've, I've offered to some people. It's like, when you think the noetic quality is entitling you to mystical imperialism, remember the ineffable part.

• 41:21André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  You aren't the best judge of it because what you experienced, even by your own admission, is beyond your understanding.

• 41:29André Duqum?

  But what do you, so how then do you make sense of, even though there is a huge variance in these transpersonal, subjective experiences, out of body, near death, ethiogen-produced?

• 41:44André Duqum?

  Whether it's exogenously or endogenously created, some people, there is overlap from these archetypal realms and characters that people experience to deities that people encounter. I think it is an important note that you mentioned earlier, right? That somebody, a Christian awakening or revelation is not going to usually coincide with a visual of Krishna.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Typically, maybe now, maybe now, these days, but in the 13th century, probably not.

• 42:17André Duqum?

  But it does point to the ineffability of something. Maybe there is archetypal or the words we use to describe the characters we see are always going to be informed with the language we have because of the culture in which we were raised. But there are energies, perhaps, in a more transcendent realm that people from all walks of life, if that is to exist, that we could all encounter. I love getting to speak with all people from all walks of life, philosophers, professors, people that are more walking the mystical path. And I feel like my job as somebody who just brings sincerity into the inquiry is not to collapse into belief or the skepticism, which can quickly become dismissal of somebody's experience,

• 43:02André Duqum?

  which we should fully examine and not dismiss. Because in many cases, it's quite self-evident that there is a profound experience that has happened to them that transformed their health, put a cancer into remission, gave them insights into reality that are profound, like Ramanujan with mathematical theorems, you know, that apparently he encountered. And I am curious, when it comes to the verifiability of these experiences, whether it's the NDEs or like I mentioned, Ramanujan, or what do you make of those experiences,

• 43:46André Duqum?

  which I'm sure you've studied or seen throughout time, that seem to have truly encountered something fundamental within?

• 43:55André Duqum?

  Reality at a deeper sense that we can see the fruits that it bared, even if it takes centuries to verify the mathematical equations that came from them. What do you, what make, what say you?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  You know, it's one of those places where I have to say that the world is stranger than I can possibly understand. And people are like, well, what do you make of, you know, a mathematical theorem being revealed in dreams by a goddess? And I'm like, I don't know what to make of that. I mean, it helps when you're already a mathematical genius. You know, I'm not super good at math. If I got, you know, if I, if someone gave me a solution, if a goddess came to me and gave me a solution to the collapse conjecture or something, conjecture, that would be really impressive because I'm not that great at math. But, you know, I look at those examples and I think to myself, I don't know. And I'm not gonna probably ever know. What I do know is that we're all running the same hardware. We all have the same brains, right? So unsurprising, we're gonna get similar overlap to that.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  You could go the Jungian route and say, look, there's some fundamental collective unconscious that we're tapping into. Or you could go the full blown metaphysical route and say, no, there's just a different fundamental reality that we do have access to via these mystical states. I don't think we're ever going to be in a position, again, should be careful with never or whatever, but I think that it's unlikely we're gonna be in a position where we're gonna be able to run falsifiable studies about the nature of machine elves or something, right? In DMT land. And I think that's fine. I think it's just like, we have to sit in the mystery of some of this stuff and say, well, we're coming out, we're coming up to the very edges of the limited experience of what it is to be a human being. And we are not entitled to know.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  We did not evolve, the apes that we are did not evolve to understand fundamental reality. We evolved to like make kids, right? And the idea that we've gotten this far with philosophy, with physics, with science, that we can like put muon detectors in the pyramids and find voids. And it's like the stuff we can do is amazing. But we're not entitled to any of it. Evolution has made us, it's lucky that we can have these sort of things. And I think that as a philosopher, we come to the very edges of these moments of human experience. And I think what philosophers need to do is, this is a moment for intellectual humility. This is not a moment to pass judgment on a mystic. It's a task of to sit down and go, okay, let's, let's work through this.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Let's take this as seriously as we possibly can, because the implications of it are some of the most important implications for existence. And my job is not to be like, oh, you didn't experience that. Oh, you just had hallucination. Uh, this is just, it's, um, what's the right word for it? It's, it's, it's, it's hubris of the highest order to, to, to gaslight someone into saying, oh, you didn't have a profoundly changed, a prof, uh, experience that changed you. And that there's something, there's some there, there. When someone tells you that, you should take them seriously. And taking them seriously doesn't mean believing everything they say, but it does mean, let's take this as far as we can go. And at some point, the science needs to say, I don't know. The philosopher needs to say, I don't know.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Mystic also probably needs to say, I don't know. And we need to sit there in the silence of, I don't know, and say, there's something profoundly transformative about what it is to be a human that we can access somehow. And in the middle of it is a vector of escape, where no one's gonna have a monopoly on it. The scientists are gonna have it, and they can do as many brain scans as they want. And they can do temporal lobe epilepsy and put you in a centrifuge and spin you around. Maybe you'll experience God, but that's still, that's not it. The philosopher, the mystic, we're all gonna have to sit in this uncomfortable silence if I don't know. And, you know, when I work on the material that I work on, you know, I, I look at that and people, I look at some of this material, some of the strangest things Western people ever written about. And to people, I say, what do you think really happened?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  And I was like, I don't know. I just don't. And that means that I don't get to dismiss it as mythology. And it also means that I don't get to dive into it and say, oh, I'm a true believer now. I'm not, I don't have, I don't have, I don't have the ability to do either of those things. So I get to sit back and, and enjoy the silence of, I don't know.

• 48:09André Duqum?

  Hey fam. One thing that brings me a lot of joy is having a warm, nourishing drink to start my day like I am right now, but I personally don't drink anything with strong caffeine, and that's why I love Mudwater. You've probably heard me share a bunch about their OG blends, which are made with cacao, functional mushrooms, and adaptogenic herbs. So you get natural energy and focus, but without the reckless caffeination of coffee. However, if you're not ready to leave coffee behind entirely, I get it. And that's why they recently launched their new coffee, made with arabica beans, L-theanine, and the same functional mushrooms. Only 45 mg of caffeine. Research shows that's the sweet spot, enough

• 48:50André Duqum?

  to support focus, mood, and reaction time, without the anxiety or crash of coffee. They're also available at Target and Sprouts nationwide. If you want to give them a try, head to mudwtr.com/know thyself and grab your starter kit. Right now, our community gets up to 43% off your entire order, plus a free rechargeable frother and free shipping. That's M U D W T R dot com slash know thyself. I hope you enjoy as much as I do. Back to the show.

• 49:19André Duqum?

  Do you have any other thoughts there on that dismissal into mythology? Because it seems like, looking through the lens with a modern scientific mind, we can dismiss a lot of these experiences and encounters and writings as though it's just pure hearsay in mythology, you know?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  It's a poor understanding of mythology. That's what it is. We say something like, "Oh, well, Bigfoot's just a myth." It's that "just a myth" part. The myths were never meant to be taken completely literally, and they were never meant to be dismissed as stories. Mythology lives in a world where every single human being lives. They're a way of parsing the world through symbolic systems. And I don't care how much of a skeptic, how much of a materialist, how much of a scientist you are, we're always parsing the world through sets of symbols. We are a meaning-making creatures. And again, if you want proof of that, just look at how meaningless we're... Many of us are experiencing life these days. We're having a meaning crisis. It's affecting all of us in some deep, fundamental way.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  And so the myths are one of the ways that we parse and generate those systems of meaning. And so sometimes people ask me, like, given what you know, how can you be religious? And I says, well, I can be religious because I take my myths very seriously. I don't take them literally. And no one can force me to take them literally. And in history, history, no one did either. It was some combination of I take them seriously and not literally. And in some sense, that's more liberating because the mythology now is allowed to live. And it doesn't have to be pinned down to these three words literally happen in this way. It's a prison.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  It's a prison of the mind, literalism. But you can say, no, there is a there there behind these words that is powerful in terms of its meaning-making capacity. And myths are the way that we do that. And it's funny because you'll have scientists, and again, not to bash the scientists, but because I'm on their team. I'm one myself in a way. But they'll say things like, oh, well, that's just, those are just myths. And I'm like, you tell yourselves myths too. For instance, one of the great myths that we love to tell is that Isaac Newton was a totally rational guy and developed physics and the theory of color and calculus, blah, blah, blah. Because he was born out of Isaac Newton's rationality. I'm like, Isaac Newton wrote more on the occult than he did on calculus.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  He was thinking about the infinite, not because he was interested purely in the math. He was interested in it because he was interested in the nature of God. And he was writing more alchemy than he was about optics. You have a myth about rationality, right? About how Descartes invented modernity. Like, yeah, yeah, and through skeptical doubt. That's how we get to modernity, through skeptical doubt. Until you actually read Descartes, in which he tells you he had a mystical dream and what a divine being came to him and revealed to him the method that became the Cartesian method. You're curating your story of modernity because you don't like the part where he has mystical dream, but the mystical dream led to the skeptical method.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  And both, if you don't tell the whole story, you're engaging in a kind of myth-making.

• 52:38André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  And I think it's intellectually dishonest and it's dangerous because it ultimately ghettoizes this incredibly important part of the human experience, which is Descartes had a mystical dream. Isaac Newton was just as interested in the occult. Kepler was just as interested in the, Kepler's mother was accused of witchcraft. These guys are the foundations of modernity. They have their foot in both of these worlds. And if we don't tell that side of the story, then what are we doing? Like, what are we really doing?

• 53:08André Duqum?

  So well said. And I am really looking forward to diving into the distortion and the curation of the story of modernity, in your words, because it's a pervasive, it's a pervasive tell.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  It is incredibly deleterious to us. And I think it's led to this meaning crisis. Part of what's led to the meaning crisis is that we have let people tell us a lie about the development, about modernity. And that lie has robbed us of some of the most important spiritual technologies of what it is to be human. Like, when we're robbed of the power of myth, we're robbed of meaning.

• 53:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  And I, you know, for me, as a person who's deeply committed to the Enlightenment, deeply committed to modern scientific rationality, all of that, you can only do that if you're being intellectually honest. And the intellectual honesty has to come with, you don't get to take the part out where Descartes had that weird dream. You don't get to take the part of Parmenides out, where Parmenides is led to deductive analytic metaphysics by a vision of a goddess. You don't get to cut that part off because it makes you uncomfortable. And the mystics don't like the analytic part. And the analytic part isn't liked too much by the, the mystics don't like, the analytic people like the mystical part. And the job, I think, when you do history right, is to make everybody uncomfortable. And when everyone's uncomfortable, we're getting somewhere. But when the scientists are comfortable telling their version of the story, and the

• 54:30Speaker 01

  mystics are comfortable telling their version of the story, and they can sit in their own siloed camps. That silo, that is the death of intellectual growth. It's a death of spirituality. And I'm like, no, this is the uncomfortable middle that I'm trying to show in the work that I do.

• 54:46André Duqum?

  Yeah, and it's the birth of immense hubris. I've heard many different modern intellectuals and scientists completely dismiss Newton's writings on alchemy. It's just complete hearsay and like, all the stuff that he wrote was just, you know, garbage over here. And his useful stuff was the calculus.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  The calculus, yeah, yeah.

• 55:05André Duqum?

  Which I understand, like, one bears fruits in a way that is useful for everybody, right? The other is convenient to the story we've been bred into, you know, of just putting that to the side. But how do you make, because I think it's James Campbell's conception of the psychotic drowns in the same water the mystic swims in with the light. So how do you make sense of what is actually coherent mystical experiences and the writings and sayings that come from them?

• 55:42André Duqum?

  And discern between straight up hallucinations and psychosis versus people that seem to be touching a coherent, profound, transcendent reality that seem like they're kind of swimming in the same water, you know? But there is a difference.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Sure, and sometimes I guess it's not my job to judge, right? It's like, I get to be like, I don't really know, like, you know, was William Blake, like, was he crazy? Like, yeah, it can be crazy and true, like, you know, like, it's not, you know, I would question these kind of dichotomies that we build for ourselves, where, you know, at the end of the day, I look at some of these texts and say, is this the ravings of a mad person? Or is this, you know, or what Lang said, that not all breakdowns are breakdowns, some breakdowns are breakthroughs? And my task is to look at the text with what I call sometimes a critical sympathy. Critical in the sense that I'm bringing to bear all the tools that I have access to. And it's admittedly small group of tools, honestly.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Philosophy, logic, science, I'm gonna bring to bear all those tools. And my job is to go to the texts, the mystical texts, and say, this makes sense. That's my north star. There is a reason this person wrote this because it made sense to them. My job is to get in their head as best I can. And find where that sense-making is happening. And I was just working on a Gnostic text called The Untitled Treatise. It's so difficult to understand that scholars just can't even give it a title. They just don't know what's going on in it. It's so bewildering. And my job is to get into the text and say, no, it makes sense. It's a me problem when there's no sense. You know, and so I throw everything I have at it.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  And at some point, I'm gonna hit a wall and say, I just don't know what's happening in this text. But this is the best we got, right? And, you know, if I get to the text where it's completely just incoherent, then I'd say like, I've reached the limits of what I can do with this material. And does that mean the text is incoherent? It might, but I should be humble enough to say it might just be a me problem. Yeah. Maybe this text was written for people initiated in mysteries, where it was meant to be performative. It was read out loud in a performance setting, and it was meant to induce a certain kind of consciousness. And therefore, it's not the job of the text to actually be making sense in an analytical way. It's meant to induce a state. That's totally possible.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  And so, the task at that point is to step back and say, okay, I'm not able to understand it in a straightforward, literal, logical sense. Let's think bigger. Yeah. Maybe this text is performative. Maybe it's like a koan. Maybe it's meant to break consciousness. It's actually, they're intentionally writing it in a way that makes it so that your logical brain can't do it. So that's the task of a scholar. And anybody who goes at the history of esotericism, the history of the occult, the history of Gnosticism, Hereticism, and they bring to bear the tiny little skillset of logic, rationalism, empiricism, and they're just like, oh, it doesn't fit into my boxes, it's nonsense. Yep. Come on. It's just, it's embarrassing. Yeah.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Like, it's just, but again, it shows you the sense of modern entitlement. And part of the reason why it is is because most people who are trained in modernity, they don't even know that there is an alternative story. Yeah. It's been so suppressed, it's been so papered over. You know, when I was in graduate school, I was, I mentioned that Descartes story. And in graduate school, I was basically told to my face by a professor, "It just didn't happen that way." I'm like, "Descartes said it happened that way, but it didn't happen that way." What he's saying is, "It can't have happened that way, because the story that we want to tell is incompatible with rationalism having a mystical origin." That's a no-no. And they get angry.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  And I'm like, "Oh, you're getting angry at me not because I'm wrong. You're getting angry at me because I'm a heretic. You have a story, a religious story about rationalism that you want to tell, and I'm saying, "The rationalism that you're so dedicated to is born out of a mystical experience, a non-rational experience, a dream. And that makes you uncomfortable, and now you're transferring that discomfort onto me in the form of anger." This is not my problem. Not my problem, man. Listen to what Descartes says.

• 1:00:05André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Like.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:00:38André Duqum?

  So I would like to, because I feel like we set the stage well in this conversation. I've been absolutely loving it. And you, through your channel and your writings, explore so many different avenues, which we feel at times are separate buckets. You know, Kabbalah, alchemy, witchcraft, all these Gnostic traditions, which I'm excited to hear your understanding of the overlap and how a lot of them are weaved throughout history. Perhaps, and I just want to pierce through the biggest illusions that...

• 1:01:13André Duqum?

  We collectively hold around who these individuals were and what was happening at these times. We could go on for probably 100 hours and still not scratch the surface as you do in your channel, and there's just so much there. But it's a gift to be able to sit down with somebody who's dedicated life to these studies. So maybe the first one could be our understanding of Mary as a reformed prostitute. Who is Mary Magdalene in your conception and your understanding as you've gone through the Gnostic texts and reading all that you have read? And we could go from there.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  It's a lot, right? I mean, what kind of unites this field as much as it's united? Sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy because it doesn't feel terribly united. I feel like my brain's being pulled in all these wild directions. It's like Gnosticism Monday, and then Hermeticism Tuesday, and Gospel of Mary Magdalene on Wednesday. And I'm like, sometimes I refer to it as intellectual spiritual whiplash that I experience. But what groupsum is, at least by the teacher that I've learned from, Professor Valtanograph, who I studied with at the University of Amsterdam, is that he argues that what brings them all together is they've all been rejected. Right? They're rejected knowledge. And I would go so far as to say not just rejected, but suppressed. They tell stories that have made us uncomfortable, or have made institutions uncomfortable, and

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  we've hidden them. Right? We've hidden them. They've become a cult. They've become hidden. They've become esoteric. They're things that only a small group of people are ever talking about. So that's sort of what unifies the field of Western esotericism and what I work on. And so we get everything from alchemy, magic, astrology, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, which, as you said, they don't seem at first to talk to each other. Gnosticism doesn't have anything to do really with medieval alchemy. They're not talking to each other. And Gnostics were a long since extinct by the time the medieval alchemists were doing their thing. But what unifies them is that in the West, we've rejected them, and we've put them all in the wasteland of history, or we think we have. And yet, they continue to have this profound effect just under the surface of the history

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  that we want to tell. Newton being one of the great examples, right? Is he the first of the scientists or the last of the sorcerers? Well, the answer is yes. The answer is yes.

• 1:03:28André Duqum?

  Is the suppression of this exploration what has kind of been...

• 1:03:34André Duqum?

  Causing indignation on your end to keep on studying them?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's when we distort history through the kind of funhouse mirror of we want history to be a certain way. And the truth of the matter is, it's never going to be a certain way. It's a mess. Now, history is just kind of a, it's a Titanic mess because it's all about us and we're a mess. And it's what makes me worried is, you know, we have this story we say, all right, we should, if you don't learn from the past, you're gonna repeat it. That's true, and we're in dangerous waters right now. We're in a meaning crisis. The world's boiling over with all kinds of philo-political philosophies that are turning increasingly toward violence. There's atomic weapons out there. I mean, the world's in a, we're in a, if you look at the history of the world,

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  we're living on the knife's edge of God knows what. And I think if we're gonna study history, we gotta study it in its entirety, including the things that we've rejected. Because it's in those rejected things where the kind of unconscious world of the Western imagination lie. And I think, you know, to crib Jung, right? If we don't get at those unconscious things, we're gonna be victims of them. So I think we just need to study this stuff. And it doesn't mean that, you know, when I go study a text of alchemy, it doesn't mean that I wanna go be a medieval alchemist. If I study the occult philosophy of Agrippa, it's not like I'm out there trying to channel the powers of Mercury or something. Although if someone wants to do that, all power to them. But what it means is that this is an important part

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  of the trajectory of Western spirituality, Western philosophy, and Western culture. Period, like, full stop. They need to be included in the story. So that's part of how I approach it. And it's the rejected, and yet they're playing an actually disproportionately important part of how the West developed, and most people are unconscious to that fact. And I just think that's a dangerous place to be in, right? But to go back to your question of Mary Magdalene, we don't know anything about Mary Magdalene. What we do know is this whole idea that she was thought of as a sex worker, turns out that's just Gregory, Pope Gregory just said that. He just took all the Marys that weren't Mary, the mother of Jesus, and just conflated them all. And, you know, I guess you can do that when you're the pope or whatever.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  But that whole idea that Mary Magdalene was a sex worker doesn't appear in Eastern Orthodoxy. They don't believe that because it never happened. That conflation of the Marys never happened in the Eastern Church in the way that it happened in the Western Church. But clearly, the Jesus movement, you know, sort of prior to what we would now recognize as Christianity, the Jesus movement had important women in it. And these women are playing some kind of substantial role in the development of the movement. And it seems like Mary Magdalene was part of that. And apparently, an important part, so much so that after the early Jesus movement sort of evolved into Christianity, there are still stories about secret teachings being given to Jesus, by Jesus, to Mary Magdalene

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  over and against the other apostles, especially Peter. And so we have a text like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, where Jesus is giving her secret teachings, not Peter. And that's clearly shade at the emerging sort of proto-Catholic church, who's really, upon this rock, Peter, you will found the church. Clearly, this group of Christians are like, yeah, not that. These secret teachings. So it's a fascinating book, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Now, is it late? Does it really represent actual teachings that Jesus gave to Mary Magdalene? I'm skeptical of that. Probably not, who knows? But what it does matter is that some early Christians felt it important enough to write it down. And we can kind of think of it as somewhere between

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Revelation and fanfiction. A lot of these, a lot of these Gospels, including the four Gospels that are in the Bible, many of them are written, all of them are written decades after Jesus is out of the picture. So at some level, it doesn't matter whether it really happened or not. What really matters is, for those communities, this text was an important touchstone on what they thought Christianity could and should be. And again, whether you're a Catholic or Protestant, it shouldn't matter at some level. Again, I should speak for Christians, but it does show you that there were communities of Christians that weren't on that specific path and were on a different path. And unsurprisingly, right? Go drive down a major road

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  and see how many different churches there are. With the fact that we can drive down a major road and see 50 different kinds of churches, well, we should be unsurprised that if you look back in antiquity, something similar was true as well.

• 1:08:13André Duqum?

  If you were to speculate, you know, when you look at the Magdalene caves, I believe, in the south of France and some of the texts found in the Nakamati Library, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, I'm curious, what are your thoughts on who she could have been if not a sex worker and from the Magdalene manuscripts and many different teachings pointing to her being and women in general being, playing a much bigger role in Jesus's life and at the time than the powers that be wanted to allow credit for?

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that certainly after Jesus's death, there's a power vacuum and there's a push for authority. Who's going to be the authentic representatives of this? And of course, they also believe the world was about to end. Jesus clearly thought that the world was going to end in his lifetime. I think he was quite surprised when he died before it did. And we see this in Paul 2. Paul says things like, "Some of you will not taste death." You're not going to die. This is going to come to an end pretty soon. So I think that the Magdalene specifically was probably a relatively high up woman in the church, may have been a widow, may have been somehow otherwise detached from the

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  system of relations that would have otherwise kept her in a home. We do know that McDoll was a town. It just means tower. McDoll just means tower. Miriam, how McDollie means is the one from the town with the tower. So we know that it was a relatively poor village. So probably she wasn't of means. I don't think she was wealthy because that village doesn't really show much wealth. It wasn't like a big Roman town like Tiberius or something.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  And clearly, she was important enough that the gospels couldn't write her out. You know, everyone knew her. Everyone knew the stories about her. So she must have been important. Now, was he secretly Jesus's wife, or Jesus's wife, and, you know, she goes off to the south of France? I don't know. I think that's when you get into, into the world where I just, there's, the evidence becomes extremely shaky and I, you know,

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  I'm doubtful of that personally. And also, I think Jesus was celibate. We know other Jewish sects at the time who also were pretty confident that the world was about to end. Some of them tried to force it. The Essenes tried to force it when they, the Romans ultimately began their, began the civil war. They tried to engage the Romans militarily and lost terribly.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  And so I think that celibacy was the order of the day because they were basically preparing to, to be purified and leave the world, be transformed into angels or something. We see that kind of language in Paul, and we see it in the Essenes too. There's some kind of, some kind of transformations that happened to the world. But, um, but now, I don't, I don't see evidence of Jesus being married to her. But again, um, but also it's again, the kind of thing where, uh, if, if that story is meaningful to people, which I think it is meaningful to many people, the idea of sort of a hirus gamus. I think that can, it's the kind of thing that can't live at the level of evidence because we don't have much evidence, but it can live at the level of mythology. And I think that's an important place where it can live.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  And I think, again, we need to reclaim the power of myth to say, no, this is a really meaningful thing to me, regardless of whether it happened historically.

• 1:11:40André Duqum?

  From a high level, how much of early religion is really decided by who won the fight?

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  All of it. All of it. I mean, once, once religions get wrapped up into state power, once they get wrapped up into armies, I mean, Christianity begins as a pacifistic religion. They get a state army, you know, they get the, they get, they become the official arm, the official religion of Rome. Wow, now things are gonna change. So I think that when religion aspires to political power, they basically decide after they've wiped out, you know, who's going to, who's gonna win and lose. I mean, I think about, for instance, the rabbinical Judaism, the, the tradition I come from. It wasn't because of anything other than they were the last one standing.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  The scenes got wiped out, side streets got wiped out. The Jesus movement ultimately no longer considered themselves Jewish and went off and become another thing. The rabbis were just the last one standing and they had the kind of spiritual technology that allowed them to survive in the aftermath of the temple. It was historical luck, and it was historical luck. And so I think that we shouldn't, we should, anytime that we are looking at the history of religion and not thinking about some kind of power analysis, we're only getting one side of the story. You know, I think of many medieval, many medievalists, Hildegard, the church loves her. She's on good graces with, with the church. Other mystics, not so much, right? And they burned them.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  So it really all depends on how you align yourself with, with, with power, what kind of prestige you have, you know? If you are lucky enough to die early, like Meister Eckhart, he basically died before he could be excommunicated. So it's, it's often the luck of history that decides this stuff. Which is, again, survival doesn't make you right. Power doesn't make you right. And I think if you were to go to the early church and go into a so-called Gnostic church and ask them, what are you? They would say Christians. They wouldn't say Gnostics or Valentinians or Sethians. They would say, no, we're, we're just Christians, like, you know? And it's, it's their opponents that named them this, right?

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  When we call them Valentinians, we're playing into the same kind of, the Valentinians were a very important Gnostic sect. Their leader, Valentinus Neelix, became the Bishop of Rome in the 180s, which can, there's a whole alternative history of what happens if Valentinus becomes the Bishop of Rome. Maybe the Catholic Church looks very different, who knows? But their opponents named them that because they're, they're, you're not a follower of Christ, you're a follower of Valentinus. And sometimes I think we should just call, like, we should rebrand the Catholic Church as Petronism. It's Peterism or Paulism. Yeah. And because all, everyone's claiming to be a follower of Jesus at this time. And we, we end up knowing these people by their, by the, by the, the names by which they're hereditated.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  And I feel like it's total disservice to these people who just saw themselves as Christians. Yeah. And we should say, no, the Valentinians were just Christians for whom the guy that they really thought was important, you know, in terms of his teachings of Valentinus. And...

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, ditto. Like, you guys are Irenaeans. You're following Irenaeanism.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  But again, the victors get to write, get to write the story. And that's the story that gets told.

• 1:14:59André Duqum?

  So, fast forwarding, I mean, long before the witch trials, there was this erasure of local spirits, people's connection with nature, the suppression of the feminine, widespread theme. How would you give a bird's eye view of the suppression of the feminine leading up to the witch trials? Like, from your understanding and your readings, what was actually happening at those times and who was being persecuted?

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  What we can tell from the architecture of things at the time is that Christianity, early on,

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  was more comfortable with syncretism than we often admit.

• 1:15:35André Duqum?

  Syncretism?

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Syncretism being that

• 1:15:37André Duqum?

  Oh, syncretism, yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Syncretism, that Christianity and other pagan elements were sitting much more comfortably side by side, especially in folk religion. And we know this because bishops complain about it. But they don't really do a lot about it. Because when things are really popular, if you try to put the kibosh on it, you know, I mean, these are the people that are tilling your lands. These are the people that are paying your taxes. If you go tell them, "Hey, you can't dance around that maple anymore. That's paganism," they're gonna be like, "Sure we can. Make us." And so Christianity, for a long time, it did not, it did not rule by the stick. It enjoyed, it suffered. I don't know what the right word is. It had a lot of syncretism. And there are moments where you can see, in some of these old churches, clearly pagan elements sitting right next to Orthodox Christian elements.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  And there's a bishop preaching up there from a, you know, there's those churches that have, you know, pictures of Thor right next to Jesus. You're like, "Thor and Jesus? Why?" And it, because the average person, if they're a member of the Norse religion or a recent converts, they're like, "Yeah, you know." Thor and Jesus are gonna fight the bad guys at the end of time, right? So it's Book of Revelation or Ragnar, it's all the same.

• 1:16:47André Duqum?

  Ragnar.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Yes, Ragnar, Ragnar and Revelation is all the same. Because if you're a folk person and you can't read, you're just like, oh yeah, at the end of time, there's gonna be a big battle between good and evil. We know the story. We already have the story. So it's, there's a lot of syncretism going on here.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  And that's true of Judaism as well. When you, you read the Bible, the prophets are constantly talking about, like, quit worshiping this goddess Asherah. Stop. And that means that people were. They were perfectly at home with the idea that there was the God and there was the goddess. And they lived in the temple and it was fine. Some people didn't like it, but the prohibition tells us that we have practice. When there's prohibition, that's an indicator of practice. So religions typically exist through syncretism. The idea that religions are monoliths is really a thing that lives only in the imagination of certain people in an office somewhere. But when you get down to it, if you go to Mexico and see how an average Mayan Catholic

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  interacts with Catholicism, it's an interesting combination of Catholicism and... Now, the bishop over in Marytown might have an opinion about that, but is he gonna go try to suppress it? It's not a good idea. What ends up happening specifically in Europe that leads up to the witch trials is that there's a guy named Johannes Neider. And Neider is a well-connected bishop. And he's beginning to get stories from all over Europe, where they're arresting women and women under torture are confessing to various kinds of strange things. And what he does is he puts all of the stories together and says, hold on, they're all part of the same heretical movement.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  It's not that, you know, part of this witchcraft and magic is a sin. Sins are fine. You can, you can get sins forgiven. What you can't get forgiven is heresy. Once you've committed yourself to heresy, you're excommunicated and you can be, you can be subject to all kinds of things. What happens is that Neider and eventually Kramer are gonna, these are two bishops, inquisitorial bishops. They're going to take all these stories and generate basically a conspiracy theory. And the conspiracy theory is, the world's about to end. It's always about to end. The world's about to end and the devil's doing the last big push to outrage God. And the new outrage is there's a new heretical sect. And the heretical sect is led by women who meet in the forest,

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  get naked, fly around, make men's penises disappear. So of course, the most important thing is dudes' penises. I'm serious. If you look at all these manuals, that's the one thing.

• 1:19:17André Duqum?

  That's what their conspiracy is, bro.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  They're like, all the things are like, yeah, they make our penises disappear. It's terrible.

• 1:19:23André Duqum?

  It's like.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  It's just the most, like, it's the most Freudian, like, castration anxiety thing ever.

• 1:19:28André Duqum?

  It's like a horrible indie film.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  It's just like, yeah, the magical vanishing penises. Uh, or whether magic, they cause hail and stuff. And the idea is that all of this is now one new heresy. And you can extract this heresy through the, through torture. And the book that really sets this all off is a book called Malais Malificarum, The Hammer of the Witches. And, um, and it was written by a psychopath. I mean, we, the guy that wrote Hammer of the Witches, Kramer, um, or Institur, this is Latin name. He was so crazy. He was sexually infatuated with, with a couple of women. It's again, it's always this sort of weird Ted Bundy type guys that end up in this stuff. But he was so infatuated with a woman, he kept putting her on trial for witchcraft over and over again,

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  that the local bishop was like, you have to go away. Like, you have to leave. Like, you're just like, when the Inquisition tells you that you're being too much, like, you're out of control. So what does he do? He's like, he's like an incel kind of guy, right? He, he's, he's, you know, he's violent and he goes, he hates women. And he goes off and he writes this book. And this book becomes a bestseller and he writes it right at the time printing is coming online. So what is effectively a screed, um, because of printing, becomes all the rage. And this, and it really initiates the witch hunts. And, you know, the modern data says that between 40 and 60,000 people, mostly women.

• 1:20:52André Duqum?

  Over what time period? 300 years?

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's about from, beginning about 1450 and ending, you know, some of the witch trials wave one in the 18th century. You have executions in Switzerland that go all the way into the early 18th century. But most of the killing is finished by the, by the late 17th century.

• 1:21:05André Duqum?

  Mainly happening where in Europe?

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  All over, from Iceland to Russia. Um, so you have, the big killings typically happen in places like Scotland and Germany, which is also the areas where you have a lot of religious strife. So Catholics and Protestants are really at each other's throats, literally. And typically, that's a pretty good predictor for when you'll have big outbreaks. But it's a feedback loop, right? I rest, I go to a village and say, is anything bad happening here? And the answer is yes, because it's 1580. And like you were living in a little ice age and yeah, it's bad. And you're like, are there any women here who are strange? Talk too much, gossip too much, curse too much, live by themselves? Don't go to church enough? Is there a woman like that here? They're like, yeah, her. And I rest her.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  The presumption is that she's guilty, right? And of course, what is the devil? He's the father of lies. So what do I do? I ask her, are you a witch? And she's like, no. We're gonna have to figure this out. And what do we do? The torture begins. And of course, she will eventually admit it, because everyone will. You torture someone enough.

• 1:22:09André Duqum?

  What kind of torture?

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Typically, the, so it's funny. It's, you know, we look at the church, we think of, if you've ever been one of these torture museums, they have all this horrifying stuff, or iron maidens and stuff. The church had strict rules about torture. It involved, you couldn't draw blood and you couldn't break bones. So typically, the torture was strapato, which is where you tie someone's hands behind their back and then lift them into the air. And that, you know, you can imagine that what it does to the shoulders is just terrible. And then they can just bounce you up and down and leave you like that overnight. And

• 1:22:41André Duqum?

  Basically trying to get you to confess to something that's the agenda.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  That's the agenda. And typically, it's not just confessing, because remember, this is a heresy. Heresy is involved more than one person. It's not just the one lady. She's just the weak link. So what do you tell her? If you just tell us the names of the other witches, we'll go easy on you. And then it's a virus. It's a mind virus. It's a conspiracy theory. One becomes three, three becomes six, six become 40,000 women. And this goes again from Iceland to Russia. In fact, interestingly enough, Iceland and Russia, the majority of people executed in the documents are men. And it may be examples of old pagan folk practices that were still being practiced in sort of the hinterland of Iceland and Russia and up in Lithuania,

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  where there may have been sort of some surviving paganism stuff, kind of lingering. And that got wrapped up into the witch trials as well. So more men were executed in Iceland and Russia than women, which is interesting.

• 1:23:35André Duqum?

  Interesting. So it was Largely strange, like perceived strange or isolated women, not necessarily people practicing magic rituals.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  No, this is the thing that people often don't understand is that they didn't often target midwives. Midwives were productive members of society. They worked alongside priests and doctors. So it wasn't healer women, typically not, very rarely. The biggest predictor for being accused of witchcraft is poverty. That's the one thing we see across the board. That's the predictor is poverty. And because again, what they're being, what they're being accused and convicted of is being members of a heretical sect. Sorcery is still a sin and men are practicing sorcery all the time at this time. So now you can still get in a lot of trouble for that. But you have Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly talking to angels and revealing all kinds of angelic language stuff.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  You have Agrippa writing three books of occult philosophy. You have tons of men at some level publicly engaging in sorcery, Faust, Paracelsus. They're living in the height of the witch trials and they're more or less able to exist with some problems. I mean, John Dee was invited by the Inquisition to come to Rome with them and he politely refused because that was a good idea. Bruno, of course, was burned alive in 1600. So you can run the risk of the Inquisition. But basically, if you confess, you can be adjudicated because you've committed a sin. You're not a heretic. The difference is these women are considered heretics. And so once you confess to membership in a heretical sect, an explicitly anti-Christian heretical sect,

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  at that point, you can be turned over to the secular authorities and that's when you get hanged or burned. Some places temporarily burned, some places hanged. Most in England, they do mostly hanging there.

• 1:25:26André Duqum?

  And it's, that's heavy.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  It's a nightmare and this is one of the lessons I try to tell people is like the witch trials are a conspiracy theory. There is no data to indicate that this, that any witches were ever existing in Europe. It was they were just Christians killing Christians. And the nightmare is, this is what happens when conspiracy theories get political power and impunity. And this is what we have to have, you know? You know, and there were people, there were people during the witch trials. Johan Weyer, the student of Cornelius Agrippa, came out and said, I've interviewed, he was interviewing convicted witches before they were executed. And he was like, what these women share in common is they all are suffering from melancholia, which is a pre-modern version of what we might call mental illness.

• 1:26:11André Duqum?

  Melancholy?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Melancholy, it's where we get melancholy. But it doesn't just mean in best time, it doesn't mean just sadness. But he noticed that some of them were talking to themselves. Some of them heard voices. Some of them were really, really happy and then really, really sad. He was a physician. He was basically inventing psychiatry by interviewing women. And what he said they in common, they're all poor and they're all suffering from various forms of melancholia. And Johan Weyer said, I think we need to be treating these women, not killing them. And guess what the witch hunter said? You work for the devil.

• 1:26:47André Duqum?

  Kill them too?

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Target him. King James wrote a book on demonology and said Johan Weyer works for the devil. Can you imagine being a regular physician, living in mainland Europe, just trying to help people? You know, help defenseless women being targeted for mass murder and the king of England puts a target on your back? Terrifying, terrifying. But these are important voices, because he is a voice that actually went down scientifically, interviewed these women and tried to help them. His teacher, Cornelius Agrippa, who wrote the three books of occult philosophy, defended a witch.

• 1:27:23André Duqum?

  That?

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he successfully defended a witch on both theological and procedural grounds.

• 1:27:30André Duqum?

  So you brought some books with you?

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:34André Duqum?

  What is that? You brought that one specifically, right?

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. So I brought, I brought three books with me that are sort of typical of the kind of material that I work in. So not only do I work intellectually and the traditional Western esotericism, but part of the... The bug in the future of what I do is that some of these books are so rare, that if I want to get access to them, I have to go physically get them. There just aren't copies. And so, a book like The Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the most important book on occult philosophy ever written, published originally in 1533. I mean, this book was, when it was being printed, the Inquisition kicked the doors in and stopped the printing of the book. And Agrippa could have been arrested and killed. But, you know, this guy is defending, successfully defended a witch, which is very dangerous, by the way.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Because if a witch, witches couldn't hire lawyers. Lawyers wouldn't work with them. Because if the witch is convicted, guess who the lawyer was defending the entire time? The devil. And lawyers also shares in the conviction. So then lawyers wouldn't touch witchcraft cases. Agrippa did. So, whoa. So it's a really, a really heroic guy. But he also wrote the definitive book on what we now call occult philosophy, which is the idea that human dignity is such that, before we fell from grace and the whole Adam and Eve thing, we had a property called dignitas. And dignitas is a kind of inherent value, that the human being was inherently worthy of dignity. It's a big deal now.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  We talk about human dignity in the UN Declaration of Rights. Agrippa thinks that that dignity comes because we're made in the image of God. And he thinks that we can get it back. We can actually reclaim our dignity, our full degree of dignity, and we do it through practicing magic. Because magic is the power by which, basically, God created the universe. And God did it through speech. And so, that's, we have words like abracadabra, right? I create as I speak. That comes from this book, actually. The Sefer Yetzirah, one of the most important foundational works of the Kabbalah. This is the first printing.

• 1:29:38André Duqum?

  So you are a curator of rare texts and...

• 1:29:43André Duqum?

  You also sell some, but you... How do you find these books?

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  So it's a fun kind of detective work. Sometimes I'll get a call and someone's like, "Yeah, I inherited a collection and this book is in the thing." Or they'll go to auction. Now, a library will be dissolved. For instance, the General Theological Library in New York was recently dissolved. A lot of institutions are just going broke, frankly. It's very sad. And one of the ways that they can justify making a good bit of money is that so many of these books are digitized. There's no reason to go specifically to the General Theological Library to look at it. So it's difficult for them to justify holding on to them, so they go to the market. And many of these books are so obscure that even when they go to auction, people don't know what they're looking at.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  And so part of the way that I understand my career, one big part of it is, these books have been systematically repressed, just like these traditions have. Agrippa's book was directly targeted by the Inquisition. These books, you know, when you get a Bible, Bibles were meant to be read, passed on. They were meant to survive. Thomas Aquinas's work were meant to survive. It's no surprise that we have lots of copies of them because they never went into the fire. This went into the fire. This book was actively targeted for destruction by the Church.

• 1:31:04André Duqum?

  So what specifically is that book and what is it dated to roughly?

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  So this is Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. It was printed in 1533. In fact, we know that, we know from the ending, it was actually printed in July of 1533. But the book was being printed in 1532. We know that because in some of Agrippa's letters, he complains to the local Archbishop that the Inquisition has kicked the door in and halted the printing of the book. And Agrippa reminds them, "Though the Archbishop of Cologne invited me here to..." To publish this. And so it's a whole big complicated process. But the book is the foundational text of what is called the occult philosophy. And the occult philosophy is the idea that the world, the apparent world is not the only world. That there's an apparent world that we can see with our five senses.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  And there's also a hidden world that God has put into creation. Hidden in Latin is just occulta, the occult world. And Agrippa believes that we can harness those occult powers. And those are the godlike powers by which creation was engineered. So this is the power of the celestial powers and the ethereal powers. And we can harness those powers. And by harnessing those powers, we become godlike again. We are dignity is restored to us. And so for everything from, you know, he has in here the alphabet of the angels. Because we should be able to write like the angels. They have their own alphabet. We can write like them. And so Agrippa lays out a systematic theory by which he thinks we can have our dignity restored to us. And this is very controversial for lots of reasons.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  One of the reasons why it's controversial is because part of it has to happen in this process. And you have these really beautiful evocative images of sigils associated with the planets by which we can gain planetary power. So the planets radiate energy. We can capture that energy and use it for various kinds of, various kinds of magical workings. But one of the things that's controversial about this book, and there's many controversial things about this book, obviously. But one of the most controversial things is that Agrippa thinks that divine illumination is a thing that we can in fact induce. So mystical states, so we go back to William James earlier, they're passive. What Agrippa says is they don't have to be passive. We don't have to wait around for God to illuminate us. We can meet God halfway.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  And when we meet God halfway, it sort of short-circuits and we get divine illumination. We can induce divine illumination. Now, on the one hand, that sounds great because now it means that, one, you can actively become a mystic. And two, you can kind of do it on purpose and make it happen. But the church's worry is that you're, it sounds like you're forcing the hand of God. And that was obviously a big, big no-no. And so this book was immediately hereditated. It was immediately declared heresy. It mixes Kabbalah, it mixes alchemy, it mixes, you know, basically every occult philosophy that Agrippa had.

• 1:33:51André Duqum?

  Wasn't there like the alphabet of the?

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the angel's alphabet, yeah.

• 1:33:55André Duqum?

  What was it, the what alphabet?

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  So it's sometimes referred to, there's an alphabet of the witches, but there's also an alphabet in here called, sometimes referred to as, the alphabet of the witches. The Theban alphabet, which is now a big deal in Wicca, the Wicca, and the Wicca religion that use it. Let me see if I can find the alphabets in Book Two.

• 1:34:11André Duqum?

  How much is this book, how would it go for today?

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  So, on the open market, it's a good question. One hasn't appeared on the open market. I have three of them. There's also a bibliographic weirdness about this book. It's kind of gets into some interesting territory because the first edition, we think of first editions as all being the same. When you get a first edition, the first printing should be the same. I've gotten my hands on three copies of this, extremely rare, and they're all different. So the question is, which one's the first?

• 1:34:38André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  And did Agrippa hide things? Like, are there, are there things that he's changed so that only if you know, you'll, that there'll be things hidden in these books?

• 1:34:47André Duqum?

  A little Da Vinci Code situation?

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  It's, you know, it's really weird. Like, I'll give you one example of this,

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  where there are mysteries in this book that we still have not totally figured out. For instance, there's a famous imagery of the dignity of man as spelled out through occult relationships to the planet. So these all, these symbols all make a good bit of sense to us. At least if you've studied this stuff long enough, you kind of know what's going on here. If you know how to read these texts, they're quite strange, but you can get some sense of what's going on here. But as we flip through to the end, we get to a diagram where we're again shown these mathematical occult proportions of the man, of the human being. But now there's these numbers, and no one knows what these numbers mean. And it's a mystery. And I, we've, I've worked on it, people have guessed, we don't know. So the book has mysteries left in it.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  So not only is it about occult philosophy, but there's actually things hiding in the book. I even think that there's some, something hiding in the printing process. I think Agrippa has hidden things in this book. And that you would never know it because the book is so rare that you would never get three copies, five copies in one room. You might find one copy in a library here, one copy there. But to get several of them, I have several of them. And now I've been, I was looking at them, like, hold on.

• 1:36:03André Duqum?

  Cross-reference, maybe.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're gonna be like, why is that part in French here and in German in this version? Why is this part surrounded with a circle in this book? But in this printing, it's surrounded in a square? And it's an outstanding bibliographic mystery. I know one, we don't know. But part of what my job is, is to do the Da Vinci Code thing and try to figure out what in the world's going on with this stuff.

• 1:36:25André Duqum?

  So these go for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes, these old texts?

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, because again, it's not just that they're old, but they're rare to a magnitude unique to them because they were hunted. This book, if it was, if you recall this book, you could be prosecuted, the book could be destroyed.

• 1:36:44André Duqum?

  You were mentioning before we rolled how we just assume that everything you can find is online.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51André Duqum?

  And that there are these-

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  The Google policy.

• 1:36:53André Duqum?

  Yeah, and that there are these first edition texts which are simply not available online that contain information you just can't find.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's funny because you go to the Library of Congress website, right? The most important library in this country, and they will tell you, we have the first edition, first printing. And I'm like, do you? Because I have three copies and they're all different, and I don't know which one's the first printing.

• 1:37:12André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  And so, one of the things is if you're a scholar and you don't know this, and you just go, of course, you go to the Library of Congress. They have the most definitive editions of everything in the country, except for when they don't. They don't even know. And so, part of the problem with a lot of the work that I do, especially when it comes to looking at these historical texts, is that, one, they're esoteric and mystical, they're already dissimulating, they're already saying one thing and meaning another. But secondly, even the printing process belies the fact that there are mysteries in these books.

• 1:37:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  The physical book hides something.

• 1:37:47André Duqum?

  What do you think it could be hiding?

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  There could be blinds, you know, in the magical tradition, there's a custom by which you give someone the magical experiment or an alchemy, you tell someone how to do something, but you include intentionally wrong things that only an adept would know. So that, you know, you don't let everybody know, right? This is a printed book, everybody can buy a copy of this. But should everybody know everything? Maybe not. So what do you do? You hide blinds, you put blinds in the text to mislead people on purpose, and only people initiated in the mysteries will know, oh, no, you can't, that's not the way that sigil, that's not right. This has to go the other way, this is mirror imaged.

• 1:38:27André Duqum?

  Yeah, it reminds me of the Declaration of Independence and the Nicolas Cage movies, you know, with the like hidden- Under UV light, findable little codes.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is some weird things like there's this little, there's like, you know, there's like a little woodcut here. And it's like, why is it there in the middle of the top of the page? So, yeah, and it makes for like-

• 1:38:47André Duqum?

  Where's the alphabet?

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me, let me find it. These books have a mind of their own in some ways, you know, you can tell, you can hear the paper. It's like a very thick kind of paper and they don't naturally want to open to the pages you want them to open to. So let me see, it's in book, back in book two.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  It's also funny because you can see where it's been opened repeatedly. Whoever had this copy at some point really was interested in these sigils to do this magic. So this was owned very likely by a practicing sorcerer. But, uh, yeah, the alphabets are here.

• 1:39:19André Duqum?

  Endlessly fascinating.

• 1:39:21Speaker 01

  There we go, there they are. So we have always coupleistic tables. And then here, Agrippa tells us, right, that this is what is called the Theban alphabet. This has become the alphabet of the witches in the Wiccan tradition. So it doesn't show up for the first time in this book, but it shows up in his teacher for the first time, a guy named Trithemius. But here we have the Scriptura Malachim, the script of the angels. So it's a Hebrew alphabet, but it's the language of the angels, which is interesting is that this type of alphabet actually goes back to ancient Egypt. So we can trace a magical connection all the way from 1533 all the way back to the Roman Empire, that these magical symbols were continuously in use.

• 1:40:01André Duqum?

  You think connected at all to like the Elysinian mysteries or?

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Not specifically to the Elysinian mysteries, but certainly continuity to the Greek mysteries in general, especially those in Egypt. Here's another alphabet of the angels.

• 1:40:15André Duqum?

  Alphabet of the angels. And so was this actually like a used language or for writing? Or is it just a system that was maybe used for a very sub, a subset of practitioners?

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Good question, you know, we don't know where these alphabets come from. You know, they, they seem to show up in magical, and specifically in Jewish magic. They pop up in Jewish magic. They're still dominant in Jewish magic today. You'll still, you can go into any Jewish bookshop and you can get a copy of the Book of Raziel that contains all kinds of amulets.

• 1:40:42André Duqum?

  Does that contain, does that also like, it makes me think of the Sefer Yetzirah, which has got so much encoding and interesting meaning.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, so this book references this book.

• 1:40:53André Duqum?

  Interesting.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  Agrippa knows this book quite well, and so they're talking to each other.

• 1:40:56André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Which is a neat connection, so.

• 1:41:00André Duqum?

  So what is that book, do you feel?

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:02André Duqum?

  Is there anything else you want to show in that?

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  No, it's just a really fascinating book, and you know, when you ask sort of like, you know, how much does a book like this cost? It really ranges, you know, I'm holding on to this right now because I want to hunt down the mystery. But I think this will eventually make it onto the market, and you know, it'll fit, you know, five figures.

• 1:41:18André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  Now, somewhere in that neighborhood, you know, which again is unsurprising just because it's an incredibly rare book and incredibly, incredibly important in the history of this material.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  We have Sefer Yetzirah here. This is the first printing, this is Mancha, 1562, so this is the first time this ever appears in print.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  And of course, it circulated in manuscript prior to that, but this is the first time that it appears in print. It's a really lovely edition. What's really neat about it, this specific copy, is that there is a Kabbalistic prayer specifically for the study of Sefer Yetzirah, the book, that's unique to this copy.

• 1:41:59André Duqum?

  What is that for people that don't know?

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  So, the Sefer Yetzirah is a Kabbalistic book allegedly written by Abraham, the patriarch Abraham. Your knowledge may vary about the historical accurateness of that, but it describes the mechanism by which God created the world. So, in the Bible, God creates the heavens and the earth through speech, right? So when I say, "Let there be light," nothing happens because I'm just some schmuck. But when God says, "Yehi or," v'ya he or.

• 1:42:27André Duqum?

  So it should happen.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Let there, yeah, "Let there be light," and then there was light.

• 1:42:30André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  So God creates through speech, right? That's a core idea in the Kabbalah. And this book, again, alleges that it is the mechanism by which God created the heavens and the earth, and is analyzing the Hebrew language to find secrets in the language that are metaphysical secrets, and the power of the language to do, to transform the world. So the most important thing that this book lays out. And there's cosmological stuff in here. You can see toward the end, there are these great cosmological diagrams that show the nature of reality and how God has structured the universe like a language. And one of the most interesting things that is detailed in the commentaries of this book

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  is the idea that, look, God and human beings share in common that we both have creative speech. Now, our creative speech has been significantly lessened by the fall, by Adam and Eve falling. Our sin has made our speech not as effective as God's. But if you're righteous enough, then you could do something. And the Gemara, the Talmud says, if you're righteous enough, you could create allah mein, worlds. But most of us aren't righteous enough to create worlds.

• 1:43:41André Duqum?

  Does that have any etymological tie to Elohim? Or does it sound similar?

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  Similar, yeah, similar words, spelled differently. But you can't create worlds, but what can you create? You can create people. And this is the myth of the Golem. You can take a lump of clay, shape it into a human being, and through speech, which is laid out in this book, you can bring that creature to life. And so the Golem emerges in Sefer Yetzirah. So, again, fabulously rare book. Jewish books are rare just because of the history of antisemitism, unfortunately, and this mystical text printed for the first time. And it's interesting because in the history of me studying esotericism, the first esoteric book that I ever got was a copy of Sefer Yetzirah, given to me by a Catholic priest, no less.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  Father Brian, of blessed memory, I used to hang out with him after school, me and my friend David. And he was the only person in the neighborhood where we could just ask anything. We could talk about God, we could talk about religion, philosophy, and he just let us talk about whatever we wanted. And he would, you know, it was like a grown-up that was smart and cool. And I remember one time, he handed me a copy of this book, I still have it. And he was like, your ancestors wrote this, maybe you can make more sense of it than I can. And it was a copy of Sefer Yetzirah. And so I think sometimes about him putting that in my hand. You know, a Catholic priest reaching out to a Jewish kid to put a mystical Jewish text in my hands, right? And then I think back to the moment where I acquired this, the same exact book printed

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  for the first time.

• 1:45:13André Duqum?

  What is the feeling you get inside your body when you're looking at these ancient texts?

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's, you talk about the feeling of the numinous, that, you know, these are survivors. I'm a steward of this book. You know, I think what Indiana Jones said, right? That we're just passing through history. This is history. And so when I take this book, it's sacred to me. It's, it's, it's survived unimaginable things. And therefore, my task is to, both in terms of the contents, make it as available as possible to as many people who want to learn about it, but also as a physical object, to treat it with reverence, that it has traveled through time, it has reached me. And my job is to get it through my lifetime to where it needs to go. It's not mine. I'm the custodian of it.

• 1:46:02André Duqum?

  Yeah, steward of it.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but at the end of the day, my job is to steward these books through history. And I think that, again, we have this capitalistic, oh, it's mine. I'm like...

• 1:46:14André Duqum?

  You sounded a lot like Gollum there.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not precious, you know? Yeah, you know, it's, it's, and it... But I think that the, the goal, I think what we can cultivate if we're wise, and maybe we'll get some wisdom, is, no. The wisdom is not yours. The wisdom belongs to everyone. You need to be the conveyor of that wisdom. And as a book, as a physical manifestation of that wisdom, you need to shepherd it to its next part of history. And that's your job as a custodian. You don't own it. History owns it. You just happen to be in possession of it.

• 1:46:49André Duqum?

  Yeah. Wild, man. I would love to come to your library and just nerd out with you for weeks on end. What is this, so what is this third one?

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Also very important in the history of what we work on is called the Hermetic Tradition. And in fact, the Hermetic Tradition covers alchemy, astrology, and magic. Those are easier to refer to as the Hermetic Sciences. And it's all based on the idea there was an ancient Egyptian sage named Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice Great.

• 1:47:19André Duqum?

  Thoth, something?

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  Thoth, yeah. He's a manifestation of Thoth. And so he's Thoth and Hermes mixed together, and...

• 1:47:27André Duqum?

  He pops up throughout many different epochs, right?

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's all around. I mean, he's, you know, he's the main guy in this whole big story, right? And, you know, the inventor of alchemy, he's a teacher of Moses. I mean, you go to the cathedral in Siena. If you ever go to Siena, go to the cathedral. In the middle of the cathedral, there's an image of Hermes Trismegistus teaching Moses. What do we mean? What a wild story.

• 1:47:48André Duqum?

  People have so many different conceptions of who or what he was.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:47:52André Duqum?

  Some sort of alien god. Are the Emerald Tablets, do those have any legitimacy in your idea?

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Emerald Tablet is a legitimate hermetic text. It's one of the texts specifically related to alchemy. It shows up first in Arabic in like the eighth and ninth centuries. But it probably goes back to Greek texts. So the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus is important. But this text, the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus were largely lost, at least in the Western world, until the 15th century, where they were brought over by refugees fleeing the conquest of Constantinople. And they brought with them manuscripts of the hermetic tradition. This is the first printing of those teachings of Hermes Trismegistus in the original Greek language. So they're printed early in 1460, translated by Marsilio Ficino. But this is the first time they're printed in the original Greek.

• 1:48:44André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  So we have them here in the original Greek language, printed here in 1558. It's originally printed in 1460, but not printed in Greek, the original language of the text, until the 6th to mid 16th century. But what's nice is that we have all of them, right? Because the original printing didn't have all of them. We have all the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus that survive, of course. But we also included with it is the famous translation of this material by Marsilio Ficino. And of course, Ficino is important because he gave us the first Latin edition of the entirety of Plato. So Ficino, basically, he is the conduit through which the ancient Greek and Egyptian mysteries reach Europe.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  And that sparks sometimes what is referred to as the Hermetic Renaissance.

• 1:49:34André Duqum?

  Which was around that time, in the 16th century?

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  Yep. It sort of, you know, really begins in the 1470s with his translations. He dies in 1499. And then after that, the translations just have a huge impact. Everybody's reading them because we've recovered lost Egyptian wisdom.

• 1:49:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  In their mind. Wisdom that had been lost for 1,500 years. And again, to Ficino, this is a teacher of Moses. And so when this stuff hits the press, it is fire, man. Just absolute, everyone's just like, we gotta get this stuff.

• 1:50:05André Duqum?

  When was the Library of Alexandria burned?

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  So the library was burned several times, um, sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident. But what's interesting about the Library of Alexandria, it didn't go away because it was burned. It went away basically because it just got underfunded. We know, we know, you know, we burned the Julius Caesar accident, call it on fire, but the whole thing didn't burn. But what we know is that over time, if you, if you've ever been to Alexandria, I led a tour out there. Alexandria is very humid and papyrus can survive about anything but humidity. They all disintegrate in about 80 years. And I know this because I've taken a whole papyrus, I've copied out an entire book of Aristotle on papyrus myself. And I've just subjected it to humidity, see what happens, and it disintegrates really fast.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  And what sadly probably happened is the Library of Alexandria was basically built by the Ptolemies as a flex. They wanted to show off how prestigious they were. So what do you compete on? Compete on everything, alright? So what's the big flex? You flex on Ephesus, and you flex on Pergamum, and you flex on Athens. They all have famous libraries. I'm gonna get my library flex on.

• 1:51:10André Duqum?

  The best library.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  And I build the biggest and best, right? The Ptolemies are no joke, and so they did. But as the Ptolemies and the Seleucids go to war, governments fund wars, they don't fund libraries in the end, when it comes down to it. And so what happens over time, they get systematically stopped funding the library, and eventually the library just vanishes.

• 1:51:30André Duqum?

  Which is around what time period it would be happening?

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  So we know that, so it's founded sometime in the mid 3rd century. We never found it, by the way. We don't know where it was. We know that it was there, but archaeologically, not a shred of the Library of Alexandria has ever been found. I walked around Alexandria in the area that we think that it is. But modern Alexandria is sitting on top of it, and it's not gonna excavate anytime soon.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  We know that in the second and third centuries of the Common Era, there was a big library in Rome and it burned. And they sent scholars to Alexandria to recopy stuff to bring back to Rome. So we know it was still functioning then. So we think that probably by the fourth or fifth centuries, it was already on the decline and maybe it had already ceased to exist. But it was also never that big. Sometimes people think, oh, it had like 400,000 rolls in it. But if you go to the library, for instance, Ephesus, which we know was the second largest library in the world. I've been there, I've been inside that library, it's still there. You can walk, you can walk it and you can do some basic math and figure out, okay, a roll, a single roll is about, you know, this big by about that thick. And you just do the math, how many rolls could fit in the building?

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  And with statues and with everything else, you get a count, right? You can be like, oh, it's about 20,000 rolls at Ephesus. Best guess about the Library of Alexandria is probably 40, 60,000 rolls. Which again, big, I mean, it's a big library. But did it contain everything? Probably not. Because the Ptolemies were really interested in Hellenization. They were really interested in showing off how smart the Greeks were. And they really looked down on the indigenous Egyptians. They didn't have a lot positive often to say about the indigenous Egyptians. So were they translating stuff from Egyptian into Greek? I don't know. I think that it was a very, the Greeks were there as part of a colonial venture.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  You know, and typically colonists don't have a lot of positive say about the things. Because if the people that you're colonizing are somehow more ancient and better than you, then what are you doing here?

• 1:53:28André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  And so I think the Greeks had a bit of a chip on their shoulder about it. But no, when I was in Alexandria, it was a, it was a, it's sort of a harrowing thing because the city's crazy. I mean, it's just, you know, it's a wide, it's a wide open city. But there was a moment I was walking around and there was sort of, I don't know what happened. Maybe I tuned it all out or maybe there was a weird calm. And it's like, it was here. Like it was here somewhere. And like every scholar in the ancient world, like Christianity was forged in these streets. Gnosticism was forged, alchemy was born here. You know, they perfected astrology like, like here, somewhere here in these, you know,

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  and it was a very, again, a very numinous feeling.

• 1:54:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  You know, and I don't take those moments for granted. It's, I can be an academic skeptical scholar, but there's something about walking into a lecture hall where Plotinus may have been. And it's a moment for you to sit down and be quiet and see if you can hear him. Right? And maybe in that silence, you know, and there's some humility to be had and some wisdom to be gained by still small voice. That was a really, really, really a fun, that was a great trip. I really had to be in the new modern, the modern Library of Alexandria also. Which was funny because we were, we were going in the modern Library of Alexandria and they have a history of manuscripts museum inside the library.

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  And they have a Torah school there from the community, the Jewish community that used to live in Alexandria. And I was looking at it and I was like, I was reading it out loud and I was like, oh, wow, this is the exact portion, it's open to the exact portion where my Hebrew name comes from. So I looked down and I see my name in Hebrew looking back at me and I'm like.

• 1:55:23André Duqum?

  I mean, that's fascinating. I'm curious, when you study such intriguing, fascinating, dense, ancient wisdom texts, kabbalistic origins, witchcraft, so much of these occult and secret teachings throughout time, and you, I get this feeling of reverence when you enter a land like that where the old Library of Alexandria was. Where is this balance for you intrinsically of exploring philosophically through thought, all of these systems and where it goes beyond thought into being and?

• 1:56:04André Duqum?

  Your own personal practice and exploration of not only what the legitimacy of these texts are, but how if you have felt called to explore the practices, to, you know, attempt some sort of mysticism yourself.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  I don't know that I've felt tempted toward mysticism per se, but one thing I can say that these texts and these traditions have had an effect on me is that these are all asking the biggest possible questions.

• 1:56:38André Duqum?

  The creation of all.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  Where did existence come from? How do you become like God?

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  You know, what is the most ancient form of primeval wisdom?

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  These are not, you know, asking boilerplate questions. This is the biggest questions possible. And there's no way, I think, if you're working with this material long enough, there's no way to not get some sense of awe. Because you have to ask those questions too. You have to sit down, at least I think you do. You have to sit down and go, okay, why is it that the universe seems structured the way that it is? Like, the Kabbalah says it's structured like that because God spoke language into being. The clue is structure. And I think that if you ponder those questions with any intellectual humility, the only response is awe. You know, and I think that I experienced that a lot,

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  is that the sense of like, yeah, this is deep, this is powerful, there's a lot of awe here. And it's not a feeling that, you know, I grew up in the 80s, you know, the Gen X or whatever, and that generation, my generation is defined by a sort of nihilistic sense of irony and cynicism and this, and I've never liked that. I've never found that, you know, everything's meaningless and stupid. And that's never been, that's always struck me as a false and bad belief.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  And, and, and these texts, and the, and the texts that I study, it's the exact opposite. Every single thing is pregnant with meaning. Like, being is pregnant with meaning if you just look, if you just breathe, if you just listen. And that's a lesson that I, I take very seriously, that what's apparent to me is not what is. And these guys are right. I mean, this is the thing I, I love to, to really bring home about this, is that when Agrippa said that there are cult forces in the universe, and we can, we can harness them to increase our dignity, he was right. We do it all the time. It's like Wi-Fi. We can, we can gather up electromagnetism, and I can reach out across copper wire and, and Wi-Fi,

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  and, and help someone along a spiritual or intellectual journey. But our, my dignity as a human being is elevated in that process. The dignity of the person who's learning about this stuff is also, he's right. And he doesn't have to be right in a sense of, you know, I'm capturing the energy of Jupiter into a talisman and doing it. Maybe it's not literally that, and maybe it is, I don't know. Right? But it certainly is the fact that unseen forces have the possibility to raise our dignity. And I don't take that for granted. And I look at Agrippa sometimes in the, you know, and I get a moment in the evening time on myself, and I'm like, you were more right than you could have known. And to give him the credit to say, yeah, like, you couldn't have seen it. And it's funny, he's, he admits this in the book.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  He says, in a letter, actually, he says, you know, I never got the illumination I was looking for. I never found it. It never occurred to me. It never happened to me in the way that I thought that it would. And you can see, so the crestfallen about this. But he says, what I have done is opened a gate. And I can point you to how you can go through the gate. And maybe it will happen to you. Maybe I'm just not worthy. And he admits, I was a soldier. I killed people. So maybe I have this blood on my hands, and I just, God's just not gonna do it. It's just, I'm not worthy of it. And that's okay. But I've opened the gate, and you can walk through it. And there's this, it's very deep humility that Agrippa has. And sometimes I, I, you know, I'll, I'll think about that and think, we walked through the gate. And like, good for you, Agrippa.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  You know, like, he's not the sort of fake guru. I have all the answers. He tells you, I don't have them. I didn't have the experience I was hoping to have. But I've gathered up everything I can and I want you to have the chance. And my God, what could we want? As from a teacher, more than that, to have the humility to admit what they couldn't do and empower the student to bring it to its fruition. And I think that's, these are the kind of lessons that I get from these guys. And I think that those are lessons that every person, every educator, every scientist, occultist, whatever. Now, these are powerful, powerful lessons that come from this tradition that I think are worthy of deeply internalizing.

• 2:00:56Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 2:01:27André Duqum?

  I certainly think we're living in a time where there's just not as much awe as would be good for us, you know? Whether it's the light pollution that stops us from seeing the cosmos and inducing that sense of awe of being both incredibly insignificant in this whole cosmic play, but also incredibly significant for having a conscious experience of it and what a gift that is. I feel the reverence and honor and humility that you point towards Agrippa, but then also, like, I think of you and the role that you play and many others as also opening the gate and pointing to the gate for many people. And how many millions of individuals have been exposed to new paradigm shifting revelations

• 2:02:12André Duqum?

  or insights or curiosities or...

• 2:02:17André Duqum?

  Just simple question asking and admittance of your own ignorance that can be the birthplace of true knowing. It's tough to be able to track the actual impact of that, but it's, and you might not even want to, but it's absolutely profound. One thing that I'm just reminded of in this moment is Agrippa's Trilemma. And it's very comforting for me to have conversations on this podcast exploring my own ignorance and the various systems throughout antiquity of people also wrestling with their own ignorance and coming up with systems or frameworks

• 2:02:58André Duqum?

  or ways to be able to rationalize and come to see the limits of reason. Are you familiar with the Agrippa's Trilemma?

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. I'm not sure which one you're referring to.

• 2:03:10André Duqum?

  Is the Munchhausen Trilemma, also is referred to as Agrippa's Trilemma, a foundational philosophical problem in epistemology demonstrating the theoretical impossibility of achieving absolute ultimate proof for any claim. The trilemma is broken down into three unappealing options when attempting to justify a belief. The first is infinite regress. The second is circular reasoning. And the third is dogmatic assertion.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, this is actually from, this is sometimes called the Agrippa's Principle of Uncertainty. Agrippa went through a phase.

• 2:03:44André Duqum?

  Is this the same Agrippa or different?

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  Same Agrippa, but he would, so what's interesting is that there's what's sometimes called the Agrippa paradox, where Agrippa's claiming to know all this occult knowledge, and then he also writes a book called De Increditudine, in which he argues no knowledge at all is possible, or not really, they're like, knowledge is not possible. And people have tried to, what to do about this seeming paradox in Agrippa. I think it's more apparent than it is real. But yeah, he mentions this, right? That to know the truth of any one claim, you have to know the truth of every claim, and that makes for an infinite regress. Dogmatic assertions obviously aren't true. They're just assertions. I can say that God is triune, or God is ten and one. That's not true proof. And so, yeah, he says, look, at the end of this problem,

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  the only thing we can do is have faith in revelation, because we know that God has revealed the truth to us, and we can have faith in revelation. There's a position called the Phaedism. And what most scholars think is that Agrippa is actually...

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  Not lying to us exactly, but if you read the book carefully, he will say, "Yeah, you can't know anything to certainty of your own, with your own mind, but because God has made us, we have access to the mind of God. And through that mechanism, through this illumination, we can get access to truths." And so it's not purifidism, it's not, you just need to believe what the Bible says, but nor is it the idea that by logic and reason alone can you get to the, to the truth of something. It's sort of a weird, religiously inclined skepticism, uh, which is interesting because it's influenced Descartes. And Descartes' own skeptical methodology is, in some sense, a development of Agrippa.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  And, um, we tell the Descartes scholars that, they really don't like

• 2:05:32André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  That this is where it comes from.

• 2:05:34André Duqum?

  Hmm. So fascinating. I, uh... So, in that last book you pulled, which is a foundational hermetic text, correct?

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:45André Duqum?

  What, in your understanding, was the system of hermeticism and understanding as a, framework for understanding reality, attempting to gain context around or solve or prove?

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so hermeticism is sort of a kind of anti-Gnosticism in some ways. Gnosticism claims that the physical world is bad and we need to escape it. The heretics actually claim that the physical world is a god.

• 2:06:12André Duqum?

  Would you say that Gnosticism, sorry to interrupt,

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:15André Duqum?

  Wouldn't assert that reality is inherently bad, but illusory in a sense?

• 2:06:21Speaker 01

  Uh, evil.

• 2:06:22André Duqum?

  You fund them into evil?

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  Matter is evil, yeah. Matter is just like, literally evil. So, yeah, the Gnostics, at least the Sethians, are pretty hardcore duelists. They really do think of literally our bodies as prisons. And that the planets radiate fate and trap us here. And they produce, they make us ignorant of reality. And they tell us lies about reality. And that's the whole point of Jesus coming here is to tell us the truth, so that we can get out of here, right? We can get out of here, at least after death, when our physical, the clay prison dies, we can escape. But only if you know that it is in fact a clay prison and you know how to get out. There's trick, they have all kinds of interesting tricks and tools to avoid the terrible archons that govern the world through the planets.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  The Hermeticists have a much more optimistic view of the human being. They do think that we're in a bad spot, which is to say that our soul did come from the One, from the light, and the light is really all that's real, and that anything that's not of the light is false, and there's a lot not of the light down here. But our souls are from the light, and that when our souls descend through the cosmic spheres, the radiation of the planets infects our soul with fate. And this fate coming from the Zodiac, from the stars, this fate kind of traps us here temporarily, and we have amnesia when we get here. We don't remember that we come from the light. And that the teachings of Hermes, Trismegistus are to do a couple of things.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  One of them is to remind us that we come from the realm of the light. Two, it's meant to sort of allow us to exorcise these demones that have infected our soul so that we become free of fate. This is a huge concern of the ancient world. We don't care about fate anymore. Christianity in some sense was an antidote to fate. It was like, nope, there's no fate. You just choose to follow Jesus and this, there's no fate. It doesn't really affect you. For the ancients, fate was everything. Astrology was how you found what was coming in fate. The Stoics taught you how to not feel bad about being fated. Fate was all, you know, was a huge thing in the ancient world. For the Hermeticists, the idea is that the way that you escape from fate is through ritual practices that you refer to as theurgy. It's like sort of working with the gods,

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  working with the being of light, with the god, and you exorcise these fated elements of your soul. And once your soul is purged of those fated elements, then it can re-ascend either mystical visions, but especially in a post-mortem ascent back to the One, and you sort of go back to you being united with the One. If you don't do that, your soul can get trapped down here. And you can go through a cycle of reincarnation. You can become a ghost. There's all kinds of bad things that can happen that you don't want to happen. But the hermetic idea is that you come to master the world around you through theology, through astrology, and through alchemy, because that is a mechanism by which the world, by which the light made the world.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  And you participate in what God does, in the divine doing. It's called theology. You participate in it and you become godlike. And in those processes, you purge these demones that have infected your soul at the moment of your birth.

• 2:09:26André Duqum?

  What's an example of one of those practices?

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  Music. We know that they did magical music practices. In fact, we have some of their hymns. We have some of their chants. There are these vowel chants. We don't know what they sounded like. There's some speculation about what they sounded like. So we know that they were doing mystical music practices. We also know they were vegetarians, it seems like, that they didn't want to get maybe what we might call bad karma from harming other animals. So they ate bloodless meals.

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  We have some sense that they would do what we would probably call it meditation or contemplation practices, where they would, were able to like spiritually ascend back up into the spheres and sort of purge some of these.

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  But yeah, we have just glimpses into kind of what they did, but we don't know exactly because these were closed initiatory schools. For instance, this one example of the music practice that we had,

• 2:10:24Speaker 01

  we only know about it because it survived in the Nagamati Library. So it's in the Codex VI, which is the strangest of the codex codices of the Nagamati Library.

• 2:10:32Speaker 01

  But they probably used talismans as a way of like capturing astral power and then wielding that astral power in a way that would like divert some of this more dangerous.

• 2:10:42André Duqum?

  Is there an object or a symbol that people would be familiar with?

• 2:10:46Speaker 01

  So for instance, you would, if you wanted to capture some of the power of the sun or the moon, you would use metals appropriate to that, so like gold and silver. You would, we have some instances of images of gods that would be carved onto them and that would capture some of the power. We have what are called karakteris, which are magical signs and seals. That are those little, they look like little rings attached to symbols. Those survive all the way down into modern occultism. They've been continuously used since ancient Egypt. So we have some senses of what they did, but again, this was a pretty secretive group of people who, um, they weren't sharing this stuff publicly, right? You had to be initiated in. And we know that because we have some of the texts from people that have been initiated

• 2:11:31Speaker 01

  in that we were never supposed to see, which is kind of neat. The discourse on the eighth and the ninth is meant for really advanced practitioners of this, of what is called the way, the way of Hermes.

• 2:11:44André Duqum?

  Seems like there's a lot of overlap there between alchemy and the coupleistic tree of life.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  So we know that they were practicing alchemy. Uh, the tree of life comes much, much later, the 13th century. But, um, we know they were practicing alchemy. The most famous example of this fusion of alchemy and, um, hermetic philosophy is an alchemist named Zosimus, um, who's living sometime third or fourth century. Uh, was interesting because we know that he's working with women. Um, and one of his students is a woman and we know a lot of the early alchemists were women because we know two of their names, Maria, Maria Hibria and Cleopatra the Alchemist, not to be confused with Cleopatra the Seventh. So, um, interestingly enough, we know that women are being initiated into these mysteries. And, um, and Hermes is of course associated like the Thoth with secret knowledge, secret

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  wisdom, and also, uh, escorting the soul after death. So unsurprisingly, part of what you're trying to do is, and again, this idea goes back to Plato, that Plato even says in the Phaedo that philosophy is preparation for death. Like we get, we do philosophy not because we're trying to be smart. We're doing philosophy that we elevate our souls so that when we die, our souls go back to the, to the one. And that idea goes all the way back to Pythagoras and Plato. But what's happening with the hermeticists is they're actively developing ritual technologies by which to accomplish that. So we don't have a lot of, we don't exactly what they were, uh, but we know they were, they were doing them. And in the teachings, uh, we have some of the teachings here and in those teachings, they're, they're, they're laying out, like this is why the cosmos is structured the way that it is.

• 2:13:18Speaker 01

  This is how we avoid these kinds of astral bodies that are dangerous.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  This is what happens when you have an experience of the one and the first one of the famous, most famous book of the Corpus Medicum, the Poimandres is a, is a, um,

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  An account by a hermeticist of this experience. And it is mind blowing, very, very powerful. They're hearing things, their heads ringing, they're hearing buzzing sounds, stuff that like, people that have also had mystical experiences, like, oh yeah, that sounds familiar. I know that.

• 2:13:52André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:53Speaker 01

  I've been there.

• 2:13:54André Duqum?

  It reminds me of what you hinted at earlier. Of course, there are unseen forces that are making, whoever's listening to this podcast, possible in a similar vein. There are unseen forces that many different frameworks and contexts and systems have translated as we originate from unicity or a being of light or light. And our journey is to remember and wake up from that initial amnesia that we come in here with. As you've studied and seen the conciliation between some of these disparate systems, I'm just curious for you to steel, man, this sort of transcendent realm, which all of

• 2:14:39André Duqum?

  these individuals are speaking about. If you were to make the best case for them.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  What would it be?

• 2:14:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that for me, the best case for it, as much as I could make a case for it, is that the universe is not random. The universe seems to obey rules and the rules seem to be very dialed in. I think about something like the gravitational constant. The gravitational constant is a very specifically, very specific number that if we were just a little bit weaker, right, we wouldn't get stars.

• 2:15:12André Duqum?

  Fine tuning.

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  Fine tuning, right? This sort of question of fine tuning. And that to me, you know, again, there's lots of hypotheses of why it could be fine tuned, right? It could be some natural selection process by black hole formation or something. I don't know, I'm not a physicist. But a perfectly legitimate hypothesis is that something tuned it. And again, people are gonna say, well, that's not scientific. I'm like, I don't care if it's scientific or not. What I'm saying is it's a good, it's, I don't know if we can test it or not, but it's a reasonable thing to believe. And if it's, if that's true, right? And again, I think about the laws of logic. The laws of logic seem like they are also the laws of mathematics. And it seems like mathematics is a language by which we can describe reality with a high degree of precision. That's just strange. But I think we just have to admit just how weird that is.

• 2:15:57Speaker 01

  And I think about other things like that. I think about, for instance, pi is an irrational number, right? It doesn't terminate and doesn't end, which means that there are true values of pi, integers between 0 and 9 of every value that goes on for infinity, including all the ones we've never found yet. That means that there are independent truths about pi that are not human mind-dependent. They're true regardless of whether we ever find them or not. We never will find them all. Of course we won't. And the existence of those kinds of transcendentals, that just points in the direction of the possibility, the distinct possibility that there's a transcendental realm of some kind,

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  whether it's a platonic realm of forms, whether it's the one, whether it's a realm of the gods, like the Epicurean thought of the intermundia, where the gods are sort of living somewhere else and futzing around with the world. I don't know. You know, I don't know. But I think it's tantalizing enough that we should take seriously things like fine-tuning. We should take seriously the existence of mind-independent truths about at least transcendentals, like mathematical entities. And this is stuff that goes back to Pythagoras and Plato, frankly. This is not new. And so when I contemplate those, I am willing to go there to say, it's reasonable that if someone posits that a god fine-tuned things. And I'm like, I don't know if I believe that, and I'm not sure if there's evidence for

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  it strongly, but you're not being unreasonable. And I think this is a thing we should, the skeptics and believers should be able to unify around, is that the realm of reasonable ideas is a lot bigger than we think it is.

• 2:17:38André Duqum?

  Yep. And I think the questioning of monotheistic faiths and creationist stories is that it doesn't really answer the question of, okay, if God created the Big Bang, or what preceded God creating, who created God? You know, it's kind of an infinite regress into who knows where. But...

• 2:17:59André Duqum?

  It does make you wonder. It does make you wonder, keep the mind open.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and again, I think this is where, you know, it's. And again, I'm not sure I identify myself. I sometimes refer to myself as a post theist. Just not interested in whether or not there are gods. They might be, they might not be. This is like, that's not really gonna change my life. An intellectual answer to that question actually doesn't change my life. Right? It's just, that's not how people work anyway.

• 2:18:21André Duqum?

  Yeah, an ontological connection would perhaps. But an intellectual understanding is not really gonna be that transformative, you'd think.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  I've never seen anyone's life be transformed by an argument. Like, how, I mean, again, I just don't, I just, I think philosophers, and again, I'm pointing the finger at myself because I am one. I think that they have this mistakenly bizarre view that if you make a good argument, you'll convince people. People aren't convinced by good arguments. Most people are convinced by experiences, emotions, relationships. Right? And so I think that, for me, what matters is that sense of awe and that sense of meaning that comes from that sense of awe. And, you know, sometimes I'm feeling burnt out or jaded or, you know. I think we all get there, right? We all get that kind of like, ugh. You know, one of the ways I've made an antidote to that, one is studying these texts

• 2:19:13Speaker 01

  and physically having them, that's one thing. But just having a telescope. Like that, there's just no, anybody, I mean, I've never met a person who get eyes on the rings of Saturn for the first time and go, eh. I'm like, you got serious depression, man. And so this is cultivating of all. Microscopes and telescopes are great ways, they're all machines. And get your eyes on the, you know, get your eyes on the rings of Saturn or a nebula or, you know, or, you know, take a piece of something out of your beard and took a look at it under a microscope and realize that your, your whole body's crawling with life. What, 4% of your body weight is living creatures that you need, that you would die without. You're not autonomous. Like, this is a myth.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  This is a bizarre story we tell ourselves about this. They're like, no, no, no, you're not autonomous. You're, you're, you're one macro creature in which there are a lot of micro creatures keeping you around. And that goes all the way up and all the way down.

• 2:20:09André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  There's the scale of being, they say.

• 2:20:11André Duqum?

  Yeah, the holonic structure in which we are a living ecosystem and a part of. And you mentioning the telescope, on the flip side, it actually makes me think about just if you were to poke at modernity a bit more, you know, and. See how the Cartesian and Newtonian way in which we view and try to dissect at times non-rational inquiries are inevitably going to fail because the telescope isn't is designed to see into the physical world and we're speaking about the possibility of the existence of a non-physical world. And I'm just curious your thoughts on science and spirituality or mysticism being at some

• 2:20:50André Duqum?

  levels fundamentally incompatible, but potentially are, and this is what I think Spinoza's dual aspect monism is kind of seeing the one unified force that bifurcates into these two areas.

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  At least two, I think, you know, the infinite numbers, we just happen to interact with two of them.

• 2:21:07André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  According to Spinoza, yeah. I think that they're, you know, to borrow the phrase, they're non-overlapping magisteria at some level.

• 2:21:14André Duqum?

  Not overlapping.

• 2:21:15Speaker 01

  I think the magisteria, that this is Gould's idea that that religion is answering a certain sort of questions and science is answering a different sort of questions. And science can do qualitative, like can do quantitative analysis, right? You have to be able to falsify stuff or an experiment, you know? But that's just not the way, there's, because I guess there's two questions here, or two things that he said. One, the world is much stranger than any of us think about on the daily.

• 2:21:43André Duqum?

  Yeah, that is an apparent to everyone, if a couple hours into this conversation.

• 2:21:47Speaker 01

  Like, you know, again, like, the fact that I'm mostly empty space, right? That I'm mostly empty space, atoms are mostly empty space, I'm mostly empty space. I don't perceive myself as mostly empty space, right?

• 2:22:01André Duqum?

  Not even mostly, right? Almost entirely.

• 2:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, not at all. And like, that's just true. It's just like, that's just, you know, like, this is true. And, you know, or the fact that I'm not sitting on something, right? It's just fields interacting, you know? When you get into that, stuff can make you a little, a little bonkers. So I think that on the one hand, Let's say that I identify as a materialist. And sometimes people think, oh, man, that's boring. Like, he just thinks it's just stuff bouncing off each other. Nobody who's interested in materialism can think that anymore. Like, whatever matter is, it's so exotic as to be indistinguishable from spirit.

• 2:22:38André Duqum?

  Yeah, and that matter arising from consciousness or consciousness arising from matter are both equally baffling.

• 2:22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just like, it's bizarre.

• 2:22:46André Duqum?

  Yeah, they're both bizarre.

• 2:22:47Speaker 01

  Both bizarre. And so I think like anybody who's seriously committed to materialism, you're gonna be pretty seriously committed to pretty exotic beliefs about reality. Because the quantum world is just the most unintuitive, strange place that exists. And the fact that it decouples and becomes a Newtonian world and it doesn't interact with gravity and we don't know. Like, this is, again, this is a place where we cultivate, we can cultivate intellectual humility and awe. Not, let me tell you how religion is stupid. Just like Reddit stuff, right? Like, don't be that Reddit guy. And I think on the other side, the spirituality side, I think it's a place where, again, I can only speak for myself. It's a place where I want to sit down with believers. I want to sit down with religious people. I'm religious.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  I'm a particularly strange form of religion, but I'm a religious person. But I want to sit down at the table with practitioners. And I want to say, I'm probably not gonna agree with you. And it really made me not even understand what you're talking about some of the time. But the truth is not a thing that I have a monopoly on as a scholar. And the truth is also not a monopoly thing for you as a practitioner. The truth is something that we find in the middle of conversations, of dialogue, dialogos. Right, that the logos is between us. It's not mine, it's not yours, it's not anybody's. It's a thing that happens sort of as we're doing the thing. Truth is a verb. And I think that when the truth is a verb, it means that I don't get to... Hold on to it and then beat people with it because I have a specific methodology that I'm

• 2:24:15Speaker 01

  using philosophically or scientifically or spiritually or whatever. But when we, when we come to a better, to me, a better understanding that it is a thing that is, that it is a verb done in community. And community of people that don't think like you, that don't practice like you, that don't have the same metaphysics or whatever. That to me is the exciting frontier of this stuff. And sometimes I'll be sitting with, you know, practitioners who are the Lithinolites or they do Anokian magic or Wicca or whatever. And they're like, why do you want to hang out with me? Like you're, you're like a materialist whatever. I'm like, it's precisely because that I'm not like you. That there's a thing that can happen when you're around people who aren't like you. It's called learning.

• 2:24:59Speaker 01

  There's no learning when everyone's in the same echo chamber.

• 2:25:03André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:04Speaker 01

  And so I think this is a place where it's an invitation to curiosity and an invitation of the possibility of actually learning something and having your worldview challenged in a way that you can grow as a human being. And when I read Agrippa, do I agree with Agrippa? No, I don't think I do. But that's a place where it's an invitation for me to think deeper about what I do really believe, to challenge beliefs that I take for granted that become sort of dogmatic orthodoxies. They're really fossils of thought, actually. And it's a place where I can hopefully grow.

• 2:25:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, it seems like there's this widespread pandemic of Dunning Kruger, of thinking we know more than we know. And anyone who's actually gone to depth of study realizes that as their circle of knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of their ignorance that they become aware of, you know? And there is usually humility that is coupled with that, which is, I think, directly what you're speaking to.

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  I hope so. I think that's, I think that's, that's what I hope happens. And again, when I do, you know, I work on Esoterica. I think one of the things that I, one of my favorite things to hear is from practitioners, is from hearing them say, "I had no idea that the rabbit hole went that deep." Right? Like, "This is my, this is my spiritual path and I didn't know X." I'm like, "Great. Now you have access to a deeper kind of spiritual technology, which is great." I mean, that's like, this is a way of, if I can empower people to make meaning through giving them better access to these spiritual technologies of the past, then, again, we're living in a meaning famine. It's not for me to dictate how they make meaning,

• 2:26:44Speaker 01

  but my God, we all could use a little help. And if this is a Taker project, then again, it's everything. It's everything from helping practitioners deepen their practice to like, the Dungeon Master getting a cooler world. You know, or the video game guy making a better video game, or, you know, whatever. It's, I think this material is, is so rich and has such depth that it can serve us in a huge spectrum of who we are. Everywhere from the practicing hermeticist to the video game designer. And I think that's why, another reason why this material was so important, because it gives us access to a kind of pool of creative question asking.

• 2:27:26Speaker 01

  And I think philosophy does its job best, not when it's trying to beat you over the head with some answer, but it's when it's deepening the kind of question you're asking.

• 2:27:36André Duqum?

  It feels like we have such a fear of being sinful creatures. There is this sort of satanic correlation in people's perception of the occult. Of course, there is, we can explore some of, some of the truth of those origins, but I think when people hear the occult in particular, there is this like, there's this, yeah.

• 2:27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Satanic panic.

• 2:28:00André Duqum?

  Yeah, satanic panic. And would you be open to actually sharing a bit of your, your story of your own satanic panic?

• 2:28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 2:28:09André Duqum?

  Because this is one of the wildest stories I've heard.

• 2:28:11Speaker 01

  It is, it is, sometimes I, I'm like, wow, that really happened to me.

• 2:28:15André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:17Speaker 01

  Well, so the word occult, just to cover that up, it just means hidden. That's all it means, just it means hidden. And so it has nothing, Agrippa was a Christian. All these people are Christians or Jews or whatever. So there's nothing satanic about any of it. They, they thought, no, I, this is how I actually become like, I like Christian Max through the occult.

• 2:28:34André Duqum?

  Christian Max.

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  Um, and so that's what they thought they were doing. And I'm like, you know, John Dee's talking to angels, not because he's trying to like be evil. He's trying to be like

• 2:28:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:45Speaker 01

  hyper pious.

• 2:28:46André Duqum?

  Yeah, the taxonomy of angels, is that Aquinas?

• 2:28:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:49André Duqum?

  Seraphim and all.

• 2:28:50Speaker 01

  Seraphim and Ophaneum and all these. But yeah, to your question, you know, it's, um, yeah, when I was 16, uh, there was a, a school shooting at my school. Um, and the, the guy that committed the, the, the committed the school shooting, um, handed me papers and told me, hey, give these to so and so. And, um, there's a lot of, I mean, a lot of things happened after that, but over the course of about eight days, we began to hear these rumors spreading that a group of Satanists were responsible for instigating this, this horrible crime. And sure enough, eight days later, I was one of several kids arrested and accused of being members of a satanic cult called the Croth, which I still don't know what that word is or where it came from.

• 2:29:33Speaker 01

  And, um, over the course of about a year and a half, um, it just, the, there was all these wild stories that were told about the, this, this business of the Croth or whatever. And the judge was just, you know, doing the, doing the judge should do. I, I need to see some evidence of this. And none ever emerged. And slowly, slowly the charges were dismissed and eventually they're all dropped. And, um, this is part of what launched me into the interest in this field was I, I became curious, what is this? Like you guys are talking about the occult and witchcraft and all the, what, you know? What is this actually historically? And it was interesting to learn, right?

• 2:30:14Speaker 01

  We talked about earlier that, that the witch craze, the witch killings were effectively, uh, there were a moral panic and a conspiracy theory mixed together. And I was like, that happened to me.

• 2:30:25André Duqum?

  Hmm.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  And like, I never want this to happen to anybody else. This is awful. Like, you know, I won't say it ruined my life because people died, right? People were injured, you know, people were traumatized. Um. But it was a question, and at that point, it became, I need to get to the bottom of what this is. And it sort of partially propelled me into this, into this field.

• 2:30:46André Duqum?

  What were the papers he handed you?

• 2:30:48Speaker 01

  Basically a will, just a bunch of rambly, sort of.

• 2:30:51André Duqum?

  This was a friend of yours or someone you knew?

• 2:30:53Speaker 01

  So someone I knew. The same as Luke Woodham, as is, he's still alive, I suppose. I knew him, but distantly. It wasn't like a good friend of mine. And the guy that he wanted to give the papers for was a good friend of mine, and they were friends.

• 2:31:06André Duqum?

  And he was like 15 or 16?

• 2:31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know how old Luke was at the time. I was 16 at the time. I'm not sure if he was younger or older. We were in the same grade, like, I think we were both in 11th grade.

• 2:31:16André Duqum?

  And he killed eight individuals at your?

• 2:31:18Speaker 01

  He killed two young women, sadly, and he also killed his mother. Before he came to, to school and injured several others. And yeah, you get this, you know, I remember being arrested and getting to jail, and there's eight of us. And I don't know, I didn't even know all of the other kids that were arrested. And I'm like, it's really hard to be in a satanic conspiracy with people you don't know. And so it was, it was an absolutely terrible and surreal thing to have experienced the trauma of a school shooting, an early school shooting. This is two years before Columbine.

• 2:31:55André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 2:31:56Speaker 01

  And then be blamed for it.

• 2:31:58André Duqum?

  And why, what was the, what was the reason for the accusation of that?

• 2:32:02Speaker 01

  So we still don't know.

• 2:32:03André Duqum?

  Exactly. For some reason, the, the cops had some, some reason to believe that there was some.

• 2:32:12Speaker 01

  Luke, the guy that did the shooting, said that his friend Grant, the guy that I was supposed to give the papers to, that he was somehow manipulating demons or something. And it's not clear, because when we get to the, when it actually goes to trial, very little of this demon stuff really becomes the focus of the investigation anymore. And it's interesting, because once it was all over, and once I, once I talked to the police and like, we're dropping the charges. It's like, you know, what a cruel thing to do to, one, to the kids, to accuse them of a pretty horrifying crime. But also to the families of the victims to be told by the police, oh, a satanic conspiracy is responsible for the, the death of, the murder of your child.

• 2:32:57Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, psych.

• 2:33:00Speaker 01

  It's grotesque. Yeah. You know, these poor parents are grieving and they're being led to believe that this thing happened and they're like, oh yeah, there's no evidence actually that it ever happened. And this is sort of a larger pattern of the satanic panic through the eighties where they would interrogate small children and ask them leading questions and then the kids would ultimately concoct wild stories about how Chuck Norris was taking them into secret tunnels underneath their daycare and doing terrible things to them. And of course, there were no tunnels and their Chuck Norris wasn't there. And it ruined people's lives. And you have these satanic panics that emerged, you know, the West Memphis Three with Damien Echols and those guys also accused of being part of the, you know, and I think Damien

• 2:33:42Speaker 01

  Echols was on death row for quite so many years. And eventually it's like, oh yeah, it's like it didn't happen that way. So this is a place where, again, you know, and moral panics are all over the place, too. You can think about the moral panics around trans people, all right, where there's all this ideal, they're going to go to bathrooms and do all this bad stuff. And it turns out, it's just a bunch of straight guys actually harming children. And so when you see these conspiracy theories, you know, it's not the first time. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are still all over the place. And so it's when you go back in time and go, oh yeah, we're just repeating the same mistakes.

• 2:34:25Speaker 01

  That's the place that worries them the most is like, this is a moment where we could have learned from history and we didn't. And part of the reason why, you cover, you know, for instance, the witch trials, like we're gonna do this again.

• 2:34:38André Duqum?

  Man, that's such a wild, I'm sure, inspired and has played a pivotal role in your search for meaning around that. And then also seeing that moral panic across time, like you mentioned through the witch trials and what do you, what do you make of that moment now in your life? Because that's like quite a traumatic thing to go through, of course, more traumatic for all the families and individuals that were implicated in it. But that's a very formative experience as a 16-year-old.

• 2:35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's one of those moments where...

• 2:35:14Speaker 01

  You get rattled awake, like you're wide awake in a way that like everything's on the line. You're being accused of, you know, very serious crime. You go away forever. And all of a sudden, you go from being a normal kid to your life is upside down. And there's obviously something about trauma that rattles you awake. And I think that what happened in that sense was like, I never want to go back to sleep. Like, I'm just never going to live a normal life. And like, that's okay, right? Like, that normal is off the menu now. So the question is, how are you going to live a life that is not going to be ordinary? And it was just like, clear to me, crystal clear to me.

• 2:35:59Speaker 01

  You need to leave Mississippi. You need to go study abroad. Do you need to... I was a working class kid, you know, so from a working class family. None of my family ever went to college. I was first generation college. And I was like, you have to, you have to make an imprint in history. You gotta try. And part of what propelled me was to this material was, okay, this is having some strange... Like, this satanic panic did not come out of nowhere. This is part of some kind of larger historical something. I wasn't really clear about what it was. But even in like, high school, we had read The Crucible. And I'd seen, oh, the witch hunts. And I was like, this is that, I think.

• 2:36:41Speaker 01

  So, you know, so the question of like, what really is the occult? What really is this? What really are, what is? And so, what, I took what was, at some level, kind of a thing that was used against me as a weapon. And mostly born out of ignorance and fear, right? And fear is always what we... The ignorance, the vacuum of ignorance is always filled with fear. And so, when I saw that happen to me, there was two options, really. You can shame and blame. Why did you do this to me? Right? You ruined my life, blah, blah, blah. That's one thing you can do. And some people, that's the response. It's a natural, reasonable response. I think if you end in that place, you're gonna have a pretty bad life. The question was...

• 2:37:26Speaker 01

  I can, I can take that, or I can say, "Let's reroute all that pain and all that negativity, and let's do the antidote to what happened." And the antidote is education. Right? It's like, let's get, let's, let's just, let's blow the lid off this thing. Let's talk about it.

• 2:37:46André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:47Speaker 01

  And after that, my goal for, for many years was, "Let's get into this stuff. Let's do it transparently. Let's make it accessible." Because somewhat, if we get the education on it, it's really hard to be like, "Oh, you're an occult if you worship the devil." You're like, "That's not what the occult is." It's just not. Like, you're conflating two different things. And you're doing it now because you're bad, it's because you're ignorant. And so the, what is the antidote to ignorance is education.

• 2:38:14André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:15Speaker 01

  So, you know, you can have a chip on your shoulder, or you can fix the problem. You know, it's the light a candle or curse the darkness kind of thing. And I was like, "I'm not cursing darkness."

• 2:38:25André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:25Speaker 01

  It's, it's, the task is now to do the educational work.

• 2:38:28André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:29Speaker 01

  It's not just to, to take the thing that happened to me and like jujitsu it into something that can benefit the world. Hopefully, God willing, you know, I don't know.

• 2:38:38André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:39Speaker 01

  But, um, yeah, that's sort of, that's been my antidote. That's been my, the way that I dealt with the, with the trauma.

• 2:38:45André Duqum?

  Wow.

• 2:38:45Speaker 01

  Is that reroute the trauma into making the world a better place in exactly the ways that, that I found myself hurt in the world.

• 2:38:57André Duqum?

  I'm glad I asked. That's, it makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. And I'm curious how that has transformed over time, you know, from the trauma that was like, "Okay, I'm gonna find out what's going on here in life." Make sense of reality and all of these occult avenues. And you clearly wouldn't have continued if you didn't have a genuine love for perhaps the awe that these things bring you, or like the, you know, you're one of like the leading experts, I feel like, and on this topic. And, um, yeah, I, uh...

• 2:39:41André Duqum?

  I want to ask you a question around. So when you look at the witch trials, right? I've, you know, there's sort of been like, kind of like a modern resurgence of pagan rituals and like women just reclaiming the wildness of being a woman. There seems to be this inherent feeling across the board that there is, because there are historical systematic persecutions of women being connected with nature, having emotional,

• 2:40:22André Duqum?

  even emotional imbalances or loneliness, to the other extreme, which is actually practicing perceived heretical practices, that there is this sort of subconscious fear that women and a lot of humans live with, depending on what lineage they come from, of being persecuted for being in full expression of who they are and for exploring these things. Like, there is a deep, inherent feeling of unsafety. And I'm curious, what do you think is the, what is the reality of that sort of generational trauma that is having some sort of expression into the day we find ourselves in?

• 2:41:01André Duqum?

  And, you know, what do you make of the energetic sort of carrying on and resonance of that period into today's time and how it shifts how we think, how we feel, the paradigms in which we look through, specifically around the suppression of the feminine?

• 2:41:18Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. I mean, in the Middle Ages, there was a sense of what's called the Great Chain of Being, right? That everything begins, God created everything in a big chain. Everything's connected. And as you go down the chain of being, things become worse and worse. So angels are pure, and below angels are people, and below who are humans, and below humans are, you know, minerals and stuff. And the chain of being is about value. And in that chain of being, it was conceptualized that men were created first. Adam was created before Eve, and therefore is of higher value, and women are therefore derivative of men. They're fundamentally secondary. I mean, you see this in things like Aristotle with the homuncular theory of pregnancy, that

• 2:42:01Speaker 01

  inside of sperm, there's just a tiny little person, either gender-free person or a male person, usually a male person. And the womb is just a passive field into which the little homunculus is what it's called, that goes in, and depending on the condition of the womb, you get a, it produces a male or a female person or a monster, in some cases for Aristotle. And so there's a long history going to Aristotle, Plato, Plato's a little bit less bad at it, actually, but it comes into Christianity of the feminine as derivative is not fully equal, as somehow less than, down the chain of being. And that has just had catastrophic consequences for the development of the Western world. It's made that half of the population is less than.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  And of course, when you add racism to that in the 18th century, you have all other groups of people who are further down the, you know, down the chain of being. And this, this idea, and again, this is where mysticism can get kind of squirrely, is that the idea is that you can descend the chain of being and you can ascend the chain of being. And you can even see this in the Gospel of Thomas. The very last line of the Gospel of Thomas is, Mary isn't worthy of talking because she's a woman. And Jesus says, well, I will make her a man. And I'm like, this is not, this kind of feels gross, right? And you can kind of interpret it away, and people have tried to interpret it away, but it just what it says, that's literally what it says.

• 2:43:23André Duqum?

  Yeah, I read that too. I was like, I read all this other stuff about bringing forth what's within, within you, and it'll save you, and then I read that, and I was like.

• 2:43:31Speaker 01

  You're like, ugh. And some people think it's a later interpolation or whatever, we don't know. But I think that, that.

• 2:43:38Speaker 01

  If human dignity doesn't mean human dignity, it just means dudes dignity, then we have a big problem. And that's what it's traditionally meant. It's just really meant men's dignity. And I think that this is just, you know, this gets catastrophic. And I'm happy to see the emergence of spiritualities and the emergence of philosophies that not only distinguish the specifically philosophical and spiritual dimensions of femininity, but like focus and center them.

• 2:44:05André Duqum?

  And also reignite the perception of women being oracles throughout time, you know, and having a deeper connection.

• 2:44:11Speaker 01

  And even that, right? It's sort of like the way that was understood by men is that, oh, these women are just... The reason why you picked the oracle Adelphi to be a peasant girl is because she's unpolluted and therefore she's a vessel, a pure vessel through which the gods can talk. She's... It doesn't really matter about her. It's just, it's, it's gross. It's frightening. But I think what I'm, what I'm... And I'm not an expert in contemporary religiosity and contemporary spirituality, to be very clear. But when I see empowered women doing this kind of spiritual work, and also academic work, by the way, the leading scholars right now on the Zohar, the most important text in the Kabbalah, they're all women, right? They're all women. So it's a moment where we're seeing, um, not just women, not gender not conforming folks, trans folks.

• 2:44:56Speaker 01

  We're seeing a real moment where this is shifting. And I'm much more excited about the generation younger than me than I am my generation, where I think the ship's sailed on us. But the younger generation, I think, is really like, really leading the charge on democratizing scholarship, democratizing spirituality along exactly those axes that have historically been so marginalized. So I'm, I think that we're going to see more spiritual creativity in the next century than maybe in the last five centuries combined.

• 2:45:29Speaker 01

  Because it's just unlocking all this potential. So I'm, I'm pretty excited to see it, you know, it's again, like the, for me and my tradition, the Zohar is the text that I hold to be the most central, the most holy, uh, you know, next to the Torah, of course, but to know that traditionally women were completely locked out of even being able to study it. And now knowing that the leading scholars are almost universally women, it's like, finally the ship is getting righted. You know, it's, it's, the ship is being, it's slowly right, but it is being righted. So that's exciting to me. And it's not exciting to me because of some kind of, you know, the right word is like Revenge. Performative revenge, kind of like, you know, the dudes are gonna get theirs.

• 2:46:11Speaker 01

  It's just that good scholarship, good spirituality comes from a plurality of voices. Yeah. But again, we talked about earlier, the more siloed this stuff gets, the more balkanized it gets, the stupider we all get. Like the thinner things are, it's just one charismatic guy in the room telling everybody what to believe. We know where that goes. Like we just, we've seen it. Like we know that song and dance. We know that it ends the way that it ends. The more we can democratize the voices, you don't do it just because you're like woke or whatever. You do it because this is actually where real creativity happens. It happens because diversity means difference and difference is challenging. And I feel like that's just, you know, where I, where I find the most exciting stuff is where I'm sitting across

• 2:46:53Speaker 01

  the table from a person who deeply disagrees with me. And yet they see we share a deep respect for what we're doing. And it's precisely in that difference where, where we can begin, we can do this dialogos, we can do this dialogue. And that's where I think we can begin to do truth as a verb. Because otherwise, if it's just another bearded guy like me reading Agrippa, you know, is it really gonna, we're really gonna get creative ideas? It's just, I don't think it's gonna happen. So I think that's the place where I'm excited is about these, the emergence of, of much more democratized spirituality, much more democratized, uh, access. Again, for me, education's all about access. The fact that I get emails from people in

• 2:47:34Speaker 01

  Brazil who are like, look, I can't afford to be on your Patreon or whatever, but thank God, because I make thirty dollars a month or whatever, but I have a phone and I can basically get a free college education in esotericism because of you. I'm like, that's exactly the point. It's, it's not about

• 2:47:55Speaker 01

  First world people getting access to stuff. It's about the person in Brazil who really wants to learn about middle Platonism or whatever. And otherwise, they would have no access to college. They would have no access to this, but they have a phone. And now, like immediately and for free, they have access to it. And to me, that's like, that's the bag. That's the ticket. That's how we incrementally, yes. But that's how education can get, put it in people's pockets and we can begin to change the world.

• 2:48:22Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 2:48:55André Duqum?

  Makes me think about when you referenced earlier, how humanity is currently finding itself on a knife's edge. And we have something that we have never had before, which is the ability to share ideas like this instantaneously across the globe. What a gift. Also, if we don't make use of it to democratize education across the board, what a curse it would be, you know, to fumble that gift. It would be a tragedy.

• 2:49:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that, and again, I can only speak for the little field that I work in, right? But I look at a lot of public intellectuals who are doing something like this. And I'm, I think we are in a moment. I've been reading a lot of the letters of Marcella Ficino. Ficino's the translator, you know? And we think about the Renaissance as a thing that just happened. Like, oh, the Renaissance happened. The Renaissance didn't just happen. People were self-conscious of the fact, and maybe in a misguided way, of the fact that we just, we lived through a period of real decadence and ignorance. Like, again, this is not totally true, but the Gothic period where they didn't have access to all this stuff. We didn't, we have it now.

• 2:50:06Speaker 01

  I mean, can you imagine the moment where like Plato is just available to you for the first time? Like, as a culture? You know, they had the demeus. They had the demeus in Latin, nothing else. I mean... Just like Arabic numerals. Like, you ever tried to do like algebra or multiplication with Roman numerals? And Abigail, it's terrible. There's just a moment in the 15th century where they look back and they were a little judgy about it, to be sure, that's fine. They look back and said, "That was bad. Look at what we have access to now. We need to self-consciously rebuild civilization along these texts, along these ideas. We need to do da-da-da-da." The Renaissance didn't happen.

• 2:50:49Speaker 01

  It was self-consciously willed into reality by people who understood that they were in a very particular, specific mode in history. And we see this in Ficino's letters. Ficino is very clearly aware of the fact that something important is happening and he is responsible for driving it forward. He has to do it and there's no one else to do it. And I think that we're in a moment now where we're coming out of a period, I think of, or we're maybe at the very end of a period, I think of, you know, intellectual decadence and intellectual stupor where universities had exclusive access to educational, it was a monopoly on education, no shame to the universities, but we were, we're coming out

• 2:51:32Speaker 01

  of a period where, or coming into a period where I do think we could self-consciously choose to go through another Renaissance.

• 2:51:41André Duqum?

  Yeah. Do you feel like we're there and that's going to happen? I know with, through the lens of like the fourth turning and these, the more that you look through history, you see these cycles. Do you think we're at the birthing of a new Renaissance?

• 2:51:53Speaker 01

  If we want to be.

• 2:51:55André Duqum?

  We have to be?

• 2:51:56Speaker 01

  We have to be. We, it's not, you know, it's not, you know, we think about Hegel, you know, we often think of Hegel sort of, as sort of a mechanical theory of history where this part negates that part and gives rise to a new thing and it's just a very mechanical reading of Hegel. Hegel didn't think it was mechanical. Hegel thought this is conscious, this is consciousness rising to levels of consciousness because of this historical circumstance where that consciousness finds itself. It's not mechanical at all. It's like people being like... Yeah, I'm here and things are different than they were back then. And I need to like change the way that I think about the world and operate in the world. The Renaissance won't happen. It'll be made, or it won't be made. And I think that's not a place where, it's not a place to invite arrogance.

• 2:52:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I can lead the Renaissance. That's not, that's not it. That's not gonna do it. It's that it is my responsibility to be part of something bigger than myself, intellectually, spiritually, philosophically, scientifically. And that the choice to like raise oneself up is that it's accepting a responsibility. Right? Sartre said that the real freedom is choosing what you'll be responsible for. That's real freedom. Freedom is not, I have the freedom to like veg out and, you know, watch TV all day. That's not real freedom. That's bad faith. Real freedom is choosing what you're gonna be responsible for. And I think that at this moment, we're in a moment where if we choose to be responsible for a Renaissance, we could have one.

• 2:53:23Speaker 01

  I do think we are at a specifically weird juncture. And I think people are, they're exhausted with the universities having monopolies on education, on knowledge production. They're exhausted with bad information. I think people are tired of bad information. I think we've seen what bad information looks like. And channels like, like Esoteric on my channel, there's a reason why it has the subscribers that it does. It's because people are desperate for good, reliable information where they're not being sold junk and being told like, oh yeah, this is the real enlightenment. Just give me $9.99 a month and blah, blah, blah. No, you gotta do this on your own. Here's the books, go do it yourself. Like, I have no ability to fix you.

• 2:54:07Speaker 01

  You've got to take responsibility for yourself. And, and I think we are in a moment where we could, we could do that. Will we? I don't know. I want to do, you know, I want to be sitting across the table for the people that want to take responsibility for that. Because the intellectual and spiritual and philosophical trajectories of where we're going, they're not an accident. They're gonna, they're gonna have to be people taking responsibility and saying, yep, I don't get to abdicate responsibility. I am now deeply responsible for my little part of pushing this forward. So I would encourage people, if you've never read the Letters of Ficino,

• 2:54:49Speaker 01

  they're really worth reading because it is, they're the writings of a man, of a person self-conscious of his place in history. And then you get the deep sense of, you know, he became a priest. He's like, this is a sacred vocation. I need God's help to do this. You know, and he only began translating this stuff in his 40s. So anyone who's like, ah, I'm 45 and can't, you know, can't do it. Yeah, ship sailed. No, it hasn't. Ficino was in his 40s when he ever translated a single word of Greek. And he was self-conscious of the fact of what he was doing. And so, and again, it's not about tooting your own horn. It's not hubris, I can change the world. It's that I am responsible for the world. My world is my responsibility.

• 2:55:32Speaker 01

  And I think that we can take, you know, as an educator or whatever, physicists or public intellectuals, we can all sit across the table from each other and say, yeah, we may have real disagreements about values, maybe, but this is a moment where we, we might be able to decisively push the agenda forward spiritually, philosophically, you know, intellectually. And we, if we can do that, great. I think, but I think we're in a moment now where the public at large is interested in a different conversation.

• 2:56:00André Duqum?

  What words of advice do you have for people to examine how the...

• 2:56:08André Duqum?

  The examining of what you are drawn to helps you clarify what it is that you want to choose responsibility for. And that is also needed in part of any renaissance is like,

• 2:56:21André Duqum?

  how would you suggest people from your own experience find what is truly worth and lights them up and is worth choosing responsibility for in life? They want to be, they feel this pull, they know that they have the capability and capacity to be part of a very important time in human history.

• 2:56:42Speaker 01

  I think that you should, you should do what challenges you. Like if you feel safe and comfortable, you're probably not doing it. I don't agree with the most of what I read because it's not about me. Right? And so I think that what I would encourage people to do is if you find yourself being uncomfortable, if you find yourself being challenged, if you find yourself like being in disagreements with people, again, respectfully, right? I'm not talking about what they do on television, fake debates, fake stuff. But it's in that, it's in the discomfort that growth happens, right? It's in the cracks the light gets in. And if you're not experiencing that, that's a critical indicator you're not, you're not doing it right.

• 2:57:24Speaker 01

  And so I would say like, also I would tell people, and this is a thing that some vexes me about sort of online intellectual culture is it can be sort of a mile wide and inch deep. And my, my position, I always say like, we need a mile deep and an inch wide. You know, like my whole career is dedicated to this one very niche thing. And you know, that's like, how much am I going to push the needle? I don't know, but I want to push that needle. Right? And so I was saying, really niche down, get something specific. And it's okay that I'm never going to be an expert in Sanskrit. I'm never gonna like, it's never gonna happen. It's just, it's not because it's Sanskrit, it's bad.

• 2:58:06Speaker 01

  It's obviously beautiful, amazing, but this is the niche for me. So like niche down, you know, find your passion and niche down on it. Because it's then you become a real expert and then your voice, your voice is actually coming to the table with like all the weight of that, of that niche. And so.

• 2:58:28André Duqum?

  Yeah, my hope is that this platform and conversations like these support even just a fraction of people listening to really ignite them into answering that call. They feel that challenge.

• 2:58:38Speaker 01

  And again, I think what you were talking about, the meaning famine. Part of the meaning famine is the sense of information overload. We don't even know what we're interested in because we're being bombarded with 50,000 things at once. You know, for me, it's find the one thing. And like, it's okay that it won't be all the things. You know, I think there's a weird pressure for us to know. The Don and Kruger thing, we should know everything about everything. That's a guaranteed way to be stupid. It's a guaranteed way. But yeah, if your passion is, whatever, Chinese philosophy, do it. Do it. And maybe, you know, and some people, I've talked to people, they're like, oh, but I'm too intimidated. I can't just like learn Middle Chinese. I'm like, yeah, you can.

• 2:59:23Speaker 01

  Sure you can. Like, in a summer, I guarantee you, anybody watching this, you take a language, whatever language, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic, whatever, you take a summer, take an hour a day, 30 minutes a day, you will go from nothing to reading ancient texts in a summer. I promise you. And people think I'm crazy. I'm like, no, you can do it. You can do it absolutely. You can do Middle Chinese, whatever. But people have it in their head, right? That there are other people who have monopolies on this knowledge. It's just not true. It's just not true. You can do it. Anybody can do it. It just takes work. And I think that a big people are so exhausted with the status quo that they're willing

• 3:00:04Speaker 01

  to put in the work to like, to again, be part of what I'm hoping, what I'm seeing early on now is an emerging possibility of a Renaissance. It's a Renaissance in potentia. The question is, are we going to activate it? And I think we're coming out of a period of decadence. And I think that we could activate it. But that's going to be a choice we have to make as a community. And if there's any antidote to meaninglessness and loneliness, it's communities of genuine, deep, reflective, inquisitive, awe-inspired, spiritual, philosophical, intellectual labor.

• 3:00:45André Duqum?

  So before we close out, we have kind of a new closing tradition where people from our online community send in some questions. And it's always fun to see what they ask. Shannon from California asks, what one personal experience throughout your life has been the most meaningful in regard to a belief in or contemplation of the existence of magic?

• 3:01:05Speaker 01

  Wow, so I don't know that I... I'm not sure if I believe in magic.

• 3:01:12André Duqum?

  Or the contemplation thereof.

• 3:01:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the contemplation, for sure. I do a lot of contemplating about magic. I think the... One of the most decisive moments was realizing that the books were real. Right? Like, I think we have this sort of like Merlin has a magic book, or the Sorcerer's Apprentice, or like... We have like, I think, a cartoon understanding of sorcery. And when you realize the books are real... Like, I've handled manuscripts, medieval manuscripts of necromancer's manuals. Where, you know, and there's a moment where, oh yeah, this is really real. And you'll see things that, you know, I can't explain where they'll say something like, I did this incantation and it didn't work. So I changed these two words

• 3:01:58Speaker 01

  and changed this oil to this, and then it worked. And I'm like, what? What do you mean it worked? Did you turn invisible? You know, and it spells like turning invisible and finding buried treasure and then things like that. Raising the dead, making the dead speak, yeah.

• 3:02:12André Duqum?

  What other kind of magical things were reported?

• 3:02:16Speaker 01

  So detecting thieves? You know, there was a... Basically, not much was in law enforcement back in the day. So like detecting thieves was a big thing.

• 3:02:21André Duqum?

  More like size and ominous?

• 3:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, like some remote viewing. It's like a thing that exists. In fact, the last phase of Anokian magic, the John D. magic, is basically remote viewing. It's a way of spying on the world through angel magic. But for me, the... It was finding these books and realizing that they were real. And then being very disappointed that no one had translated them because most people look down their nose and go, oh, magic, that's silly. Or I don't believe in that. Or I, this is a medieval superstition. And so it becomes unworthy of translation, just even translation. This is changing, of course, since, uh, since basically the 90s. It's slowly starting to change. And... There was a moment where it's like a kid in the candy shop. You just like realize like, oh my God, this is real. The books are real.

• 3:03:08Speaker 01

  None of them are translated. We can translate them. And what's fascinating is that now we're beginning to see, for instance, one of the main things that's emerged in this field is that we're asking the question, who wrote these books? And the answer emerges is very interesting. Who knows how to do rituals? Who knows how to read and write in Latin? Who knows how to get access to the implements that you would need to do this kind of magic? And the answer that emerges are priests. That's the only people that could have done this. And what's developed now is that we now know they were all talking to each other across cities. And this is now what emerges, what is called the clerical necromantic underground. So there are these networks of clerics

• 3:03:53Speaker 01

  passing magical secrets to each other that by day they're a normal priest. And by night, they're like trying to find buried treasure using summoning demons and stuff. So it's extremely fascinating world where, basically in the past 20 years, scholars have discovered a completely underground network of sorcerers all through Europe, all communicating, all copy each other's books. And now it's like people like me and other people are like, I'm actively in Europe hunting these books down and trying to figure out, okay, this handwriting in this book matches this handwriting in this book, which means they traded books for a while. And this book is downstream with this book, which means they were connected this way. And we're putting the network together. And so we're beginning to get some sense of who owned what, who's reading what, who's copying what,

• 3:04:37Speaker 01

  what libraries these things in. And so what's fascinating, again, the contemplation of magic is we're finding the sorcerers. This isn't just like made up Merlin stuff. This is, these are real people and we're finding them. And so I have at home, I've handled handwritten 16th century, 17th century books of magic. And get eyes on them, get them translated, get the watermarks on the paper tested, get the, you know, all the, everything tested and be like, okay. Like, these were people practicing sorcery in the Middle Ages. These are the real wizards. And we are now unlocking their secrets. Another great thing, it's sort of adjacent to magic, is alchemy. So one of the most exciting things that's happening in the world of alchemy right now

• 3:05:21Speaker 01

  is that chemists are now beginning, analytic chemists, chemists are beginning to take alchemy seriously as proto-chemistry. And they're recreating alchemical experiments in labs, forensically. And one of the more famous of the, one of the most fantastic of these is the work being done by Lawrence Pritchard, where we even have manuscripts, where we have two different manuscripts, and the manuscripts say different things. And we're not sure which one is reliable. And we recreate the alchemical experiment, and it does a thing that matches one manuscript. We now know that the alchemy, doing the alchemy, now tells us which manuscript is reliable.

• 3:05:59André Duqum?

  Hmm.

• 3:06:00Speaker 01

  So, like, just, we're in the cutting edge of not just esotericism as like a theoretical thing, but like, actually recreating alchemy in the modern lab to see, oh yeah, they weren't just futzing around doing random stuff. They were serious experimentalists, who, one, gave us chemistry. There's that. But also, we can even correct texts based on this. So we're really in an exciting period of time when it comes to the forensic recreation of magic, the forensic recreation of alchemy. And again, this is all just a really, really fun time to be doing this, because at least a small cadre of us are like, let's take this stuff as seriously as we can.

• 3:06:45André Duqum?

  Hmm. What do you think about, I think it's like, the thirst is evidence for the existence of water. There's something inherently in us that deeply wants to believe these hidden teachings, secret teachings, magical happenings are real. There's something so alluring about it. I'm curious, what do you think is in us? Is that, as, I'm sure it's probably many things in your conception, do you believe there's a possibility that there is fundamentally a lost art that we can intuit there is an existence and reality to? Yeah, that magic or alchemy could potentially actually be real in some way?

• 3:07:25Speaker 01

  It's certainly real in some way. I mean, I don't know that you can make the philosopher's stone, I don't think chemical transmutation was ever possible or in the cards. But why do we go after it? I think we go after it for a completely reasonable reason. And that reason is that the world, the way that it is apparently, is clearly not exhaustive of all of reality.

• 3:07:46Speaker 01

  Like, I think if you just study the world long enough, what is apparent is not exhaustive of a reality. And if there is a hidden world behind this one, and clearly there is, I mean, there's no doubt about it, that there definitely is, then we want to be able to access that world. And maybe access it for a range of reasons, some of which are not so great. But I think that that desire is a very deeply human desire. Is that, oh yeah, like, this is not all there is. And that underneath this, or beyond this, or through this, or whatever, there's some other thing. And we can get access to it and like, become godlike. I mean, who doesn't want to be able to turn invisible, or have Magneto powers, or I don't know, whatever, right? We all have a deep crave for that.

• 3:08:29Speaker 01

  And so I think magic is one of the spiritual technologies and technical technologies that developed along those lines.

• 3:08:38Speaker 01

  And again, I think about sort of the most banal examples of magic in medieval times, and really throughout a lot of history, is like finding buried treasure. Who doesn't want to like, put a spade in the earth and to come out with gold coins? You know, and it's not even like, because you want to be rich. It's just like the goony desire to find a bunch of buried treasure. And it's all over magical manuscripts. Every magical manuscript has some kind of, find a buried treasure thing. So I think there's a deeply human desire just to unearth the lost and wield some kind of secret power that insulates us from the boredom of normal life. So, again, sometimes people ask me, like, do you,

• 3:09:23Speaker 01

  you secretly do magic, right? They're like, yeah, I know you do, right? And I'm like, if I secretly did magic, would I be doing YouTube? I would could like secretly get the Powerball numbers. Yeah, I'd like dip out. I'd be living in my mansion in Rhode Island or something.

• 3:09:37André Duqum?

  Or if you were doing magic, maybe that's what you want us to think.

• 3:09:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe exactly.

• 3:09:40André Duqum?

  More valuable.

• 3:09:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, maybe it is. And people are like, yeah, you're a secret, secret magical practitioner. I'm like, I work my ass off on YouTube. You doing magic on the side? Like, if I could turn invisible, bro, like.

• 3:09:54André Duqum?

  What would be your, your superpower de jour?

• 3:09:56Speaker 01

  Oh, man, what would I want? I think Magneto is pretty like, as a Jewish person, I kind of like spiritually connected to Magneto.

• 3:10:07Speaker 01

  But he can fly and like do metal stuff. It's just like kind of, maybe he's a little bit overpowered.

• 3:10:12André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:12Speaker 01

  But.

• 3:10:13André Duqum?

  It's like being Superman. You just get like so many.

• 3:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just not fair.

• 3:10:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:17Speaker 01

  You know, so, um, but yeah, again, I think the part of the desire for this magic stuff is, I mean, some of it's bad. You know, you know, some of the stuff is like how to make women have sex with you. It's like clearly just magical roofies. That's what it is. I mean, it's like, people, oh, it's love magic. And I'm like, we should not call this love magic because no one's consenting to this.

• 3:10:40André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:41Speaker 01

  This is like, and in fact, we changed the term. We use now we use the language of erotic bonding magic. That if you magically make a woman have sex with you or a man have sex with you, they're not consenting. We have a word for what that is. Uh, and that's pretty horrifying stuff that you see in magical manuals, and it's all over magical manuals.

• 3:10:58André Duqum?

  Even in some hermetic texts, I know there's talks of like mind control and certain things. Yeah, there's, seems like there is the dual experience of the light and the dark on all of, on all of it.

• 3:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's again, power corrupts. And when you get, when you start, you know, we don't, can does not imply should. That's one lesson we just don't want to learn as human beings. Can does not imply should. You know, and I think about that moment, the Oppenheimer moment.

• 3:11:24André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:25Speaker 01

  Right? Where we like realized when you split an atom, you release all this energy and immediately Howard Anson and all those guys wrote, said, please don't build that. Cause once you build the first one, it'll never stop. And Oppenheimer's like, watch me, hold my beer. And now we got these things everywhere. And like, so there's a moment where human beings, I hope, will one day reach the maturity of realizing that can does not imply should. We will look at something and go, nope. That we should, that door we should not open because we are not mature enough to walk through it. And I think magic is a place where we see that happening. Where there's, you know, Agrippa is a great example of someone who I think has a very high level of what I'll call magical maturity.

• 3:12:08Speaker 01

  He really sees magic as a means to become godlike, and by godlike, he means good. To raise our dignity, to become godlike in all the creative, beautiful, positive ways. But for every Agrippa, there were some necromancer skulking in the dark, being like, yeah, I can use that stuff to get laid.

• 3:12:24André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, surprise, surprise, right? This is the gamut of the human experience.

• 3:12:30André Duqum?

  Are there schools of magic currently that you're aware of or that you would presume are underground currently?

• 3:12:39Speaker 01

  There have to be. I mean, I get emails that are always very, you can imagine the emails, like.

• 3:12:44André Duqum?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 3:12:45Speaker 01

  They're, they're, they're gas. I've been invited to so many underground magical occult orders. That I lose track and it can't be but like three guys, you know? How many could it be?

• 3:13:02Speaker 01

  But I will say that I've seen some evidence of there being like underground orders of magic, some of which I think are pretty frightening. That are, that are interested in bad stuff, interested in getting power and manipulating people, manipulating politics.

• 3:13:21Speaker 01

  And I've seen some evidence of their existence. It's always hard to know, right? Because it's, are you looking at the tip of the iceberg or are you looking at the whole iceberg and it says two guys?

• 3:13:28André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:28Speaker 01

  You know, you never can know exactly.

• 3:13:30André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:30Speaker 01

  But, you know, there, you know, I've definitely, in my book business, there are books that we've had where I've elected not to sell stuff to people. Just because I don't have bad vibes.

• 3:13:42André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:43Speaker 01

  Like, I don't know what vibes are, but I'm like. Like, this is not transactional. Like, these books are sacred at some level. And they're not just for like you to get to like flex on your other weird friends.

• 3:13:56André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:56Speaker 01

  That's not, that's not my bag. You can go get it somewhere else, right?

• 3:13:59André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:59Speaker 01

  Like, this is not capitalism, not, not in that sense. So, but, you know, again, if there's a technology by which to wield power, there will be bad people to, to get it. And I suspect they're out there. And you have things like the Order of Nine Angles and stuff like that, which are pretty horrifying organizations, or organizations, that, you know, self-consciously wielding magic through human sacrifice and child abuse, God forbid. But they're out there. And again, this is where education and morality are very important components of this entire field, because it is a place where, again, we talked about earlier, you ask the big questions and you're using the, some of the most powerful spiritual tools

• 3:14:43Speaker 01

  developed in the Western world. And you put those in the hands of psychopathic, right, racists. They're not gonna play fair. You know, it's, it's, you know, it's Heiner Hitler and them trying to use the skulls of people to raise Aryan ghosts and they're like, you know, there's, there's, there are those guys out there.

• 3:15:07André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:10André Duqum?

  What you mentioned earlier around, I mean, when you look at Harry Potter and the Marvel movies and you look at the modern mythology through Hollywood and speaking and why do we feel so pulled beyond the cinema of it, you know? What do you feel like those films and stories are reigniting in us archetypally and, and drawing out in a sense, you know, what is the deeper pull beyond just the excitement of a well-produced thing, speaking to something perennial and aspirational in the human spirit?

• 3:15:46Speaker 01

  I think they're doing the work that myth is supposed to be doing.

• 3:15:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:50Speaker 01

  I think that's part of what's happening, is that the Marvel Cinematic Universes are kind of off-brand myth, right? And, and those, and those kind of movies and stuff, I think, work because they do tap into those like archetypal kind of hero's quest kind of stories. So, one, I think they're popular because we don't have good myths anymore. And they're kind of doing the work of... There's a stopgap.

• 3:16:16André Duqum?

  Yeah, I kinda like how video games can be like a shadow career for you.

• 3:16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:16:19André Duqum?

  Going on your own hero's journey.

• 3:16:21Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's sort of, yeah, I think that's something like that.

• 3:16:25Speaker 01

  And I think earlier we talked about that, you know, that we're living in a meaning famine. And because of the meaning famine, we're turning to almost anything that will give us some sense of like awe, of some sense of the numinous.

• 3:16:41Speaker 01

  We're desperate for it because we need it as human beings. I mean, this is the part where I think it's interesting where sometimes people say, you know, "Oh, you're a materialist, therefore you're not interested in the sacred and the holy and the numinous." So I'm like, "Absolutely not. It's precisely because I'm a materialist." Because we are the kind of creatures for which this is a core psychological whatever value. And this is one of the things I think the, for instance, Soviet Union got extremely wrong was the idea that you can just whisk away religion by banning it. And people are not going to turn to some, to back to religion. Like, it's actually immaterialism to think that you can enforce some kind of state atheism or something. Really a nightmare. So I think that that's the reason why we're going to these kind of giant screen experiences of seeing this,

• 3:17:25Speaker 01

  because we're in desperate need of more powerful myths.

• 3:17:31Speaker 01

  And the old myths aren't working. We're gonna need new myths. And I know that's a strange thing. The Romans would call that ridiculous, right? The gods, religions are true because they're old. This is what the fundamental, the Romans' critique of Christianity wasn't that they believed in a crucified god. They're like, "Yeah, people believe in all kinds of weird gods. It's your god, your religion's new." That's not a thing, right? And I think that we have a weird Roman prejudice about new traditions, that we can't make new traditions. But the truth of the matter is, there is no tradition that wasn't made up at some point. Every tradition was made up by somebody, made up by some community. And I think that there's a worry that you can't do that. It's always fake. And people, I'll hear people say, "Oh, those aren't real witches, they're just LARPing."

• 3:18:15Speaker 01

  And I'm like, "Yeah, but their life is meaningful to them, and you're just complaining on Reddit." Like, "You happy about that? Is that good? Do you like that? Does that make you happy?" Like, you know, boo, boo, boo them. So I think that we need to be... Open to the possibility of speculative mythology, experimental mythology, forensic recreation of mythology. I think there's a lot of really neat stuff where people are trying to do recreations of the Old Norse religion or something. And I think that we should have an open field of this kind of stuff where we're experimenting, because it's not going to fix itself. The meaning crisis isn't going to go away.

• 3:18:55Speaker 01

  And even me, as a person who I actually identify as religious and not spiritual, for me, I do the thing, and by doing the thing, people are like, "Well, who are you praying to if you don't believe in God?" I don't care. But what I do need to do is externalize a sense of what is outside of me. Externalize my sense of I am not the end of the story. And that's why I wear this siamaka, is that I put it on in the morning, and I know there's something above me. I'm not the end of the story. I'm not the main character. And I think that's part of what we want out of these myths. And I think that that is a deeply human impulse. And at this point, I think an impulse that if we deny it,

• 3:19:39Speaker 01

  we deny a basic part of our humanity. And I think it comes at great peril. I think people that can live quite bad lives because of it.

• 3:19:49André Duqum?

  Religion is a technology in that sense, yeah.

• 3:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I often talk about spiritual technologies. And sometimes this kind of jars people, because the spiritual people don't like tech, and the tech people don't like spirituality. But these are technae in the sense of prosthesis, right? Bernard de Glair says we're a prosthetic creature. The cup is just another version of this. Books are just external minds, they're external memories. We're creatures that exist by prosthesis. And I think that spirituality is one of those very important prostheses. It's a prosthesis by which the world doesn't interpret itself. The world's not meaningful on its own. It's just a bunch of things happening. But it's that filter, that incredibly important filter, by which what is otherwise just effectively random things happening

• 3:20:37Speaker 01

  being filtered through a process by which it's structured and meaningful. And I think that without that, we're not human. Like, we've become some kind of monster. And I think that's, you know, I see, I think we're seeing the evidence of that kind of monstrosity is when nothing matters, nothing, nothing matters. No one cares about anything. You can do whatever you want. And I think that that, I think that that becomes a really horrifying. Yeah, we've become, we've become monsters.

• 3:21:08André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:09Speaker 01

  And I worry about that. And when I, when, when someone else's, when someone else's physical need is not my spiritual need, right? We are up to bad stuff. When like, when the other becomes a problem and not like a place where dialogue can happen, where community can happen, where love can happen. Man, what have we done to ourselves?

• 3:21:37André Duqum?

  This conversation has been honestly succinct. It's been really fulfilling, nourishing, so exciting for me. And also the fact that we get to share it with people and that people will be tuning in from all over the planet, man, I, I just, I really appreciate the degree in which you've been devoted to your work and really niched down to actually penetrate deeply enough to have the context needed for all the texts and studies and technologies that you've been exploring that we just, believe it or not, touched the tip of the iceberg of in this conversation. I know there's a lot more we can continue to dive into, and I'm sure we will in subsequent conversations, but I want to ask as a closing question, which is kind of

• 3:22:20André Duqum?

  a big question to ask someone, but it's like, if you had 60 seconds and you had one chance to share one message with humanity as a closing on this podcast, what would you say?

• 3:22:34Speaker 01

  60 seconds? I would say that in order to live a flourishing life as a human being, flourishing begins in awe. And when it begins anywhere other than awe, I think there's a gutter at the end of every other place. So if we want to flourish, and flourishing is hard. You know, happiness, we think happiness, happiness can be a really shallow thing. Flourishing is a difficult thing, actually. But if we want to flourish, we flourish by cultivating awe. And so I think one question we can ask ourselves every day, where can I find awe? And I think that in that place, there's curiosity, in that place, there's beauty,

• 3:23:17Speaker 01

  there's challenging, there's challenging yourself.

• 3:23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can cultivate awe, a sense of wonder. And it's there, we can find a real profound human flourishing.

• 3:23:31André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:35André Duqum?

  I feel like this conversation generates a lot of awe in me, and I'm sure everyone who's tuning in. And so, again, thank you so much, man. We're going to leave links down in the description where people could stay connected with you, your work, your YouTube channel, all of it. Any other last thoughts before we close out?

• 3:23:49Speaker 01

  No, I really appreciate the conversation. It's really serendipitous it all worked out. I happen to be traveling to California, and it all worked out. So, yeah, thank you for the invite and for the time and for the wonderful questions. And, yeah, again, the ability to have conversations across communities is just...

• 3:24:03André Duqum?

  De logos.

• 3:24:04Speaker 01

  It's just really, yeah, the de logos. It's just, it's really fantastic. And I feel deeply humbled and honored. Thank you.

• 3:24:11André Duqum?

  Yeah, thank you. Thank you, everybody, for tuning into this episode of the Know thyself Podcast. Until next time, be well. We did it.