Loading summary
Transcript376 lines
- [00:00]
A
What if everything you thought you knew about the Dark Ages was completely wrong? This wasn't just a time of mud and misery. This is a world where magic wasn't fantasy. It was real life, where priests actually practice astrology, peasants carried written spells for protection, and the line between religion and occult didn't really exist. And it actually gets darker. We're talking about a war hero who fought alongside Joan of Arc and may have become one of history's first serial killers. I mean, rituals, blood sacrifice, all this is a time where people believe that the universe had a hidden order, and if you understood the rules, you could bend reality. So how did a deeply religious society embrace magic? And where do those same beliefs still exist today? And there was no better person to join me for this episode than my good friend John from Medieval Mindset. He is an absolutely phenomenal storyteller. He's so knowledgeable. He's read basically every book on medieval history ever, and he's just a great guy. He's very funny. I'm so excited for you guys to hear this episode. And if you want to take a step inside the medieval world and uncover the world that you never knew existed, this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Camp. John Medieval Mindset. Thank you for joining me, my friend.
- [01:20]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [01:21]
A
I'm very excited to chat with you. I'm a big fan of your channel. And, yeah, I recently saw your video that went viral. That was the first one that I saw was Gen Z is basically Medieval China. And immediately on seeing the title, I was like, this is perfect. Like, it's tying in all the things I love. It's like, commentary on current phenomena existing within pop culture, specifically amongst the. The kids, which is always fun. And then tying it in with, like, some obscure, very specific moment in history.
- [01:51]
B
Yeah.
- [01:51]
A
And I'm like, on the one hand, it was really validating because, like, things like looks maxing and stuff like that, I'm seeing it happen. And I'm like, this is kind of funny, but also, this is. There's no way this is the first time in history. And as they say, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
- [02:09]
B
There you go.
- [02:09]
A
Yeah, I think it was Mark Twain.
- [02:11]
B
Right. Fact check.
- [02:12]
A
But I just. I love your content. I think it's really good, and I think the. The way that you approach it is really fun. But today, I specifically want to talk about the part of medieval history in the Middle Ages that I find the most fascinating, and that is the occult.
- [02:27]
B
All right.
- [02:28]
A
The Alchemical studies, the forbidden dark magic that everyone back in the day was so transfixed by.
- [02:34]
B
Right, right.
- [02:35]
A
So before we jump in, I would just love to know, like a little background, tell me how you got into this, what your fascination with the medieval, you know, historical period is. And then I would love to just dive into some of like, the interesting occult phenomena that was going on a thousand years ago.
- [02:51]
B
Yeah, for sure. I started studying medieval history in college and just got super interested in it. I feel like for me, the Middle Ages, it's kind of a time that gets written off a little bit. I think it gets Monty Python, where people just kind of don't really take it seriously or think it was like a thousand years of mud and like nothingness and then the Renaissance. So that attracted me to it. Wanting to know more about this time period that I feel like doesn't get a fair shake. And then it feels just far enough away that it's like a foreign country. It's like this forgotten dream, cultural dream we have. And then just close enough that you can kind of recognize yourself and recognize human behavior in it. Like, we have the first autobiographies. We have really in depth descriptions of kings. So it's like you can start to recognize these guys, these figures, these archetypes that we still have today. So that's what got me interested. And then I'm a big gamer, so I played a lot of medieval games. Crusader kings, Age of Empires, the Kingdom Come, Deliverance series, all those. So that, that really got me interested. And then I just started reading and I was like, let me, let me get on YouTube and try and share some of this with the people. I just love talking about it. So.
- [03:46]
A
And it works.
- [03:47]
B
Yeah, that's how it seems to be working. People like it.
- [03:50]
A
Yeah. So when people say the medieval times and they'll kind of use a bunch of terms all at once, they'll say Medieval Times, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. Can you describe really what they're talking about? Because people are kind of thinking like, all right, like King Arthur, knights, Monty Python. What time are we talking about and what geographical area roughly?
- [04:10]
B
Yeah, so the term medieval usually specifically talks about Europe, mostly central and Western Europe. Like something like my video title about medieval China. I had some people in the comments being like, well, that's not. China didn't have a Middle Ages. They had a different, you know, description of that. So Middle Ages, medieval, typically central and Western Europe. And normally it's dated to around the. The final kind of fall of western Rome in 476 AD and then when it actually ended is a topic of a lot of debate among historians. And it's one of those things where it's whatever kind of agenda you're sort of trying to sell, that's when you say the Middle Ages ended for me. I talk a lot about medieval Catholicism in my videos. So like Christendom and medieval Western Europe as like a Catholic entity started to kind of fracture, really fracture culturally with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, Martin luther nailing the 95 theses. So to me it ended in 1570 when he did that. But other people might say 1492, the discovery of the New World, that kind of ushered in the Renaissance. Some people might say the fall of, of Constantinople in the mid 15th century could have been at 1453. So it really depends on what viewpoint you're looking at. But for me, I would say kind of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Although one other point is that the kind of line between the Middle Ages and what came after the Renaissance is pretty blurry. I think people think one day everybody woke up and said Middle Ages are over, we're in the Renaissance now. But that wasn't really how it worked. They didn't call it that at the time. There was some awareness that like there's a cultural transformation happening. But a lot of your favorite kind of Renaissance artists, the most famous, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of the Renaissance, were thinking from a very. They were medieval men primarily that were just starting to kind of get re tapped into the teachings of classical antiquity. But it's a blurry process. When the Middle Ages started and ended, when did the Roman world end and when did the Medieval world begin? That's where the Dark Ages comes in too. Some people use that term to kind of denote the entire thousand year period of the Middle Ages, which is inaccurate. But usually it's because for the first few hundred years in Western Europe, after the Roman Empire kind of collapsed in the west and was exclusively in Byzantium and the Byzantine Empire in the east, there's just not a lot of historical records. So it's historically dark. Like we don't have a lot of written surviving chronicles. But really one thing I like to talk about in my videos is that it wasn't as dark as people think. There was a lot going on there. You have Charlemagne, obviously, you have everything that's going on with Justinian and the Byzantine Empire. You know, there's really in a lot of places, people, this is kind of something I see a lot of parroted in My comments. But it's true, like, people didn't. This is an era before mass communication. Like, people didn't know the Roman Empire had fallen until nobody was coming to repair the roads anymore. So it's like this wasn't like one thing. One day you woke up and checked the news and it's like, Rome is. Rome is done in the West. It's like this is a gradual process. A hundred years after the fall of Rome, people are still getting Roman education, learning Latin, all these things. Like, they would still think of themselves as Romans. So it's kind of. It's all blurry, blurred together. I think we like to think of things as segments, granted.
- [07:03]
A
Yeah.
- [07:04]
B
But it doesn't always work that way.
- [07:05]
A
Yeah, that's so interesting. It's also kind of how we're taught it, right?
- [07:07]
B
Yeah.
- [07:07]
A
Like, it's like, okay, on this year, everything changed, but it's like, all right, well, you know, 20 years before that it was starting to change and 50 years after that it was still kind of the same. So, yeah, it wasn't really that year, but that's. It's used to delineate because how else are you going to teach things? Of course, Brackish windows of time.
- [07:23]
B
Yeah.
- [07:23]
A
So to me, it's interesting because I don't think you can really talk about the medieval times or like that era in Western Europe without talking about Catholicism. And one of the things that I am fascinated by growing up Catholic and like, kind of hearing about this era sort of abstractly, like a lot of these, like early church fathers and like popes and things like that is, you know, this period of time, it's murky and it's also kind of the. The advent of a lot of specifically around like the Black Death, a lot of interesting superstitious, quasi religious, mystical thinking. I think it's probably existed for a long period of time, but it gets formalized in this window and carries over into the modern day. It seems like kind of in this time period, I think, really onset by the bubonic plague. So I'm curious what type of like, I guess occult practices or mystical thinking was happening in that window. And what sticks out to you in your research that you're like, oh, this is bizarre or fascinating.
- [08:26]
B
Yeah, for sure. Well, what we would today consider the occult or black magic or dark magic or really just magic generally. There wasn't as much of a, like, moral label put on it in the Middle Ages, whereas now you kind of imagine witches in the woods and a wizard and they're doing something Evil with a pentagram. Like, magic was more so a part of everyday life, kind of in a world before you had scientific reasoning as sort of your bedrock for how you see things. So it's like one example I've used in my videos is if you go to a peasant in a tavern and you tell him, hey, there's a guy three towns over that can levitate. There's no law of gravity. Like, Newton hasn't been born yet. There's nothing in his mind saying, that's impossible. In the magical medieval world. That's all within the realm of possibility. And a lot of it was carried over from the ancient world. A lot of this was like Greek and Roman occultism that had kind of been taken and Christianized by some of the early Christian thinkers. And then there's also the myth that before the Renaissance, none of that classical learning survived in Europe. It did, and it was copied and well known by monks and clerics kind of all over Europe. And a lot of the early practitioners of magic were actually part of the church. And I think one of the historical stereotypes is that the Catholic Church was. They condemned everything and they were super harsh and, like, you couldn't exist outside of, you know, this very narrow lane they had for you. But the reality was that, like, medieval Catholicism was breathable. It was flexible, it was wide. There were a lot of local practices that, in retrospect, we would say were pagan or the church would kind of take over a new area or kind of absorb a new culture like Scandinavia. They would bring in the Vikings. And it's like, you can keep all your local weird little rituals you do, but you have to Christianize them, at least on the surface. So everywhere, you know, holidays become, this was the feast day of, you know, this God or goddess. And then now we're going to turn it into this feast day of Saint so and so, and we're going to Christianize it. And the same thing sort of started to happen with magic where it was, instead of having this be a pagan ritual you're doing in the woods, instead you're going to write this prayer on a. On a scroll, like this Christian prayer, and you're going to wave it over a fire, and that will help with the healing you need for, you know, this. This ailment you have of it was called everyday magic. In the Middle Ages. A lot of it had to do with healing ailments because this is a world where, you know, you could scratch your finger on a nail and be dead in a week. So people kind of Relied on magic a lot. And astrology as well was a big part of that. Something that I think modern Catholics would be like. Astrology, that's a cult, that's evil, you know, whatever. You can't. You can't, you know, practice that. But in the Middle Ages, it was viewed as, like, I wouldn't necessarily say strictly orthodox Catholic, but, like, that's God's realm. Those are the heavens. Like, of course that's influenced by, you know, the good and sovereign Catholic God. So that's all kind of. If you're looking to the stars for answers and you see in not just medieval, specifically occult writings, but even just medieval medical texts or medieval, like, proto scientific texts, it'll say, don't do this cure until these. This star alignment is in. Like, pray over the scroll, over the fire, when this star alignment is in. In this place in the sky. So it's all of these things kind of working together. Yeah, it's fascinating. And then there's also. There's the alchemical side of it as well, right?
- [11:34]
A
Yeah. I mean, before jumping into alchemy, which is its own whole thing, which I've heard people say that Isaac Newton would consider himself like a. An alchemical researcher or perhaps even a theologian before he's considered himself a physicist, which I just thought was like, obviously a different time period, but just a fascinating sort of thing where we think of people in our cultural memory as one thing, but they might consider themselves a totally different thing. Like just an interesting ripple. But before jumping into alchemy, this idea of everyday magic I find so interesting, because I think there's some cultures today that still kind of do this. And I think Americans, broadly speaking, if you adhere to any. Any type of superstitious practice, you kind of do this a little bit.
- [12:12]
B
Right.
- [12:12]
A
Like, even saying bless you, like, after someone says yes, I think that comes directly out of, like, middle age thinking. Right?
- [12:19]
B
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I would definitely say. I mean, even looking at, like, medieval Slavic practices, which has always been interesting to me because it's something that's. They were Christianized, but I think more so than maybe any other group of people in, or kind of, like, broader ethnic group in Europe kept their pagan practices, and it wasn't really seen as a. As a problem. And one of the things was if you build a new house, you have to leave an offering to the fairy of the hearth. And I talked about this in a. In a. In a video. And I had a lot of, like, modern Slavic people be like, we still do that when we construct A new house, we leave an offering out. So a lot of these practices have survived and then sort of, as long as it wasn't in the Middle Ages, as long as it wasn't seen running directly contradicting to church teaching, and as long as it wasn't something that you were using to kind of push yourself as this new religious icon or kind of challenge the power of the church, it wasn't seen as heretical. And so a lot of villages kept these practices and it was seen. I don't know the ma. It's hard to imagine a world. I think that's the one thing that we've lost from our medieval mindset is this view of the world as a mystical place and that we don't have to understand everything. You can just look at a sunset and it's just the glory of nature and you don't have to. All the scientific layers of like, why is the sun setting and how does the earth rotate and all these, that all has its place. But I think you see in medieval writing and medieval thinking, just this kind of God is the showman and we're the audience. And that extends also to, you know, in the woods at night, they're filled with fairies and pixies and we have to kind of stay abreast of them. Or you can keep yourself safe by writing a prayer on a little piece of paper, rolling it up, putting it in a talisman around your neck, and that'll keep you safe. So there you go. It's Christianized. There's, there's no problem. It's not pagan, it's Christianized.
- [14:07]
A
Yeah, there, that is something that is lost a little bit like the, the acceptance of the unknown. And I do think a lot of these sort of mystical stories that are told amongst each other, either through folklore or some type of pagan worship or whatever, it is an attempt to kind of explain things, but it explains it with such a broad blanket that it, it doesn't over intellectualize it. So like, I don't know, I, I remember even like talking to people in like middle school, early high school, and they're like, well, you know, like love isn't real. Like it's just like chemicals in your brain. Like when you're having pro social behavior, like with your mother, like it's not. You don't actually love your mom, it's just. And I'm like, first off, like, I don't even know if I fully buy into that. I see what they're saying, but it's like the reduction in that and it really, like, kind of leads to this kind of social nihilism that I think could be destructive. Whereas in this time, it's like, no, love is the only thing that matters. Like, you can't articulate it. You don't really know what's happening chemically in your brain. And so as a result, this overwhelming feeling that, like, unites all of humanity, you are so romantic about. You know what I mean? Like, you write about love and, like, you discuss the love that you have for other people in such a vivacious way that it probably increases happiness.
- [15:17]
B
I think so, you know, like, yeah,
- [15:19]
A
by knowing everything, it might decrease it in, like, probably quantifiable ways.
- [15:24]
B
I would say so. And I think also it creates this sort of, like, self consciousness that's not necessarily positive. One thing that you see in medieval literature a lot, and actually 20th century writers like J.R.R. tolkien, who were super, super influenced by medieval literature, if you're ever reading Lord of the Rings, you'll notice that he'll just go on for pages and pages describing, like, a mountain or a hill or like, the scenery out the window. And you're reading it and you're like, this is so boring. But it's actually a holdover from medieval literature where they would spend a lot of time just because this is God's creation. This is, and we're here to reflect the beauty of that creation. And if you're not doing that in the medieval mind, that's some kind of moral failing. It's the same thing. You see and Gothic architecture, you wonder, how did these stonemasons and how did these peasants who were basically working on volunteer time, build these incredible works that would be difficult to build with modern technology? And it's because they're focused on their mission here on Earth is to reflect the glory of God in their own creation. We're part of creation. We're part of an ordered universe that also plays into magic. If there's an ordered universe and God has set you where he set you for a reason, and he set the animals where he set them and the trees where he set them, then you can kind of alter and play with that order a little bit with magic. So that's why, like, if you read about medieval magic, it's so specific. You have to carry a bag of dog fur in your left pocket and, you know, rub this salve on your right foot for three days and stand in the sun. And you're like, why all these instructions? And it's because they see the world as this, like, almost Rigid order. And it's reflected in medieval society as well, feudal society. And that you have to, like, be paying your respect to that order by following these instructions. That's how God works. And it's the same thing. This is the same mindset that, again, creates a Gothic cathedral and can do all of that complex math and. But also marry it to real. The real beauty of creation. There's like, it's kind of the central paradox at the heart of the medieval mind. This, like, real analytical need to organize and then this real mystical, occult, kind of strange side of it as well, like imagination. And they marry, the two of them.
- [17:23]
A
And Gothic architecture is the, I guess, the byproduct of that marriage. Like, I wonder if. Yeah, I would love to know your perspective, but it seems like Gothic architecture, even just in what you're saying, it's like, okay, we're going to try to replicate the creator with complexity and order, but then also leave some elements of, like, mysticism, like throw some gargoyles on there, you know, like, have like, these, like, fairy type things.
- [17:44]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [17:45]
A
Like, a gargoyle is such a fundamental part of, like, Catholic architecture, but I don't know if they exist in the Bible. Like, is there such a thing as a gargoyle in the Bible?
- [17:53]
B
There isn't, no. No. But, yeah, so things like that. That's actually a great example. So I think that's something people get confused by. If you walk through one of these, like, old medieval Catholic churches in, like, France or England, you'll see the saints, you'll see angels, all the things you'd expect to see. And then you'll see, like, a gargoyle or. In England, there's a really common kind of visual motif called the Green Man. And he's like this. He's like. His face is covered in leaves, and he's kind of like peeking out almost from his own. It's like Elmo but with leaves. It's kind of what he looks like. And, you know, there's been a lot of debate. Is he. Is this medieval architects and artist kind of putting, like, slipping a little pagan imagery in there? Is the Green man a pagan image?
- [18:32]
A
Is he the green man up? I'd love to see that.
- [18:34]
B
Is he pagan and he's been Christianized? And I think the answer is going back to what I was saying earlier, like, paganism and Christianity in a lot of places in the medieval world kind of lived side by side. So it's. It's a. It's perhaps a pagan image that's been Christianized or there have been some that have said that he represents renewal for like fertility, rebirth, which is of course the resurrection of Christ. So he's kind of like a mix between the pagan and the.
- [18:57]
A
Can we get an image of him?
- [18:59]
B
Kind of cool. Yeah, he's peeking out from the. He's got these things coming out of him. Actually an influence for the. Another Lord of the Rings connection. The ents in Lord of the Rings.
- [19:05]
A
Oh, wow.
- [19:06]
B
Yeah. But he's a really interesting figure.
- [19:08]
A
What a wacky looking dude. And this would just be like on a church.
- [19:11]
B
Yeah, they're still there. So you would see it on a church pillar next to, you know, all of your favorite neighborhood saints. And then you'd see the green man peeking out and. Yeah, like the prevailing kind of religious perspective on it is that he represents like rebirth, resurrection, kind of like the Easter story, Christ coming back to life. But he's obviously a holdover from a pagan kind of forest God, forest nymph. And he's kind of been married into Christian tradition.
- [19:35]
A
Yeah. It's such an interesting perspective because now as a Catholic, like talking to my mom, like she's like very rigid on what is and is not Catholic. Which as like a funny side note, I'm curious your thoughts on this later. But she said, I always ask her, I was like, if you could live in any time. Because she's like, you know, dissatisfied with the current state of the world. People are, if you could live at any time, what do you think the most prosperous time in human existence is? And she, I expect her to be like the 90s. I don't know, I feel like people just like, like romance, like when they were like young or so. I don't know.
- [20:06]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:06]
A
And she goes the dark ages, like that's the time. And she's like, it was the height of Catholicism.
- [20:14]
B
Yeah.
- [20:14]
A
It was the most beautif architecture getting built, the most amazing churches. Like people were pious that lived in small communities. That's when I'd want to go back and I was like, bubonic plague. She's like, doesn't matter.
- [20:24]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:25]
A
So regardless that this is my mom. So she's that kind of lady and God bless her. And she's like, don't do anything that would even flirt with the occult. Like she gets nervous when I talk to like people that have done witchcraft. She's like, don't do it. Don't even talk about it. Because in her mind it's like there is Christianity in Catholicism, then there is everything else which is satanic. And it's funny, though, because to your point with this, there was a window in Catholicism where they didn't have the lore, they didn't have the saints enough. Like, there weren't enough saints to, like.
- [20:55]
B
Right.
- [20:55]
A
Kind of revere. So as a result, it's like they're kind of pulling from surrounding things. Right. Like, so much of, like, our depictions of, like, the devil come directly from the Divine Comedy or come directly from, you know, the depictions of Pan, you know, this, like, sort of mischievous, like, woodland creature.
- [21:16]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:16]
A
And so they're kind of drawing on stuff that's around in order to create these visual depictions and artistic depictions, which I guess are not canon in a religious sense, but exist within the cultural idea of the Catholics at the time, which they were pulling on that stuff because that's what they had. Whereas now we don't have to pull on it.
- [21:33]
B
Right.
- [21:34]
A
So anything that exists on the periphery of what has already been codified as Catholic.
- [21:37]
B
Yeah.
- [21:38]
A
We just push out and we go, this is pagan. But in the time they had to pull on it.
- [21:42]
B
Yeah, no, definitely. And I think also, I mean, it is important to differentiate, too, that there were some things, of course, that were considered kind of outside the realm of what was orthodox Catholicism and what was acceptable culturally. So something like natural magic, which is used for healing purposes or even, like astrology. I mean. I mean, you would have monks and clerics practicing these things. This was like mainstream Catholicism that it was pretty much seen as okay as long as you didn't go too crazy with it. But then where it starts to cross over, and you see this more in the late Middle Ages into heresy is a. When you are using it for self promotion, like you. You yourself are claiming that you're a prophet or that you're in some way running counter to the earthly power of the church or the heavenly kind of power that the Church has to define what is and isn't Catholic theology. That's a problem. The other thing is if you're organizing groups of people around you, like the Albigensians in late medieval France. And the other thing, the third thing would be if your discovery or your miracle or your magic that you're doing is running in some way counter to kind of the main pillars of this is who we believe Jesus is. This is what we believe about the Bible. This is what we believe about salvation. And if what you're putting forth is in any way running counter to that, then that's a problem. So you have these kind of like. Like proto Protestant Groups in the late Middle Ages, like the Lords, famously in England, who are like, we don't need a Pope, everybody should read the Bible, Basically anything that you would find, like, a Protestant church today. But they're seen as, like, extreme, like, social pariahs. It's like Catholicism is such a part of the social fabric that if you're not going to Mass, you're not going to confession, and you don't believe what everybody else believes. That's a big problem because this is like a society where everybody has to work together to survive the winter. So if you're the guy in the village that's like, not doing what everybody else is doing, like, that's. People are going to look at you sideways. And that extends all the way up to the church. So as long as you were first of all humble about your discovery, let's say I did some magic and this happened in my village and the church, that was okay. But as soon as you were trying to promote yourself, that was a problem. And then as long as it went along with church teachings broadly, then it was okay. But once you started to cross over into, like, this is my discovery. I'm the second coming, you know, all these things. So a great example is actually Joan of Arc, probably the most famous example of how this can. Two things can be true at one time, because she obviously hears these. She has this miraculous revelation. She leads France to these military victories in the late stages of the Hundred Years War. And so in France, like, the Church, everybody loves her. Like, she's great. She's, you know, she's a messenger from God. And like, here's an example of, like, miraculous church approved. But then when she's captured by the English, this is like, also Catholics who are like, no, she's a heretic because she's trying to. She's doing something that only a man should be doing, first of all. And second of all, the voices that she claims to have heard, she was doing it for, like, propagandistic purposes to push this French cause and yada yada. So it's interesting, too, again, another example of the lines being blurred where even in two different places, you could be a saint or a heretic for the
- [24:39]
A
same thing, which were at this point functionally the same religion. I think people forget that because obviously, post Henry viii, England is no longer Catholic, but at the time of Joan of Arc, it's a deeply Catholic country, of course. Yeah, yeah, that is so interesting. I mean, the Joan of Arc story is maybe one of my favorites from the time. Like, she has a vision. I mean, she's also 12.
- [24:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, 13. Yeah.
- [25:00]
A
Like she's a 13 year old girl living in France and you would call it Medieval France.
- [25:05]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [25:05]
A
And gets a vision that there's a sword behind an altar or something and has to go find it and then go on this crusade and then finds the sword and everyone's like, well, I guess she's. Yeah, like, I guess she's the famous, like she. God's talking to her and then she goes and runs off with the sword and starts killing people at 13.
- [25:22]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [25:22]
A
And then she gets captured and like, it's just the most insane thing ever.
- [25:26]
B
Yeah.
- [25:26]
A
I'm curious what, like, have you looked into the historical veracity of that story?
- [25:30]
B
I mean, it's a lot of like medieval. So the Lives of the Saints were a really popular, like literary genre in the Middle Ages. And it's difficult in the Lives of the Saints or really in any medieval literature to differentiate fact from fiction because you'll read certain things and it'll describe like a battle that we know literally took place. Like, there's archeological remains, like, we know this many people were there, roughly. And then like right next to that story in the same, you know, book, it'll say like, and then this saint was beheaded and carried his head, his beheaded head, miles to the center of Paris. It's like, okay, well, I don't know if that part happened, but these are both recorded as equally fact. I think the interesting thing about Joan of Arc is like, this is late stage 100 Years War. Like, it has not been going well for France. And I do wonder if the kind of religious fervor she was able to excite among the people, it was kind of just like, all right, screw it, give her a shot. Like, put her out there, see what she does, you know? Yeah. And interestingly too, I mean, this is just kind of an aside, but her kind of right hand man, who was an established knight in the French military and one of the highest ranking kind of military members in France, with Gilles de Rais, who then ends up after this whole episode with Joan of Arc, he retires to be a nobleman in the countryside and becomes history's first serial killer. History's first Epstein kills over 100 French peasant children in occult rituals, blood drinking, the whole nine yards. But his original claim to fame is that he was with Joan of Arc. He was kind of one of France's most celebrated heroes. And it was this huge fall from grace for him. What it was a very public trial. That's actually still very, very complicated.
- [27:02]
A
Controversial. No way.
- [27:03]
B
Yeah.
- [27:04]
A
Can you pull this up? That is crazy. Yeah.
- [27:07]
B
G I L L E S this
- [27:09]
A
guy, which it's also weird that he's the right hand man to.
- [27:13]
B
Or you could say she's his right hand man because he's the established.
- [27:16]
A
She's operating under his tute because of the structure of the time, the fact that the two of them are cooperating and she is a child. I guess childhood is kind of a different.
- [27:26]
B
Yeah, it ends at seven in the medieval world. Or you're seven or eight, you're not.
- [27:29]
A
So her at 13, is she seen as a. She's seen as a young woman.
- [27:34]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [27:35]
A
So it's not the way we would see her is like, oh, she's a kid leading an army.
- [27:39]
B
Yeah. I mean there was definitely still some of that kind of immaturity that would have been seen. You know, people would have thought of that. But really the thing to remember about the medieval world is that pretty much any, any famous medieval figure you're reading about is like very young by today's standards. Like most medieval kings are taking the throne at age 16 or 17 and like, like leading major world events, like major battles, and they're like not even 20 years old. Yeah, it's crazy.
- [28:04]
A
So it's like Alexander the Great died like at our age.
- [28:06]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, what have I done?
- [28:08]
A
He conquered the whole world.
- [28:10]
B
Yeah, exactly. But no, yeah, that's something that's important to remember. And then also, obviously average lifespan is, is much shorter. Of course that's offset by the infant mortality. But yeah, that is fascinating. Yeah. This is like, this is crazy.
- [28:25]
A
And what, like is there a motive for his killings? Like is he trying to do these occult rituals or is he just a sadistic killer?
- [28:30]
B
So there have been a lot of theories about it. One is actually PTSD that he, he, he had been like kind of mentally scrambled by. Because he was part of so many battles. You have to like, one of the things about medieval warfare that people I don't think understand is that if you were like a noble knight, like the mortality rate for you was quite low. Like, chances are you would not die in battle, you would fight a lot. But, but it was more beneficial for the enemy to capture you and ransom you than to kill you. So if they see a guy on horseback with plumage and nice armor, like, they're not going to shoot at you, they're going to like grab you and you know, take you to the side because they want to ransom you for money. So he saw a lot of combat, which obviously in the Middle Ages would have been very close combat, very bloody, very disturbing. And then he's just kind of expected to one day lay down the sword and retire to the countryside and take on his family estate. And he has a lot of. Of kind of beef with his family members over who gets to control the estate. And people say that contributed to his stress and his ptsd. And then he also became, first of all, super Catholic. And then, as part of his Catholic exploration, became more interested in the occult and devil worship, apparently. And then that's when children started to disappear from the countryside. And it wasn't actually until years later that somebody saw one of his, like, close cohorts, like, usher a kid away from the marketplace and they started to make connections. And then they were exploring around his castle and they found, like, a huge repository in the back of bodies. It was crazy. Yeah. And then who knows, like, fact from fiction, but apparently, like, midnight rituals. I mean, this is like witnesses who testified at the trial. Midnight rituals, blood drinking, Satanic practice, basically what the Church would refer to as necromancy, which is the bad kind of magic, demon summoning magic. There's everyday magic and then there's necromancy. He got into the necromancy side of things and the motivations are complex, but he was clearly not in his right mind.
- [30:18]
A
Whoa, that is wild.
- [30:20]
B
There is some modern, like, analysis that suggests, like, maybe this could have all been made up. And like, these people who accused him just wanted access to. He had, like, a really nice estate. He had a lot of land, a lot of, like, familial wealth. So the question is, did they make up all this against him or is it real? But it seems too detailed and there's so many. The transcripts still survive from the trial and, like, these are eyewitnesses giving accounts of. Hey, now that I think about it, I saw him walking around with, like. He was always at the market with, like, different children and there were things going on and I never put two and two together because he's a nobleman and you don't question a nobleman. But now that I look back and so I don't know, it's difficult to say. Or were they paid off? I mean, it's, it's. It's tough to say, but he was, he was Medieval Epstein, basically.
- [31:03]
A
Whoa.
- [31:03]
B
Yeah.
- [31:04]
A
That is crazy. I mean, I'm, like, shocked by this.
- [31:07]
B
Yeah.
- [31:08]
A
And the fact. I mean, I always think about, like, trauma when it comes to ancient battles, because it's Something that we talk about now a lot, or at least something I think about, like, like, you know, the surge of like Body Keeps the Score. That book that was like on the New York Times bestseller for like 400 weeks or something, that this idea that like the trauma that you endure in your life exists in your body residually in your subconscious or something that you're actively thinking about and that people have PTSD from different things. And we talk about soldiers that go to war now that come back with ptsd, but I'm like, I read about the Spartans.
- [31:36]
B
Yeah.
- [31:37]
A
And I'm like, this was a brutal Greek culture of people like killing each other. And you like, sacrifice, not literally sacrifice, but you put your kid on the mountaintop to get, get, you know, taken back to the gods, like really difficult, painful life. I think about the Aztecs. I'm like, they're murdering people. This is like the stuff that they go through. And then I never consider like the trauma that they deal with on a day to day basis. Yeah, there must be trauma, like there must be deep seated psychological wounds that is shaping the way these people are interacting with each other. And this. I'm shocked that this doesn't happen more.
- [32:07]
B
Yeah, I mean, it probably has. I feel like back then it. I mean, even up until like the 80s with DNA, it seemed like it was much easier to get away with this kind of thing, especially in the medieval world. Like I was talking about earlier, the idea of the ordered universe extends down to medieval society. So there wasn't as much social mobility because there's an understanding that God has put everyone where he put them for a reason. So if you're a peasant, you were born a peasant, you're not supposed to be anything else. Same if you're a nobleman. Same if you're, you know, a clergyman, whatever. So it's like you don't question a noble like a nobleman in late medieval France is perfectly positioned to get away with these kinds of crimes because you don't question somebody like that. But it's interesting. This is also kind of around the time that what we would term as PTSD starts to be recognized by late medieval doctors. It started a few hundred years before with knights coming back from the Crusades, because the Crusades, obviously there's the, like, endurance aspect of it, where you're walking, usually on foot, thousands of miles through desert, and you would be ambushed by, you know, local Turkish tribes. And then you get to the Holy Land, you're fighting Saracens, and you're in this foreign land that you don't understand. So there's a lot going on there. And they would come back, and there are. Are contemporary accounts of, like, these guys who would just come back in, like, a fugue state, and they, like, couldn't really talk, and they couldn't really, you know, comprehend what you were saying to them. And they had to be taken care of in monasteries because there was really no cure for it. And it's interesting, too, just from eyewitness accounts, in late medieval cities, especially in England and France, pretty much everybody would know somebody who was a veteran of combat because it was so common. So, like, you would know a guy in your village who had, like, a busted leg because he got hit by a mace and it never healed properly. There's this, like, crazy statistic I read. I don't know if this is totally made up, but it was in a book called A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. And the author, I think it was Ian Mortimer, was saying that in a medieval village, you would see tons of people walking around with a limp because they couldn't properly set, like, broken bones. So, like, everybody would have some kind of nagging injury. Like, he was, like, one in 10 people would have had a limp like these. But, you know, you go to the tavern, like, somebody in that tavern in England in, like, 1380 is a veteran of a foreign conflict and can, like, tell you about it and has the scars to show you, and it's crazy. And, like, these guys, I mean, definitely a lot of alcoholism to deal with this, which.
- [34:16]
A
Right. The drinking culture seems like it makes so much sense. Like, again, my image is, like, guys in a tavern drinking mead, singing songs, and that type of, like, I guess, like, communal, like, medicinal practice makes so much sense. If you're thinking, like, all these people either lost someone through an illness, they lost a child through some type of illness, they got hurt themselves, they have chronic pain, they're dealing with, they have ptsd. They're no longer, like, with their boys doing war stuff. And now they just have to, like, tend to their estate or, like, you know, be a scribe or something. And so now they're, like, miserable. And of course, they're just gonna get hammered with their friends.
- [34:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [34:57]
A
Does that track?
- [34:58]
B
Yeah, pretty much. And then there's also something you see in, like, modern war movies. I feel like there was just a movie with. I think it was called the Covenant Guy Ritchie movie with Jake Gyllenhaal, but basically there's this trope where it's like, the guy comes back from Iraq or Afghanistan. He, like, can't fit into regular society, so he joins, like, mercenaries. He joins, like, Blackwater. Like, him and all his old boys from the Marine Corps, like, they go for one last raid together, things like that. And that was actually kind of precisely what happened. A lot of these guys would come back from these foreign conflicts and wouldn't really be able to reintegrate into society. Like, there was no. So once you've, I think, achieved, like, experienced that level of, like, sensory violence, like, you can't just go back to, like, being a blacksmith. Yeah. So a lot of these guys. A big problem in late medieval Europe was, like, these mercenary groups. Because it's like, okay, the war's over, but we're not going back home. And there's a town right over there that's unprotected, and there's two dozen of us with swords. Like, we're just going to form a crew, and we're just going to start raiding and drinking and pillaging. And that became, like, a major, major problem to the point that. That you can look at some of these late medieval conflicts as basically kings being like, we can't deal with all these mercenary groups. We have to, like, send them. We have to, like, invent a war to get the. To give these guys something to do. I mean, they had been around for a while, and that's actually one of the kind of motivations for some of the early Crusades. Like, there are so many young groups of knights just doing crazy shit all over Europe. Like, send. Like, send them somewhere. Like, come up with something for them to do.
- [36:18]
A
They can defend the Holy Land.
- [36:20]
B
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, we'll take back the Holy Land. We'll, you know, and they're there. And there's obviously, there's money to be made there. There's relics there. There's, you know, obviously a religious goal we have. So, you know, things like that. When you look into the motivations of some of these, like, historic, like, these broad historical trends, at its core, it's always very, like, human psychology. Like, damn, I don't want these, like, young crazy guys messing up villages in my kingdom anymore. And the people don't like it. Let's go invade Italy.
- [36:46]
A
Interesting.
- [36:47]
B
Yeah.
- [36:47]
A
I was just talking to my buddy Luke the other day. Day. And he was describing Europe as specifically, medieval Europe was just a very difficult place to live. Like. Like, the weather was bad. You're living around animals, you're getting cholera. Like, it was a difficult setting where he described some of the other parts of the world. Of course, you know, there's other elements of the world that were having difficult times. But he's like, if you were living, like, in Mesopotamia, life was a lot easier. The weather was more temperate, you had food around. There'd probably be, like, less raiding and, like, less pillaging. But in that specific part of the world, it was like, raiding was massively beneficial. It was one of the best ways to accrue wealth. And on top of that, you have these groups of men that are living in squalor and difficult situations that want to go do violent acts. So if you're in charge of all these people, you're like, okay, I could either let them implode my kingdom, or I can send them around, enrich myself and give them a job to do, and worst case scenario, they die. Solves my problem either way. So let's get them out there. And it's partially like, I guess, a retroactive explanation as to why Europe in this time period is just constantly fighting each other. Is that. Do you think that's fair?
- [37:53]
B
Yeah, it's actually there have been some, like, in the 20th century, post World War II, there were a lot of anthropologists who were interested in look, like there was this whole attitude of, like, we can never let this happen again after World War II. So there was a lot of interest from anthropologists in the 50s and 60s of looking back through history and examining human behavior, like, how do these conflicts happen? How does violence kind of erupt in the human soul to this extent? And how do people put aside, like, their personal moral compass to do these horrible things? And one of the things that was noticed as a pattern is that in societies where the median age is young, like, if you plucked a random person off the street today, I think the median age is 35 in the U.S. like, the average person would be 35, whereas in, like, medieval England, they would be like 17, the average age. So it's like a totally different world. And younger people tend to be more impulsive. And especially younger people in positions of power kind of tend to see things differently. Young, full of bravado and this desire for chivalry, like, that fuels a lot of these violent acts. And then also, if you're looking at, like, a mercenary group, you can see in, like, group psychology that, like, a group of young men that are already maybe trained in the art of war, like, they're going to encourage each other. It's almost like a Lord of the Flies type thing, where it's like you get a group of dudes together, like the Moral, the moral kind of veneer might fall apart. So I mean that's something that's interesting to consider as well as for the like medieval Europe being kind of like a miserable place to live. Yes and no. I think it kind of depends when, when and where you're talking about the ratings certainly, but that, that wouldn't, wouldn't have been everywhere. Like if you're in a coastal, coastal town in Anglo Saxon England in the Viking era, like not a great place to be. But if you're in like southern France in the late Middle Ages, like not as bad. And then also from approximately the Middle Ages had climate change too. And from approximately 900 A.D. to 1200 A.D. was what's called the Great Warming period, where actually the weather was much better. There was, there were vineyards in England which now is unheard of. They were growing fine English wine grapes there and like super fertile soil crops grew like at twice the volume they normally would. And it actually spurred an early renaissance called the 12th century Renaissance. That wasn't like the full blown thing that the Renaissance became later, but it was kind of this era of like more material wealth, more of a leisure class forming because people are just have to spend less time like you know, tilling the fields and more food available. So it's really for a thousand years of history. I do think again that's the Monty Python legacy. It's like you imagine those two peasants in the, in the mud. But it kind of depends when and where. But yeah, I would, I mean I, I wouldn't, I would much rather live in 2026 actually. I think.
- [40:22]
A
Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean, same. I'd much rather live now as well. But in discussing, in discussing war and the Crusade specifically as well as semi occult secret societies, I think that we would be remiss to not bring up
- [40:37]
B
the Knights Templar, of course.
- [40:38]
A
I mean it's fascinating to see the Knights Templar and the legacy that they've left on the world. And I'm curious why you think there is this legacy. But it's effectively like kind of a, like a militia religious war group, like secret societies type thing of these really qualified men that were, you know, going to protect the Holy Land and you know, make this corridor safe for bandits and stuff like, like that. But in addition to that they have this rich sort of like branding and history that is carried over to the Nazis.
- [41:11]
B
Yeah.
- [41:11]
A
Where like they invoke a lot of like the Knights Templar sort of philosophy and then now is having a resurgence today.
- [41:18]
B
Yeah, yeah, I've seen that a lot in my comment section, there's a big, like, Crusades resurgence online. Like young men interested in the Crusades, interested in Templar imagery and lore. I see that a lot. I get a lot of requests for content on that.
- [41:29]
A
So what can you tell me about the Knights Temple? What can you tell me specifically about the secret occult kind of things and the lore that exists around them? And then I'd love to know your take on why it's so prevalent.
- [41:38]
B
Yeah, so I think like in the Middle Ages, anything secret and occult and magical is like tied up in Christian imagery. So it's difficult to kind of separate the two of them because a lot of it is tied up in like Old Testament lore, especially with the Templars. So basically, as you said, they're set up in Jerusalem in the wake of the first Crusade to protect pilgrims because now this sort of pathway has opened between Europe and the Holy Land and like, we've conquered everything. And you can travel much easier to come do a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to see where Christ was crucified and all these things.
- [42:06]
A
Because if you're a Catholic person in Spain trying to go to Jerusalem before
- [42:10]
B
that, it was tough.
- [42:11]
A
You're going to get some marauders going to come by, some bandit's going to rob you, maybe you're killed and left on the side of the road. It was a huge risk.
- [42:17]
B
Yeah. What's also important to know at this time is that for most of the Middle Ages, monastic culture is very, very popular in medieval Europe, which is difficult for us to wrap our heads around, like why anybody would want to live that way, like from a modern perspective. But in an era where life is short and your physical life is seen as a, as a test for your eternal life. And people really, really believe this. If you're living a monastic existence, that's like kind of the best way to live your life. In accordance with God's will to ensure eternal salvation, et cetera, et cetera. All that to say. The Templars start out to protect pilgrims on the road and it's Hugh to Payne. It's Nine Nights one of the. They're led by this French guy, Hugh de Pain. He's a crusader and basically he starts this order and they set up a tent off the side of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. So there's your Old Testament lore. Solomon gets tied up in this because he received like, special wisdom and knowledge and that from God. And that ties into some of the later, the later Templars lore.
- [43:12]
A
Solomon has the lesser key. He's a master builder and with Hiram Abiff, he's able to create the temple. Yeah. And the temple is obviously fundamental to. To Jewish history, but also like freemasonic history. And so there's all these threads that are getting pulled in. Yeah.
- [43:26]
B
And like, immediately already, because they are setting up their kind of camp, like as part of his temple. It's like, what did they have access to? That's where the Holy Grail starts to come into. Is this where it is? And does it confer special powers and knowledge upon the people who are able to touch it? In the Middle Ages, there's this concept of what's called virtus, which means basically being able to. It's the same thing that ties in with relics. If you touch something that a holy or godly person touched, it can confer their traits and their holiness onto you. So that's why if you touch John the Baptist's skull, like this relic, it does something special to you. So same with the Holy Grail. These things were super important.
- [44:03]
A
And the relics, I think, have a reference in the Bible. Could you search the verse specifically that basically endorses relics? I forget exactly which gospel it comes from, but basically it's like, I'm going to butcher this. We probably should just pull it up. But more or less, it's like Jesus touches a cloth, and then that cloth later touches someone else, and then that person is healed from their blindness.
- [44:22]
B
Yeah, I could just touch the hem of your cloth, my Lord. I will be healed.
- [44:25]
A
Exactly, yeah. And so obviously Catholics read this and generations after Christ and they go, oh, yeah, items are able to transfer spiritual power.
- [44:32]
B
Right.
- [44:33]
A
Look at those gospels. So now let's just continue to do this. So now even in Catholicism today, you have these relics that are venerated. They're seen as having some type of, you know, I guess religious divinity imbued into it. And Catholic thinking, even in the modern day still has that where, again, these items aren't worshiped, but if you have them, it can, you know, put you in favor with God. I mean, even like the Eucharist in general, it's like, okay, we are. God is, you know, Christ himself is present in this bread. The bread literally isn't him, but the spirit of Christ is in the spirit of this bread. And these relics are extremely popular in the Holy Grail. Correct me if I'm wrong. Is thought of in that time to be the chalice that Christ drank from at the Last Supper.
- [45:12]
B
Correct.
- [45:13]
A
And that this was one of the most important images of, you know, like, late Christendom in the time after, you know, the death of Christ. And they see this as like, the pinnacle. And that perhaps if we can have this item, then we can, you know, have eternal life. We can, you know, have closeness with God. It's an automatic, like, free into heaven pass. Yeah. And I don't know how the story became what it is, but there's a thought that the Holy Grail exists in the temple.
- [45:41]
B
Yes. Yeah. So that it was in some way delivered there.
- [45:46]
A
Yeah. Here are the verses here, if anyone's curious, that in view 2 Kings, a corpse is revived upon touching the bones of the prophet Elisha. In Acts A, miracles occur when a handkerchief or aprons that had touched St. Paul. And then similarly, people sought to be healed by the shadow of Peter. And I guess, according to this, some interpretations argue that relics have no inherent power, that by treating them as sacred objects and be idolatry. And Moses was later destroyed when people began worshiping a bronze serpent. So it's discussed, but within, you know, Catholics typically are more likely to have relics than.
- [46:22]
B
No, it's interesting, too. I mean, you mentioned the Eucharist, which is. Looms extremely large in the medieval Catholic mind. Like, that's the center of village life. That's the center of everything. People will would, like, rush to the church to see it be lifted high above the altar. Like, it's. It's seen as very, very important. And going back to the idea of magic, if a priest can say specific words and transform this bread into the body of Christ, who's to say he can't say specific words and transform your sick body into a. Into a healed body? Like, that's a spell, basically.
- [46:51]
A
Right.
- [46:51]
B
So it kind of extends into this idea of everyday Catholic magic. But the Templars, basically how it started to work was. Is Hugh to Payne. He's their. He's their kind of figurehead. He comes back to Europe and basically tries to drum up money and support for them. He gets that money and support in the form of Bernard of Clairvaux, who's like the most influential monk. He's an ascetic. He's, like, very well respected as kind of the premier holy man in medieval Western Europe at the time. And he thinks the Templars, like, once he hears about them, he's like, these are the coolest guys I've ever heard of. They fight their knights, they're chivalrous. So they do everything that a medieval man should do, and they, like, live monastically and they pray and they fast and they do all. So it's like the Catholic mind and the medieval, like, Marshall mind are married together, and like, Bernard's like, oh, my, this is crazy. So he starts really pushing for them. He gets them, like, a special papal dispensation. So then they don't have to follow any local laws, and they don't have to pay taxes, so they're accountable only to the Pope, which will create a lot of problems for them in the long run. But basically, because of this, they're able to slowly kind of enrich themselves again. They're tax exempt. They don't have to follow local law laws. They set up the first credit system for people that are going on pilgrimages.
- [48:01]
A
This is fascinating.
- [48:02]
B
Yeah.
- [48:02]
A
I think people should take special note of this.
- [48:04]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So this is, like, this is the time. So once they get the. The. The kind of green light from Bernard, and he get. He's a Cistercian monk, and he kind of gives them, like, their stamp of approval, and they start wearing a white Cistercian tunic, and then they're like, let's put a red cross on there because we're crusaders, and that's where that comes from.
- [48:21]
A
What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I want to you tell. Tell you a scary story. Yeah. Specifically for the dudes. All right? Imagine you're going out with your wife. Okay. You're having some dinner. You know, you get some drinks. The vibes are good. And you go back to your apartment, your house. The lights are low. You got a little Miguel playing on the radio, and all of a sudden, you realize your piece is like, yeah, dude, I'm actually good. Yeah. Wait, what? We're. We're ready to go. And your piece is like, nah, dude, I'm just actually gonna sit this out. I mean, you're trying everything, all right? And your wife's just looking at you like, all right, are we gonna do this? And you got to be like, maybe. Maybe tomorrow. Well, this doesn't have to happen anymore, because I want to tell you about Bluechew Gold. Yes. Because this isn't just about showing up physically and being the man that you are. It's about actually being in the moment. Blue Chew Gold's new formula combines ingredients that support blood flow and mental arousal. And that's also going to help blood flow to your brain. You're probably thinking of funny lines. You know what I mean? Being. Being cool off the cuff. It's not just performance. It's connection. All right? And now you're not overthinking, and you're not stressed. You're just there and able to be you. Now, if this is a tablet that dissolves under your tongue and it's really simple and discreet and you can just put it in your wallet or something, that way you are always ready to go. And, ladies, if you're listening, send your man the link. Turn him into a trophy husband. Keep him in the house. You know what I mean? A stay at home, house, husband. That's what you want, right? Give it to him and let him lay it down. All right? No awkward timing, no weird pressure. Just the confidence you really want. So discover your options right now@bluechew.com and we got a special deal for the listeners of this program. Yes, if you were hearing my voice voice right now. When you buy two months of BlueChew Gold, you're gonna get a third free with the promo code Gagnon. That's right, the promo code Gagnon. G A G N o N. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And we thank Bluetooth for sponsoring this podcast and making this show possible. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I just want to state the obvious. You're not going to hire a chiropractor to do brain surgery. And if you're gonna go fight in the Octagon, you wouldn't hire a guy that. That watches a lot of ufc. And if you have a personal injury case, you're not going to just, like, hire your buddy that's good with contracts because you know that when you're hurt, it's because someone else was negligent. You don't want just, you know, lawyer vibes. You want real lawyers. And that's where Morgan and Morgan comes in. They are America's largest injury law firm with over a hundred offices nationwide and more than 1,000 lawyers. Crazy thing, they've recovered over $30 billion for over 500,000 clients. They've got a real track record of fighting to get people full and fair compensation. So if you are ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan. And their fee is free. Unless they win. Yes, free. You literally don't pay anything unless they win your case. That's how confident Morgan. Morgan is that they can get compensation for you and your injuries. So for more information, go to for the people.comgagnon that is f o r the people.com g a g n o n or dial pound law, that is £529 and let them know that you got sent by the people here at the campsite. Also, this is a paid advertisement. Now, let's get back to the show.
- [51:25]
B
Basically, what you could do is like, let's say you're starting out in London and you're doing a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. You could, like. It would be dangerous to bring all of your money with you. Get. Get robbed on the road somewhere and you'd lose it. So to solve this problem, the Templars basically introduced this system where you would have this coated parchment. You would deposit your money at a specific Templar bank in London, and they would give you a coated parchment with, like a cipher on it, and you bring that with you to Jerusalem. And the Templar bank there would, like, do the cipher and know how much money they were supposed to give you. And it was the first example of kind of like we're doing away with physical money and now you're operating on, like, credit, basically. Or you can do, like, you can deposit and then withdraw somewhere thousands of miles away. It's like, this is like, totally new to the medieval mind. And it actually sort of begins the framework of, like, the economic growth and the mercantile kind of ideals that would become popular in the late Middle Ages. But because of this now, Templar banks, Templar strongholds, they start popping up all over Europe. And then now in some places, like, Templars are more powerful than the local noblemen or the local dukes because they have all this money. And that gets, like a big kind of target on their back because people don't really like this. And they have this special tie in with the Pope, so that gives them, like, religious power to, too. So the clergymen don't like them for that. The local, you know, rich people don't like them for the fact that they have more money than they do. So there's a lot of people that don't like them. And in the early 14th century, the king of France, Philip the Fair, is in debt. He's in a lot of debt at this point because he's been fighting the English and the Flemish. And so he owes his debt to the Templars, and so he's like, hey, guys, you should let me join the Templars. And like, we'll kind of fuse and then, like, the debt, maybe we'll. We'll figure that out. Out. And they're like, no, you can't join. And so he decides to just get rid of them. And it leads this early morning raid in 1307, all of these accusations against them, that they had been spitting on the cross, that they had been engaged in certain untoward sexual acts, and that they had been worshiping the devil, which is, like a really interesting aside there about how that whole thing came about. That's originally where the term Baphomet comes from. Which if, like, in devil worship, he's kind of pictured as this, like, goat figure with, like, he's got, like, a pentagram on his chest. I've just seen him depicted this way in, like, modern, like, black metal imagery.
- [53:40]
A
Yeah, of course.
- [53:41]
B
But where.
- [53:41]
A
Yeah, it's like a human with, like, goat legs, human arms, goat head, pentagram.
- [53:47]
B
And he's like, leading worship or something in front of a fire or whatever. He's a. He's a priest. But the reason. Well, I'll talk about Baphomet, because that's really interesting. But the reason why all of this was so easy to accuse the Templars of and why there was so much mystery around them was because their rights, first of all, they had, like, total leeway to do whatever they wanted. And so they kind of operated in secrecy. Like, a lot of their rights and rituals for induction into the Templars happened behind closed doors. They were super exclusive with who they let in, and they didn't reveal any details of, like, what you had to do to be let in. And over time, as they became richer, it's. It's like posited that that those rituals became less and less strict and they became less and less of a monastic order. And, like, certain weird things kind of started to get introduced into these rituals. And guys were conducting the rituals who maybe weren't super well educated in what the Templars were originally even supposed to be about. I mean, especially now that the order has grown so much, it's getting watered down. And so it kind of made them this ripe, this ripe kind of target for basically any accusation you can level against them. And in the late Middle Ages, the worst thing you can accuse somebody of is, like, devil worship, heresy. And actually, the worst thing you can accuse a crusader of, a Catholic knight is worshiping Muhammad, which is actually where Baphomet comes from, because obviously the Christian enemy in the Crusades are the Islamic peoples, the Saracens. And so the worst thing you can do as a crusader is be in bed with the Saracens in any way, or worship their prophet or their gods. So basically, one of the accusations against them is that they're spitting on the cross, they're giving each other these weird secret kisses below the navel, which seem to be kind of, you know, suggesting maybe they were doing something else, which would have been seen as very irregular in medieval society. And then they're Worshiping a severed head of Muhammad. M A H O M E T Because medieval Christians believe that Muslims worshiped Muhammad, they didn't understand the whole Prophet Allah thing. So, like, they are worshiping a severed head that they call Muhammad or Muhammad, and then that was mis, like recorded in a manuscript as Baphomet instead of Mahamet Muhammad.
- [55:51]
A
Wow.
- [55:52]
B
And so then that becomes. And then over the centuries, you get 18th and 19th century, like occultists who then take on this whole Templar. So to answer the question of why, I think that ties into why the Templars are so, like, still romanticized today and why they have such an outsized role in like, occult and conspiracy theories and Freemasons is a. They're the first, at least in like, Western memory, secret society, really, that. To operate on that scale and have that level of power and influence. And of course, when you achieve that level of worldly influence, like, people are gonna think something weird is going on. I mean, the same accusations were leveled against the Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation. So there's that there's the secret rituals, which we don't really know what was happening behind closed doors, like for their induction rituals, I assume they were not spitting on the cross and worshiping the severed head of Muhammad, but who knows? And then you have these accusations which technically the Pope first said that they weren't true. And then he kind of got overpowered by King Philip and he was like, okay, it is true. It was this whole kind of kingly versus papal power struggle, but that's really it. And then the fact that they sort of. They were so powerful and they disappeared so quickly, like in the course of a few years, they went from the most powerful organization in Europe outside of the Church to just being completely dismantled. And it left this vacuum of mystery and this vacuum of this great secret society that suddenly disappeared off the face of the Earth.
- [57:16]
A
Earth.
- [57:16]
B
And in that vacuum, you can kind of put any of your own kind of spin on it. And actually, even contemporary writers, like, they're. They use the Templars as characters and like epic poems of the time period or chronicles, and they, they tend to have kind of supernatural powers or they have access to certain relics in the Holy Land that average people don't have access to, like the Holy Grail. And that this in some way confers special divine knowledge upon them. And that's how they're able to become so rich and influential. So it's really, there's, there's. There's so many avenues you can go down with the Templar lore, but I I feel like some of the popularity now is just because how cool they were. Cool?
- [57:58]
A
Yeah.
- [57:58]
B
The cool guys with swords in the Holy Land. I mean, there's kind of like a Gen Z religious revival happening now and crusades stuff. And. Yeah, it's interesting, too, in the. I just rewatched Kingdom of Heaven with Orlando Bloom, Ridley Scott movie, movie, and they're depicted as villains in that movie, which is kind of odd because that wouldn't have been how medieval people would have thought of them, even in the face of all this persecution that they were spitting on the cross. From everything we can tell from contemporary chronicles, most people thought that was B.S.
- [58:25]
A
like, really?
- [58:25]
B
People were like, we like the Templars. Like, they protected us on the road to, you know, the Holy Land. And they were seen as, like. I'm trying to think of, like, a good modern example. They were seen as like, who are those guys in New York that were the Red Berets? And they're like the neighborhood of Curtis Lewa, the Guardians, something like that.
- [58:40]
A
Is that what they were? I think they were the Guardians.
- [58:42]
B
Yeah, they're like, near neighborhood. You know, they keep you safe. So it's like, we like these guys. So, I mean, this was around the time that a lot of big questions about Catholic authority. And, you know, there's a papal schism. There's a lot of things happening that make people sort of question whether or not what's coming down to them from their king and from the church is 100% true. And this is an example of, hey, we all realize this is BS and there's a personal motivation for this. Like, the king owed them a bunch of money, and now he's trying to kill them all.
- [59:08]
A
Fascinating that they were. They were even kind of like, hip on, like, the conspiracy wave back then, where they were like, all right, this is a hit piece. This is a. This is a hack job. This is not real.
- [59:16]
B
We don't trust the government. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, too. I think one more thing that feeds into why there's so many conspiracies about the Templars is that they were all so, like, the key players in that morning raid in 1307 were all rounded up and brought to basically, like a dungeon. And they were all horribly tortured because there were specific tortures you would do for crimes that didn't have a witness. Because now if there's no witness, the only thing you have is, like, the confession. And it's seen as legally permissible in medieval France to get that confession. However, like, in the end God decides. And like your guilt or innocence, if, if you're, if you're innocent, you can withstand the pain. If you're guilty. It's the same thing as trial by combat from earlier centuries. If you do this trial by combat and you lose and you die, that's because God is saying, saying you were guilty.
- [60:01]
A
Ball never lies.
- [60:02]
B
Yeah, ball never lies. There you go. So a lot of these Templars confessed to these trumped up charges. The Muhammad had the spitting on the cross, the navel kiss. So that fed into this like mystery of whether or not it was really true. And the main kind of Templar leader at the time was this guy Jacques de Molay, who kept. Over the course of seven years, he was tortured and kept in prison and he kept confessing and then recanting and then confessing and then recanting. And then finally they burned him at the stake. But right before he was burned, they were like, you have a chance to kind of clear your name or say whatever you need to say. Confess publicly. And he was like, no, it's all made up. Like throw the torch. Like this is it. So I don't know to me that, that makes me think that. I feel like under torture people will say anything.
- [60:45]
A
Yeah.
- [60:45]
B
So you know, you know, that doesn't give any veracity to the story. But it does seem like at the time and with historians now that like 99 of this was probably made up.
- [60:54]
A
Up. Yeah, I mean that's what it seems like to me. I mean sure, they probably doing some improper things and whatever. Like, probably like was it this like bizarre occult, like ritual? Probably not, but I guess I don't. It seems like there was a lot of alignment for them to want these guys to get taken out.
- [61:12]
B
Right. And also, I mean it's just because like certain occult or like dark magic practices weren't happening doesn't mean that they actually didn't have. I mean there are so many theories about like, like portals in Jerusalem or certain, like, like certain places in the world where the spiritual veil is thin and when the distance between man and God is, is shorter. People say northern Maine is one of those places. I used to live in Maine.
- [61:34]
A
Really?
- [61:34]
B
Yeah. Where it's like I, I think just places where the northern light people say about like Iceland too. I think that's maybe the northern lights has something to do with it. But in Jerusalem, Jerusalem is obviously one of those places, is a very holy site. So that's not to say that they didn't have any kind of. We, we think occult is like a Negative thing, but that. It doesn't mean they didn't have access to some kind of divine, you know, treasure or divine relic that now is probably gathering dust somewhere in the basement of the Vatican. But, like, that very well could exist.
- [61:58]
A
Fascinating. Yeah. And then when was Jack de Molay killed? What date was that?
- [62:03]
B
13. So they were. He was captured in 1307, I believe he was burned at the stake of 1314.
- [62:08]
A
But the day. Oh, Friday the 13th.
- [62:11]
B
Friday. Oh, that's right.
- [62:12]
A
Yeah, that's right. I just think that's such a funny, like, little ripple.
- [62:15]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:16]
A
Like, I don't know if that's. I think. I don't. I don't know if people know if that's exactly why Friday the 13th is so unlucky.
- [62:22]
B
Yeah, but sure, I'm.
- [62:23]
A
That. That to me was like one of the explanations that people gave.
- [62:26]
B
I see.
- [62:26]
A
Like for why Friday 13th is unlucky. Because the day of the. I think it was either the day that the raid happened or that mole was killed.
- [62:32]
B
Okay.
- [62:32]
A
I can't remember exactly which.
- [62:33]
B
That's interesting. That makes sense.
- [62:34]
A
That was. That was one of the theories. Yeah, you can fact check me on that.
- [62:37]
B
And there was a. There was a curse on King Philip's bloodline after that, like which he suffered a bunch of mishaps and so another crazy little ripple.
- [62:45]
A
This whole thing. Oh, the Last Supper is thought to be that Norse number. Come on, give me something. There we go.
- [62:50]
B
There we go. Okay, so that was the Friday of the raid.
- [62:52]
A
There was a Friday of the raid.
- [62:53]
B
Okay, that makes sense. I had never. I wasn't familiar with that.
- [62:56]
A
And they saw it as a cursed day, which again, maybe if that is the feeling, kind of goes to the casual person's feeling about the Templars, where the day they get raided is unlucky. So it kind of implies that they like them. Right. Yeah. That's interesting. Another one is 11. 11, apparently is when the treaty after World War I was signed. Oh, okay.
- [63:14]
B
Okay. Interesting.
- [63:14]
A
And that was like a. It's like a lucky number, cuz it was when the war stopped. You can fact ch me on that too. Again, I don't.
- [63:20]
B
That makes sense.
- [63:21]
A
Pull stuff out here. The master number. Of course. All right, D. Come on. Keep. Give me.
- [63:25]
B
Come on. Give me something.
- [63:26]
A
Give me something. Give me something.
- [63:27]
B
Something with angel numbers, too.
- [63:28]
A
No, Come on. I thought I had this one. Hold. Go down. Christos, your AI is bad. Can you.
- [63:33]
B
You need to use AI.
- [63:35]
A
Can you use an AI that says I'm right?
- [63:36]
B
It's suppressing information.
- [63:38]
A
Here yeah, Use an AI that says that what I say is correct. Cuz I would actually really prefer that. Oh, never mind. All right, all right. Forget that. People, if they're. If you're using this for like a research paper.
- [63:48]
B
I believe it. I choose to believe it.
- [63:50]
A
I appreciate that. You know what? And faith is a virtue. Exactly. I like that. So Philip II kills De after torturing for a while, kind of this unjust raid. And then the apocryphal story is that De, like says something to Philip right before he dies where he's like, like, you will pay for this. Or something to that effect. Probably not, but maybe. And then like a year later, what is it De has? Or the. Philip has a bunch of issues, but also the Pope dies.
- [64:20]
B
Yes. Yeah, yeah.
- [64:21]
A
What is that story?
- [64:22]
B
Yeah, so it was basically kind of this ripple effect of I. It's difficult to say too, because people saw it going back to what we were saying about like medieval magic, signs, rituals, all these things in the medieval minds, like everything in an ordered universe has to be connected. So of course, people widely, the public condemns this kind of action against the Templars and they see it as unjust. One of the important things too is that Philip is able to get the. One of the most powerful kind of like knowledge and theology centers in the universe at the time is the University of Paris. And he gets them to side with him through some like, backdoor dealings, maybe some payoffs, and say like, yes, these, this is all true about the Templars. And like, once you get the University of Paris, Paris, like those guys on your side, that gives it real world credence. And then there's actually in the early 2000s, there was a document unearthed in the Vatican basement, like in a file somewhere from 1308. So the year after the raids where the Pope explicitly said, like, I do not believe that this happened. I don't think the Templars did this. And like, I am giving them papal clemency. But it disappeared from the records. And a couple years later, he kind of assented to what Philip was pressuring him on. And so this is a time, like I was saying earlier, where papal power, like the papacy, is not at its peak anymore, really in Europe. There's just a lot of challenges to authority, both locally and from kings. It's always been a delicate balance of power. But yeah, in the years immediately following Jacques de Millay's execution, which is kind of seen as like the capstone of this Templar persecution, Philip dies. Yes, this is it. The Qinan Party parchment. There you Go. Absolved Grandmaster Jacques de Malay and other leaders from heresy charges. But, yeah, they both. They both died in the wake of. But again, like, in the Middle Ages, people. Popes, Popes especially, died randomly, like, all the time, and so did kings.
- [66:13]
A
But it was within a year.
- [66:14]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [66:15]
A
Just saying.
- [66:16]
B
Yeah, no, there's something to be said for that, for sure.
- [66:18]
A
I don't know how. How fast ancient curses work, but.
- [66:22]
B
Well, yeah, I mean, who. The seed could have been sewn in that moment and then it took. Yeah.
- [66:27]
A
Takes a little bit, you know. A little bit.
- [66:29]
B
Yeah.
- [66:29]
A
That's crazy. What a. What a wild tale.
- [66:32]
B
Crazy.
- [66:33]
A
Yeah. I mean, I'm just. I'm. The Knights Templar is just such a fascinating thing. Can you look up the Nazi connection? I forget which episode I was doing research on. Maybe you know this, but they're like Hitler and like, just generally like Himmler or whoever else was doing, like, the branding for the Nazis. They, like, we're invoking a lot of, like, Templar, sort of like the Iron Cross crosses. And, like, a lot of that came specifically from the Templars. And I think the reason that they liked it, it was like, it sort of romanticized, like, the soldier saint kind of thing. So it's like we were fighting like a holy war. I mean, this probably put it into a better, a. A better term 20th century cultum, specifically the Ordo Novi Templi, the Order of the New Templars, which was founded by Jorg Lon's Lebenfeld Fells, who. He's a fascinating. He used to be a priest that ends up becoming like an occult racist and creates Ariosophy.
- [67:23]
B
Okay.
- [67:24]
A
Which is like its own form of, like, Aryan occultism, which is wild. And the group basically merged Templar traditions with Proto fascist. Oh, yeah. Ariosophy, influencing Nazi thinkers of promoting Aryan supremacy. That one there. The Order of the New Templars. And so some people suggest that this is actually where Hitler got the swastika from. Oh. So click on that really fast. So this happens. So I guess, like, the Third Reich is like 33 or whatever. And so this society is founded in, like, the 1900s. So, like, literally in 1900. And so again, I'm kind of riffing here, but basically this guy creates this order, takes this image, puts it on the flag as, like, the New Templars, and we're like, you know, white nationalists. Like, if that's white's not even really like a thing, I guess, but like, hey, we're Aryans. We're creating the master race and we're doing it through the old Templar thing, they're pulling on this stuff. And this is apparently where Hitler gets first. The first visual of this image.
- [68:21]
B
High interest debt can be a real vibe killer. Credit cards, personal loans and more can make you feel uncomfortable even in the sanctuary of your own home. Well, what if you knew that SoFi can help you leverage your home's equity to feel more at ease? It's called a SOFI home equity loan and it could consolidate your debt at a typically lower interest rate than existing debt with lower monthly payments payments and all while keeping your existing mortgage rate. View your rate@sofi.com payoffdebt today Mortgages originated by SoFi bank and a member FDSC and MLS number 696891. Terms and conditions apply. Equal housing lender K Pop Demon Hunters Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle.
- [69:01]
A
So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [69:05]
B
It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Participating McDonald's while supplies last. Interesting. Yeah, I mean it makes sense there where it says his goal was to bring right wing extremists in post World War I Germany together and mobilize them in opposition to the liberal party. It makes sense that that like the Templars like loomed so large in the western imagination and there was so much mystery around them. You even see this in like earlier writings in the 1800s from some of the kind of like gothic authors. Basically you can kind of reflect any. Like the mirror of the Templars is so big and mysterious. Like you can reflect anything you want in there. And it's something that like people are instantly familiar with and they're instantly familiar with its power. But you can kind of put your own own spin on it. I even see it now on Instagram. Like there's a lot of this has come back like Aryan kind of like ideology and some of this like mysticism and then also the Templars and all of this and these kind of like super right wing spaces online. I see people like.
- [70:14]
A
I think makes kind of some sense. Like can you. What is the translation of Deus Volt?
- [70:18]
B
Oh, God wills it. God. That was the original rallying cry. So Pope Urban is the Pope who kind of rallies support for the First Crusade in Western Europe. He goes on this kind of barnstorming speaking tour of churches, courts, and his big kind of slogan is day's fault. God, God wills. And it's something everybody can kind of repeat back. And it became this crusader slogan. And so now people say it on social media to be like, I'm based, like, day use vault. Like, I'm in. I'm in on all this. Like, whatever. Agartha, I don't know if you're familiar with Agartha.
- [70:47]
A
That's like a base of world inside the world.
- [70:49]
B
Yeah. But it's like, it's now. It's. It's now I. From what I can gather from context clues, it's, like, put forth as like, a sort of ethno Aryan, like, paradise within the Earth. And it's definitely tied up in all this, like, Nazi ideology, Templar, all this. So, yeah, it's. But it's another example of how you can kind of press anything you want onto this because it's so mysterious.
- [71:08]
A
Well, I think that's part of, like, the Norse Aryan mythology that Hitler is even invoking, is that, like, these Aryans are, like, Nordic people that actually are, like, Agarthians that came from the center of the Earth that, like, populated that part of the world. And it's our job as the Aryans to take it back and, like, preserve it, something to that effect. So, like, Agartha is, like, this fictionalized city in the middle of the world is. Yeah. It's like proto white Utopia.
- [71:35]
B
Yeah.
- [71:36]
A
And the Deus Volt kind of, like, again, I don't know, because I see people that, like, invoke it, and I don't really exactly know why they're doing it, but it feels like it's kind of as people in Europe and America feel like their countries are being invaded through immigration, they're like, oh, they're just letting everyone in. Da, da, da. They're longing for the rigidity and the brutality of. Of war. And they're like. They are enjoying the imagery of the Crusades.
- [72:03]
B
Yes.
- [72:04]
A
I think that's really what it's tying into.
- [72:06]
B
Yeah. No, it's super interesting because I see it sometimes in my comment section, and I just now, because I post, like, medieval stuff on Instagram, I'll get things recommended in the same vein. And I see a lot of people with that, like, same political bent kind of yearning for the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages, a time when Christianity was totally dominant in Europe, like, totally ethnically homogeneous. Like, there wasn't really, like, you. You might get like a traveling group, African monks or something. But, like, almost everybody was a white European, and it's like, culturally homogenous. You would know everybody in your village. And we all share the same ideas about Christianity and whatever. And people are kind of yearning for this past that in a way they've imagined and romanticized in their head and what's in. Maybe this is a video idea for the future. But, like, people in the Middle Ages did the same exact thing with ancient Greece, specifically ancient Troy. A lot of medieval kings to basically give themselves authority as a king like that I've been given this divine power by God to rule over. You would have these fake line drawn up and posted, like, everywhere, and they would be painted too. So, like, even if you couldn't read, you could see the images of, like, I am actually descended from Adam and Noah and then the people of Troy and then Aeneas who went wandering and then he settled in England and he said he created the Plantagenet dynasty. And that's how I, Edward iii, became your king, because I'm descended from this noble lineage. And it's interesting too. You see from a lot of medieval writers, there's this looming shadow of the old Roman Empire that fell, fell, and they know that they're living. And that's where the term we're standing on the shoulders of giants comes from. Medieval scholars would write that about ancient Rome, that we are living in the wake of something that was incredible. And what's coming after right now is the apocalypse, like the second coming of Christ. So they wouldn't have called it the Middle Ages, but they did imagine themselves as living in this middle period between something, some mythic imagined past that used to be incredible and like, this doom and gloom, like the world's about to end. And in one of my videos I talked about, about, like, now we feel the same way. Like, we look back at, like, the 1950s and 1960s and we, like, romanticize it in our head is like, that was peak America. And that was, we should go back, make America great again. And then. But if we look 10, 20 years to the future, it's the Apocalypse. Like, it's like the two we're living in this.
- [74:15]
A
It's kind of comforting.
- [74:16]
B
Yeah, it makes me.
- [74:18]
A
It makes me feel comforted, like, to know that, okay, even people living in a time that we might romanticize, they themselves were in misery and they themselves were like, oh, we're in the end times.
- [74:27]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [74:28]
A
That if everyone thinks they're in the end, end times, and no one's in the end times.
- [74:30]
B
Yeah. Right.
- [74:31]
A
So it kind of makes you feel like, all right, I will feel bad for people that actually are in the end times.
- [74:34]
B
Yeah. Sometime someday it will be.
- [74:36]
A
And they will be right. And they're like, due to the end times, then they're going to be right. And I told you. Yeah, you're like that guy with the sign on the road.
- [74:42]
B
There's those people. Every few years, they always go viral online because they're like, the rapture is this year in September, and then it passes. But one time, they'll be right, statistically.
- [74:49]
A
The Millerites.
- [74:50]
B
You ever heard about that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [74:51]
A
They were a classic one. They're like, we're all getting to the mountaintop. Jesus is coming. And then he did, and he was like, I think we timed it. Yeah, it's next year.
- [74:59]
B
Where do you go from there? You know what's crazy is that these
- [75:01]
A
Doom Day cults actually get more like, they kind of like, concentrate, because let's say you have 100 people, you have a prediction, it doesn't come true. 20% of them leave. So you got 20 people that are out. The 80 that stay are actually more committed.
- [75:16]
B
Yeah.
- [75:17]
A
You do another prediction, you're going to lose 10 of them. But the 70 that are still there are way more committed. So it actually gets more concentrated and more radical as time goes on with each failed prediction.
- [75:25]
B
Prediction, yeah.
- [75:25]
A
Which is kind of wild. It's really counterintuitive.
- [75:27]
B
Yeah, it's. No, it's interesting. I mean, I love. Anytime there's like a new cult documentary or anything on Netflix, I always have to watch it. But I was watching. I think it was like a dramatization of the Branch Davidians and how it was like, people would peel off, but then the people that stuck, like, the. The lines that they would be willing to cross as time and the boundaries that sort of dissolve between, like, what any normal person would think was okay. It's so interesting to see not only A, how quickly that breaks down, but B, how it's like, also the cult leader from the beginning can recognize, like, who's my real. Like, Manson was the same way. Like, he had texts and all his, like, kind of closes. So, like, he knew from the beginning, like, these are the guys who are going to do whatever I say. Yeah. Other people might fall away, but, like, these are the. Yeah. It's crazy to think about and where you have to get to mentally to be able to do to. To do something like that. I don't know. It's Crazy.
- [76:10]
A
But it is, it is comforting to know, like, even then people were, you know, they were, they were pissed and they wanted to go back.
- [76:16]
B
Yeah.
- [76:17]
A
And that, like, make our country great again is the most. It must be the most reused slogan. Yeah.
- [76:26]
B
That's a very ancient slogan. Yeah.
- [76:28]
A
I mean, every Roman emperor, like, was like, all right, guys, great news. We're going back to the old Rome, Egyptian pharaohs. Hey, guys, great news.
- [76:36]
B
We're.
- [76:36]
A
We're going to build pyramids again.
- [76:38]
B
Yeah.
- [76:38]
A
Like, it's literally the same thing.
- [76:39]
B
Even the Renaissance. Like, we are rebirthing Roman culture. Like, we've been in darkness for a thousand years.
- [76:45]
A
It's not called the songs.
- [76:46]
B
Yeah.
- [76:46]
A
You know what I mean? Yeah. We are rebirthing this thing that once was great.
- [76:50]
B
Yeah.
- [76:50]
A
We're making Europe great again.
- [76:51]
B
Yeah.
- [76:52]
A
Yeah. I mean, Reagan used the Holy Roman Empire.
- [76:54]
B
We're bringing back the Roman Empire this time. It's holy, it's Christian, but it's like we're using all the symbols and terminology that you recognize from ancient Rome. It's like a throwback episode. But we're, you know, we're bringing in, we're ushering in a new, a new rejuvenation of our culture and of our, of our people built on these old ideas. Else.
- [77:11]
A
Yeah, it's just, I think, a really important lesson for people to recognize. Like, anytime you hear someone say, like, hey, we're going to make this thing great again.
- [77:18]
B
Yeah.
- [77:18]
A
It's almost always a tactic. It might be the right tactic. Maybe they're doing the right thing. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, maybe they're like, hey, let's make like college great again. Or like, let's make, I don't know, the, the Knicks great again. Then you might be like, all right, yeah, let's, let's. We should make the Knicks good again. But it's almost always like a branding thing that's been just used. Used to death.
- [77:38]
B
Yeah.
- [77:38]
A
And the first time you hear it, you're like, that is a good idea. But then you see that every emperor ever has used it. You're like, okay, yeah, I don't know. To me, I just find that very striking. I forget. I was just literally talking to Luke yesterday about this. He told me my buddy Luke Caverns, I don't know if you know him, he's a awesome, like, archaeologist. But he specifically specializes one in like, kind of Hellenistic, like, like Egyptian, kind of like specifically Alexandria is like his love, but then also like Mesoamerican, South Central American, pre Columbian history, Aztecs, Olmecs, all that. And he, but he was just telling me this exact thing where it was like Augustus I think takes over and he's like, like Caesar Augustus is like, we're making it great again and starts building all these public works projects.
- [78:19]
B
Yeah.
- [78:19]
A
That are supposed to remind the people of the old days.
- [78:22]
B
Yes.
- [78:23]
A
Yeah.
- [78:24]
B
The same thing happened in the Byzantine Empire during the so called Dark Ages. I know when people say Dark Ages they're usually referring to Western Europe, but in like what would be modern day, what, Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, all the way into the Middle east is the Byzantine Empire, which is the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire. So to these people Rome never fell until like the 1800s. And yeah, essentially a big part of their national mythology is like these emperors would come to the throne. There was a lot of turnover with the emperors and a lot of core intrigue. Like, you know, family members would murder each other to get to the throne. It was very dangerous to be in the line of succession to be a Byzantine Empire emperor. But it was always soaked in like old Roman, not mythology in terms of gods, but mythology in terms of like Caesar and you know, Nero and these, these emperors that, these names that you would remember, like we're bringing back, you know, Hadrian, these emperors of Nero is not a great example, but Hadrian's a better example. You know, these great emperors of old Constantine, who was kind of the, the founder of what would be considered the Byzantine Empire and then also now infused with Christian, Christian, Christian like ideology that this so and so has been chosen by Christ and they're in the image of Caesar. It's kind of like fusing of the two.
- [79:32]
A
Yeah. Which is another thing that happens across so many cultures where it's like, okay, you have the secession problem, we have the religious authority, you have the political authority. And then every now and again a smart guy comes around and goes, hey, I'm just going to combine them.
- [79:44]
B
Yeah.
- [79:44]
A
Who was it? Imanhotep in Egypt. Oh yeah, yeah. He was like, I'm actually, I am the son of the former Pharaoh, but I'm also the son. Son of God.
- [79:53]
B
Yeah. And like whole sun worship.
- [79:55]
A
Exactly. Like I'm pretty sure it was even hotel.
- [79:57]
B
I might be wrong, I don't know,
- [79:58]
A
but it was like one of the Egyptian pharaohs. I was basically just like, hey, look at my images. And all of his images were him with like the sun behind him and they're like, oh, that he's the son of a God. Yeah, of course he's going to be the king. It's like the divine. Right. Just all the way passed through.
- [80:09]
B
Of course. Yeah. You have to, like, prove that you have this lineage to this kind of imagined mythical past. And, like, people are kind of willing to buy into that national.
- [80:16]
A
And we still do it now.
- [80:17]
B
Right.
- [80:17]
A
Like, anytime someone's like, I don't know, anytime any Kennedy says something, it's the news. Yeah.
- [80:23]
B
Yeah.
- [80:23]
A
Even if you're like, a distant cousin related to the name.
- [80:26]
B
Name holds weight.
- [80:27]
A
Just having the name, it's the same thing where it's like, oh, you are a part of the divine, like, bloodline of American history.
- [80:34]
B
Yeah.
- [80:35]
A
For what, like, is a rich guy from the 40s that, like, started this whole thing.
- [80:40]
B
Yeah.
- [80:40]
A
And we are still holding on to the name to this day. It's just wild.
- [80:43]
B
Yeah. It's fascinating, too. I mean, one of the things. Things just comparing medieval modern is, like, in the Middle Ages, even up until, like, extremely recently, whatever your national or local kind of mythology was like that, hey, we're descended from Troy, or we're. We are this people that came from this biblical tribe or whatever. Like, that was unassailable. Like, you did not attack that. You did not question that we share this national mythology. This is our story. This is our narrative, and we don't touch it. And I think something you see that was even true in the United States up until recently, like, the founding fathers were almost like gods. Like, like, beyond reproach. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson. Everybody knows these names. Even, like, later figures, like an Abraham Lincoln, like, completely unassailable. Like, you would never hear a negative. At least when I was growing up, you'd never hear a negative word about these guys. And then I think in the last decade or so, there's been, like, a reappraisal of, you know, well, he was a slave owner, and he was actually secretly doing this with so and so. And like, this guy was. And it sort of seems to be. It's confusing to see, like, what is just an acceptance of the truth and what is. Is sort of this kind of need to, like, undermine that national mythology. And, like, what does that say about a place that a culture has found itself at?
- [81:51]
A
I don't know.
- [81:52]
B
It's just an interesting question for me to deal with just because it's so usually you would only. In any time before the modern era, the only time you would ever attack the national story is if you were an enemy. Like, if I was conquering your empire or your kingdom, I would say your national story is. Your story is made up, your myth is made up. And My myth is true. But now it's like, no myth is true. True. And these. These unassailable Founding fathers, they were just, you know, kind of fat old men in petticoats and.
- [82:18]
A
Yeah. Yeah. It's a difficult question because, like, from. Like, from. From a citizen's perspective as someone that is curious and loves the truth, I'm like, I want to know the full, unfiltered truth of everything. Like, I'm taking the red pill. Yeah. Of, you know, in Matrix, not manosphere. But, like, I'm like, I want to go down the path of knowing all the things, but from, like. Like an aristocrat perspective. If I was building a nation, I would develop myths and encourage people to buy into the myth. And for most of human history, it works because everyone's kind of bought into the myth, and I think the homogeny helps. Whereas in America, one of our founding myths is like, the American dream. You know what I mean? You can come here and you can achieve your dreams, and it's meritocratic, and the good guys win. And then if we're not upholding that.
- [83:03]
B
Yeah.
- [83:04]
A
Immediately people that are moving to this country or that were forcibly moved into this country are feeling like, hey, the. This whole thing's a lie. I was told that I could be free here. I was told that I could be the best, you know, version of me, and I was told that it was meritocratic. And here I am working really hard, but there's, you know, systemic issues keep me down. Or, you know, the. It's actually really nepotistic, and I had no opportunity in the first place. So screw this whole dream thing. It's not a real dream. It's actually. Actually way worse when the reality is, like, it's probably in the middle. But when you put such a grand slogan as your founding myth. Yeah. As if it's undermined even a little bit by its own constituency. Or, like, if the constituency feels like it's being, you know, it's not actually living up to that, then they're going to cut it down and go the exact opposite way, where they're like, oh, America's actually the worst country in the world.
- [83:53]
B
Yeah.
- [83:53]
A
Where you're like, all right, that's probably not true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [83:57]
B
Like, yeah, no, I. It's. It's. Even the concept of, like, national identity was something that only really started to develop in the late Middle Ages. But it's just something that's interesting to think about, is, like, a human instinct. Like, how do we think of ourselves as a group and, like, what influences that. And I think over time, obviously, as, like, techno technology has advanced and culture has kind of expanded, I would say, like, that group gets bigger and bigger. First of all, you know, a thousand years ago, it was your village with 100 people in, like, your identity as part of, like, wider France or even, like, your province. Like, it was. You really cared about your village. Like, you weren't really interacting that much or thought of yourself as a subject of so and so.
- [84:33]
A
I'm Parisian.
- [84:34]
B
I'm not French, but I'm Parisian. Yeah, exactly. And then that's expanded, and that's expanded, and that's expanded. I think what we're seeing now is, like, it's. It's almost like with the death of monoculture and the fracturing of the algorithm and even, like, political fracturing. Like, you're not just a conservative, you're like a Fuentes guy. Or you're not just a liberal, you're a Hasan piker guy. Like, it's even, like, fracturing around specific personalities to the point where. Where it's like, even conservatives don't agree with each other. You're Tucker or you're Fuentes. Like, which one are you? So it's like this whole thing where I feel like it's all kind of going back to, like, this regional, fractured culture. And in a way, if that can go offline, I do think the rebirth of regional culture and the rebirth of regional identity might actually be the way to go. I also feel like it's something that you see a change over time in how people view their government and how people view who's at the helm of their government. Government. And I think something we've seen in the last hundred years in the US which would have been unheard of for medieval people, is killing your king or killing your president would have been. I think we have this image that back in the day, if people were pissed off at the king, they would go drag him out of the castle and cut his head off. But in the Middle Ages, like, executing the king was, like, extremely taboo and extremely rare. Like, that's a divinely appointed individual. Like, even if things are going wrong in the country, you see this in the English chronicles. They never actually blame the king. They're like, well, it's not. He was chosen by God. Like, we. We have all these wars and taxation and, you know, these diseases, but it's not his fault.
- [85:56]
A
He's.
- [85:57]
B
He's. He's just getting bad advice or, like, he's having bad luck or whatever. And it it was kind of mostly unheard of to ever kind of attack the person of the king. And then obviously, like post French Revolution, once you start guillotining everybody, it's like now, now that's on the table.
- [86:10]
A
But even like Roman Empire, there would be a lot of backstabbing.
- [86:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, literally. And the, and the Byzantines too. But it wasn't for the most part. It's not, not the people killing. It's not like a lone gunman, a lone archer. It's like your family member has you blinded and castrated so you can be
- [86:24]
A
the emperor or other senators or other people in your court.
- [86:28]
B
Yeah. So I, so I, I don't know. To me, that's just something interesting to think about. Of like how we, how ideas have changed over time. Of like what we view as authority and what, like how that influences our culture and like this idea of like the American culture with the American President and the American dream. Dream and all these ideas we've had and how in the last hundred years, like radically that's been splintered. And I think a lot of the doom and gloom and like the craziness and chaos you see online, especially post Covid, has to do with like us being brought up and educated in this paradigm. And then all you have to do is open your Instagram feed and it's like, this is not, this is not what's going on. Yeah, they just shot at Trump, shot Charlie Kirk. They, you know, there's a, there's, there's not only a war going on in Iran. You can watch the whole thing on your phone. Yeah. Like, or you can watch what's going on in Palestine on your phone. Like, you couldn't even do that 20 years ago with the war on terror. It's just like this new paradigm and who knows what it's going to turn into in the future. But I feel like it explains some of the chaos. I don't think the human mind or human impulse is meant to withstand this flood.
- [87:32]
A
No, not at all. And I think that we're in the middle of two zones where it's like we're kind of operating with a older political system, like a neocon political vibe where it's like, yeah, we'll go to war with these people. We're kind of going to like exert our like, American hegemony because we have like the best culture. We're going to like do our stuff and they can't control the messaging. And so now we're living in this like, out of step thing. Where, like, we're hearing messaging from official platforms. The information that we're seeing online is so the opposite of that. And it's difficult to know if that information is even real or not. It's difficult to know if the footage you're even seeing is real or not. So it's this mismatch of, like, reality and information. And I think people just eventually go, I don't know anything, and they just step away. Yeah, I think it's just kind of like an acceptance of, like, it's, again, kind of nihilist, where you're just like, nothing I do is really going to change it. Nothing really matters. And I think it's either like a step away or it's like a radicalization.
- [88:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, yeah.
- [88:24]
A
But I think that's. I think it's mostly step away.
- [88:26]
B
People are just like, well, yeah, well, I've seen. I see. I get a ton of. Now that I do, like, video essays on YouTube, I get a ton of video essays recommended to me. And one of the things I'm seeing, like, young people make making video essays about as, like, a 2026 trend, or maybe even into, like, 2027, is, like, how sexy it is to be chronically offline, to have, like, a flip phone. Like, if you meet somebody your age, you're like, 20, and they have a flip phone and no social media. Like, that's like, aura. That's mystique.
- [88:50]
A
Quiet luxury.
- [88:51]
B
Yeah, quiet luxury, quiet living, cottage core, all that stuff. I feel like that's kind of. That seems to be the vibe that's, like, attracting people. I think we're. We've all very quickly become exhausted of. Of the constant flood, and then also that maybe, like, people weren't meant to care about this much or know about this much. And, yeah, I think it's just a natural reaction. Obviously, the pendulum's always swinging in one direction or the other. But, yeah, I'm. I'm. I talk about this in my content, but I'm kind of. I mean, with AI and everything and the way the kind of political system is now, and what you said about messaging was really interesting. My prediction is that I think 2024 was the last election where there was ever anything like organized messaging from a political party. Because in my opinion, one of the places where Kamala's campaign kind of failed was that they weren't able to really get a clear message across. And where Trump succeeded was he had such a clear message. He's always been great with the slogans, but he was able to he had Tucker, he had Fuentes, he had all the heavy hitters. Like, everybody circled the wagons around him in a way that the left wasn't really able to do. And now you see that with the Iran war and everything with ICE and with everything, like, there's. There's so much splintering on the right. But I think 2024 was the last time we'll see anything like what we're used to with modern political messaging. I think it'll be totally different in three years, so. Or two years. But.
- [90:05]
A
Well, I will say Zoron had great messages.
- [90:07]
B
Yes. Yeah. No, he killed.
- [90:08]
A
It worked.
- [90:08]
B
He understood. He understood.
- [90:10]
A
But, like, he. He almost did, like, a Trumpian style thing of, like, free buses.
- [90:14]
B
Yeah.
- [90:15]
A
Low rent.
- [90:15]
B
Rent, like everybody could name. Yeah.
- [90:17]
A
And even if. And I think what's important about these things from, like, a political messaging perspective is that you don't actually have to do it like you should, but, like, you. You don't need to. Like Trump saying, build a wall. It's not about the wall. It's about the emotional connection to the sentence. Because what. What building a wall means is like, we're going to take our country back. We're going to make it white. We're. We're going to make, you know, we're going to stop immigration. Like, different people can kind of put different things onto it. There's probably, like a farther right contingent that makes it right racial. There's maybe like a more centrist contingent that's like, yeah, we're going to secure the border. But it's not about the wall. Right. It's about what the message.
- [90:54]
B
We are awesome. They are them.
- [90:56]
A
Exactly. And we're America.
- [90:57]
B
Yeah.
- [90:57]
A
And then, like, you know, stopping the rent. Freeze the, you know, free buses, whatever that is connoting. Like, hey, you're having a hard time financially, I'm gonna help. And it's just making this. Making the slogan so clear that even if you don't do it, it just signals like, hey, I'm on your side.
- [91:11]
B
Yeah.
- [91:12]
A
And Kamala didn't really have. Have a. A slogan that you could attach yourself to. Like, it was, like, kind of vague. It was like. And I think, like, Democrats in general have a hard time with this, where they try to make it, like, accurate, and it's like, hey, you don't have to be accurate.
- [91:23]
B
Yeah. This is the error of the Internet.
- [91:25]
A
Like, don't. Like. It doesn't matter really what you do.
- [91:28]
B
And, And. And I think one thing also, just speaking to Zoran, success is like, he knew who his voter base was. And he knew where they. Where they are. Like, Zoran did not need to go on Fallon. Like, his voter base is not watching Fallon. They're watching the man on the street interviews that people do in New York, or they're watching, like, a DJ set in Brooklyn. And then he shows up and he's there, and it's like, oh, my gosh, that's Zo Run. Like, that's what people think is cool. Same with Trump. You go on Theo Vaughn, you go on Joe Rogan, you know, So I don't know. I feel like the media landscape is changing so rapidly. Like, any kind of political success in the future Zo Run has, the blueprint is like, you have to, like, stay ahead of the curve. You have to be where your people are.
- [92:05]
A
Yeah. Okay. One final thing I want to ask you before we move on on. What can you tell me about medieval alchemy?
- [92:11]
B
Yeah, so it's really interesting there. So medieval alchemy, at its core, was this idea that you can take metal, like, any kind of metal, and. And transmute its physical properties to turn it into gold. And if you were able to do this, like, if you could magically or through a series of. There were a lot of different approaches to it, series of scientific kind of inputs and experiments, turn something like lad into gold, that you would. You would be the richest man on the planet.
- [92:35]
A
Infinite money glitch.
- [92:36]
B
Yeah, infinite money glitch, exactly. So it was this pursuit, and it had a Christian angle to it as well, because there was also this side of, like, the purification of the soul and how, like, life is a pilgrim's progress. Like, you are a pilgrim on the road to salvation. That's what life is. And, like, your whole life is you trying to turn your lead soul into salvation gold. Like, you know, to be. To be close to God or whatever. So there is a theological aspect of it as well. It wasn't necessarily condemned by the Church, and it was practiced by clerics and things like that, but it was kind of frowned upon and poorly understood. And it mostly came originally from ideas that had originated in, like, ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Kind of, like murky ideas of potentially being able to, like, alter physical substances or even alter the human body. Rome falls. It's picked up by the Byzantines and by Muslim scholars and kind of held there. And then it starts to transfer back over west over the centuries. And some modern thinkers, like Carl Jung, have kind of posited that there was no real lead to gold. Like, nobody was actually trying to do that and all of it was metaphorical. It was all about the Christian soul and all about. But there's so much evidence and so many medieval texts that are clearly like, you can read the Arabic text and they drew in the margins like, this is the oven I built to turn. I showed some in my alchemy video, I showed some of these diagrams. But it's like you see the medieval Arabic and you see like, this is the oven. We have to burn, burn at like 500 degrees for like 20 hours. And what was interesting about alchemy is that it has this very human desire at the core of it, like riches and wealth and renown. But it takes what we would think of as like this mystical process. And there was also a lot of belief of like, you should do these things on a full moon or you should do this when this constellation is at this point in the sky, because that'll give you a greater chance that like God will grant your venture success and turn this into gold. But it kind of accidentally led to a lot of our modern science, like chemistry and biology, because these guys were trying so hard to figure this out, that they accidentally figured out, like, oh, wait, this is like, this is how you. This is the scientific method. Like if you actually. So, yeah, so it is funny, like
- [94:46]
A
accidentally making massive scientific discoveries, right? And be like, oh, I just discovered copper.
- [94:51]
B
Useless.
- [94:52]
A
Like I discovered like germ theory. Throw it away.
- [94:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. That does not turn lead into gold. That's. But it's the technological side of it too. It's like, how do you. In the medieval world, how do you. So one of the ideas was that you would have to purify the metal, so you would have to burn it at an insanely high heat for an insanely long period of time. Like the technology, you can't do that with a campfire. Like, you have to figure out how to harness the power of heat and energy. So it's like when the human mind is put towards something like that and there's a real benefit to it on the other side, like the impossible becomes very possible.
- [95:24]
A
Possible.
- [95:24]
B
And this is something that there was actually like collab, especially once the kind of portal between Europe, Christian Europe, and the Islamic Middle east sort of opens up with the Crusades. There's a lot more cross pollination of thought there. And a lot of guys who are taking ideas from famous Islamic alchemists, like Avicenna was one of them. He was also a doctor and gave a lot of like, kind of medical treatises to Europe during this time. There's also Jabir IBN Hayam, who had a lot of ideas, ideas about like, how to keep heat running at this high, at this like necessary temperature and all these things. And so there's. This extends even beyond the Middle Ages, I mean, well into the 1700s and 1800s. Like guys are trying to figure out how to do it. And it became sort of like a gentleman's pursuit. Even someone a little bit earlier, like Isaac Newton, like, it's. It's like a hobby. If you're like a cool dude who like, like science and you're kind of like nerdy and you like this stuff. I think Nikola Tesla dabbled in alchemy a little bit, or at least studied it. Like, this is like a cool throwback thing to be into. But I think over time it's been recognized that like, this isn't like a. This isn't like a real pursuit maybe. But just to kind of sum up the whole idea, if every metal, which is what they believed, is made up of what, fire, earth, water and air, these four elements, that's what makes up a physical object in the world in the medieval mind. And it's made up of like, portions like 25, 25%. 20, 25. If you can like change that, like maybe 30% air and like 20% fire and like maybe a little less water and a little bit more. Like, if you can meddle with that, then that's how you change the core physical property. Because again, going back, this is like an ordered universe. Like God ordered it this way, but we can kind of play God and do a little of this everyday magic. And again, that was like. The Catholic criticism was like, you're playing God. They had a lot of ideas too, about how to like, what you could do to a human fetus. To what? Yeah, there was a. Oh, man. What was his name? I mentioned him in my AI Alchemy video. He's late medieval. Oh man. I can't remember, but starts with a B. I can't remember. But basically his whole idea was like, if you have. Are able to like at a certain point in the pregnancy, take the, like extract the fetus from the womb and then you can keep it in this like, porcelain tank and wrap the porcelain tank. Tank. This is going to sound insane. Wrap around it like horse dung, like warm horse stung that you're continually adding to it because that keeps something like body temperature like you, like you would have in a womb, then you can grow a human outside of a womb without the need for a woman. Great. No, no, just Kidding.
- [97:57]
A
Finally.
- [97:57]
B
Yeah, I know. Yeah.
- [97:58]
A
We were trying to make gold, but instead we invented a. A womanless future.
- [98:02]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Then you could. And then in certain ways, ways like by taking temperature away or adding temperature or adding this or taking away that, you could influence like the person, like, what's growing in there, like their height, their. It's like early eugenics, basically, like early genetic. And this is like 1500 that this is happening. And he's written off as a kook. And like all of his, you know, contemporaries are like, he's a drunk. I don't think I ever had a sober conversation with this guy. But he had some interesting ideas and like, he was. Yeah, he. He just. A lot of his research, like, became the foundation for modern Paracelsus. That was his name. Paracelsus.
- [98:33]
A
German Paracelsus.
- [98:34]
B
Yeah, German guy. Yeah. And also he had another theory about. He had a lot of horse dung stuff going on about that you didn't even need to have the fetus. You could mix human semen and I forget what the other material was. Put it in a porcelain jar, horse dung, 40 days, and then you would open it and there would be a fetus in there. And then you have to feed the fetus, human blood for 40 days to like, bring it to maturity. And then from, like, if we can master that and figure out how to create a human being without, like, without needing a woman at all, then we can like, start to genetically experiment. Maybe we could like, like mixed species things like this.
- [99:05]
A
And what was his pursuit? Like, what was his goal? Like, did he have some type of spiritual mission?
- [99:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, all of these guys pretty much were devout Catholics, which is interesting to. Interesting to think about. But basically their idea was that, like, God has given man the ability to like, the natural world is this great riddle that God has put before us. And it's actually a religious pursuit to try and solve that riddle. So it's like none of these things are outside of the natural order of what's intended. Like, if it's possible for the human mind to conceive of it, like, clearly, if it's conceivable, it's believable and it's achievable. Like, you can. So, like, if this is possible, it's because God ordained it. And if we try this and it fails, then like, okay, we were acting outside the will of God. But, like, over and above all, this is a pursuit to create and get ourselves closer to the Creator by mimicking what the Creator did. So if God created humans in his, like, in his form, in his image. And we can do something sort of like a facsimile of that. Like, that would be the ultimate pursuit in the medieval Catholic mind, which now we would think of as insane. But was that broadly accepted? No, people thought this was, like, a crackpot thing. And I mean, now, even now with, like. Like freezing and fertilizing eggs, and you have people even out there, like, that's playing God. You shouldn't play God. And I think people broadly are like, you can't, like, decide genetic things because we have the technology to do that now. But back then, no, he was like a French fan figure. But these were. But, like, his findings, like, along the way, he accidentally or. Or purposely, like, figures out certain things. Yeah, like, I know a lot of his findings, like, had became basically the modern, like, basis for, like, forensic technology. And, like, being able to, like, identify certain. Like. Like. Like being able to identify certain parts of a human and, like, no. Link it to, like, an early form of not, like, D. DNA, but what would have come before that. Like, you know, that saliva carries its own specific. Like, it's not a fully formed DNA idea, but, like, each thing is unique to a certain person. And, like, he had a lot of ideas that, like, influence some have a
- [101:02]
A
germ prototype or, like. Yeah, like a forensic prototype or something like that. That is so interesting.
- [101:08]
B
That's crazy.
- [101:09]
A
Yeah, that is, like, it's. It's so interesting how people, like, kind of tie in, like, religious ideas into, like, their own personal pursuits to kind of, like, achieve their means. Like, he's kind of talking about, like, yeah, like, God creates. Like, we should try to ascend and enlighten ourselves when we can create. Like, I forget who it was. There's two different groups. I'm sure there's many. But, like, Rasputin had a version of this as well as the Sabatian Franks. I don't know if you're familiar with this. This is, like. I've heard the guy's name. If you search Sabation, Sabatian Franks. It was specifically, like, a group of, like, kind of, like, wandering Jewish people that were led by, like, this one rogue rabbi. But Rasputin did the same thing where basically they independently created this philosophy. Philosophy that to get close to God, we must sin, and that through the purificate, through sinning, we're able to purify ourselves. And by the more purification we get, the closer we are to God. So if you never sin, then you never get purified. Right. So you're actually less good Than if you. Yeah, this guy. Oh, there we go.
- [102:05]
B
Interesting.
- [102:06]
A
So he's. For the record, I should point out, he's been, like, tied in with, like, a ton of, like, anti Jewish conspiracy stuff. Not the reason I'm bringing it up, but more here if you rule down. More, more, more. Roll down a little more. Oh, keep going. A little more. Yeah, so if you break the traditional laws, you could basically use that sin for redemption. And, yeah, like, Rasputin was doing the same thing. So he would, like, travel around and have, like, these wandering orgies with all these different women. And he would, like, tell women, like, hey, if you hook up with me, cheat on your husband, have a kid out of wedlock, it's actually good because then you can repent, and repentance is ultimately the greatest virtue, and you'll be forgiven by God more. And that ultimately the meek are going to inherit the earth. So, like, who did Jesus hang out with? It was with prostitutes, but by lowering yourself, you'll actually be closer to God. It's like this whole rationalization of the religious philosophy that satisfies their personal impulse, which is bang a bunch of chicks along the way. Yeah, yeah.
- [103:01]
B
There were, like, there were a lot of heretical groups in Western medieval Catholicism, too. And I believe the one I'm thinking of is the brethren of the free spirit who had a similar.
- [103:08]
A
Really?
- [103:09]
B
Yeah, like, orgies, you know, sell all of your possessions. We'll live together. We'll all just kind of bang all the time. And, you know, that'll bring us closer to God because, you know, the first thing, like, Adam and Eve and the first thing that God says is like, go forth and multiply. So it's like, we should be having sex as much as possible. And Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden, so they were nudists, too, apparently, all these things. So it's. Yeah, it's. It's crazy.
- [103:30]
A
But, you know, I mean, it would be borderline fun to try to use the religious doctrine to justify your own personal proclivities. You know what I mean? You're like, well, technically. You know what I mean? Look, look at this verse. What did Jesus. Jesus said, eat my body. So what should you do?
- [103:45]
B
Do cannibalism.
- [103:46]
A
You. Yes. You got to get. You got to top me off. Exactly. There you go.
- [103:50]
B
Yeah.
- [103:51]
A
Like, it's just crazy how people use this stuff. But to that. To that end, this guy's, like, trying to do experiments on fetuses. He's like, no, no, this is actually what God. Yeah, this is his Will Davis fault.
- [104:00]
B
I mentioned that. I mean, I talked about that in my AI Alchemy video. And so many comments were like, I think this guy was just like, jizzing on horse dung and then trying to, like, people were like, calling him out for it. He's like, no, no, no. It's an experiment. Super chill. Yeah, it's chill, actually. Yeah, this is going to be dope.
- [104:14]
A
All right. Well, this has been fascinating as always. I really appreciate this.
- [104:18]
B
Of course. Yeah. Thank you for having me.
- [104:19]
A
Thank you so much. Medieval mindset on YouTube where people can check you out. A rising star in the medieval history space.
- [104:25]
B
Thank you. Yeah, I hope so.
- [104:28]
A
And I thought this was fantastic. Thank you so much. I would love to do it again soon. And yeah, save travels back to Atlanta.
- [104:34]
B
Thank you.