The Surprisingly Recent Origins of Wicca and Druidism
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode, Simone and I discuss the history of Wicca and the men who revived it, Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crawley, and how they managed to get people to believe they were part of a secret cult.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone! Today is going to be a very interesting episode on a topic I should have
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done a long time ago. It's going to be on how the movement that today purports itself to be
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witchcraft or Wiccan or Druidic, all of these religious systems are very, very modern. They
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are some of the youngest religious systems to exist and have literally no ties to any historic
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pagan faith practices. And even when they were revived, were revised as monotheistic traditions
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and only became pagan in their later iterations. What? Specifically here, I'm talking about the guy
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who made up the Druidic faith, not the Wiccan faith. These were both around the 1900s. So we're
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going to go into these individuals, how they made it up, how they got people to believe them. We're
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going to go into Aleister Crawley, another interesting figure. He didn't even claim to have connections
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anything in the past. He was just a wackadoo. I didn't know he was a real guy. I saw him from
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the show, right? And I was like, oh, a real guy. No, he was a wacko, but way more fun than the other
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guys because at least he owned that he was just making everything up. And the other guys, well,
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and he stole a bunch from Kabbalah. And we'll go over where... So were the other guys trying...
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...practiced as witchcraft today within the Wiccan community, not realizing that what they're
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practicing doesn't come from ancient witches, but it comes from Jewish mysticism.
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My God. Do I understand correctly then that the two men who claimed to have either rediscovered
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or who reignited Druidic practices in Wicca sort of pointed to historical materials that
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they may have made either misinterpreted or made up, kind of like Joseph Smith using funerary
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No, no. It's, well, maybe not crazier than the Joseph Smith story, but he said he met a
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cult in the woods that taught him about all of this.
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So the first one, and we think we know who some of the figures he was talking about were,
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Because there's been people who have gone through and researched him to learn more about this.
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So the guy was Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant with a taste for the occult.
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He returned to England in the 1930s, and he claimed that in 1939, he was initiated into
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a secret coven in New Forest by a group he called the Wicca, allegedly survivors of an
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His story leaned heavily on the now-debunked theories of anthropologist Margaret Murray,
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who argued in the 1920s that European witchcraft was a remnant of pre-Christian fertility religions.
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There is no solid evidence of a contiguous witch cult surviving the Middle Ages, but Gardner
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So a quick note here, if you're like, well, where did all of these mystical traditions come
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from if they didn't come from some ancient religion?
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It turns out that people will invent the same mystical traditions over and over again.
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For example, when you hear a sports player keeps a lucky sock under their helmet or something
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to win games, you don't go, oh, he must have picked that up from some ancestral religion.
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You're like, oh, yes, humans often end up associating fetishes, not like sexual fetishes, but like
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small token stuff with having magical properties and then build rituals around them.
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It is a natural and emergent human behavior with the fact that we see today things like chaos magic,
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which is another group I could go into, where they believe things like McDonald's arches
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are like abundant signs and stuff like that and can be used like just, or you see pop culture paganism
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where people will believe that like Loki, not Loki, like the ancient North God,
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Yeah, Snape is definitely not, no connection to anything.
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Not like Harry Potter, Severus, like the actor.
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So it's not that there was no rituals being practiced in these regions,
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but these rituals were almost certainly maybe two generations old.
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They were not, it's very hard to keep rituals running a long time unless they are being practiced
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When rituals aren't being practiced at the community level or really rigidly within a
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family structure, like, and we've seen this historically over and over again.
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It's hard to keep a tradition going without public rituals or, or at least publicly saying
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But we'll get to like other proof we have that he probably wasn't even pulling this
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I like the idea of being a lifelong fan of cults and just making the cult you wish existed,
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Can you imagine a lifetime spent in civil service, your nights and weekends spent, you know,
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looking, looking to find proof of the thing you wish existed.
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Because then people followed, people, people like actually started doing, like he made
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Yeah, all these other people made up their religions.
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He, you know, they say, you know, dress for the job you want to get, you know, be the
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So in the 1930s, he got involved, or he says he got involved with the local esoteric scene
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He claimed that in September 1939, he was introduced to a hidden group of witches in the New Forest
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led by a woman who he called Old Dorsey, later identified as Dorsey Clutterbuck.
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What is so called the very real name of Dorsey Clutterbuck?
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This is a real person who later people went and investigated the area he was and who he
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And he referred to her as like a wealthy older woman who fit Dorsey Clutterbuck at the time.
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She was a wealthy conservative Christian woman who lived in Highcliffe near New Forest and
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Oh, so she would have found this very offensive.
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Gardner's associate, Dorsey Valentin, tracked down her diaries via Clutterbuck's housekeeper
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The diaries mentioned social events and gardening, but nothing about witchcraft or covens.
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So the person who discovered all of this was a true believer in this guy.
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So she had no motivation to lie or try to deceive us.
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She found the lady who supposedly taught all of this to this guy.
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This lady was a devout Anglican and a well-known devout Anglican.
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Not only that, but they had her private diaries.
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So it's not like she was practicing one thing in private and then doing another thing in public.
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And interestingly, what are they going to say here?
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She was, on the other hand, did know a lot about folklore and was very interested in folklore.
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So what seems likely is she may have taught him about some local folklore and he built the rest of this character himself.
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Now, historian Ronald Hutton in Triumphs of the Moon, 1999, argues that Clutterbuck might have been a figurehead used by Gardner to legitimize his story.
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She was an unlikely witch, devoutly Anglican and socially prominent,
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but her eccentricity and interest in folklore could have made her a possible cover if Gardner needed one.
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Gardner lived in the area in the late 1930s and mingled with occult enthusiasts, including members of the Ruscurian Order Croatan Fellowship, a mystical group with a theater in Christchurch.
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Some speculate this group or a splinter of it might have inspired his coven story.
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A member, Edith Woodruff Grimes, nicknamed Daffo, was close to Gardner and more plausibly involved in occult activities, but there's no record of her leading a pagan witch cult.
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So something important to note here, if somebody's like, is it entirely implausible that a group with old practices was meeting in the woods?
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Yes, it actually is, because there were so many and widely known other occult traditions of this period, like this one that we're going to go into just a second,
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that people would have just associated with if they had those inclinations, instead of going to this secret one that met in the woods.
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You know, why not do what you do today and go with the theater kids, where you know they're all,
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I love it that it was theater kids back then, theater kids today, but then you're like, okay.
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Yes, maybe this Rokurian Order Crotana Fellowship, maybe they had some ancient tradition.
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We know what they believed and we know where they said they got it from.
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The core beliefs of the ROCF claim to preserve secret knowledge from ancient Egypt and the Renaissance Ruscurians, so not locals.
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If you're wondering who the Rosicutions were, it was a spiritual and cultural movement that arose in modern Europe in the early 17th century after the publication of several texts,
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Rosicutionism is symbolized by a rose cross or a rosy cross.
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It was a Christian-tied movement that was interested in things like alchemy.
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The point being is they said where they got it was from, Egyptians and Rosicutions, Renaissance and Rosicutions.
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It was not from some sort of local hidden witch cult that preserved some ancestral pre-Roman tradition that was local to Britain, okay?
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Which is where he said this stuff came from, okay?
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They believed in a, uh-oh, hidden great white brotherhood of enlightened masters guiding humanity.
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Sullivan taught that members could tap into cosmic forces through meditation, ritual, study, think astrology, Kabbalah, and other co-physical ideas about reincarnation.
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Theatrical flair by the 1930s when Gardner encountered them, R-O-C-F, had their base in Christchurch near the New Forest where they had built Ashram Hall, a tiny theater for mystical plays.
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Sullivan wrote and performed these dramas, the Rite of Isis, for example, blending Egyptian mythology with Christian allegory and to enact spiritual truths.
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Members wore robes, chanted in stage ceremonies, less, quote-unquote, witchy, and more like a cosmic morality play.
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Practical mysticism, unlike hardcore occult groups like the Golden Dawn, the R-O-C-F, was less about spellcasting and more about self-improvement through esoteric philosophy.
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They attracted middle-class seekers, doctors, teachers, retirees, looking for meaning in a post-World War I world.
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Some rituals involved healing vibrations or channeling divine energy, but was pretty tame compared to Gardner's later weakened rites.
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So keep in mind things like trying to talk to the dead and mystics doing, like, stage performances to scam people was really common in this period.
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We did another episode on Houdini's war against mystics.
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Yeah, all these people, like, tapping on seance tables, et cetera.
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In 1954, after Britain repealed its Witchcraft Act in 1951 specifically, which prevented publishing this stuff, Gardner published Witchcraft Today, laying out his version of this ancient religion.
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He blended Murray's ideas with bits of ceremonial magic, St. Freemasonry and Alistair Cawley's influence, folklore, and his own imagination.
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His rituals, like the use of a magical circle, astrums, ritual knives, and a dualistic god-goddess framework.
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He did believe in, like, a dualistic, singular, monotheistic god that had, like, a feminine and masculine side.
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We're cobbled together from Victorian occultism, not dusty grumwires from antiquity.
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Gardner's collaborator, Doreen Valentia, this is the one who later identified who the old lady was, joined in the 1950s and polished his work, stripping out some of Crowley's heavier Thelemic vibes to make it more palatable.
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Valentia herself admitted the rituals were modern, not ancient, though she believed they tapped into the timeless spiritual current.
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So, basically, the person who inherited the Wiccan tradition and then built on it admits this guy made it all up.
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That's, I mean, I feel like even more so, like, okay, this is honest.
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I think it validates it more so long as you're willing to accept that.
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It's just, like, understanding this is the culty religion for people who wish there was a culty religion and acknowledge that there just isn't one.
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Yeah, yeah, and I think you're going to like this next guy, Simone.
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So, you can be like, who is this Alistair Crawley?
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What was he about if other people were picking up his ideas?
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So, born in 1875 in Workshire, England, to a wealthy, strict Plymouth brethren family, Edward Alexer Crawley rebelled hard against his religious upbringing.
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After his father's death, he inherited money, ditched Cambridge, where he studied but didn't graduate, and dove into the occult.
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By his 20s, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 1898, a secret society blending Kabbalah, tarot, like tarot cards, and ritual magic.
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Think Victorian England's Hogwarts for mystics.
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He clashed with his leaders, like W.B. Yeats, got kicked out, but it shaped his lifelong obsession with esoteric systems.
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Oh, I should dig into that secret society more.
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The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, it's a boy.
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So, Crowley styled himself a larger-than-life figure.
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He called himself the Great Beast 666, loved scandalizing polite society, and lived a chaotic life of drugs, sex, and travel.
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Egypt, India, Mexico, Sicily, and this is traveling in the 1800s, so this is, like, wild travel.
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In 1904, while in Cairo with his wife, Rose claimed a spirit named Ayahuas dictated the Book of the Law to him over three days, a text that became foundational to his philosophy, which was called Thelema.
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He spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1947, spreading Thelema, writing prolifically, poetry, novels, occult treatises, and founding groups like AA, well, it's A and then, like, a triangle, and then A and then a triangle, a magical order, and the Ordo Templi Ortanis, O-T-O, which he retooled to fit his vision.
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His reputation, a mix of genius and infinity, papers dubbed him the wickedest man in the world for his libertine lifestyle, opium, orgies, and rumors of black magic, mostly exaggerated.
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But he was a serious thinker, blending Eastern mysticism, Western occultism, and his own flair into something unique.
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Gardner met him in the 1940s through mutual occult circles, and Crowley's influence seeped into Wiccan's rituals, even if toned down later.
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Despite the ancient veneer, Crowley did not pretend Selimo was a literal hand-me-down from pharaohs or medieval wizards.
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He was upfront that the Book of the Law was a new revelation dictated to him in 1904, and called it the start of a fresh spiritual epic, not a dusty relic.
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So, basically, he's so much an egoist, he's like, I don't need any, you know, this is just all new, dictated to me by spirits.
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Wow. I mean, that's not that much of a deviation from so many historical religious leaders who heard from spirits.
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But you can also see why old traditions get washed out so quickly.
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If even this guy who was trying his very best to sort of pick up some form of, like, pure mysticism of England that had any sort of an ancient root,
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ended up being heavily influenced by this other guy who, not even a full generation before, was like, I made all this up.
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You know, you're like, okay, I can see how if you add in the third every generation with your next crop of crazy people,
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it's going to really quickly wipe out any historic stuff if you don't have text to be going off of.
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Now, I wanted to dig more into the Selimic vibes, because remember it said that a lot of Crowleys had this Selimic stuff.
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And the other guy who made up Wiccanism ended up buying into the Selimic stuff and writing it directly into the religion,
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which is one of how we know it's not ancient, because we know the guy who made it all up.
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But the person after him, Valentin, attempted to remove a lot of the Selimic stuff.
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Because the idea of, well, this gets back to maybe what is a historic religion a bit more.
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The Selimic's central tenet is do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, which the Satanists also picked up,
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meaning to follow your true will, your deepest purpose above all else.
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Or as Cartman says, I'm going to do what I want.
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Self-liberation, cosmic exploration, and rejecting conventional morality.
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The vibe, Selimic rituals and writings drip with theatricality and intensity.
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Think elaborate chants, references to Egyptian gods like Nat, Hadid, etc.
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Crowley's stuff often feels dense and rebellious with a break-all-the-rules attitude.
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For example, his Gnostic mass involves a priestess, a priest, and symbolic acts hinting at sacred sexuality,
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Way more esoteric than Wiccan's circle-casting and moon worship.
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Gardner borrowed the Malemic phrasing and structure,
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like Crowley's focus on invoking higher powers or his use of smote-it-bee,
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So, Wicca also took some ideas from Freemasons, okay?
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Again, just stealing from everywhere, but none of it particularly ancient.
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Some early Wiccan rites even echoed Crowley's obsession with polarity, male-female, light-dark,
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though Gardner redirected it towards fertility and nature.
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Vic, so, what do you think of this guy? Better?
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I mean, I do like the person who followed up immediately after Gardner.
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It feels like she adds a lot of validity to the Wiccan tradition
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and then, two, trying to remove the parts that are the very most made up
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and trying to create this sort of, like, nature religion
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instead of a religion focused on, like, rebellion for rebellion's sake.
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Yeah, it sort of feels, to me, like a fan community
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trying to make itself work and to make it itself sustainable.
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Let's look at where these communities borrowed from Kabbalah,
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which is Jewish mysticism, which was largely, by my estimation,
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That's around when it was collated, so it's a fairly...
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Obviously, Jews are going to be very offended by this,
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but the ideas in Kabbalah, like, you can track where they came from.
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that was popular around that time and had existed,
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or we have records of it for a few hundred years before that time,
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Sufi mysticism, and basically pop mysticism of that time period.
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But it was genuinely ancient from their perspective,
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Well, not 1,000, you know, like 800, 900 years old
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then you're looking at, like, maybe 1,200 years old.
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But then the idea is, okay, so what from Kabbalah
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ended up being captured in the Wiccan tradition?
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If you're like, oh, what parts of Wiccanism come directly from Kabbalah?
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Well, one, we know Crowley, so it came through Crowley,
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in that Crowley ended up including a lot of Kabbalah in his stuff.
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especially his magical order, A triangle, A triangle.
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Crowley used the Tree of Life to structure spiritual progress.
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In his systems, initiates climb the Sephurek like a ladder
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from Malkut, the physical world, to Keter, union with the divine.
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Each grade in the A triangle, A triangle corresponds to a Seraphie
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with rituals and meditations to master its energy.
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For example, his book 777-1909 is a Kabbalistic cheat sheet
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linking Sephuret to colors, planets, and teret.
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Crowley was obsessed with Kabbalistic number crunching.
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where Hebrew letters, which doubled as numbers,
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This numerological play came straight from Kabbalah's playbook.
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and this obviously causes a major problem for modern Kabbalists,
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is that the movement that both Wiccanism is descended from
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which of course means that a lot of the symbols and symbolism,
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oh, that looks like Satanic or Wiccan symbolism.
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And the reason is not that they emerged from the same tradition,
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but that these other two traditions just directly cropped Kabbalism
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which you'll notice about Kabbalism is that it feels much more like
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of mysticism than the ancient systems of mysticism,
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Or you're looking at the really interesting one.
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It was a Greek philosophical tradition based around mathematics.
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The group I was thinking of here were the Pythagoreans.
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The Pythagoreans followed strict rules and rituals aimed at achieving purity and
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They believed in reincarnation and sought to escape the cycle of rebirth by
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living an austere life and adhering to their philosophical and mathematical
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And they practiced a really interesting philosophy that may have some
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relations to the branches of like early Christianity and Judaism.
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but it feels very different from the older traditions,
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or coalesce what was becoming popular in the middle ages,
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like the lesser banishing rite of the pentagram inherited from the golden
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Michael and Gabriel tied to the separate Crawley's Gnostic mass invokes divine
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the feminine and masculine at Seferit to mirror Kabbalah's balance of opposites
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He rebranded Kabbalah's abstract energies into his Egyptian pantheon,
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but the framework's Kabbalistic roots are clear.
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So it's almost like he did a control F and then replaced a bunch of like
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I think that this is where a large part of my negative bias against Kabbalism
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comes from is that the first time I would have engaged with this category of
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mysticism or a branch of mysticism partially descended from this tree would
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have been when my friends in high school and middle school were getting in to
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like Wiccanism and I would go through some of their books and be like,
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Like what's going on with this or other forms of,
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I think a lot of people go through where they're like,
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I'm going to research the edgiest of mystical paths because I'm a middle
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schooler and I want to see what my parents don't want me to see.
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the mental frameworks appeared very similar to ones I was engaging with ideas
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that were particularly sophomoric or otherwise puerile.
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It would be a bit like if you grew up in Japan and your first experiences with
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Christian theology and cosmology were from neon evangelion.
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I remember all this stuff from my weird otaku phase when I was really into
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because to some people that would be seen as invalidating of Kabbalah,
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you're going to be more familiar when he talks about angels and Michael.
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it feels a lot like fan fiction and just mixing and remixing and then trying to make it
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into your own thing that people get excited about independently,
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this is the one who took over from him afterwards,
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Joanne Gardner and the one who discovered the old lady joined the cavern in 1953.
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helping refine the rituals and texts that would define gardenian Wiccan.
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the ritual playbook for Wicca was a mashup of influences,
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including stuff he'd picked up from Aleister Crowley,
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or just too Crowley specific for the broader nature,
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So she rewrote parts and softened the edges to make Wiccan more accessible.
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It is very like an early fan fiction community.
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Valentin specifically targeted chunks of the text Gardner had lifted from Crowley's works,
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Gardner's original rituals included Crowley's dramatic invocations,
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the mighty ones with a heavy poetic flair and phrases tied to the limit concepts,
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emphasizing the goddess and horned God over Crowley's esoteric ideas.
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She also toned down some of the sexual undertones and mystical bombasts that Crowley loved,
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which didn't fit her vision of a gentle earthier witchcraft.
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she rewrote the charge of the goddess from a clunky,
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Crowley heavy draft to the lyrical versions Wiccans still use today.
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a type would scare off some newbies and taint Wiccan as a Satanist knockoff.
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She also wanted rituals that felt timeless and universal,
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not tethered to one man's philosophy in her own words from her 1989 book,
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She saw Gardner's reliance on Crowley as a crutch and pushed for originality if the result was still modern.
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That's how modern her rebranding and recreation of what we think of as Wiccanism today was.
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So now we're going to talk a bit about the Druids,
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because this was another group from around the same time.
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because I grew up definitely with the impression that Wicca was kind of a,
00:28:49.920
misled me to believe that Druidic practices were old and ancient,
00:28:59.540
stone circles and fairy rings and other weird altars in the woods,
00:29:09.480
that was probably used for some kind of Druidic ritual.
00:29:27.600
this is another guy from around the 1900s re-imagined.
00:29:33.540
the people who think they're actually following Druidic practices,
00:29:42.080
When he recreated their ideas and ideology as noble proto-Christian
00:29:48.320
rather than policyistic ritual figures described by Romans,
00:29:54.440
He argued Druids worshipped a single supreme God foreshadowing Christianity.
00:29:59.000
He saw them as enlightened priests who taught morality and natural law,
00:30:09.160
To be buried in that ditch at Stonehenge with the injuries he has suggests we have a sacrificial victory.
00:30:17.380
Like actually back in the real day of there being a religion practice.
00:30:25.060
We know that like they would have a practice where when they make bridges,
00:30:28.240
they would sacrifice children and bury them under the bridges so the bridges wouldn't fall down.
00:30:33.200
When I've gotten tours of the areas around Stonehenge,
00:30:39.460
it was probably just a mistake that there was a child here.
00:30:47.520
but an adult who was sacrificed at Stonehenge and we can see where they were hit on their head
00:30:57.320
And they certainly weren't monotheists by any understanding we have of the period.
00:31:01.540
This individual who recreated modern Druidism linked it to biblical patriarchs like Abraham,
00:31:08.460
suggesting they inherited primal universal faith from the near East brought to Britain
00:31:17.220
this is like the lost tribes of Israel and Phoenician traitors.
00:31:20.040
The early Druids tried desperately to attempt to connect their religion to Christianity
00:31:26.020
and monotheism because they saw that as like an enlightenment ideal.
00:31:32.900
it was the totally disconnected from Christianity,
00:31:36.460
the ancient religion of this area and polytheistic.
00:31:53.960
and they often were tied to bloody rights like the Wicker Man's burnings that Pliny
00:32:02.040
It was actually Julius Caesar who wrote about the Wicker Man's ceremonies,
00:32:05.700
Pliny mentioned that they had human sacrifices,
00:32:09.060
but Julius Caesar specifically goes into how these sacrifices were done.
00:32:15.520
he writes that the Gauls would construct large figures made of osiers,
00:32:21.960
and then set them on fire as part of their sacrificial rituals.
00:32:28.680
who believed that the gods required human life in exchange for propitiation.
00:32:33.620
He notes that the Gauls preferred to use criminals for these sacrifices,
00:32:40.700
And I would also note that this is one of the only Druidic ceremonies that we have a description of.
00:32:47.540
we have a description of a bunch of nice ceremonies they did,
00:32:51.440
This is like one of the only Druidic ceremonies we have with any degree of historicity to it.
00:33:27.740
well before the Druidic religion was ever came to exist.
00:33:32.120
And it would have been old news by the age of the Druids,
00:33:47.660
Archaeologists now see it as a burial and ceremonial site,
00:33:52.100
all the ideas he got about what the Druids believed,
00:33:55.560
which didn't even have a connection to the Stonehenge in the Bible.
00:34:16.140
It didn't itself claim to come from any sort of ancient stuff.
00:34:20.920
It didn't have the same sorts of rituals or anything like that.
00:34:29.200
close to the Society of Odd Fellows and stuff like that.
00:34:39.200
did this blow your brain given being raised a hippie?
00:34:52.200
what do they call the religions that people have built around Loki and Snape,
00:35:00.820
Yeah, I think pop paganism is the ultimate proof point
00:35:09.960
where they've shown in studies that if you say,
00:35:15.260
people have often found placebos to be quite effective,
00:35:39.840
and the existence of Snape Wives and Loki show that,
00:35:44.840
that we are willing to induce suspended disbelief,
00:35:54.240
and I think if you read the writings of Snape Wives
00:36:13.280
like, the Snape Wives genuinely believe that Snape is a real person who,
00:36:21.080
Yeah, my point is that people are willingly deluding themselves into this.
00:36:29.060
oh, I'm going to choose to believe something that's not true.
00:36:50.560
and you don't look for the evidence to the contrary.
00:37:02.780
You've only had spiritual experiences in this framework,
00:37:17.080
I have to really respect her a lot for a few things.
00:37:19.740
I think she was right in the way that she rebranded Wiccanism.
00:37:30.020
imagine being like the right-hand man to this guy,
00:37:59.800
this one has done particularly good at spreading,
00:38:21.440
some modern Wiccans have tried to reinvent this stuff,
00:38:24.140
like dancing naked in the woods and stuff like that,
00:38:30.620
it'll resemble the old superstitious things that you saw,
00:39:11.760
as seen in like stereotypical Shakespearean works,
00:39:28.580
So they could have been these various different faces.
00:39:31.120
we don't know much except for the sacrifice victims.
00:39:49.960
we really need to stamp out these older religious traditions.
00:39:56.700
couldn't there have been pockets of these ancient religions that were practiced in regions,
00:40:05.020
I would guess there probably could have been pockets.
00:40:08.980
But the thing you have to remember is you get a church crackdown on one of these pockets.
00:40:13.560
And if they don't hold the tradition for let's say even 50 or 60 years,
00:40:18.380
it's going to be incredibly hard to recreate it from like local memory.
00:40:25.660
know the types of rituals that your grandparents got up to or the types of,
00:40:32.540
we can look up the common rituals and myths of the 1900s.
00:40:39.160
do you even know if your grandparents ever did a seance?
00:40:44.960
I'm pretty sure none of my grandparents would have done a seance.
00:40:58.340
Then the other two weren't really born yet until much later,
00:41:03.660
And they sort of grew up in the affluent growing America in 1950s.
00:41:11.380
because that would have been the period of seance.
00:41:19.320
But then they were like in Romania and like fleeing Russia.
00:41:22.280
So if your grandparents had lived in the United States,
00:41:30.540
I'd say because you have four of them at least,
00:41:33.660
I'd say over 50% that at least one of them participated in a seance.
00:41:38.260
And yet you don't know about this or not know about it because
00:41:46.880
I think that there's just really poor transmission,
00:41:51.820
Like I had one grandmother who thought that she was reincarnated from a
00:42:00.700
I didn't hear like the belief system behind that.
00:42:34.640
but I read it to the kids and I've forgotten at the end of the story,
00:42:49.300
like the dogs going into the woods and then going quiet,
00:42:58.280
But then we got some called Jack's tales and we started reading them.
00:43:03.900
Holy Jack and the Beanstalk was not a standalone myth.
00:43:09.960
Jack and the Beanstalk was part of a series of campfire stories about a boy named Jack who got up to crazy.
00:43:19.560
Completely lost in the cultural memory that that was the case.
00:43:25.720
how quickly these people who want to believe in ancestral traditions being passed down.
00:43:30.540
I would just ask you how many direct ancestral traditions do you have outside of your mainstream religion from your grandparents?
00:43:48.940
If even you can't remember the very things that your grandparents went through,
00:43:53.260
how do you think this passes down for like dozens of times that number?
00:44:19.560
if you want to go into early Christianity versus the religions it was replacing,
00:44:26.060
called Was Christianity Actually a More Moral Religion?
00:44:28.940
When I asked Grok what his favorite episode of our show was,
00:44:45.080
do you know anything about this or how the movement started or anything?
00:44:49.400
I know I had my like nineties friends who had their,
00:45:11.880
Nothing could disappoint me more than if our kids end up becoming Wicca.
00:45:19.440
I would be more disappointed if they buy spells on Etsy or whatever it is,
00:45:38.600
They're like the kind of people that I would expect to cut holes in condoms and stuff.