Oh Bread of Bard, Hello, and welcome to the show.
This is the Cult of Conspiracy and I am the Cajun night and tonight we have one a very special guest. We had some scheduling conflicts, right and you know what, we will take the absolute brunt of the guilt as far as that's concerned.
Here at the Cold Conspiracy.
We've be pumping out so many episodes at such a rapid rate that sometimes some things go by the wayside. But you know what, we're rectifying that situation. We're happening right now. Ike Baker from the Arcanum podcast, Brother, what is going on?
Well, thanks for having me and yeah it's no, no, no, right, All's well that ends well. So we are here, and uh, I'm really excited to kind of get into it. Thank you for having me on. And I'm quite interested to see what topics for conversation you guys have lined up.
I mean, to be honest with you, there's a lot that we could go down.
Just for anybody who doesn't know, Ike Baker is a I don't want to use the term expert, but I also feel like it wouldn't be correct to not use the term expert of arcane magic with a kesotericism, alchemy, magic with a K Masonic history.
Believe it or not, We're going all over the place here, so I believe it or not.
Your boy is kind of a jack of all trades, master of some you know. To be determined for those that have never heard of you, please, I give the rundown the elevator speech.
Who are you and what are you about?
I am a local wizard and I have drawings for sale. I well, I it's a long story, but as of today, I am an initiative senior initiator of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I am an administrator. I'm a temple chief of the North Carolina Temple h O g D. Which is in Asheville. I am a practicing Martinist. I am a Freemason and Masonic historian, so on and so forth. I belong to a lot of these initiatory orders in the Western esoteric tradition, and at this point in my
life I'm I'm doing. You know. I have a podcast Arcandom where I bring on arguably the foremost authorities, whether they're authors, practitioners, scholars in the field on Western esotericism and philosophy, and all that fun stuff, and I try to have conversations with them, and it's the show has been. It's been a real blessing in my life, and I've been able to go on to teach and write books. I'm on my third. I got two more in the pipeline for next year. Yeah, and and and to teach
and to present all over the world. I go to Egypt every year to present and host a conference, and I take people on immersive excursions where we study the history, theory, and practice of Western ceremonial in these places. I go to London every year. This year I'll be in Amsterdam and Parma, Italy doing some talks. So a whole lot of stuff. But it really starts with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I sort of like stumbled into them when I was about nineteen years old.
Yeah, okay, so we're gonna have to break down a few things you just said before you get to raven Ly and I's questions.
So, okay, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
And you also said you are a Freemason, and then there was one other organization that you say, you're the Martinis.
If I'm not mistaken correct.
Yeah, those are the ones I can talk about.
Okay, fair enough, fair enough.
So for anybody who does not know, Ravenly and I have talked about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn primarily,
and I don't mean this in a insulting way. The Battle of blythe Road has been brought up a couple of times on this podcast, where Alistair Crowley went against young in them and basically through his magical incantations and hand sigils and basically they were trying to have like a magical duel until finally the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn decided, fuck this guy in roundhouse his ass and like beat the absolute shit at
him physically. So for those that don't know, give the breakdown from your understanding of what the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is, please.
Sure, sure, there there's so there's Let me just say about the Battle of black Blathe Road that it's there's I am no fan of Crowley whatsoever.
Good but because you shouldn't be correct, but.
There's a lot of legend in in that whole uh, in that whole account that it's but it's fun, it's fun. It's one of the things that makes the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as a feature of you know, findeska occult history so so so much fun and so so interesting, so fascinating because of all the cast of characters that were a part of this. A lot of people sure don't realize it, but so so. The Harmonical Order of the Golden Dun was formed by three Freemasons
in London in eighteen eighty eight. And these Freemasons belonged to a para Masonic or I guess what we would call a concordant body called the SRIA, the Societys Rosicruciana in Anglia, and which is.
The Roscrucion order of the Freemasons.
Well, let me rephrase this.
They were not a order of the Freemasons that were RESICUTIONI they were Masons that happened to also be Rosicrusions that founded their own thing.
Correct, Well, it was. It's technically what we call like a concordant or an appendent. So it's not the three craft degrees of freemasonry, the first, second and third degrees right entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason. Those are definitively. And I don't give a shit what anybody says about about the thirty thirds and stuff. I really don't. I'm
a Masonic story and I know many thirty thirds. If a thirty third came to my Blue ladge and tried to order me around, I could respectfully tell him to go fuck himself and he'd have no recourse. So, because there is no higher degree than the third in Freemason right, degrees one through three are vertical movement within the fraternity, the York right, the Scottish rite, it's horizontal movie movement. They're side quests now, prequels and sequels.
We just did an episode on this literally like a day ago.
So I'm not saying this to push back. I am asking this strictly as an outside observer.
Right.
So there are those there are those Freemasons that would say that what you are saying is absolutely ridiculous, and there's no way that a thirty second degree could even come to the same playing field of a third degree Scottish York doesn't matter. They had this elitist entitlement air about them.
What is your response.
I have never met any of him, and I've traveled I traveled the country, I've troubled the world and spoke for scenary. I will say that within the Scottish Right, which is an appendant body, it's not the core of Freemasonry. Now within the Scottish Right, there there's, there's, there's. You know, we have the Northern jurisdiction and the Southern jurisdiction. The Southern jurisdiction is what everybody knows, because the Southern jurisdiction
is is they run the Pike rituals. That everybody talking about Albert Pike and how he I mean, he was a really really shitty author, not much of an esthetetical.
Have you read Morals Indulgent? I mean yes, but we've read some of it.
I read we were reading some of it the other day and I was like, God, blessed, this is terrible. That was actually what my question is going to be.
No.
I loved the sound of his own voice and wanted you to know that he was so fucking smart.
He wanted that.
Well, well, here here's the thing. He does in one of his prefaces talk about how he is not the originator of much of what he put in that book. He was he rather thought of himself more as a compiler, which is true because he lifted whole cloth from people like Eli Fos Levy and even Victor Hugo, right he wrote let me, but he does take on this really really obnoxious, pretentious writing style. And now here's the thing.
He's lifting whole cloth from Levy, He's lifting from Victor Hugo, He's lifting from all the many French sources and in the textual corporal the body of work from the you know,
the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Of course that he's writing in the nineteenth in the nineteenth century or the eighteen hundreds, but the occult literature from that time had a very distinct style in France, which was to sort of like play this little weird dancy four play game where it's like I'm gonna say a bunch of high sounding mystical shit and I'm going to talk a lot about what's behind the curtain, but I'm not going
to tell you, and I'm gonna be like concealing more than i'm revealing. And every single time I've encountered that in person, they just it's a cover for they don't know what they're talking about. Right, So I live in the South, and uh, I'm not a fan of Pike. And and you know, so there there are there are Masons that can't understand why I don't like Pike, Why I'm.
Not amazing to not be a fan of Pike. That's a wild statement. Break this down.
You see you see it, you see it. The problem is, like, it's rare to get your average Mason on a fucking podcast. It's rare to get like those those people aren't like you're you're you're what we call knife and fork Masons, the people who show up for dinner and charity, I mean.
Like, which is the majority of Masons.
For the record, most of them, they're going for the networking, they're going for the charitable outreach of it. They're going for to say they're a Mason. And that's like they're not a part of like the clique, if you want to get real technical about it, Like I mean, the thing is, the thing is.
The only clicks that there are are the grand lodge systems. Because what people don't understand about Freemasonry is that it's completely in the United States, Freemasonry is completely decentralized, So there's no Grand headquarters. There's no Grand headquarters for Freemasonry. Each state is its own sovereign. So the highest Mustonic authority in my my my state is the Grand Lodge
of North Carolina. And I happen to know many of the people that that are in there, and they're you know, they have regular jobs.
I mean they were so to push back slightly, and I would love to hear your retort to say that the Grand Lodge in Washington, d c. Presides over the Grand Lodge of North Carolina.
You say, absolutely not break this down, really, no way.
Yeah, I mean this is these are fundamental things people that have they just don't understand it. It's there is no central governing Masonic body through and through and through and through there never has been in the United States. What we do is we have uh concordats uh where we we or we say okay, like there are certain things, right, I'll use this example. There's this thing called Prince Hall masonry.
Right, black black masonry, right right, yeah.
I mean it's still predominantly black in a lot of places. So various states, particularly in the South, have chosen to either acknowledge them, which is it's a kindness. They still operate, their lives don't change, but it's it's it's like it's like a sign of respect. Okay, we acknowledge, we know so so some now some lodges that down in the South, I'm not going to go into the whole certain name and names and Louisiana.
I know a few Prince Hall Masonry liges versus some that claim that, oh, we would never accept a black Mason, even though they will accept women Masons today but not black Masons. It's there's a lot of old school. I hate to be this way, but it's true. There are some lodges that still operate with a real sense of racism in their roots. There are some, not all, there are some.
Yeah, well i'll finish my example here and I'll kind of tap tap into some of the things you said. Some states, the majority of the states, choose to recognize Prince Hall. When there is an issue and another state has not recognized Prince Hall or something, then other states can choose to sort of like not no longer have concord at or or no longer have amity. It's called actually with that lodge. So it's like we're all out here kind of just doing whatever the the Grand Lodge
at the state level is doing. Now it's important that you that you mentioned that there there are lodges that that are are that can be inherently racist. It's because the a lodge is not a place. A lodge is the people.
It is the same way the Christian faith believes that the church quote unquote is not the brick and mortar building, It is the inhabitants that come to.
The body of Christ exactly, yeah, exactly, the living body of Christ. Yeah. So so it kind of works that way as far as there there are certain things to make sure that you stay in amity with the law, with with everybody, and and these are called you know the uh, there are keystones of freemasonry that keep you what are what we call it within regularity, right, Okay. So this would be being a man being of age at which you know, in some place used to be twenty.
One, now it's eighteen.
Yeah, exactly. And you believe in a higher power, okay, and that that higher power can't be you know, Satan for the most part. It's got it has to be you know, a recognizable form of worship of the divine in some way, so or you know, an understanding of the of the divine, a belief in the divine. The Golden don is the same way. The Golden Dawn is a little stricter because we are not a democracy. In the Golden Dawn. It's a hierarchy, and it's it's it's
a benevolent hierarchy for sure. But you know, like we don't. We don't accept anybody that's actively doing any left hand path work, so Satanism, anything having to do with Crowley and any of his work. And I would say that when a Masonic, I, me and two other chiefs decide who gets into our temple, who gets initiated. Okay, in Freemasonry, every member of the lodge has to vote who's there for we receive notice, we'll be voting on this candidate.
All the people who need to come. You need to become nobody's twisting their arm about anything, and and if we all vote them in, then then they're in. And a lot of times you will see that. And again
this depends on the lodge, depends on the jurisdiction. But yeah, I mean there's not there's not necessarily a place in freemasonry for people who are actively pursuing Freemason, I mean Satanism or or even you know that people will normally keep the fact that they're doing any kind of crowlely work kind of hush hush because the overwhelming majority of Masons, particularly in the South, they're very they're very religious Christians.
Okay, So so wow, I didn't know that, to be honest with you.
Yeah, because like like like a lot of the information out there is just like it's a bunch of people trying to figure it out from the outside in and then and then when people come out of the house to talk about what's going on there, they don't believe us.
That's fair. It's what about overseas because like, okay, so if everybody is governing themselves within each state, what does overseas look like? Because when I was looking on the Mason site, like there was very it seemed like it was country to country how they actually did it. It wasn't just like city to city or state to state kind
of thing. It's just like strictly like Germany had their own vibe going on versus France versus you know, is that what you've seen, Like do they practice different ways over there? Is this all inherently Masons really overall aren't really practicing in the demonic realm like a lot of people believe.
Yeah, So, I mean it's it varies very, very widely. There's so the United Grand Lodge of England, right, that's the big body because it was the first one that was actually sort of formalized and put together in the early eighteenth century, and there was there were other forms of masonry happening, primarily in the UK or you know at the time, the the British Isles and in Scotland.
So we have a lot of history of free Masonic lodges, right because they kept minute books where they recorded everything that was said and done, and we still that's that's something that we do today. Every lodge has to write down their minutes and all that stuff and read them to you know, out loud to the members at the next session, so on and so forth. So we have some of that stuff, I mean, dating as far back
as the sixteen hundreds for in Scotland. Now the uglas we refer to it, right, the United Grand Lodge of England is a presiding body that we want. Most Grand Lodges in the United States want to have amity with them because they're legit. But it's a different kind of masonry.
Now.
I belong to the SRIA, which was the college. I was the Rosie Crucian body. I was talking about, what is.
That going to mean? Sr I A.
You said, yeah, the Societist Rosie Crucian and Angli it means the Society of Rosie Crucians in England, and so so we in the States we have the SRI CF, which is a different Latin acronym. But I belong to the SRI A. And I actually belonged to Metropolitan College, which is the college all three founders of the Hermitic Order at the Golden Dawn came out of. So that
that is a real honor. And I say this not to kind of pat myself on the back, because I had very little to do with that, but more so it would be like I have a foot in in English masonry, particularly I've just joined another lodge there and I'm waiting for approval. But it's masonry over there is it's it's I'll put it this way. I go to London every year. I'll be back this year. It is
a great town. I think to be a mason, not because people are so accepting because they're kind of not h but the fraternity is extremely strong there and they have and I'm staying in London, they have you know, the base of operations there at Freemasons Hall. There's a research library. I mean, I haven't ever gone into that building and not run into somebody that I knew from
like zoom or from YouTube or something. So it's a major hub of activity where notable Freemasons like living, notable Freemasons hangout and have coffee, have beer, do riginal whatever it is. It's it is absolutely one hundred and ten thousand percent not at all satanic at all whatsoever. It's not not demonic in any way, shape or form, because I think, first of all, that shit is silly. Second of all, I am I am a Christian, so like I'm not going to why the fuck would I do
anything demonic? Right, It's just I'm not interested in it. But now you go to France and they have a different sort of thing because they broke a few of those rules, you know, the sort of the the keystones of Freemasonry. I forget what they're called. There's a specific name for them, but it's escaping me right now because it's late. They ended up you could be an atheist, uh, and you and they began recognizing and accepting women in
the Masonic fraternity. We have. There is co masonry in the United States, and it depends, you know, whether or not a Grand Lodge is going to recognize that. But co masonry is obviously, you know, female oriented or co ed oriented freemasonry, to varying degrees of acceptance. But in France, France, they kind of just did away with a lot of the stuff, so they split into two Grand lodges, and so yeah, I mean it's that they're the two big ones.
I would say, Uh, but there's there's stuff I don't even know about because there's for a little conversation going on in Germany and stuff like that. I think is a really really big with the Scottish right. But of course their Scottish right is not our Scottish Rights's completely different.
Very different, right.
Right?
Okay, So how long have you been a brother of the Masonic Order?
Uh?
Coming up on my sixth year.
I believe.
Okay, Okay, if you travel to London, like you said, yearly four, is it the Masonic Grand Meeting?
Uh? No, I go because I love to travel, and I get invited to speak and do presentations at bookstores on on. You know, I'm averaging a book a year, so I basically the second half of every year for me is dedicated to touring and talking about my book. But London is a town I really really love because I've always just had an affinity for their history. I mean, I remember being thirteen years old and reading Robert Lewis Stevenson, you know, Doctor Jekyl, mister Iden. Just the cobblestone streets,
the cloak and dagger, aestetic. It's just incredible to walk around there. You know, things in some quarters of London they look like, you know, not not too far of a departure from what they may have looked like in the nineteenth century, but certainly the people are different, right, modern people. But yeah, so I'll go there. I do
research too, at the British Museum, the British Library. I got my researcher card and everything and and and at cool Yeah, the the United Freemasons Hall has a research library that I've I love spending time in. You got booked at.
I would love to go there and read. I'm a reader. I'm a researcher. So I would just that's that would be so awesome to be able to get that and go read.
London is one of the best cities in the world to be a scholar or a historian because they effectively, the British took everyone else's fucking history and it's it's all there for you to peruse. You know, it's all there, it's your fingertips. They don't they don't put a very thick barrier between people who want to research this stuff and actually getting it done.
So I have a question, So you belong to all these different groups, do they like, is there any interference because you belong to different things? Because I mean, wouldn't they do they conflict of interests? Do they like counteract each other? I mean, because it seems like they might be all inherently kind of a line but also believing
in different things. And if it's like if you're Christian and esoteric, like I just can't even break it down a little bit more for me because I just want to kind of understand because there's so many different components to each one.
Sure, I'll start with the organizations. I'm a part of, the Golden Dawn, the Martinist Order and every other thing that I'm a part of is derivative of Freemasonry. It all comes out of Freemasonry, and it is commenting on free Masonic symbolism and ritual. So a lot of people don't understand that, Like the Golden Dawn is if you're if you do Golden Down ritual, you're basically doing free Masonic ritual with a lot of bells and whistles on it.
Break down what ritual?
Yeah, like any because I don't because I don't. Honestly, I don't know any of them. So like that's I'm pretty ignorant to that in and of itself. I've heard of it from people talking about it, Like we talked to one person. They kind of like broke down some of it. To be honest, I don't know a bunch. So for those of us that are really.
Golden Dawn is also acknowledging Tubulcane to be an important figure.
No, it's it's it's it's not that they acknowledge or don't acknowledge Tubulcane. You know, these are all pedagogical or symbolic you know, sort of teachings that they that they all have, but but I'll put it this way. It's difficult to in order to wrap your head around this stuff. You cannot approach it with your exoteric mind. You will never understand the esoteric with your exoteric perspective. It's not possible.
It's not possible, I promise you. Okay, I've spent twenty over twenty coming up my twenty second year of doing this in one form or another. Okay, very seriously, and at a certain point you realize the perceptual filters that have been installed in modern people completely fuck us when we're trying to look back and understand what the past
was like. The actual things that we have installed in us into our mental framework as a product of our civilization, as a product of our institutional you know, our educational institutions, as a product of even the type of speech and the type of media we consume. It is preventing us from understanding these things. I don't know if that's by design. I tend to think at some point it's it's it's it's used as a nice leverage. But the key thing
is that I'll answer your question. Raven ritual is based on a formula. A lot of people don't understand its particularly Masonic ritual. It is the it is the process of going from darkness to light. And this darkness, this darkness is a darkness of the outer world. We call it the profane world. But this word in Latin profianum just means outside of the temple. The it's we're going from uninitiated life where we don't have the light. What is the light? The light is effectively both the substance
and nature of the divine. Okay, say if you if you boil it down from the corpus or medicum, you can you can basically distill it down to this, God is one. His substance is light. Okay. So this preoccu patient with light. It's not just about this rote memorization and this learning of philosophy. It's literally coming into touch in some way, shape or form with divinity.
Uh.
And so in this, in this way we always you know, you're let around the the ritual as like parts of the Old Testament, part of the Psalms are are recited, parts of the Bible are recited. You know, as you you move around in Masonic ritual and you're introduced at at at the various stations and what you realize is that there's there's only stations in the east, south, and west, and you're moving clockwise, constantly clockwise. Okay, So that's a
big part of the formula. Why because all this stuff was formed in the northern hemisphere, and the Sun is always in the southern sky in that in the northern hemisphere, it never goes into the north. So you have these three officers representing sunrise, afternoon or mid heaven uh uh, and and sunset, and you are going around from the from the west to the east, by the north, from from the east to the west by the south. What does that make You're being trained to move like the sun?
Why in the sun not because we worship a sun god, but because this is our terrestrial, our our physical analog of that spiritual light. So the Freemasonry and the Golden Dawn and are primarily what we call solar orders. This is the whole death and rebirth things. To say, the Sun dies in the west and is reborn in the east. But it also it also dies in winter and is born in spring. Okay. So there's there's all of that
allegory going on. It's all pointing really towards a single thing, which is the immortality of the soul.
Okay, So do you go around the equinoxes too, like you guys kind of do like specific rituals around like a certain times year. Do you do them with every level? I mean, I know that you do them with every level up you go.
The Golden Lawn has equinox rituals specifically, but they're what they do is is they sort of they set the individual Golden Dawn temple in abeyance temporarily and then reconstitute it. So it's like taking everything down just to rebuild it, particularly on the equinoxes, because that's the that's the only time in the year where you have equal amounts of light and dark. Okay. That that's why we do it on the equinoxes because it's balanced. It is it's the
only time of the year where there is balance. Uh So, it's it's a lot of that. It's a lot about learning about spiritual truths and then how to be in the world from looking at frankly, you know, the solar movements and the lunar movements and what nature is doing. Honestly, so I don't I don't know if that answers a lot of your questions. But it's I mean, this is we're now we're getting into you know, like five hundred years of history at this point, so a lot. That's a lot of ground.
I like history. So I mean, it's it's I like to understand it because I mean all I've really, I mean,
I've heard what I think everybody else has heard. When we talk about like specific orders and especially freemasons and stuff like we just did an episode on it, is like, you know, a lot of people discuss it and think that it's just inherently it wasn't started out as evil or you know, satanic, but then it got twisted with Pike and then turn into something else, whatever it is, and then people talk about the thirty third and then you know, this is it potentially you know, they're doing
left handed magic or they're like, you know, doing evil ritualistic practices, and you're you've been around the world and you've seen all these things, but you've never actually experienced any people doing of these things. So you know, is that is that just something that people just kind of a conspiracy that people made up and that's just been running rampant for a long time.
The thing is that you always fear what you don't understand or what you're excluded, what you're excluded from, and we need a scapegoat, we just do. People can't exist in that area of total autonomy, which says, come, what may the responsibilities on me? Especially now, we live in a society of victim culture, and it's every everybody, everybody is everybody is pointing towards some sort of fucking ghost,
somebody in the shadows to blame. But at the end of the day, a society, a civilization is the sum of its people. And so our best bet is to look at ourselves, revolutionize, start the revolution within. This is the purpose of initiation is to begin to begin. This is what initiate means, right, to begin to get started in this this revolution of the self. And yeah, it's the thing is people also don't understand, particularly the United States,
and like we're not. There's no one grand you know, Masonic uh sort of lodge that that governs everybody, tells everybody what they can and cannot do. So when you see instances, right, remember I said the lodges are the people, Okay, when you see instances of lodges engaging in corruption, and engaging in, you know, a nefarious activity. What they're not understanding is that like that, we cast them the fuck out as soon as we figure that out. And the same the same thing that you know, I use this
analogy with the Scottish Rite, with whatever. If you have let's just say, right, you have a part of your family that is kind of they're kind of like little wacky, a little crazy, and uh, you have I don't know friends come over or you you've got your your new partner, your new spouse at Thanksgiving and these fools over here are acting up. You understand how that reflects on you. At the same time, you also understand that that's not me, you know, that's these people over here. So it's just
it's a very similar thing. Just to personalize it for people. It's a very similar thing with freemasonry. It's not this thing where you know, I mean, most of what we're doing is praying, and literally like blood blood drives. I mean we probably pray at an average meeting and we pray to God, the creator of the universe.
Okay, real question, Grand Architect or God, the same person. But a lot of Masons that may not be of your uh sect, of spirituality might call it something.
Else exactly, which which is why we reduce it to the great, great, great architect of the universe in freemasonrym because it's it's it's not prioritizing one word for that that that creative intelligence over another. It's it's something that's quintessentially quintessentially Masonic. However, it's really derivative of from the Platonic tradition. The Platonic dialogues are really the first time we see on the historical record, and depending you know,
you also see it in in the Old Testament. But the dating of the Old Testament is is so it's such a hairy thing, particularly for scholarsh scholarship, that we we don't really know. There's no there's no hard consensus on how old the Old Testament is.
Well, that's not a Masonic thing, that's a that's a normal person thing as well. To say that you know what happened in three thousand BC, bro, we have no way of fucking quantifying that.
Yeah, exactly exactly. And it's it's all based on on these kind of older is better and we want our things to be really old and whatever. The truth is
always somewhere in the middle. Right, sure, but we see really God as an architect for the for the first for the first time in a Platonic dialogue called the time Ass, which I believe was is thought to have been written around three hundred and sixty somewhere around three hundred and sixty BCE, and effectively Plato through the chief interlocutor, who in this particular dialogue is not Socrates, which is is not the usual thing. It's this Pythagorean philosopher time Ass.
He's talking about the nature of the universe as mathematics, because this is the way the mind of God works. Right. Plato is famous for saying God can continually geometrizes. Not only that, but legendarily, over the gate to his academy there was there an inscription that said, let no man ignorant of geometry enter into year. Now, what would a mason, right, what would an operative mason need to know above anything else? Geometry?
Sure? Sure, so these two.
These two things are so intimately connected that I actually go around the world giving UH talks. I give a talk called UH Platonism and Freemasonry.
Okay, I personally have such an issue with Pythagoreas for so many reasons.
For one, he didn't come up with no theorem.
There are Samerian texts that obviously will show that the entire lineage of how the triangle we all can can dictate the Piagoras theorem right of how a square plus b squad equals c squared.
He didn't come up with that shit that was.
Ritten, But he never he never claimed to.
No, no, no, no, no no. At that point.
The issue I have with him not only did he take credit for things and and maybe he didn't.
He didn't though, because he never wrote anything so anything. All these things were attributed to him by people that were writing three hundred years after he died.
And that's fair.
That is absolutely adequate and fair, and I'm with you on this. However, his numbers cult, his math cult, he still forced people to be silent for at least a year before admittance, this sexual weirdness that they would do before they even learned how to do a basic equilater or triangle math. It just he himself was a bit of a fucking psychopath.
But what she what she got to realize too, is that he didn't force anybody to do anything because this was all voluntary.
Oh sure, for a year and give away all your worldly possessions and uh negate your family lineage in favor of the numbers cult. Yeah, willingly do so. That doesn't make it like more okay personally, but I hear your point.
Personally.
I think Pythagris is a bit of a psychopath, but so are most cult leaders. And I don't just mean that to the cult of what we think about today. Even the cults of ancient Greece. The cult leaders, even the cult of Dionysius, the cult of Zeus, the cult of whatever. They were looking psychos, but they were very charismatic.
They could draw what what what? What criteria are you using to judge their their to diagnose their psychology. It seems it seems a little retrofitted and a little outlandish for somebody to to look back and paint all of like history's holy people with the with the brush of insanity, when really, really you you were just talking about how Noah's flood cannot be verified because they because they happen three theft. We don't have any way of verifying any
of the stuff that you're saying right now. I'm very I'm very, very very very intimately tied into you know, uh, particularly Pythagorean, Platonic and Hermetic history. And I work with scholars I sit on an academic board with about their hondograft from the University of Amsterdam, Charlie Stang, who runs the center, the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions. So these scholars also are my friends, and I'm leaning
on them for this stuff. And uh, you know, much of what the problem is that we we as modern people, are consuming tertiary and quaternary like sources so far removed from the actual text. Have you ever read a pithet? Have you ever read a Pythagony in text? Truly Pythagorea in text?
Have I personally yes, yeah, most people which will say no, which one.
I'd be lying if I was to give you some sort of a title of them. But I specifically because.
And the reason why I dug into Pythagoras in and of himself is because so many people we like, we said, we talked about the Pythagoron theorem so much in high school. We don't know how to do our tax but we can tell you about some fucking a square plus b squared right. So like I was curious whenever I found out that pythagore and himself led a number's cults, and I was like, well, here's the thing.
Here's the thing though, and again this is the misinterpretation. There are two phases in Pythagorean history. There's the authentic Pythagorean UH group, and then there is the neo Pythagora. For sure who who was writing in UH probably around the first, second, and third, all the way up to the fifth and centuries of the Common era. And in between these there's a little bit of a gap in
in the the the communication. Now you look at you know, the earliest Pythagoreans, Pythagoras himself wrote nothing, but he he he had several students that that wrote and their preoccupation had nothing to do with numbers. As a matter of fact, doctor Justin Sledge from the Esoterica channel, I.
Know it's actually brother, doctor Justin Sledge. I'm such a fucking fan of his content, just so we're clear.
So he so he goes into this about how there is actually no evidence to suggest that Pythagoras gave even the tiniest fuck about numbers.
So this point also it had nothing to do with triangles, in nothing to do with numbers. What it was was occult to personality, and he wanted to be at the head of it. It's specifically a couple of rules, right strict vegetarian diets, like you cannot touch meat.
Okay, fine, fine again.
Again, I gotta correct you on that. It depends on which which. So we get the bulk of our of our of our information from a couple of sources. Diogenes Laertius, who writes about the Philosopher's a little bit of Plutarch. But the main two biographies that you have in the Pythagorea and Library are Porphyry's Life of Pythagris and the Amlicus's Life of Pythagres. And the Amlicus specifically says, of all the flesh of which it was lawful to sacrifice,
they partook. This makes more sense than anything else because these people were extremely, extremely religious and to to when you made an offering to a god in ancient Greece, what you would do is everybody would eat and then you take you take like the thigh bone of the of the the cattle. Whatever you're eating, you would wrap the fat around it and chart the fat and the smoke would go up and with your prayers to the God,
so on and so forth. But it would be it would have been considered impos Are we sure, we're one hundred percent sure about the reason.
Why I'm asking is because there was And granted we're talking about mystery cult versus mystery.
Cult here, take away Christianity for two seconds.
We're talking quite a few centuries before the Christians came on scene, right, And you would have a statue made to name your deity doesn't matter for this principle, but a deity. You would have their mystery cult make offerings to them on their altar, and it would be a meat and whatever else. They would leave it there to rot, and they would send their lower level guys to come at like one in the morning, two in the morning to come take the meat away before it got to rotten.
They wouldn't eat their sacrifices to the God. They would offer to the God itself and let it oxidize there in the middle of the street for everybody until it's stunk to high heavens.
So in the in the main, the larger cults cults to Zeus so on and so forth, and particular, I mean, we have these writings in Hessiad, we have them in Homer, we have them in Avid, we have them in Virgil. Uh, we've got tons of attestations of this particular feast happening. Now, if it was a if it was a closed uh sort of what we call hieratic, if it was a hieratic operation, meaning closed only to the priests, then they would come and the priests would partake of some uh.
Now again you you can, you can, you can look at for instance, the table of Showbread and the Tabernacle and the tumble of Solomon, where yes, they would leave it out for a night, but they go back and they would they would eat the bread because effectively, to to to to face this stuff and throw it away was in its entirety was sort of like unthinkable, especially those cultures back then that did they didn't really have
the same food stores that we did. But in the in the in the public, in the public uh sort of rituals that that we do have, the the entire community would partake in these feasts, and it would have been considered impious, uh met. And you guys know what that word means. Uh, to to not partake. So they they're there.
They were.
They were what we would consider by a modern standard. They were fundamentalists. Uh, but that that that extended to it. They that extended to religion as well, the overarching religion of their day. They participated in that religion, and they were actually not ostracized from it.
Okay, so aside from the vegetarian thing, which multiple sorts.
Because I was gonna say, I was like, I've just looked up like seven different sources and they all said the same thing. Yes, I'm scanning through right now, and I'm like, well, I mean, to be fair, there is a lot of literature that is incorrect. But just at the top, it's it is saying that, it is talking about that over and over and over again.
So I'm this this this is it's it's a common thing that was that was suggested by somebody like Porphyry, who was very, very against the eating of animal meat. But what you gotta understand is that even in the source materials, the source materials don't agree with each other. So you have an instance of Iamblicus, who's, you know, a great theorogist. He writes it in his in uh, if you could probably do a word search. Uh, if
you have a pd PDF version of it. But he says, of all the of all the flesh of which it was lawful to satirify. So my whole thing is that it and this is how it works in academia, in scholarship. If the primary sources don't agree, then there is no consensus.
I'm with you, But there are things that are of a consensus when it comes to Pythagoris himself. For instance, okay, fine, the vegetarian conversation.
I'm with you.
But they also were very strict about nobody can eat beans or legomes. That was also a big thing, and then also a silence for five years before you could ever learn the first mathematical equation to be a part of the call to Pythagoras. I'm sorry outside looking in, and i know I'm very biased on this. This sounds like the worst of a fucking cult. Five years of silence.
Bro bro Well, I mean.
You're yeah, but you're you're you're a podcaster. You have a microphone in front of you. Of course it's gonna suck to you. Fair Like, why why would this guy, why would that group of people be asked to run the government of Crotona if there wasn't something redeemable about their ideas. I mean to again, to us, we think it is unthinkable. But again, you also have monks that
take vows of silence for their for their entire lives. Uh. Now, we could definitely say, hey, you know, those guys are crazy.
The Buddhist monks are fucking crazy. For the record, I agree with that, But anyway.
I would say, I would say, yeah, we modern people balk against that level of restriction on on self expression, and that we also balk against other people telling us what to do or staunch individualists, you know. As a consequence, I think that that on either side of the fence. I obviously am not a monk. I obviously am a podcaster or I talk about this stuff. I obviously have not taken vows of silence. But I do think that
the pendulum can can swing too far to either extreme. Sure, Like now, it's like what that what that like radical individualism does is it completely desacralizes everything about our world, and it abstracts us from from the an ancient worldview, which was much more in tune with you know, not
just nature, but just the overarching cycles of things. So I tend to try and find that middle, and especially as somebody who is immersed immersed in the scholarship, I try and exercise a level of epistemological humility, which is to say, it doesn't matter, It does not matter what Google says about about what they're telling you about. By that, I have the fucking Greek over there, and I can pull it off my shelf say look there there's deviation
in the primary sources. This isn't some guy writing in the seventies. Isn't somebody writing in the thirties. This is a neo Pythagorean writing in the second and third centuries of this era. So and he's this is what he's
telling us. So when you approach when you approach things from the scholarly level, you have to say, okay, there's a lot of evidence here to suggest that they ate mostly vegetarian, absolutely, but there's this reference here to say they ate at sacrifices, they partook them of the meat. So it's I always try and straddle that line. And the problem, the problem that I come up with again over and over is that when you bring this stuff to the mainstream there's nothing but extremes.
Sure, people have.
Extreme opinions, they have extreme blame. But the thing is like they don't really know what.
They don't know, you know, a very fair point.
I did see, I did see a contradiction. Actually, I'm reading through a scholarly thing. It took me a good bit to find this one. But this says that while there is abstinence, the abstinence of meat was ideal. Historical records indicate the system was flexible, that some reports suggesting that later generations permitted moderate consumption of meat during rituals. He himself reportedly advised athletes to eat meat for strength.
So yeah, that was a.
Good bit down.
It talked about the ethics of it, and talked about flesh and the argument of it. It talked about the reincarnation of it. And then in the very bottom it said the little tiny paragraph.
So well, and see, that's the beautiful thing about a moment like this where you realize, like just how deep you gotta like shovel through the dog shit on something that you know a lot of us use. I use Google too, you know there's different versions, right, there's Google for scholars. A lot of people don't know about that, But.
I love Google for scholars. I've been using that for decades.
Yes, it's it's fantastic, it's it's wonderful. But even still, you know, there is when you enter this stuff on it at the real level, and I'll never forget it. You know, I was just kind of an esotericis interested in the history of this stuff. I was, you know, I would say, naturally gifted at certain things. I start going to these conferences, I start organizing these conferences, and so that you know they're here in the States, they're
overseas in Egypt. And I got up to give a presentation and I'm presenting with scholars from all over the world at the highest level of scholarship. And the first thing that I like, the first thing I realized, was like, oh my god, I feel like I'm naked because my my game compared to these people, my understanding of the field in its totality. Right, there's certain things you got to know about methodology, how to find, how to get to which sources should I be looking at, what can
what can go wrong with translation? You gotta be really careful which translations you use, especially in the Greek. You could you could be looking at two different translators. This is especially true for Plato and reading the same same dialogue and it's it's it reads completely differently. But I remember right then and there feeling very embarrassed and being like, okay, I got to step my game up, and and when I did, I realized, I'm like, you know, there is no consensus on anything, which.
Is kind of everything is everything is consistently an argument with every single There's a lot of historical things that people and genuinely agree on, but when it comes down to the details, that's when people start to argue about specifically almost everything. And being in the field that I was in, I've read a lot of scholarly research and it's in constantly back and forth and back and forth.
Even presenting on this podcast, I try to at least give information of like, hey, this is what I believe or this is what I'm finding as the main hub, but these are also what I'm hearing about as well, because it comes with most research is that you will have a large body agree with one text, and then you'll have somebody else that may find somebody that has
a different special dialect that can translate it differently. Then in those one or two words change the entire meeting of the text that you're reading, and then that causes a lot of scholarly debate between all of the historians and stuff, and so it's it's quite challenging, especially when you bring in language into it, because then it causes a lot of conflict because there's a lot of languages in the dialect specifically that has changed over time, and
we're trying to recurate what it is, and nobody's really speaking those specific dialects any longer, so then you're trying to figure out exactly one word differences of what it could or couldn't be.
So sure, yeah, and language wasn't Yeah, As to your point, the dialect, their language was not systematized the way what it is today. There's variations in spelling and declension and
all that crazy shit. But one of the greatest examples of this is in the Platonic dialogues when some translators choose to translate the word damon, which is diemonium is the actual tense of it version, but it's they'll some people will translate it as conscience, but that word really means spirit, and so a lot of people, a lot
of people will will go around never knowing that. Throughout the Platonic Dialogues, Socrates keeps stuff, opping to check in and speak with and speak about this spirit that is with him, that is telling him what not to do or or when when not to do things. Uh, it's very clear from the if from the Greek. I also happen to be ethnically Greek, so I can I can read and speak it. But of course this is ancient Greek.
It's not.
Yeah, kkni and and some attic. There's some stuff an addict too, but but mostly kini yah and uh. You know, it's a abundantly clear looking at the the the the Greek text. But you know, again, like to your point, the translators will will sort of gloss on these things. And and I think they felt called to modernize it for the readers of their time. But in doing that they they didn't meet the text on its own terms,
and they did it in an injustice. This is the hardest thing is meeting this stuff on its own terms. We come to all this stuff with a lot of bag okay.
A lot of biases too.
There's a lot to be said there, there really really is.
And with that to kind of get off the Pythagorea conversation and get back to the Freemasonry conversation. I have to ask you, right, So you, as you said, are not a fan of Pike.
Right, you're not a big proponent of Pike.
Now Morals and Dogma, which is allegedly outside looking in completely, and I'll acknowledge that this is the way that the ceremonies and the rituals go from ranked to rank of the Scottish Rite. And some would argue the York right and all these things. He basically took what was at the time forty five hundred different levels and fifty two different rights and combine them into what we would now
call the organization of the Free and Accepted Masons. Now that being said, Uberpike obviously had a little bit of some biases. He wasn't exactly a good do dude, right, And we would acknowledge that from our current modern day and age. You are saying that there are contextual differences that make or break the conversation. There are so many Masons that are still adhering to Albert Pike's conversation in his book Morals and Dogma, and still take that book
to be what they would call the Masonic Bible. I know that's a misnumber. I fully understand this, but they would still take every word that this man said to be literal. What is your take on this as per the modern day Freemasons?
You know, and some of my Scottish Rite brethren may maybe.
A Scottish writer York right now? Also York right, York, York right? So this is the Knight's templar route.
Correct? Yeah, okay, what level are you?
If you don't mind me asking, I'm a night templar.
You're over level twenty then? Correct?
There's fourteen degrees in York in York, right.
I say level two because if you were to take it to a one to one comparison of the Scottish in New York, York jumps a couple from here to there, you know what I mean?
Yeah? Yeah, you're probably talking about the Rosequah to the eighteenth degree.
You understand what I'm saying here, brother, break it down for them what we're talking about.
I know all the ritual, I've read it all I've I've even seen some of it performed, but it's I'm not interested because the thing, the thing that I find in Scottish Rite a lot of times is that well, first of all, it's like how much can you really do? Like I'm not a single guy.
How much money? Yeah, I mean it's.
Not that expensive, you know, like dues are typically manageable. Otherwise the brethren vote him down, you know, because it is it's extremely democratic. But but the thing is, like I have found that Scottish Rite is like the key. This is gonna be terrible to say.
Please please, please, by all means, brother, let it fucking go.
And I haven't interacted with every Scottish Rite valley, but some of the people that I have interacted with with you, they're like they're they're like all they're all this hush hush in this hype about esotericism. It's like a kid that's got like the big you know this Like when I was in middle school, I'd go over to like my friend's house, and you know, his parents could afford to buy him like this massive drum kit, and meantime I had this little janky snare drum I had to
work all summer to buy myself. But I could play the shit out of that thing. And this kid barely knows what he's doing behind this massive you know, Peter cris drum kit he's playing. It's kind of a similar thing where like there there's a lot of steam, there's a lot of talk about esotericism, and then when you really get into it, it's like again like you guys, there's nothing here, it's all fluff. So it's it really
comes down to that. But the main thing is is that the Scottish Rite has no jurisdiction whatsoever, no jururisdiction whatsoever over any of the Grand Lodge of Craft or or Blue Lodge Freemasonry. So it's it just doesn't work that way. It's again it's kind of a side quest. It's this guy's interpretation of what freemasonry is. It's you know, it's the same thing with the Knights Templar. You know, York right is I mean the Royal Arts degree is it was considered one of the main degrees when the
Grand Lodge in England formed. But but most of you know, York right is kind of this. It's this way of of of I guess bringing the the Free Masonic story, which basically ends at the Temple of Solomon for the in the in the third degree bringing it into Christianity and into chivalric uh. And a lot of this was based on this guy, Chevalier Ramsey who who made a great oration about how Freemasons were descended from the Knight Templar and like created. He was like the Dan Brown of his time.
You know, to break down that one down, what is your take on that? So many people will say, Oh, well, clearly the builders of the temples and the pyramids of Egypt clearly became the Knights Templar. Clearly became the Freemasons.
I specifically, and somebody who does not see the connection, I understand why people would put these together for a non fictional book, like some damn Brown shit, Like you're saying, there is little to no evidence whatsoever to say that the Knights Templar became what we would know is the Freemasons today. But it would also stand the reason that the Freemasons of today would take on some of the ideologies of the Templars of old, indoctrinate them into themselves, and then rebrand if you will.
Yeah, I mean, you know. A really great Masonic scholar from the the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His name is W. L. Wilmshurst Walter Leslie Wilmshurst. I like the way he discussed it because he's writing at a time where there's this overarching trend to connect freemasonry, all esotericism to like ancient Egypt, like root it there like that, why a trail?
Help me make this make sense. I've tried so hard.
They try to make connections to the ancient pyramids, the Stone Hinge to the pyramids of Cambodia because obviously a fucking period in. It's like, wait, what do you mean period in? There's so much context missing here, dog.
It's it's unfortunately it's a case of universalism or universalized. It's the universalizing current. They want to reduce everything down to a single sort of monosystem, you know, a single world religion. There's just exoteric and esoteric versions of it. I mean there's there's some good points there other points. It's just kind of like, wow, you're you're flying past these red flags and not even stopping a look.
But I understand at least a point right to say they're able to cut stores, how are they able to cut stones of bronze ata technology?
Okay, I'm with you. There's some wild shit, we can have this conversation, but to say the Pyramids of Egypt are clearly connected to Stone Hinge, are clearly connected to the Hope.
Well Indian Mounds in Ohio, like because obviously, what do you mean, fucking obviously I must have missed the fucking obvious red flags here bro Well.
And that's the thing, you know, and you see a lot of it in all organizations, but particularly one, particularly ones with titles and sashes and and things like that. You fall into a real trap of like, I'm a part of this special thing, and so where where this is our lineage? And and unfortunately, you know, you will find people that come to something like freemasonry kind of
your point before. I don't really see too many people in it for the networking, just because on the local level, it's like, you know, it's carpenters, it's plus, it's people who stock shelves at the supermarket, that kind of stuff.
But but that's relatively new. Right fifty years ago, you if you were somebody of note, you would have been a freemason. These days, it seems to have gotten back to the craft worked.
Right.
By craft work, I don't mean the esotech, I mean like actual plumbers, actual carpenters, actual pipe fitters, and things like this.
But the Masonic numbers have been dwindling for at least a decade now correct.
Yeah, probably longer.
Yeah.
I think it's a great I think it's a good thing.
Or break this down so many people would disagree with what you just said.
Break that down further, brother.
No, I think it's a great thing. I think. So there's there's this period in between the First and Second World Wars, and then especially right after the Second World War. Yeah, I have this phenomenon showing up, especially in American culture, called joinerism, and it's like everybody was Rotary club, Alex clubs, the whole whole Neighborhoodwis club. Yeah yeah, yeah, whole neighborhood
was a gigantic family. I think there are good things to that, but I think when it comes to Freemasonry, what it did was it allowed the ranks to be filled with people who did not understand esotericism, and they and their Christianity rubbed up against that. And even to this day, if you say the word occultism, they automatically think satanism. They hear the word cult without realizing like no, it's actually it's a Latin word meaning hidden from the eye, right,
because the word for eye was oculus. So occultous is that you can't see the things that are causing this to happen, hidden virtues, hidden qualities, hidden causality. But you still see that people have a real gut reaction against any kind of esotericism to freemasonry, so they strip it out completely. But my loud ass goes around and make doing presentations to really challenge that among the brothers. Because if freemasonry is good for a single thing, I think
it's good for men. But if I had to say it's good for a single thing, even more so than charity, it is a great forum for the exchange of ideas, or at least it can be. Because no one is higher than anyone else. In a free Masonic lodge. We meet on the level there. It doesn't even matter the Worshipful Master in the East. You respect his office, but he's not higher than you. So you can really talk about whatever you want.
In a lot of let me ask you what you just said, not to poke holes. I'm hoping you're able to give a bit of distinction.
Here.
A worshipful Master in the east. You're saying that he is not higher than a brother that is going towards the east. As some might say, Oh I'm a traveler, Oh I'm heading east, or I'm a traveler heading west, meaning that I've already gotten the illumination. I'm heading back to you know, elevate my younger and lesser brothers in the way of the light.
You're saying there's no hierarchy here.
There's no hierarchy among master Masons, the level master Masons. Yes, at the third level there are offices in a lodge, but that doesn't make the brother like higher than me.
Then break this down for me again, completely fish out of water trying to look in here. You got a twenty seventh degree order of the fluty flaws of the floody does it doesn't matter?
Right?
Cool Graham Pooba of the shit.
Who is talking to a Master Mason level three who is deciding whether he's going Scottish or York. Right, This guy's been Scottish right for years. He has all the monikers, all the things.
Whatever. You're saying, it's a lateral.
Move rather than a elevated move. So many people would disagree with you on this one bro break this down for us to show that this means that the literal move.
But these these people who would be disagreeing with me, are they Masons?
And again outside looking at there are some Masons that would disagree with you. For the record, these are the same Masons that would say, oh, the Prince Henry Lodge are not real Masons.
Yeah, it's at that At that point, it's like this elitism based off fat That's.
What it breaks down to, dude.
But at the end of the day, like it's we say it constantly, it's it's it's actually in like it's it's in some form of Masonic bylaw. Forget tradition. I mean it's in many places, it's written into masonry that there is no actually actual higher degree than the third. So it's and this was this is the way. Functionally,
Let's say let's say, okay, well that's debatable. Let's say, well, like we can't find it in our we can't find it in our book, okay, so but functionally, can the Scottish righte come over to you the Blue Lodge until you start telling you what to do and start bossing you around and start talking to just like actually as absolutely.
Not you're gonna have it, and they I don't.
Know, absolutely not absolutely as a matter of fact, Scottish Right, you know they are. It's almost famous for for for having issues with either your right groups at a local
level or sometimes uh, it's somewhere in the history. You know, it's like because a lot of these a lot of these lodges, a lot of these valleys, they have like hundreds of years of history and at some point you can see like this battle, this disagreement because at one point Scottish Right, particularly in the South, they had a lot of real estate, you know, they really really did, and and in the eighties they started divesting themselves of all that, which has kind of left a catastrophe for
modern modern But but it's you know, functionally, it does not work that way. I mean, if you've reached the third degree, like you are on the level, there is nobody that is higher than you or can tell you what to do.
You say, they're always on the level, if you might if.
You yeah, yeah, And technically what we say, also at least in the North Carolina working is we're all travelers headed west because west is death. You know, we're all headed to death. And that's if anything. You know, if I could put freemasonry into a single kind of idea, it's it's a memento more. But the thing is, you know a lot of people know memento MORI remember death, but they don't know the second half of that, which is ergo memento vivieri, which the full thing translates to
remember death and therefore remember to live. Yes, so so, And that's not live like hedonist, it's lived. Help people, be a boon to your community.
It means yes, it means live as if you might die tomorrow, so live today to the fullest. That doesn't mean live for yourself. That means live for your community, live for your family, give a fuck, truly give back to the Yes.
I mean part of part of your obligation in masonry is to not neglect your other duties. We have. We have a saying like if if you can't do something because you got the kids or you have a family obligation, you just say it's my my cable tow isn't long
enough that month. You know, it's like I can't, I can't I have responsibilities to do you in some launches, I mean you'll somebody will come up to you and be like, listen, brother, Like you know, because every time one Mason offers advice to another, it has to remain very very fraternal. But somebody, you know, a good brother would come and be like, listen, don't don't neglect, Like, we'll figure it out. We'll get the extra guy to do the degree, we'll get the extra guy to help
run the pot luck or whatever it is. Don't neglect what you got going on at home, because that's not what this is about.
Right.
Yeah.
Ok, So to circle back, So not only we've been we've been hammering the Mason's a good bit here.
You're not just a freemason.
You are a esotericist, correct, Yeah, I'd say so. So you also acknowledge the Order of the Golden Dawn. Now break this down for us, because there are so many people, so many scholars, and I will use the quotes on the term scholars with very liberal quotes on this to say that the Order of the Golden.
Dawn started out as a way to try to.
Find the philosopher's stone, esotericism, whatever.
But there was a big split.
We're negating the rosa Crucian conversation let's just talk about the East versus the West, right, Madame Blovotsky was clearly out of her fucking mind. And most people that will look at her book and also juxtaposed that against the historical narrative will say, oh, wait a minute, she may have gone to end.
You know, she didn't meet the people that she said she met. This is obviously a lie. Whatever.
Fine, fine, But to say that the Order of the Golden Dawn was actively trying to find the fountain of youth through esoteric and some would say therefore satanic means your thoughts.
Well, I've been a member of the Golden Dawn now for about a decade. Yeah, I've done two documentary presentations on my channel about it, full edited and everything.
I've known a secret organization.
I'm sitting here talking to talking to you about it.
Of course, I'm just making sure we're all keeping it on the up and up here. So like you talking about this, are you going to be ousted as a no.
Sort of a you know, a plug? What was the term?
What's the term when they say that somebody has turned a cia op that now talks about it?
But was the term?
I don't know, but I've people have accused me of being a plant or something that.
You know, are you a fucking playing for the Golden Dawn and the Freemasons?
Bro? Where are we at?
I mean to be one hundred percent honest with you. If that's even crossing your mind, like you, you need to lay off the fucking weed because you you might be smoking yourself retarded. I don't mean you, but like anybody.
To me, I'm on behalf of the people that might be listening to this pod have those questions the fucking throw at you.
I'm asking on behalf of them.
And look, I've been you know, I've I've done shows like uh Tinfoil Hat with with my man Sam, who's a great guy and I loves great his his his audience. Uh, you know, they're they are convinced first of all that I'm Jewish?
Are you? Are you fucking you dog?
It's just so fucking weird that like nobody will let you tell them, will let you tell them who you are. It's like it's like if I if this is It's like if I want to go on a date with a girl and I'm sitting there telling her the entire fucking time, who I think she is. I'm never gonna I'm never gonna.
Know anything about her clearly.
So yeah, I mean people have accused me of of that, but like, why the fuck would I do that. I don't make any money, Like it costs me money to go to these goddamn meetings and being an administrator, Like it's like, what the hell would I get out of it? If if I if I even got a whiff that there was any nefarious activity going on, I would just fucking leave because, like, I have a life.
Your local lodge that you pay dues to, are they listed? Is a five to one seed three or five one seed ten?
Just curious?
I I can't give you an an an absolutely accurate answer, and so I'm gonna.
Fair enough, fair enough.
I just we we I know that we operate on a charitable basis. We donate regularly to the Children's Home, the Masonic Retirement Home Fund, and to the local local Red Cross and VA Hospital.
Say I'm joking, I'm joking, I'm joking.
We are. We are technically we're not able. Every year I host in Ashville the uh the Southeastern Masonic Symposium, and we were forbidden from from making a penny off of anything we do. You cannot make. You must make zero dollars if you do anything Masonic. That's in the fucking by laws. You can't make a red scent. You will bleed yourself dry. That's fine, but but nobody will
pay you to do this. So it's you know. My thing is that, like most Golden Donners don't like the perspective I take right really, just because first of all, again there's no consensus, Like I fucking hate Enochian. I don't like doing an Okian. I think the whole thing is completely suspect. Yeah, d and Kelly's stuff, It's just not my bag. But the thing is, there are Golden Dawn magicians that are obsessed with a Nokian and they hate, they hate any time somebody even suggests it might be
a little you know. So so yeah, I mean.
I get you are the outlier on this one to say that you, as a member of the Hermitic Order of the Golden Dawn, do knock it down with the Nokian magic.
I do that, I have to, but I don't.
I don't sit there. I don't sit there like leaning into it the way people do, like totally in fully believing that I'm communicating with this specific type of entity or being. It's just okay, there's no way to.
Know break this down for us. Please, please, for the love of God, stop everything. Okay, let's take a let's take a hard pause here.
Yeah, let's talk about a Nochian magic, because a lot of people will make the connection between the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and a Nochian magic. And you're saying that you don't believe that you specifically you are connecting with some sort of a spiritual entity. I'm not gonna say a god. I'm not gonna say angel, I'm not gonna say a demon. I'm trying to be as liberal as I can be. Here is open ended to say that you don't get down with a Nokia magic.
A lot of members of your organization would but call you a fraud.
Well, I mean, I I don't know that they would, because again, a lot of these people I do podcasts with I talk to, you know, I'm an outlier, but it's not that salacious. I do think that there is uh the people that really lean into it, that sort of identify them so by the practice of Enochian magic, they they don't like it when anybody sort of suggests because it's it's happened before in the history of the Golden Dawn, right, Paul Foster Case left, he didn't want
to do any Inochian. There have been other examples of people that have kind of walked away from the Enochian thing, not carried it over. But it's it's just something that I'm knowing the history and then also kind of like just having my experience. It should be said that the Golden Dawn practice is a radically different form of Enochian than Dan Kelly actually kind of established in their journals.
It breaks it down because some of our cult members may never have heard of what you just said.
Yeah, break this down.
Enochian magic is essentially a form of magic that is predicated on the use of certain alphabets, certain symbols, and certain modes of practice for lack of a better term, implements and things like that that allow one to communicate with a group of angelic supposedly angelic entities that are often referred to as you know, Kean angels. Now in the sixteen hundred's, John d who was a court astrologer for Queen Elizabeth, he began a series of channel to communications.
He couldn't really do the scrying. Scrying is when you peer into a crystal ball, a bowl of water, a black mirror, something, in order to create a focal point for the imaginal faculty. So because what you're seeing isn't actually appearing in the mirror of the water, it's here, but it's you're overlaying it onto that thing. So he couldn't really do that very well, and so he hired a guy named Edward Kelly, who actually ended up being a little bit of a questionable character, but Dee was
convinced that he was at least talented in this. And so if it began, over the course of seven years a project of communication with these angels that led them all over the European continent and embroiled them in politics, and ultimately their their lives ended in misfortune, poverty, and ruin. So my thing is that we don't do that kind of like what we would call, you know, grimoire type of magic that that the Enochian system was originally laid out to be. It's actually a little bit more of
a sophisticated system. A lot of quote unquote d D purists or Enochian purists. They they are very they very much look down their nose at the golden dawns kind of innovation of Enochian where they boil it down to a different system which is way, way, way too complicated to explain in anything less than a half an hour, because it's so fucking intricate. It's another reason why I hate it. It's like, we don't need to be doing this.
Kind of stuff making it way more calm, okay, for no reason.
Yeah, exactly, It's like Richmond's already hard, like.
Like why do we have to I can remember all this shit and then add more complicated crap on top of it, like no, thank you.
Yeah yeah. So so it's but you know, magicians are always ceremonialists. They're always in looking for the next kind of thing and some more gear. But yeah, I'm not a big practitioner of Younokian. I'm very outspoken about it, so most people, most people are are kind of aware of that, at least in my my personal circle. I still will work the system, but I have my own safeguards and and so I'm not I'm not not doing the work. It's it's just, uh, they're the Golden Dawn itself.
Even though Enokian technically is the capstone of what is considered stylistically the uniquely the uniquely Golden Dawn system of magic, it encompasses, particularly in the modern day, almost all of Western ceremonial So there's so many other things to do, There's so many other cool things to do. So you know, it's not like I'm not I'm like just sitting here twiddling my thumbs, like I have a whole list of things that I have to get done. They have nothing
to do with Enochian. So that's that's another thing that's that's kind of interesting. And and a lot of people that go on the record and talk about the Golden Dawn have are not in the Inner Order, you know, like very few of are actually have have gotten even beyond the first grade of the Inner Order. Okay, which you know, I'm I'm kind of I'm way past that by now, but hm, but yeah, I mean, the Golden Dawn itself has nothing to do with the Fountain of Youth.
They didn't really give a shit about alchemy, which actually was a disappointment to me because when I was looking through the earliest documents, which are almost all found at the Freemason's Hall and the Sria Library. I was like, they had this one old guy named W. A. Ayton, and he was like apparently their link to the alchemy of the past. And he says in multiple this letters like he didn't have the stomach for a certain type of alchemical work. He like never even did it, and uh,
you don't. A lot of people come to the Golden Dawn, now right. I'm an administrator, so I'm in charge of like interviewing them, vetting them, taking them, the learning about them, you know, through conversation with them. A lot of people are like absolutely in a state of absolute dejection when they get into the like okay, I'm in I'm in the the last grade of the outer order, and there's still no alchemy. What's going on here?
The order versus the inner order, give us a little bit of course.
Yeah, yeah, So the outer order is the Golden Dawn. The inner order is called the Rossi rubier Oria krukis the ruby rose and cross of gold. It's Rosi Krucian. So the inner order is that's where you So I'll put it this way. The outer order is a trajectory,
a system of spiritual alchemy. So spiritual alchemy, absolutely, it's a very very cool, very sufficient system of breaking down the psyche into four parts what we call the elemental self, earth, air, fire, and water, moving through these things, purifying, bringing things into awareness and integration. And if it all sounds very psychological, it's because it is. But let's not forget that the root of the word psychology is seekkey psyche, which means soul.
So you go through this sort of ritual initiatory path of spiritual alchemy, and the magic is done to you. Right, we're initiating adepts, trained adepts are doing these initiation rituals to you. Now, when you get into the inner order, you then do the magic, and you are essentially engaging in what we call rosi Crucian theorgy, and the main goal of which at the introductory levels is to come to unite with what we call your higher divine genius.
Break that one down.
Please, So many people will say, uh, you know, divine, masculine, divine, feminine, so many of these what I will playfully please don't think this is hatefully define as the wo woo spiritualists, we'll say divine, masculine, divine, feminine, all these things, as if they have any clue what the fuck they're talking about.
Break this down, So the higher divine genius is at actually remember that word I said, diamond. Okay, So in the Platonic literature and the of the entire tradition, not just the original Platonic dialogues, but everything that was inspired after those dialogues, because they formed the basis of not
just philosophy, but like modern theology. Even so, at a certain point they become preoccupied with this idea of linking up with their diamond, their personal diamond, which is a tutelary sort of angelic being that serves can tell them the purpose of their life and help lead them through their incarnation and all sorts of things that leads them
higher up the ladder of ontology, so on and so forth. Now, Thomas Taylor, the great eighteenth century translator, who was one of the most prolific translators of all time, he translated all of this stuff. He did not translate the word diamond into its English equivalent, demon, because he knew that was not They were not the same word. They didn't have the same meaning. So instead he chose the term genius, the genius, the personal genius. This is where we get
the idea of, oh, someone's a genius. It's not that their brain is really bigger, they're really smart, but they're inspired by something higher than themselves. And so this is in a fact, this is where the Golden Dawn gets
that language. What you're really doing in the Golden Dawn Inner Order or is trying, now that you've purified yourself and recalibrated your psyche, then to link up with your with your higher diamond, which is you can look at it for your own sake as like this exogynous, like objective entity, but in reality, what it is is it's a higher part of your spiritual architecture that completely transcends your ego.
Mm hm.
So that's that's really what we're looking to do in the outer order, and the goal, the specific goal of the Inner order is it's something called the tikunhao Lam from the Zohar and from Kabbalistic literature, which means the restoration of the universe, the restoration of the eons.
When you said the Kabbalistic literature, do you mean the true Kabbala or the Hermitic Kabbala. I feel like there's an important distinction to be made here.
Yeah, I mean I wouldn't call one true over the other. That'd be like calling that would be like calling my grandfather the true baker. And I mean, depending on who you're talking to, it's it might be right. But uh, I would say, yeah, it's what when I'm when I'm talking specifically about the ticun hala Alam, I'm talking about uh Hebrew Kabbala. There's also a Christian Kabbala that that becomes how the people in the Golden Dawn sort of morph it and into this thing and create the Hermetic Kbala.
And now the difference is the Hermetic Kabala takes Cabalistic principles and projects them onto everything, whereas in the Christian and the Hebrew versions of the Kabbala they only use that that exegetical method, that methodology, a trans translation and interpretation. They only use it for sacred scripture. But then people in the Golden Down and say, oh, we can put this to tarot cards, we can you know, classify the
planets by the so on and so forth. But specifically going to what you what you had asked about the takunaha Alam and the Kabalistic literature, particularly the Zohar, and it's it's sort of appendicies, which is Hebrew Kabbala and the Lurianic Kabbala, the Kabbala of Rabbi Itsak Luria who was also known as the Ari and his student who really wrote everything down. Hi am vital Okay, So you you mentioned taro was your take on tarot cards?
So many people will feel very very strongly.
One way or another on this, whether they have ever actually seen a tarot deck or not.
What's your take?
I like him. It was when I first started, it was my preferred method of divination because I'm a very visual person. Uh. I had some really interesting experiences in the beginning where I would ask a question, and I would ask the same question, and I would I would keep pulling the same card over hours days. That kind of freaked me out when I first started working with them. Now it's to the point where I don't need to
divine all the time. You know, It's like I I just I don't need to divine to know, like what the traffic's going to be like on my way to the grocery store and even some big events in my life. It's kind of like, do I really want to know what's gonna Howard? Do I want to just kind of live my fucking life? Do I can I trust myself that, having done all these rituals, gone through all these initiations, that I'm actually the kind of person that can finally
handle whatever happens. Or do I need to sit here like like an anal retentive, uh, you know, sort of gopher, just just drawing and reading cards. You know, I don't When I do read cards, I don't do more than a three card spread anymore.
You know.
It's like, but if I if I need that much info, like, you know, I'm too close to the to the question at hand to be objective about it. So I don't really.
Go to.
Diviners and stuff. If I do a lot of elections, meaning if like for the premiere of my first episode of The Channel, I chose specifically it's called electional astrology. I chose a specific time from that place on Earth that would be helpful or beneficial for this. I did the same thing for my book. I did the same thing for my wedding. So I'll use astrology more than I'll use taro nowadays. I think the terror is really
good if you want to do meditations and contemplations. It's good for personal work that's not necessarily divinatory.
Okay, now talking about astrology, you're somebody who with all of your background, with all of your research, all of your education, you still look at the storyline as if that has something to do with you personally.
Break that down, please, I think it has to do with everything and everyone personally. My main break, my main break, happened pretty early on, where again I realized I had something in between me and the experience of humanity that was sort of you know, my inheritance over the course of thousands of hundred, probably hundreds of thousands of years. Okay, there was something preventing me from engaging with my humanity, and the way that it manifested was in things like
boredom and anxiety and this. Then so you go and you try and distract it with food, video games, sex, music, and it's just this itch that doesn't go away. And I found out pretty early on, like, oh, it's because there's this thing that's preventing me from just experiencing reality, and that a lot of that thing is that that perceptual interface that gets installed through things like you know,
educ institutional education. So now what I have found in divorcing myself for a time from all of those things. You know, there was a there was a time many many years that I did this stuff and had no ties to academia. The experience of it really revealed the truth of it to me, and it also it also integrated me into you know, this universe that I'd always kind of felt like a little ship just on a getting rocked from from side to side, through through the storms.
I finally felt like I was a part of this you know, teleological machine of the cosmos. And I did not I don't get rid of what I under stand in terms of you know, modern science, modern astronomy. But the thing is this, when I die, what the fuck does any of that matter. I don't die with the facts. I die with my experience, and so it's I can't We're taught nowadays to continually outsource the locus of like epistemological authority, right, so like what can and cannot be known?
We got to leave that to these authorities over here and these over there, and those people will never fucking speak to each other. And finally, to the end degree, they won't be able to see the forest from the trees. Okay, so it becomes this Tower of Babbel situation where everybody's speaking a different language. So it's that doesn't really bring us to wholeness and integration and fullness. But what I do is I take my subjective experience of being in
the world. I take the sort of objective criteria and quote unquote facts that are given to us by observable, empirical, you know, sort of science, and I don't need one to explain away the other. I hold them side by side and I allow them to communicate with each other, but one is not like they have their own domains
of authority, and I think that's really important. We get a lot of talk about cognitive dissonance, and there's only you're only gonna have cognitive dissonance there because somebody fucking trains you into buying the bullshit that it's got to be one or the other, when in reality, like life is a capital M mystery and a mystery, particularly when we say something like the mystery traditions, the mystery cult is not it's not a puzzle to be figured out.
It is an experience. It's something to be experienced. It's not the mystery traditions. You don't get like these big secrets like oh my god, now I know the world, what the how the world was made and all this stuff. No, you're being introduced to it away a way of walking this path to have those experiences, and then when your
experience of that is your own. So, you know, I think that with life, I have to approach life as if it is a great, beautiful and terrifying mystery that needs to be experienced and not you know, that doesn't mean I don't want to know anything about it. I have to cultivate my intellect. I have to do that. I mean, because human beings are given this great gift. But I can't allow the intellect to take over and remove my humanity.
You know.
That's that's what's causing all this existential friction in us, I believe, and and it's it's one of the this is what initiation has has taught me to understand, and it's taught me how to be in the world again. And it's you know, that's why I get very passionate about it because it it's think about it. If what I'm telling you actually exists, What if the way that I'm explaining what I went through and how I arrived at this wholeness actually exists in things like Freemasonry to
a lesser degree the Golden Dawn. Certainly, if you follow the system Martinism, then yeah, the powers that be wouldn't want you to fucking look at anything I'm doing. They would they'd love to paint a gigantic fucking target on my face and the face of other Freemasons and other people like that. That's the whole thing now, And I speak here generically to the audience, right, you are the
fucking syop. It's not freemasonry. You are the syop, the perceptual filter, the thing that is installing you like a goddamn alien on your on your head that you're not even aware is there. That is the syop.
Okay, So to those Christians out there before I ask my final two questions to you, what is Martinism and how does that apply to everything that we've been talking about this evening.
So Martinism is a tradition coming out of primarily France in the eighteenth century.
It's not Martin Lutherism. Correct, No, okay, mak you sure, no, no, No.
It's actually named after well, there were two two qualifying people involved, but I'll name the one that it's named after. His name was Louis Claude de San Martin. So Martinism comes from his last name, San Martin, Saint Martin, and he wrote beautiful mystical philosophical works under he wrote the mononymously under the name of the unknown philosopher, and he did not create an order. He worked privately with certain students,
and then his students went off and had students. Okay, So now these grandchildren, so to speak, of Louis Claude de Saint Martin system, they meet up one day in Paris and their names are Augustine Chabusseau and Gerard Nkos who's also known as Papou or PAPIs. They meet and they basically say, wait, hold on, you had a teacher who studied with Louis Claude de Saint Martine, So did I? So did I? You know, Like it's like or your teacher studied with someone who studied with so you know,
like that almost like apostolic succession, so to speak. And so then they decide right, being Freemasons in the.
They were confirmed freemasons.
Yeah, all of this, nothing, nothing that has left my mouth tonight in terms of orders, does not come from Freemasonry.
Wow.
Wow, that's a lot of orders.
It is, it is. And Freemasons love orders, and we love paper, we love little little certificates, we love new rituals.
Yeah, we got badges.
Exactly.
It's like boy Scouts, but for like grown men it is.
It's like, literally very much is.
The boy Scotts in America is a whole other conspiracy.
We can go down another night, but yes, yes.
So it's effectively it's out of all of these traditions. It's much less ritualized. The initiations, of course are ritualized, but the practice is contemplative, and it's it's prayer based, it's it's actually we call it the way of the Heart. And and so there's really not a whole lot of Martinist ritual that you are necessarily doing on your own.
And you know, a lot of it consists of reading the Psalms and doing certain studies and uh and praying and and it's it's a devotional path, right, like for anybody that's familiar with the Eastern stuff. Martinism is like the baghdy, you know, the sort of thing that we have in the Western naesetary traditions. It's it's, it's it's
certainly a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful system, and it's it's a it's a welcome break sometimes from having to, you know, like have all regalion, do all the rituals. So it's it's brought me a lot of peace and I really enjoy it.
Okay, So to circle back, all things considered, you have been a member of UH. I feel like it'd be incorrect to say Martinis, Freemasons, and Golden Dawn. I feel like you probably are a member of multiple orders, but those might be the main three, right, mm hmm, Okay, all this considered, you also claim that you are a Christian. May I ask, respectfully, sir, what denomination you claim to be.
A part of. I don't.
I don't. I don't claim to be any denomination, but I will say this I am. You will find in Martinism, UH They're not officially linked, but you will very often find when there is a Martinist chapter somewhere, it has this kind of like sister church. Okay, and so I belong to that church which considers itself pre Nicene Christianity.
Now we're talking Ethiopian or Eastern or Oriental Orthodoxy.
Just before the nice scene creed. Okay. So because early the earliest forms of Christianity were in the Mediterranean, right the churches that Paul was communicating with and so on, where the apostles were at. But it does not claim to, you know, necessarily be of one particular school or sect it is associated with. I would say Rosie Crucianism and
certain forms of Gnosticism as well, but we don't. It's basically like people who look at this stuff and integrate it on a mystical and esoteric level rather than biblical literalism that drives everybody apart and needs to like choose a side and choose a team. You know, that was never the message of Christ. I don't care who you are. That was never. You can argue with me to the cawskumb with never the message of Christ. So you know
these kinds. There's this whole thing called the Independent Sacramental Movement, and I recommend if you haven't heard of it to check it out. It's essentially a tradition of what we call wandering bishops that come from various sects of the churches that have been anathematized or kind of outcast, and they have gone on because there's nothing outlawing a bishop for making a priest. You lay those hands on there, you do that ritual. It don't matter what church you
belong to. This guy's a priest now. So it's you know, there's there's a whole tradition out there called the independent Sacramental Movie. I would say we're kind of adjacent to that, but we're much more esoteric. We you know, a good example of of the I s M would be the
Joeanite Church. Okay, if you look up the the uh Joanite or Apostolic Joeanite Church, they they're they're usually considered within within the IS s M. But so so, I mean I I served as a deacon for seven years and then I was ordained as a priest in that order and uh, and I administer all seven sacraments. I've married people, have baptized people, I've you know, done all that kind of stuff. I've even done extorcism. So so
you know that that's kind of where I stand. I I have a very different relationship to Christianity, and that I don't fucking need to. I don't need anybody to tell me what it is ever, christ You know that that's that's really it, because we have everything we need and and we have a lot of extra shit that just kind of gets in the way. But yeah, so that's where I say it all the time, like most Christians wouldn't consider me a Christian, but at the end of the day, I don't give a shit.
With that being said, I need to ask this question. And I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm being a bit of a dick, But there are those of the Christian faith that would say the fact that you are a part of so many secret organizations makes it inherently non Christian. And they will quote Ephesians five, John eighteen, Matthew five, Mark four, second Corinthian six basically to say.
That if you are a part of a secret organization of.
Any type, any even if that's a secret order of Catholic priests, doesn't matter.
A secret order must.
Inherently be evil, and if it is done behind closed doors, let it be brought to the lights.
What was your take on this, sir.
Christianity was a secret organization.
When you break that down, what do you mean?
It was a mystery cult? These people, these people could not. These people could not.
When they were being like crucified for their beliefs.
You mean, well, there are certain certain forms of the christian of people in Christianity who have come forth like Jesus, like the apostles, But not everybody did that. Sure, not everybody proclaimed their faith in other words, because they were murdered for it, right, exactly exactly, So, I mean there's another reason why why you would have to keep things secret, you know what I'm saying, because the people won't accept you. Now,
that's the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is that the same kind of rhetoric and hate and distrust that people would foist upon quote unquote secret organizations, secret secret organizations. What we have a fucking sign on the door that tells you where and when we meet. How is that secret? I'm out here doing this thing. You know, nobody's gonna yell at me. I can talk about this stuff till the cows come home. There's there are no secrets. If you want to become
one of us. You will find your way to it.
To do you want to ask one if you know what I just said and you know the math behind it.
Yeah, but aside from from any kind of like you know, conspiratorial numerology, it's it's like one of the things we asked you when you come to Freemasonry eight or nine different times, is this of your own free will in a court. You see this throughout in the Golden Dawn and free and Martinism. Are you making this choice because somebody pressured you into we're not allowed to solicit. We're not we're not allowed to go out there and quote
unquote recruit. That's against Masonic uh, you know, sort of good behavior. But yeah, Christianity, for sure, in the beginning had to keep itself. They had to They were meet in houses, you know, they didn't have these these these beautiful churches. And in short, the Roman Empire you know, eventually incorporates them. But I mean it's it's through a long tradition of martyrdom and hiding. I mean, look at it this way. Can still go to Egypt and I
go every year. You can go to the Mortuary Temple of the Queen Hatchepsit right, one of the few queen pharaohs in ancient Egypt. And you will find what appeared to be templar crosses. I don't, I'm not saying they are, but they look like the red templar crosses. And the Egyptologists there inform us, and we know from from certain textual histories that they would leave these signs so they would know this is a safe place to meet and have our ritual. At that point it was, it was
already ruins. So yeah, I mean, there are plenty of people who you know, who know who I am, and I'm sure there are a lot of people now that are coming after Freemason's. They bombed the Scottish righte in Athens, Greece. They your brother was shot point blank coming out of lodge a couple of years ago. Bricks have been through our our Masonic temple window. So it's like, yeah, more
encouragement to like, just like, I'm not like that. I'm ready to do fucking battle, you know, because I think that if the the overwhelming population has been so mind fucked that they are basically everyone is part of some part of a raving lunatic mob. And so it's like at this point, to completely capitulate is to sign my
own death warrant eventually. So, uh, you know, I'm a little bit more proud of being outspoken against this stuff and trying to to you know, I show up hard against it, you know, because I'm not.
I'm not.
I'm not really afraid of any repercussions from one side or the other. There are brothers who think that this is what I'm doing right now is on Masonic conduct, because I'm talking about talking about sticking up for myself and for the fraternity.
But you also haven't given any secrets, you haven't given any past codes, you haven't told us how to do the proper handshakes at different levels, like you're you're all good.
Yeah, it's it's it's just, you know, Masonry asks you to be a certain way in the world, and that is what we would call, you know, up upstanding, upright, and square. So, uh, some Masonic, some Masonic jurisdictions have written into their ritual lectures, their charges and stuff. Are you not supposed to get enter into argument with people who defame the society. You're not supposed to, you know.
But at the end of the day, Like I always point back to the founding Fathers, right and like they caused you know, it was specifically a couple of Freemasons who did who or organized the Boston Tea Party and had a big part in the revolution and the founding of this country. You can say what you want about them as people the same way. In three hundred years from now, people will be criticizing us for things that
are completely normal right now. But at the end of the day, you know, I think, you know, be a good boy sort of masonry was inserted after like World War One, world War two, when it was you were expected more so to kind of like toe the line. I think certainly in order for Freemasons to stand up for themselves, their sovereignty, their country, their families, they had to, you know, put up a little bit of a fight.
And that's kind of where I'm at now. I'm fully aware I'm not going to change anybody's mind, but I think that there needs to be some pushback and there needs to be some alternative, some sane voice out here for people that are kind of on the fence.
But you also recognize and understand the fact that you are the outlier to say that you are going against our pike, to say that you are going against.
But all of the north, the entire northern jurisdiction of the Scottish.
Rice helped me out real quick, real quick.
When you say the northern jurisdiction, there's a fish out of water asking this question, where does that line draw? Are we talking the Mason Dixon line, but some people claim the south is if you were south of the Mason Dixon line, which I call bullshit.
Where are we talking?
It's I believe from Virginia down to Florida and extending I think over to Texas.
So there's the Mason Dixon line. The people like, for instance.
Really Mason Dixon's a little higher. I aimed to be.
That asshole, but like, I'm sorry, Virginia is not the South. North Carolina is not the I hate to be that dickhead. I don't mean to be. I'm not denying their red neckedness or their hillbillyiness. But the same time, if it doesn't run through your state, you're not the South.
I'm sorry, I'm fucking sorry, but like here we are sorry, not sorry.
You know. Mah Anyway, Well, I think I think you might be an outlier there too. If you come to North Carolina.
Listen, I'm not their barbecue. But I'm sorry you have mountains. You're not the South. I'm very sorry.
Huge ticks, lots of ticks. I'm good.
Yeah, it's uh so. The Southern jurisdiction operates based on Pike's rituals, and and they like his works like Esoterica, Morals from Dogma and so on and so forth. The Northern jurisdiction works older rights, which are effectively the ones that would have come over from the European continent before Pike had had And I'm not again, I'm not a Scottish right mason sry. I'm I've never even seen Northern jurisdiction, so but I'm aware of the infamous kind of like rivalry. No,
I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that, like I'm a complete outlier. I think just my thing is that, you know, I was raised in America in a European home, which, why.
Are you not a Scottish right I understand you fell into your right for reasons and things and stuff, nothing negative.
Because I don't like Pike, and I don't like Pike.
Why Scottish right, is inherently pike Ish.
In the South. Yes, the Southern jurisdiction works the Pike stuff that the Northern jurisdiction. Fuck all to do with Pike. They hate him, they don't want.
Him around, Like, I don't understand why they would follow this person though, Like even just reading his stuff, it's just obnoxious, Like, let's be really honest, and then the way that he believed in and they and what he believed in, and he was upset with people being anything other than pro slavery, and then just all of his work and what he actually worked on, like his history of the person he was, and inherently seems like it goes against the original formation of the Masons and what
they had written down. So I don't really understand why anyone would still to this day follow that, like it would make more sense to remove it.
Yes, well, well, and you do get, you get he's writing in the in the post war South, when he's writing all of this stuff. Yes, he's now a he was, you know, he had an office in the military and of the Confederate Army. He's now lost. Okay, he's lost. That all said, and as we all know, you know, the Confederate States to this day still Barrick Grudge. I mean, I come down here, you want to take a fish about out of water. I mean like, I'm a Yankee in the South of literally literally like I mean they
I've been called a Yankee many times. Yes, yes, exactly. I think my old neighbor, Catfish told me.
Your old neighbor, Catfish said, fucking sends home the fact of what you're saying.
My neighbor is named frog. So like I'm gonna be early honest.
We got my neighbor three streets up named coon Dick. And I don't mean that, I mean raccoon dick. He has three bones on a necklace he carries he uses his toothpick, which is my raccoon dicks.
Anyway, Yeah, it's disgusting.
Yeah, so yeah, that's the South. But I you know, it's I I again, I try to meet that stuff without without condoning any of it. I'm trying to look at the I'm contextualizing everything based off of what was going on in this place at that time, and a lot of a lot of those lines from north to south, northern and southern jurisdiction have exactly to do with the very valid points that you made. It's actually why I will not join one of the reasons why I will
not join the Southern Scottish right now. Here's the thing, though, this is what you find a lot in masonry, and
a lot of people aren't aware of this. Many not all, but many Masons are legacies, which means my daddy did this, his daddy, daddy did this, his daddy daddy, daddy did this, and so now it's like whatever, that kind of like, you know, weird fucking interpretation of freemasonry is just another you know, I don't know, way to make yourself feel like a charitable person that gets kind of like boiled
into this. And this is also why people join these things, is my daddy was the thirty second, my daddy was the thirty third, And there's this mystique towards what was going on because back in those days and to a greater extent today, like we don't talk about what goes on in the ritual. You can read, sure, go read it, but I'm not going to sit here and tell you, you know, then I'd be like it would be fucked up, Like
why did you join this thing? If you're just gonna go around and profane it and talk about it all the time. So but you can read it. Everything's published, Everything is published, right.
So with that, I have to ask you.
There are those that say that to get to the thirty third level of freemasonry, you have to acknowledge that you serve Lucifer.
What is your take?
I did a whole video on the Lucifer question. I would refer everybody.
To that give the plug. Where can they find it?
R kanam ar Ci n vm. It's what is freemasonry? Is the name of the episode I did part one and part two. It's a really really solid breakdown for beginners that'll get you into that. I'm not a third thirty third degree. I do know many thirty third degrees, and they really, at the very least the way that it's done in North Carolina said it's honorary. It's just it's like it's just honorary. It's it's like a boys club, is really what it is. It's it's not we don't
you know. The whole Lucifer thing is is really it's a problem because where we get the term lucifer from is the is the vulgate Latin translation that of the Septuagint. So the Septuagint is the the Hebrew Bible or many books from the anoch degree, right, And it's this one line from the prophet Isaiah where he says he's calling a king of Babylon, specifically a king of Babylon by a title called Eosforspray, which means dawn star of the
morning in the Latin translation. In Hebrew, it's helll is the name uh in the In the Latin translation you get Luki fed or the bearer of the light. Right now, Also in second Peter first, first, actually let me point out that if you just you keep taking if people take that out of context, yeah, I could talk to
anybody's the morning star at that point. If you read the fucking force sentences for paragraphs that are right before that, it's extremely clear he's talking about a king of Babylon, and that's who he's saying has fallen from on high with the thing.
There's multiple times in the Old Testament where a probably speaking to a physical king and referring to him as some sort of a demon. He wasn't talking to the king, he was talking to the demon that was imbuing.
This king to that point. There's more.
But I don't I don't think. I don't, I don't think any I. First of all, i'd have to I'd have to check on that before I agree with you. Second of all, I would say that it's it's abundantly clear that he's not talking to satan uh in this particular thing. This is the origin of the term. And I'll tell you where where this comes from. You you then get the Book of Revelations, which is the last
book written in the Bible. Okay, there's an intertestamental period of four hundred years, so you're looking at a bit minimum four hundred year difference. But you get John of Patmos, who writes the Book of Revelation, and that is where we get the story of Satan as a fallen angel. So you get a biblical herminuticists and patriarchs, the early christiap basiarists like Augustine, they retrofitted this idea of the description of Satan in John's Revelation to fit this kind
of this this passage from Isaiah. It's because and here's the thing. In Second Peter of the same translation, the apostle Peter calls Jesus Lucifer.
That again, contextually speaking, you're right, you're right that when he calls Jesus that he's talking about a light bringer, as in an illumination bringer.
So here's what you're doing. Here's what you're doing. What you're doing is you're kind of selectively kind of playing this game where it's like, well, this, this is more valid than the other, when in reality you're making you're giving yourself the same exception that you're denying over here.
Not necessarily, dude, to say the methodology.
There is not it's not it's not really gibing. But but I get it. You've you've probably got a stake.
In the No.
No, no, to say that would be the same to say that language does not translate or traverse over time. That being said, a butt dial in a booty call would be the same thing. But booty call dial obviously these things mean the same thing. No, a butt dial means a completely different thing than a booty call. To say that, uh, a Lucifer in the Book of Second Peer like you're talking about, clearly means the same as Lucifer being the fallen Angel in another context. That that's intellectually dishonest.
I don't really see how you're deriving that. I think, I think honestly, honestly, if I'm speaking honestly, I'm feeling a difficulty in communicating this stuff with you because I would have to sit you down and like take you through interpretational hermeneutic class uh for you to be able to understand what I'm talking about. But there is no reference. There's no reference to Satan as Lucifer in anywhere in the Bible. Zero, there's zero reference.
I would have zero reference.
It's it's other it's other people translating it as such, saying, oh, here, Lucifer is Satan. It doesn't say in the Bible. If you can show me where in the Bible it actually says it using the vulgate Latin. Satan is referred to in the New Testament when he tempts Christ, when Christ is talking to the the the the heads of the Synagogue. Satan is referred to in the Counts of Elyon. He is a kind of court adjudicator in the Old Testament, but he's never referred to as Lucifer in the Bible.
How about Isaiah. We're talking Old tests.
But that's the thing that it doesn't say it's Satan. It's just what I just said to you. He's calling a king of Babylon Lucifer. He never equates him with Satan in the Book of Isaiah.
No, No, you're talking about the Latin Vulgate, right, we're talking about.
Yeah, but it's the Latin Vulgate. It's the same book. It's just a different translations. The Greek is Aos forrest de proie, the Hebrew is hellel. I just told you all that. Nowhere does he say Satan.
You said Latin Vulgate.
So I found example in the Old Testament of the Latin Vulgate where Lucifer is being mentioned as a sense of Satan, as in the Falling Angel. But we can talk about this another time. I would love to have you back on the show.
Bro.
I feel like we barely just scratched Jesus Christ. I feel like we barely scratched the surface of what you could bring to the table. Honestly, So, as we are rounding out this episode, brother, where can the people find you? Where can they find your content? Where can they find your podcast? Your socials? Give yourself all the shameless plugs at this time.
Ike Baker dot com. I k E b A k e R dot com. That's got like most of my stuff up there. The last documentary presentation I made for the Arcanum channel, the last three podcast episodes I did, I got my blog up there, and uh, just about anything else that you want to know about what I'm doing, it's all on there. The YouTube channel is Arcanum a ar c A n v M. It's like, uh, sort of like type styled like the Latin would have been kind of foolish, but I liked it at the time.
That's uh, that's really that's where you can find most of my stuff. All my my socials are on there. It's under I'm under the same name on Facebook and Instagram. Uh, I don't really do uh TikTok or anything like that so or snapchat. So really just Facebook and Instagram. But the main thing is gonna be Ikebaker dot com.
Fuck yeah, dude, absolutely so all the good cult members please go give our boy a follow, come help us boost the algorithms across all the platforms.
As you have heard.
On this episode, he is a wealth of knowledge on all the things and the stuff, and brother Ike, I hope that we can have you back on the show sooner rather than later to break down even deeper into so many things that we barely scratch the surface on. Kind of mentioned in passing, but we need a deeper dive on if you'd be willing, I'm sure our listeners would love to hear it.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, There's there's so much too, There's so much to talk about that it's just like, you know, we we might we might serve ourselves a little better choosing like one topic to dial down into, you know.
But I also like you about side masonry, dude, I have so many other questions I didn't get to ask you on this episode, honestly.
Yeah, well we can. We can dive into that and other stuff on the next time. But thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it, and thanks to everybody that has tuned in and listened.
Lily Ravenly, if you have anything you would like to send off as far as the cult members to give them a little.
Bit of a you know, a vibe. Where are you at with all of this?
I thought it was really interesting. There's a lot of information, like a lot of information, So I liked it. I mean, I was a lot more breakdown of things that I've been curious about, So I'm definitely interested in having you back on to break everything down even further so that way we can kind of dispel a lot of these conspiracies that many of these organizations have around them and actually getting to the actual scholarly the information about it
is what I'm interested into. So thank you for illuminating us with all of this information, because I'm sure that actually helped a lot of us understand more about it.
So good cult members. As we wrap this episode up, you would like to get your start in the buying and selling and trading of gold and silver, Bully in the go to link in the description below to cecsilver dot com and get your start today. Do you want to buy a little bit? Do you want to buy a lot of bit? Listen, talk to your financial advisor, talk to your CPA whoever's handling your your retirement portfolio, and ask them what they think about investing in precious metals.
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