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But now we wait till and be welcome to stuff you missed in history class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to Casual Friday. I'm Holly Fry. And I'm Tracy Bwelle.

Then I told Tracy during one of our breaks while recording our Madame Blavatsky episode that there was a detail about her I was withholding for this because it's not that important to her life story, but it's kind of gross and fascinated me a little bit.

I kind of braced. I was like, what gross and exactly what are you talking about?

She allegedly smoked 100 cigarettes a day.

That's a lot. That's how many? Five packs. Wow. Now, I will say this. I may have grown up in a household with an adult that smoked about that much.

Yeah, it was yucky.

Even when I was a smoker, which is a long time ago, I still found that yucky. Yeah.

Because everything just gets covered in smoke and it all, like the whole world has a yellow sheen on it. Yeah, but it just was fascinating to me. I was like, I don't know how someone who does that travels as much as she does because you would think like her lung capacity would be diminished. Well, and like when do you have time to eat.

Right. I mean, I picture her smoking while eating and in fact, all shot is said to have met her before that séance started on that farm in Vermont. They had had like a meal first, like they served lunch first. And he waited for her to go outside, to smoke, to go approach her and speak to her for the first time. And I'm like, I'm surprised she made it out the door.

Like, yeah, well, like I mean, I know we're talking about, like, modern manufactured cigarettes versus whatever, like wrestling that was probably needing being rolled by hand. But like the people I have known that characterize themselves as chain smokers were smoking more like three packs a day. So five just seems like so many.

Yeah. I mean, that's like four cigarettes an hour, presuming you didn't sleep. So obviously she did sleep. So that means like probably more like six an ounce of light. It is a lot.

But I know she is so fascinating.

I feel like I could see there's a part of me that completely understands how her world unfurled from being that sort of clearly the part of her that I kind of identified with was the descriptions of her when she's younger, where it's like on the one hand she's very stubborn and a little bit bratty and really saucy and talks back to everybody. But she also was like an academic achiever and, you know, bookish and nerdy. Sure. And I was like, oh, yeah, I understand all of this.

Yeah. And then how someone like that would long for more than what the world offers them in terms of interestingness and starts to unfurl a long list of things that are probably untrue, some of which got backed up by her family enough like it became family law. Enough that I think she probably started believing it. Yeah.

And then after that, like once you're once you believe your own life, the rest gets real blurry and you begin to make a world of your own design, whether it's rooted in reality or not.

Fascinating. Yeah. Yeah.

Anytime we have somebody that we talk about on the show whose focus we might find in like a New Age bookstore today, I'm like I'm always reminded of various people I have known in my life who at the time, like when I was in my 20s or or, you know, teens or whatever, I was like, wow, that person really has some kind of key to another mystical doorway.

And then later I was like, did they, though? Right. Well, and it's interesting you mention that because there are plenty of modern historians and also just people who study religion and philosophy that will say, like, you can see how New Age was seeded, like these ideas, the more kind of watered down new agey ideas that are kind of rooted in Eastern religion or Eastern beliefs, but have gotten really like Westernized in ways that don't really understand the actual basis of those beliefs.

Like a lot of people attribute that to Blavatsky. Yeah, like she brought these ideas over in a way that was not really completely understanding them, not completely respecting them. I mean, as I said, she was so problematic about being like, I need to go to this place and learn about, you know, a higher sense of purpose in reality and the things that we cannot understand in our world from these people who clearly have the key. Oh, they don't have the key.

They're stupid and they've been ruined in some way. I will move on to the next thing. Like, it's very it's very problematic. And so you start to really realize that in some ways she was rewriting things to suit what she wanted them to be, not really taking them from the sources right away that respected them for what they were. Oh.

Oh, Madame Blavatsky. In your fringy, long loose robes, yeah, yeah, she's an interesting one, we talked about Mother Shipton this week.

If we did so, I mentioned in the episode that I had told you that I was going to do this episode if I could find enough. And then I was surprised by how much I wound up finding. In addition to that, my process was basically to go through, bookmark a bunch of stuff and grab various papers, start going through it and take a bunch of notes. And I had taken a bunch of notes. That were based on that second edition of the first book that included mother ship and whole biography, hmm, not really realizing that it was like a second printing of something that had come earlier and having no concept at all that the earlier works than that had no reference to her biography in any way.

And I realized relatively late in the game that all of my notes were in entirely the wrong order. And I was going to have to like go through and move literally every piece of it around to somewhere else to make it make any sense.

Whew. That's always fun. That's always a fun moment when you go, oh, this is.

Yeah, it's like all the messy mess. But it worked out, yeah, and was funny, thank you. I love that it's just a it's a funny topic inherently.

Yeah, yeah. One of the things that we did not mention that I was trying to figure out whether to mention a lot of the stereotypical tropes that were used to signify, which is.

Are also used in like anti-Semitic caricature. Yes, absolutely. So there like there has been some discussion about like what the order of that is.

And whether it's that these markers, these like physical markers on people's faces that were considered to be unnatural and wrong in some way were were used to create like caricatures of which is as well as caricatures of Jewish people or whether one of them followed the other. And as far as I can find, it seems like these same tropes used on multiple different groups of people, not so much that one of them fed into another. Right. It's more just like a shorthand way to convey otherness.

Yeah. In a manner that is ugly and not to like the standards you yourself would identify. Yeah, yeah.

There was a phrase in this outline that I did not comment on while we were talking because it would have taken us way off course. But there's this line that you wrote about the baby doing mischief, which is unseen hands pelted the neighbors with rotten apples and garbage. And I had this flashback, OK, when I was a kid and the David Letterman show began. One, I didn't have a bedtime like I just never did. My parents, everyone in my family has sleeping issues and so my parents were never hardcore about it.

But even when they did try to send me to bed, I would just, like, stay up late and, like, sneak to the back of the living room and watch David Letterman. But one of the great things that they did, I thought it was great and it stuck with me forever, is when Chris Elliott used to appear on David Letterman in the early years as this sort of random character. But one of the lines he would say all the time, which is always stuck with me, was they pelted us with rocks and garbage.

And so when I read this, I was like, it is Chris Elliott.

Chris Elliott wrote this out and that's all I could think of. They pelted us with rocks and garbage.

That whole that whole lengthy biography that he made up that just includes so much. That's just fantastic and strange and clearly not a real thing. I don't know, it's it amused me to read it. Well, we know that he loved poetry and gaming, so it makes sense that he would want to make some stuff up to maybe support the problems created by the other one.

Yeah, yeah. It also was it was more fun to me to read all of these. Just they were they were fun reading for me and a lot of them, in spite of the like intense misogyny of one of them in particular, I had a good time reading them, which was a nice breath of fresh air, because when I got into the one that was about John Cleve Sims and the Hollow Earth, I was looking forward to reading like all of the weird documents of that.

And I actually found specifically like the the book that had detailed all of his theories to be fantastically boring.

And I also did not realize getting into it, that his son had lifted a bunch of the same text. So when I was reading his son's writing, I just I got into this part that was the same as the boring thing I had already read. And I was like, wait, am I making this up that I really read it all of this before?

Or is it just so not captivating to me that I have invented the idea that I read it already? Double barreled boring. Yeah, I don't know why it did not strike me nearly as delightful and interesting as I hope that it would, but it did not. This one, on the other hand, did. So thank you for your poetry and gaming problem. Yes. Mr. Head, you made us giggle today.

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