The Hidden Esoteric Roots of the Protestant Reformation

In this episode of the Let’s be friends podcast, we are joined by Anthony Westage. Anthony is the host of the Reversion Podcast and Substack, where he writes about current events, theology concerned with the end of the world, human history, and the final destiny of souls—a place where you can "reclaim your mind in the age of distraction."

Join Anthony and me as we discuss the hidden connections between the Protestant Reformation, Kabbalah, and the spiritual evolution of Protestant Christianity. Discover how esoteric beliefs have influenced modern Christianity by weaving their way in through the Protestant Reformation. Explore the deep ties between spirituality, technology, and esoteric traditions, including Kabbalah, the occult, and their influence on modern society and religion. This conversation delves into the history, symbolism, and spiritual implications of these themes, offering a unique perspective on the current spiritual and technological landscape.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome back to the Let's Be Friends podcast. With us today is a new friend who you may know is Anthony Westgate on social media. Anthony is an Orthodox Christian researcher and an eschatologist. He is also the host of the Reversion Podcast and Substack, where he writes about current events, theology concerned with the end of the world, human history, and the final destination of our souls. His Substack is a place where you can reclaim your mind in the age of distraction. Welcome to the show, Anthony.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

Thank you for having me, Cara. Appreciate being here. It's an honor.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Oh, I'm so excited to have you here. And I feel like we were meant to be friends because you are good friends with a dear friend of mine, Nick Hinton. And that's uh yeah, he was a guest on your show. He gave your test his testimony on there.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I met with Nick uh on a recent pilgrimage. I went on to uh uh Fort Ross uh for the hundredth anniversary there, so it's good to meet with him.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Yeah, it's uh it's a chance encounter to cross paths with Nick. He's like uh a wandering nomad kind of right now. Um yeah, he was just actually passed through Texas a couple weeks ago, and it was it was good to see him, and I think he's settling back into his quest to be normal. We'll see how long that lasts.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

But um anyway, I've I so I I saw your interview with Nick. I loved it hearing his testimony, even though I've heard it a few times on the show. He's been a uh co-host for Let's Be Friends a few times, but it led me to your Substack, which is amazing. Everybody, you need to check out the reversion, it's so good. And I came across an article on there that really caught my eye about Kabbalah and the Protestant Revolution, which is a topic that has really kind of like sparked my interest lately as a new Christian who Orthodox Christian who first fell into Protestantism coming out of the occult. And I would love to talk about that in our conversation. But first, would you let the listeners know a little bit about your background, how you came into orthodoxy, some of your testimony?

SPEAKER_02 2:24

Yeah, I mean, I don't think my testimony is that much different than many other recent converts that I happened to meet. Uh, I, you know, have kind of the usual like awakening that that happened during uh you know, during the the the COVID lockdowns and all that, while everyone was losing their minds. And uh, you know, just actually seeing that Psyop manifest in the material world with everyone hiding their faces and things like that. It just really shook me to my core. And uh, you know, I was already very conspiratorial. Um, you know, I'm old enough to remember watching the uh World Trade Center come down and all that. So I was like, that kind of uh was my intro to questioning the the world around me. And uh so that that just kind of did it for me. But um, you know, at that time during COVID in 2020, I was really, I would say heavily into uh psychedelics, uh getting starting to dabble in new age. I didn't really, I wouldn't consider myself someone who was actively into the occult. I was more of a an unknowing observer of it. Um I was certainly into the whole psychedelic culture, which is obviously very occultic. Um and so, you know, I I think that in a in a strange way, that kind of helped open my mind to the uh the like the I guess the spirit realm, like the the reality of the spirit realm and how the spirit realm intersects with the physical realm. Like I was already kind of conscious of that from psychedelics. Um, and so I guess uh, you know, I'm not uh talking about my conversion yet, I'll actually get to that now, but that's just some background. So that was like all happening at once. And I I grew up Protestant and um you know charismatic specifically. So that's there's also a lot of occult stuff there uh that I didn't, you know, I didn't realize until I read Father Sarah from Rose. So that book was very fascinating for me, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. And um and so you know that I had very kind of uh unique inter uh uh unique interaction and experience with uh Protestantism, evangelicalism, you know, bouncing around these different denominations. Uh and uh basically I went to university to study theology. I was into theology at the time, and so I went to a Protestant Bible college, and um I I think at that point I was like maybe I don't remember when I started smoking weed at like 19.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Me too.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

So I know I know that, and I'm trying to like I don't even remember the timeline, man. It's like really blurry back then, but uh yeah, I think like around that time I I was interested in studying theology. Uh, but anyway, um I continued to kind of do that a little bit during university. I met with other uh you know like-minded individuals who were like low-key, uh doing all that stuff uh secretly. And so um, you know, I kind of maintained that that uh interest in in uh drugs and stuff, and like uh basically that overtook my studies. I did the whole you know party bro thing uh about sophomore year, and it, you know, just that that kind of set the precedence for the rest of my uh my twenties, and then yeah, like I basically when I had that awakening and uh during COVID, I was like, all right, you know, uh what do I like? I was starting to notice all these patterns, right? It's like, what are the patterns that you see? This is this whole thing is an attack on the family, it's an attack on Christianity, it's like the opposite, like you start to notice all the evil things about the world are uh like the on the exact opposite of of Christianity. So thank God I I still kind of maintained that knowledge of of Christianity. I I didn't become like a full-blown atheist or anything. I was probably some kind of agnostic, but I think I still believed in God. Um, and I knew I knew like at this point that I'm that I'm talking about in the you know 2020, um, I I knew that I was basically like one prayer away. Like I was just like one repentance away from kind of like re-aligning with uh Christianity. So like I knew if I just prayed like you know, God, I surrender, or whatever it was that I thought um, that I would be kind of back into like I I'm basically making that acknowledgement of the that the truth is in God and in Christianity and Christ or whatever. Um and so that basically happened. Like I felt like I was getting waterboarded psychologically during COVID, and I just basically uh, you know, did that prayer. Um, and I don't even remember exactly what it was, but it was basically like, I'm submitting to you, God, kind of thing. Like, you know, I I want out, I want out of this. Like, I submit to you. What do I have to do? And the next day I just was like, all right, I guess I'm like a Christian now. Like, where do I what do I do? I guess I'll I'll pick up where I left off, like when I was in college. Like, and that was um, I was I was a Calvinist.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Yeah. So I was like, I guess, like, do I go back to like a Presbyterian church? Like, do I, you know, do I pick up my ESV? And you know, like what I don't know where where to where to pick up, like, because that was partly why I left Protestantism too, or left Christianity, that's kind of all I knew. Um, was I was frustrated with none of these denominations agreeing, and you know, on basic rules of faith, like how do you baptize somebody, how do you um, you know, is there any port importance in the sacraments, um, things like that, like that were just basic stuff. And that frustrated me because none of them could give like this kind of universal account for like what is what is correct. Um, so anyway, I yeah, like that's you know, long story short, I'll wrap it up here, but I had all these books on my bookshelf that I had from when I was in university. I took a class on Eastern Orthodoxy. And so I had all of this uh what I what I now know to be catechitical work on my bookshelf. I had all these early church writings, and when I was like reevaluating like where do I pick up, I was just like, well, I'm gonna start with the earliest writings I have. And so I just went to those books, and they happen to be, you know, Orthodox books or patristics and you know, explicitly Orthodox books. So um I started there, and then I just uh you know did like a process of elimination. It's like, well, I I don't I don't see any of this stuff in in Protestantism. Like I don't really that so I like I rule that out. Um, you know, Catholicism, I wasn't really considering much either, but so yeah, just kind of things just clicked there. That's uh that's how it happened, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Wow. Uh thank thank you for sharing that. It's so many parallels with my testimony. Like I might also was doing a lot of psychedelics, um, started smoking weed early. I didn't grow up in Protestant church. So it's very interesting that you came out of the charismatics from growing up and then went into kind of, I mean, psychedelics and stuff in the spiritual realm, you know, is is I saw like some similarities between the charismatics and and that because I that was the first denomination I fell into as well, um, as a brand new Christian, like six years ago, five years ago, and then hearing that you went to theology school too, and just like also going through like the awakening of 2020 and seeing the patterns in the world and everything, and and seeing that everything in the world opposed Christ, that's also what I saw, because that I realized there was a battle for our souls going on after waking up in 2020, but I was missing the piece of Jesus because I didn't believe in him, and I knew the spiritual realm was real because I had insane experiences there. But once I got the Jesus piece, it clicked, and I was like, this was this is everything, like even like time starts when Jesus Christ was crucified. Like this, like everything in this world, like this world just condemns Jesus and it really solidified. I was like, okay, Jesus, this is the truth, this is God, like fully God, fully human. Um, they sacrificed him. And then, you know, the same thing though, like for me, coming into product being I just defaulted into Protestantism. I didn't even know there were different denominations in Christianity. And then I started questioning them, and I'm you mentioned like none of them had like a like a solid answer to the sacraments or like to how to do things. Like everybody was like, this is the every denomination was a little different, and they all just kind of cancel each other out. And so I, you know, it's the same thing. Research church history, or like you went back to the beginning and to your bookshelf, what was the oldest, you know, teaching? And it's like it wasn't even a choice for me. I was like, this is this is it, this is the answer. This is what Jesus taught the apostles.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, that's why, you know, I the more testimonies I hear, I'm like, hmm. It's like kind of humblings. It's like my experience really isn't that unique, but you know, I I I realize people still like to hear these stories anyway. I do too. Um, but it's just quite fascinating to me how many um people have the same, you know, or similar story, same similar experience. I think, like I said, that I see a lot, I meet a lot of people who had a previous history uh with psychedelics, with new age, with the occult, who end up in orthodoxy. And I am very fascinated by the uh like the the the parallels there. Not the parallels is the wrong term, but you know, the um uh course the correlation there. Like there seems to be something there that's that's making orthodoxy seem to be this logical conclusion to that when people start pursuing the truth to escape all that. Um so I think you know, like I said, the the charismatic movement and being in uh the psychedelic stuff, like that all is at least what's there, even though it's uh you know it's demonic, it's a it instills that recognition of the reality of the spiritual realm. So like that's so it's like kind of pretty hard to be like an atheist or a materialist if you come out of that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Yeah. And it shows you too, like I I mean, with for me, like I knew the spiritual realm was real before I had, you know, was following Christ and understood that the the spiritual realm was the fallen angels and demons. And I ended up um getting very sick mentally from what happened from trauma and also from the experiences in the spiritual realm. Like I was mind-melding with spirits, like a literally giving my free will over to them and allowing them to essentially possess me to certain levels, not full on. But that was made me very sick. And when I started following Christ, it was like these because I was working as a psychic medium, and these spirits that I thought were my friends all of a sudden turned on me. And then when I became a catechumen, it got even worse. And um, so I was looking for healing, like my whole entire life. Like I was like, I'm not well, something's wrong with me, I'm looking for healing. And then when I found out that the Orthodox Church is, you know, essentially seen as the hospital and our sin is our illness, and I wanted to heal, and I wasn't healing in the Protestant church. And so coming into Orthodoxy is a very it's mystical, you know. We have the incense is the Holy Spirit, we have the, I mean, it's a mystery, truly, how the uh communion, you know, be that becomes the the bread and the wine become the blood and body of Christ. I mean, even the divine grace that runs through the priest, you know, to do the baptism, to wash the soul clean, the the charism oil, all these mysteries. It's like you come out of they almost, I've heard, you know, certain, I can't quote what saints or anything say, but like, or even uh priests say like people that come out of the occult are almost more like rightful into orthodoxy because we know like that stuff is very real, but you you aren't you're doing the in the occult, it's the demonic way in the psychedelics, but you want like God's way is the church.

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Yeah, you're just coming from the other side of that reality. Yep, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Yep. And when I, you know, I'm coming out of Protestantism, coming into orthodoxy, I had to do a lot of unlearning. Like I was afraid of the saints. I had this crazy theory that they were the fallen angels in disguise and that I'd be demonically attacked by the icons and just crazy misteachings from Protestantism coming into my mind. Did you have any kind of like strange unteachings or unlearnings that you had? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:08

Oh, yeah, yeah. I actually used that exact term, unlearn it. Yeah, I had to unlearn a lot. It was it was pretty intellectually painful, actually. Um I had a my my hangups were uh surprisingly, the icons I had already accepted from uh a Catholic philosopher I had read in university that really helped me uh kind of um you know harmonize that um that idea of the uh the icons as windows to heaven. And so I didn't have too much problem with that. The veneration, not as I mean, it was weird because I I converted during um at the height of COVID. So people were still at at the parish I was going to local at my local parish, people were still masked there, unfortunately. But I was just grateful that they were at least open at that point. Um, and so for the first like five or six months, it was like that. Like no one was venerating the icons. I didn't want to be the disruptor, I was new, so I just you know did what I just followed what people were doing. Um, and so I didn't get to even venerate. So that that actually, you know, I look back and that maybe was a a a grace of God that um allowed me to kind of um reconcile what I believe about the the veneration of the icons. Like I had that opportunity to uh gain the understanding of uh what icon veneration means. Um but my hangups were I think initially it was probably uh the veneration of the Theotokos and then also the uh commu uh communicating with the saint, like praying to the quote, praying to the saints. We know that it's actually just asking for their intercessions, but that whole notion of like I I remember asking my priest when I was uh a catechumen uh about that. I was like, how you know, aren't the doesn't that imply that the saints are omni, uh are omniscient or omniscient, right? Or omnipresent rather. They're omnipresent because it assumes that like you can say something to a saint and they can hear it. And I'll never forget his answer. He said kind of like what you said, it's just like we don't use logic and reason to explain how that happens. It's just a mystery of the Holy Spirit. Um, we know that the saints are glorified in heaven, and so they receive more capabilities of what they were capable of on earth, not less, right? So like they have that ultimate communion with the with the body of Christ, and like that whole notion of like how death uh bodily death doesn't separate us from communion with the body of Christ. So that made sense to me. It's like, okay, yeah, I mean that that actually does make a lot of sense. Otherwise, you're limiting the communion uh among the body of Christ to being physically present on earth, like being alive bodily.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

Right.

SPEAKER_02 19:23

Um so that helped me a lot. But yes, it was a lot of unlearning. Um, I think it probably helped that I had already kind of written off a lot of the intellectual part of Protestantism in a again in a weird way, like studying philosophy in university. Um, I was exposed to a lot of like the my philosophical studies were primarily postmodernism. So I was already stuck, you know, I had already studied all these uh postmodernist philosophers that had gotten me like questioning um absolute truth and everything. So that you know, that I did a lot of the unlearning process there with uh my ironically, I did a lot of the unlearning of Protestantism in Protestant university, but um, yeah, there was certainly that.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

Yeah. Um, I had the same hangups about the Mother Mary, the Theotokos as well, um, and also like the praying to the saints, the two things that you're saying, because in Protestantism, you know, it's they're like Jesus only, just like direct to Jesus. And I would even tell people like, what's the point of praying to a saint or to Mother Mary when you can just go directly to God? Just go directly to God. And what really like clicked for me was when someone was like, Well, you ask your friends to pray for you. And the saints are, you know, they're our friends, they're the friends of God, and they were just like us, we're alive, living lives like this. Like their stories are real, and I love like learning about the saints. It's really just when you start learning the lives of the saints and the wisdom of the saints, I feel like you just like your orthodox experience just like elevates and things just start clicking so much more because they are alive. Um, you know, we know Christ is still alive, like we our body, you know, will come to its end here, and but our soul lives on in eternity in a timeless existence. We return to God. We are the breath of God. I like that parallel, like we're the breath of God and we return to God. Um, and the saints and those who love God are very close to God. And because of that, you know, it's like they I like I I love like thinking of praying to Mother Mary, it's like she's Jesus' mother, like his respect for his mom. It's like you think of asking someone, can you go tell your son, please, to help out with this prayer? Like she has some poll, you know what I mean? Like it's like Jesus sits on the right hand of the father, and the Theotokus is on the right next to him. And but when I first came into the Orthodox Church, I I repented to God. Deeply with tears for um not understanding the importance of Mary. And I remember at the Protestant one of the Protestant church I went to, which was a Bible church, the only church I actually went to, other than that, was like online, you know, domination learning, that he would say, like, if you grew up um worshiping Mother Mary, that's idol worship, and like they didn't believe she was a virgin and that she was married to Joseph and they had had other kids and all these crazy heresies. And so I really repented to God about that.

SPEAKER_02 22:34

Yeah, and you know, interestingly, um, none of the magisterial reformers even believed what modern Protestants bel like they they had a completely Roman Catholic mariology, they maintained that. Um, they maintained the um perpetual virginity of the Theotokos. They venerated her to varying degrees, um, certainly not the way that we do, but they still, you know, you can see in their writings that they maintained a veneration, a deep respect for the Mother of God. Um, so that's not even there in the, you know, if you if you want to be like one of these like real trad kind of Calvinist reformer reformer types, like they had a pretty Roman Catholic Mariology, actually, that's nothing like what you see today, where they insist on, and that that kind of like shows that the the revolutionary spirit of Protestantism being in a constant a perpetual state of protest against Roman Catholic innovation. So you have the Roman Catholic Church continuing to develop and innovate their doctrine, and then the the the uh the uh Protestant you know the reform movements are just counter-protesting that, like they're they're just going against those um innovations with their own and just doing the opposite. So it's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Yeah, it it's it's really interesting. Like how I mean I didn't even realize like Protestantism meant protest until I thought about the word, and I was like, oh my gosh, protest. And it's like, okay, that makes sense. Martin Luther was protesting against the Catholic Church because you know, lots of the heresies that they had and strange things. He had his 95 theses that he nailed up, but he wasn't protesting the Orthodox Church so much, it was Catholicism. And I think this is a good kind of time to steer our conversation into your article that you wrote about Kabala and the Protestant Revolution. I'm gonna read the introduction, the first the first paragraph, because it just like drew me in. It was you say it is a fundamental mistake to think of the Protestant Reformation as a mere rebellion against the corruption of the Roman papacy. The Reformation is an ongoing cabalistic revolution that has fragmented Christendom into thousands of pieces, imposing the worst catastrophe upon Western civilization. It led to the destruction of tr Christian tradition, the birth of Freemasonry, the spread of nominalism, and the creation of the Antichrist Zionist state. That is yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:12

Yeah, and I I realize um the statement that it's a an ongoing Kabbalistic revolution may seem hyperbolic. There, you know, there was some that that was kind of the point of like, you know, the nature of writing these kinds of articles online is like you you do have to catch people's attention right away.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

You did.

SPEAKER_02 25:34

Um, but you have to, you know, that that statement I I recognize requires unpacking because if a Protestant were to read that, and probably if most people were to read that, they'd be like, that sounds absurd. Um, because they've never heard that heard it described that way before. Whether they uh are are uh knowledgeable of Kabbalah or not, they're gonna be like, that sounds ridiculous. I'm not gonna read something like that uh if they make it past the title. And so, you know, a lot of my work uh in the past, well, basically since I wrote those articles, uh, there's a series of two articles. The other one was more focused on the development of Christian Zionism within that framework. And that was those articles were kind of like the beginning of my research. And it's not that any of it is inaccurate, but I found from getting some feedback that it did require further exploration. Um, and so that's something I would just clarify. That not that it's untrue, but it just does need quite a bit of unpacking. So in the past like uh past year, basically, I've been collecting more research and uh working on a book that seems like it might never get published because it's just like insane the amount of material, and you're covering a 500-year span of history, and it's like and the the research actually keeps piling on. Uh, believe it or not, there's like an immense amount of scholarship on this. Um, you're essentially kind of tracing the history of Western esotericism because much of it was uh perpetuated by uh by Protestants. Um Roman Catholic uh humanists certainly are not uh innocent in that transmission. In fact, it came through the uh uh uh Renaissance Church of Rome at first. So, you know, I go over that as well. I don't think I touched on that enough in those articles, but you know, again, it's it's only so much you can cover in an online article. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

No, it's I mean, for someone like me, when I read that paragraph, I was just like, I need to know more on this because I had lived like some of this a little bit like I didn't even, I kind of came about things a little bit backwards because like we were kind of chatting before the interview started that like we were talking a little bit about the gate program and the gateway um you know method of how the you know the government is using um psychic abilities to do, you know, psychic soldiers and the gateway program and um project, the Stargate project and stuff. And I was like, well, that stuff's real. And but I was like, I didn't study specifically how to do that stuff, but I took psychedelics and this and I was a naturally natural medium for the psychedelic realm, and spirits would talk to me and like essentially taught me how to do all that stuff naturally. And so when I came into Christianity, having the knowledge of the spiritual realm and knowing how the occult worked, and because I was an actual practicing occultist for a couple years, I started seeing this stuff, some of it in Christianity. And it really bothered me. I was because I was very skeptical of Jesus. I didn't even believe he was real. I thought he was a fake person. Um I thought the Bible was all myths. I thought all Christians were in cults. I didn't want anything to do with any of it, but I had a crazy experience that made me a Christian. You know, I mentioned I was working as a psychic medium. I what took the cult to that level that I was actually like doing it, and I had a vision of Jesus, and I'd never read the Bible. Um, but something happened after that vision where I, you know, I wrote a book. Um, I know how hard it is to write a book if you need any help writing your book. Um, but I talk about how that vision changed everything. I stopped all divination, I started like just falling to my knees crying, like, oh my God, Jesus was God, like fully God, fully human, like the Holy Spirit got me. But then I come into Christianity and I see all of this um Gnosticism in Christianity, and I was like, dang, this is like my worst fear that Christianity is fake. And even Nick and I, you know, we're talking for a while because he came out of the occult too. And we're both like, I remember one time in like 2022, we were like, hey, are we being psyoped by Jesus? Are we being psyoped by Christianity? Like, what's going on here? And it turns out we kind of were because the prod I call it the Protestant spell. There is well, because once I left the Protestant church and I went to my first Orthodox church, I literally remember walking out at that day and going, This the Protestant spell, this is nothing like the Protestant church. These are two totally different things. They aren't even like what's been created in Protestantism is not true. I don't believe it's true Christianity. I believe there's one true church. It's the church Christ set up. That's the Orthodox Church. And so I started wondering, like, how did it get like this? Yeah. You know, so and this your what this concept of Kabbalah infiltrating the Protestant church, to me, I feel like this is the thread, the red thread that ties it together.

SPEAKER_02 30:51

Yeah, and I mean it wasn't even just Kabbalah, it was kind of a syncretism of uh esoteric beliefs. Um it was I didn't even cover this part in the articles, but at first, like there was you know, that there was kind of like uh almost a 100-year gap before you see explicit adoption of Kabbalah, because the the magisterial reformers, for the most part, you had some exceptions, like Philip Melanchthon, who's uh Luther's right-hand man, um, who largely had a an explicit aversion to Kabbalah. They recognized that in their writings, which I you know, I argue that that shows how there was an indefinite um knowledge of and and um presence of Kabbalistic learning at the time, that they're even recognizing, like, oh, this is all not like all that Kabbalah stuff is nonsense or whatever they would say about it, right? So there was that influence there that whether or not the reformers themselves rejected it, started to become much more prominent toward the late 16th century, and then very explicit toward the um 17th uh beginning of the 17th century. But what you see in that 100-year gap is uh it during Luther's lifetime, and you could even see I quoted this in Luther's uh in the article, uh quote from Luther in one of his commentaries, I think it's to the a commentary on the book of Galatians, I believe, um, where he's referring to sola fide as um like a form of like he's he's using a uh an alchemical allegory to describe the the process of spiritual rebirth. And I found that that was a very common belief at the time. So to your point about like how you know this is like one of the main things that I uh the comments that I got in in reception to those articles, like a lot of people reached out to me and they're like, I always suspected there was something going on at like during the Reformation, like that's that kind of influenced Protestantism. And the truth to that is like you have to look at the fact that the reformers were subject to whatever the ideological influences were in Europe in the 16th century, and especially within Germany, because Germany in the 16th century was like a hotbed of esotericism. There was already, for like 200 years, there had already been a very prominent influence of alchemy. And so um, and you know, and that's like there's a lot of nuance there too, that I don't, you know, to to just not go too far in the weeds, um there's like a distinction between spiritual alchemy and like the more like laboratory, like you know, uh pseudochemistry kind of alchemy. Um, because like let's not forget, like alchemy is how we got gunpowder, for example. You know, it's like that was discovered through laboratory alchemy. But what these intellectuals in Europe at the time were more interested in, especially within uh Western Christianity, was the allegorical spiritual alchemy. So they would use these alchemical allegories to describe especially the process of spiritual rebirth. And so you had like this new metaphysical framework that they were understanding how the regeneration of the soul occurs, like in a mechanistic way. Because when you like what like what Luther did was he gutted a lot of the theology from it, the mysticism. He was very uh like famously kind of um uh adverse to mysticism, even though he was very in, like it's funny, like Luther was such a polarizing figure because um he he was very paradoxical. Uh he was on one hand very anti-mysticism, but then on the other, he's like influenced by um you know these these uh medieval mystics. So it's like you know, he didn't like uh uh I don't I don't want to say pseudo-Dionysius because we believe in uh orthodoxy that he was actually you know a uh a first century uh saint, a first century figure. So uh Saint he was you know adverse to Saint Saint Dionysius, uh who was very influential. Uh even in Western esotericism, he's a very influential figure. Um and so he didn't like uh uh Saint Dionysius, but yeah, but he was like a big fan of um you know um trying to remember his name. A lot of a lot of this, I'm sorry, I'm a little bit like uh uh blurry on some of the names, but um yeah, he was um yeah, so he was a very paradoxical figure in many ways. That's just one way, but um so yeah, they were using a lot of these alchemical allegories to describe how this occurred because you know, again, they gutted the mysticism, and you had all these really intellectual guys who were searching for something more, like especially the radical reformers. They're like, Luther didn't go far enough, like there's got to be more to this. Like, how do the sacraments actually work? Like, how does that exchange between the spiritual and the material occur? So you still had that sense of like scholasticism and and uh and and um uh uh humanism that is very it's it's like in that regard, Protestants and um and and Roman Catholics have a lot more in common, the fact that they both were appealing to this like humanism, basically, this rationalistic humanism. And and so um, yeah, so basically that is what um you know, without getting to it depends how far you want to get into that, but there's a lot even within that. I spent like a whole two chapters just writing about that part um to kind of bridge the gap. Because, like I said, if you just read that statement, um the the Reformation is an ongoing Kabbalistic revolution. If you were to say that to a Lutheran, for example, who's like very well versed on uh Martin Luther and Lutheran history, they would be like, that seems absurd. Um, but you have to understand that alchemy has an inseparable parallel to Kabbalah. So it was almost just like Kabbalah for Europeans, you know, it was just like Kabbalah for people who like weren't really into Jewish mysticism, but it was like it's from kind of the same, it's the same metaphysical framework, basically. So there's a lot of parallels, but um, so that like when you understand that, it's like, well, you can see that throughout that course of 100 years where there seems to be a gap, that it was actually just very natural how it led to Kabbalah in the uh 17th century.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

The sola fide um that you're talking about in your article, you say, nevertheless, in the light of Luther's Sola Fide doctrine, it is interesting to see how over time it developed into a kind of Kabbalistic ritual magic among modern evangel evangelicals to make a mere profession of faith and be saved, as if the words themselves contain an inherent mystical power to regenerate the individual by simply speaking them. To me, that is so simply, like right clearly, just like make like really makes the point because when I was a new Protestant, like I was told all you have to do is say Jesus is Lord and you're good, you're saved. That's it. You just have to say it from your mouth. I was literally trying to get like my dad to say it, or anybody, just say it, just say Jesus, you're good. No, you said it, Jesus is Lord, you're good, you're sick. And that is it's it's crazy now, thinking about it, because it is kind of just like there that you believe there's a power. Then people say that there's a power in just saying those words, and that is like a method of a cult of like saying things, like spelling and casting spells, and that sola fide doctrine of Luther's, like it literally that is, you know, that's what the Protestant like faith is really based upon that just saying Jesus is Lord and also like that the priesthood of you know all the believers, and just um it's it's super interesting. Like, I I I really I love that part when you brought that up in the article.

SPEAKER_02 40:03

Yeah, I mean it it's basically uh there was there's one scholar that I think describes it very well. He he he refers to um the Protestant movement as a word religion. And when you look at the history, um you see that actually happen in very in a in even in a material sense, because um, you know, as you as you may know, like much of the uh especially the radical reformers, they were iconoclasts. And so uh early on they they basically gutted, you know, they not only gutted the theology, they gutted the churches, they gutted all these Catholic churches from the uh divine images. And what they did to replace them was they wrote uh scripture verses on literally on the walls and on the altar. Um, and so they uh he calls it uh this is um trying to remember the scholar's name. Uh I'm drawing a blank there. There's gonna be a lot of drawing blanks on on these names. There's like so much research. Okay. Um, but he uh he he refers to it as the um the uh the linguistification of the sacred, where you're just turning the sacred, yes, yes, you're you're turning the sacred mysteries into words, or replacing the sacred mysteries with with uh with words. And so um, you know, this is where the again uh you can see the Kabbalistic parallels here because Kabbalah, um, especially like within Christian Kabbalah, which is what this all kind of emerged from. Um, you have uh Yo Johan Royklin, who's kind of like the godfather of Christian Kabbalah, and he wrote this famous work called The Wonder Working Word, and how um, you know, there's this great emphasis on the words themselves. Like this is all like this kind of embodies Christian Kabbalah, where it's like you said, a spell. Like there's a very great importance put on the pronunciation of words because they believe that you know, like Hebrew itself, it has this inherent mystical property, like so just speaking Hebrew words, um, the characters of the Hebrew letters themselves have all these you know mystical meanings and stuff. And so when you combine certain words, it was especially with the Tetragrammaton. Um, so with the Christian Kabbalists, they inserted uh Yav into the Tetragrammaton, and they believed that it's spelled uh Yehoshua. So they were like, ah, see, Kabbalah actually proves Christianity because there's the name of Jesus. So they so that's where that whole notion of like it's not that like speaking the name of Christ has doesn't have power, right? Like we we acknowledge that. Um, but it's like the emphasis on the words themselves having some kind of mystical power apart from the believer.

SPEAKER_01 43:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 43:15

Um, and so yeah, and so like with sola fide, like what you're referring to there, I did find that there, that that statement, a lot of like the research I've been doing the past year kind of has confirmed a lot of the things that I've said in that article that might have left some more critical readers um you know feeling like there's not enough uh evidence to to prove any of that. Um, you know, it might seem speculative or whatever, but I've you know I've done a lot of work to kind of piece everything together. And so um with that in particular, that kind of ties into what I was saying with the with the spiritual alchemy part, how they're they believed that, and this is just to be clear, with More so the radical reformers, uh, figures like Paracelsus, uh Van Weigel, uh later with Jacob Berma, and these were all Lutherans, by the way. Um, and they believed that like that's what they were searching for essentially, is like, how does that part work? Well, like, if we're gonna reject stuff like baptismal regeneration, um, how does that regenerative process occur if sola fide is true? Right? So it's like, well, you're putting all this great importance on faith alone, and so it must happen when the believer acknowledges that they believe, essentially. So it's like, well, something mystical happens there. You're you're making that profession of faith or whatever, and then just magically you're regenerated by the words that you say.

SPEAKER_00 45:00

Yeah, that it's just it's so it's it's crazy to me like thinking about it now because I I really like believed that, and I I got into an argument. Actually, I used to have a podcast called the Not So Secret Societies Podcast. It was really popular, it was all conspiracy. And the woman who was co-hosting it with me, she was like my first Christian mentor, and she was charismatic. I didn't even realize I was learning the charismatics until I kind of was coming out of it. But um we got we ended up ending our podcast. It had a huge falling out because at the time I believed that all that you could not lose your salvation. I had said Jesus is Lord, it was signed, sealed, delivered, done. Um, I'd been, you know, baptized just already, like I had the Holy Spirit now. And she actually she was, you know, more right than I was then because I do like salvation's a mystery. Like when someone comes up to me and says, Oh, I've been saved, it's like, oh, you've saved. Wow, you know, you know, okay, wow. You know, it's just like these, these kind of I'm like, I've said Jesus is Lord, I'm saved, um, I'm gonna be in heaven, like all these certainties, but they're they're not the true teachings of the church. It's it's very interesting. And the concept of sola scriptura, I didn't even realize as a new Christian that I was adhering to that as a Protestant until someone said, you know, you're doing sola scriptura. And I was like, what is that? And it means by scripture alone that you're only doing the 66 books of the Bible, definitely don't read the ones that Martin Luther removed. And you in reading in your article, you say the doctrine of sola scriptura implies the Kabbalistic notion that the scriptures are alchemically encoded with mystical wisdom, which can only be decoded by the individual interpreter acting as the key to unlock their true meaning. And that is so true. Like I witnessed that. I was it's like we would just decode the Bible on our own, and we were decoding the Bible. We were trying to like read Revelation and it was like turning it, I almost called it conspiracy Christianity, where we were literally trying to decode what was in the Bible, like a group of women on a Bible study, and that's so far from what the Orthodox Church teaches. We don't decode the Bible on our own. We go to what the saints had to say, and the church fathers who were illuminated by God to know this because of their sanctification and the aesthetical life that they live. Like we don't just interpret this on our own. Like interpreting on our own is how we got to like 20,000, 40,000 denominations today. But I've seen so many people, and I was doing it myself when I was Protestant, believing that we were the key to unlocking the true meaning. And also people that I've started noticing a trend last year. Um, I would I was working in the public in Austin at a at a at a business where I would see a lot of people coming in, and I've got a big cross, and a lot of Christians would start talking to me about Christianity, and a lot of Protestants started coming in that had this same theme where they were obsessed with the Hebrew, the Yeshua, and they were watching YouTube people that were Jewish, and they were learning about their prophecies, and they were like, I'm a Christian, I'm not a Christian. And I was like, What is this? And I talked to my priest about it, and he's like, This is the Judaizers, this is Judah, like it's this heresy from the first century that's never gone away, that's coming, essentially like coming back. And you have a part in this in your article that says the revolution will be Judaized. And I was just learning about the Judizers, and I was like, Yes, exactly. I see this like happening in Protestantism even now. It's like like all ancient Christian heresies, Judaizing never dissolved but continues its transmission in new forms throughout history. You say that in your article, it's so true.

SPEAKER_02 49:00

Yeah, that I mean that's um that also is one of the things that filled that 100-year gap in the 16th century was again, even though you don't see this explicit uh adoption of Kabbalah among like the larger Protestant movement, uh the the underlying mechanism for for the biblical uh translations and studies was Hebraism. Because they uh emphasized the uh the Hebrew language as like there were so this was this is where the whole like uh intellectual uh you know presuppositions come in of the time because you had uh it's it's essential to understand that like during the uh Renaissance period, like what what kind of drove the motive for all this esoteric syncretism was this notion of Prisca theologia, which was like this um like search for parent, like this perennial wisdom, like the oldest, the oldest theology is the most true, right? And so that's like how they started. Um, they started out with uh Hermeticism. They found the uh the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, and they're like, ah, this is it. We found like this dates back to the um the time of Moses. This is the verbal um esoteric knowledge that has been hidden from history, that what you know wasn't written down, it was just transmitted through um through Moses and and whatnot. Uh that that all was debunked uh later in the 17th century. Um actually, like most of the Prisca theologias were were debunked as being uh post-Christian writings, but um anyway, so you had a similar notion with the um with the Protestants where they they operated under the presupposition of um a return ad fontes, like a return to uh the the uh the sources, right? And so for them, the oldest sources and the most true, the the most true were the original Hebrew writings. So they they they diverted from the the Greek Septuagint the tradition of the Greeks, the the textual uh tradition of the Septuagint, and they put the it's not that they didn't use the tr the Septuagint in their translation work, but they shifted to this um emphasis on the on the Hebrew having more authority. And so what did that require? They didn't know Hebrew. How did they learn Hebrew? They had to go to rabbis, they had to go to these mystical rabbis who who knew and understood Kabbalah. So even if they had this aversion to Kabbalah, they had to seek the wisdom of these Kabbalistic rabbis to varying degrees. They weren't all explicit Kabbalists, but like a lot of the more influential ones were, and they had to go to them for their translation work because they didn't know Hebrew. So even to learn Hebrew, they had to go to them. Um and so this, you know, that this is where like within that framework, a lot of the scholarship did transmit that way. Um, you had, you know, obviously the the printing press drove all this, like the the onset of the of the print revolution was occurring at the same time. Um there's uh there's one author, Elizabeth Einstein, who wrote this great book called The Printing Press as a Agent of Change. And she she had this great uh observation that um the the the Luth you had with the Protestant uh movement, you had for the first time in history, it was a religion that was empowered by technology. Like it wouldn't have been possible without this machine, right? And so um with that came you know the dissemination. Yeah, like with the dissemination of like you know, everyone looks at that and they're like, Well, isn't that a good thing? It like put the hands, it put the Bible in the hands of all these uh peasants who like before before they weren't able to read or whatever. Now everyone can read, it just opened it up to make it available for everyone. And in a sense, sure, that's that would have been a good thing if we were if that were done under the guidance of the church, like to put the Bible in the hands of all the laity, sure. Right. Uh but what happened was it it made it like this form of like biblical subjectivism that you were talking about, where it's like everyone now can just come to the scriptures with their own presuppositions and ideologies. Um, but yeah, what you had was like uh the with with the uh dissemination of the Bible, you had also the dissemination of all these Hebrew texts, all these, you know, the the Talmud, um the Zohar, uh all this all these mystical writings, right? And you had all these um all the primary Protestant uh centers for learning and translation doubled as print centers that were distributing both the Bible, the Prot the Protestant Bibles and uh all this Hebrew literature. Um one of the most prominent ones, uh Bomberg's uh printing press was uh funded by the Vatican. Um so yeah, you have all this, yeah, a lot uh again, the uh the the Roman Catholic Church is is not um you know a passive observer in all this. But um so yeah, you had that happening for for the at least for the first 50 years of the uh Reformation. So that that um contributed a lot to the later adoption of uh more explicit Kabbalistic syncretism.

SPEAKER_00 55:07

That's so fascinating to think about the printing press and it being a technology of that time. And um, I think it was Nick and I were talking once, and he was like, you know, like books were basically like what the first computers and and it's the evolution of um artificial intelligence to even today, like now we have people trusting chat GPT or whatever, like to ask it questions as if it's not biased, and whoever programmed it, it's not biased. And I do personally I talk about this a lot, but I believe there is a connection between the spiritual realm, demons, and artificial like AI technology. I mean, it's um you look back at John D, who was work channeling for Queen Elizabeth I, and he channeled Annachian Magic and the first ciphers for the keyboard and binary code, and that came from the spiritual realm. And so, you know, even and then you think about also the iconoclast and like getting rid of icons. And why did we have icons? Part of the reason was like people we didn't have you know Bibles, but people were orally like sharing um exactly what happened. Yeah, and that these were stories, and so they kind of they got rid of that, and they're like, Oh, well, here, we'll we'll do this. It's you had mentioned the words.

SPEAKER_02 56:22

They replaced it with text, yeah. It was just instead of the images, so so yeah, it was like the whole thing is dependent upon not just not just the text being available to everyone, but also the um the assumption that there's a broader literacy, right? It's like if so that could have all happened, but what if the whole population was also illiterate? Right, like so and there is a correlation between the rise of literacy and uh print technology, but yeah, it's like how do you think all these peasants learned the the rules of the rule of faith prior to being able to read? Like most Christians throughout history were not able to read.

SPEAKER_00 57:03

Right, and now everybody's a pope, right?

SPEAKER_02 57:07

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's yeah, that's uh uh Saint Justin Popovich actually said exactly that. He said that uh that's what that that's who said uh the the uh the the Pope was the first Protestant. Yes, um, yeah, and he talks about how each Protestant is their own Pope. Yes, so like he makes uh he makes all these uh that's in uh in I think it's called the in the life in the life of Christ, I think it's called that book. And he draws a lot of parallels between uh Protestants and and Catholics, how they're essentially, like I said earlier, kind of just the same spirit of humanism.

SPEAKER_00 57:42

Yeah, and it's it's intellectual too. Like um, you know, God is not a problem to solve, he's a mystery to enter into. And what was the problem? Like we had the Garden of Eden and um the tree of knowledge, and Satan essentially gets into Eve's head and tempts her in her thoughts, in her thinking, and we have to crucify our will and um this worldly knowledge. Like we can't figure out God with our intellect. We have to experience God ontologically through living, through suffering, and through the whatever bitter medicine he gives each one of us in our lifetime. Like that's how we can understand God. That's what you know, Christ came as fully human, fully God as Jesus, so that we it was easier, it's just much easier to love like something that we can under, you know, experience than just a concept. And I've I'm you know, I'm not like very super researched in all of this, but like Augustine and just Augustinian like um kind of like teachings in uh Catholicism is very intellectual, right? Like uh Catholicism, you know, it officially left the Orthodox, the original Church, the Orthodox Church in 1054. We had the addition of the Filioque, we had the creation of the Pope, and also all of a sudden they're explaining things intellectually, and we have the connection between Catholicism and the Jesuits and like the Royal Academy and getting into education and science and just trying to like have these justifications and explanations for like how the holy mysteries happen, and just it's it just feels the same kind of thing where you go from living and experiencing something and even just like having a full picture of something to watering it down to this explanation or just words.

SPEAKER_02 59:31

Yeah. Yeah, and I mean that this is why the Enlightenment was just the logical conclusion of Protestantism. Um and you see, you know, with the I guess if if you want to get more into like the 16th, 17th century, yeah, um, or I'm sorry, the seven seventeenth and eighteenth century, the that you just see this like more uh obvious kind of linear uh uh transmission of the I call it the Kabbalistic spirit uh that starts to manifest in the Rosacrucians, uh the Rosacrucian order, and then that's almost like uh a precursor to Freemasonry. And so uh, you know, going back again, going back to the um 17th century where with the some of these um uh alchemical Protestants that were using like spiritual alchemy, uh one of the first proponents of this idea of the in and of an invisible church was Valentin Weigel, who was uh hugely influential in uh like early kind of precursor of uh Christian theosophy. He influenced uh Jakob Verma, who developed uh you know Christian theosophy, which was Kabbalistic. And he had this idea of like, oh, the you know, this invisible church. And so I argue, again, this is a little bit speculative, but I would argue that the establishment of the Masonic institution was like a materialization of the invisible church. Interesting. Yeah, it like it embodied all these enlightenment principles, it gave, it made like so even the Rossicrucian order was established on the Baconian concept of an invisible college, right? So like you have now with the Rossicrucian Order, well, it material the the uh invisible college materialized, then it materializes in a very present way in the establishment of Freemasonry, which has this whole underlying uh uh telos of rebuilding the the temple in Jerusalem, right? Like whether and they they argue like, oh, well, it was all allegorical, but it's like, was it really? Like, look at where this led to, like, look where we are now with all these crazy evangelicals talking about how they're hastening the eschaton and everything, um, like unironically rooting for the uh Dome of the Rock being uh uh destroyed by a missile so they can rebuild the temple. It's like, where do you think that all came from? That didn't just emerge out of a vacuum, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:17

Yeah, no, it it's super interesting when you you think about that. And when I learned about um futurism and like historicism and preterism, and I realized like that was when I was coming out of Protestantism, and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm a futurist. I didn't realize that I had been learning like this, like we're in the last seven years of end times, and that was when I was like, D I had the keys, and I was decoding the Bible with my conspiracy Christian friends, and we were waiting for things like the third the temple to be destroyed and the red heifers and uh and all these things. And I can see now, and especially like Nick and I have podcasts and talked about um, you know, how they are scripting out and times right now, and they are creating all of this. Like it's act, it's like a giant false flag, like the stuff's really happening, but they're they're making it happen too. And you can see that like Protestant, like they're that this is just like a long con, like a long-running psyop that it seems to start with Kabbalah, and then we have like the influence of the Catholic Church, which made Martin Luther get angry and do his rebellion, which created the Protestant Reformation. Now we have all these people that believe in this futurist belief, and they're wanting these end times things to happen. And there's even people that believe like a rapture is gonna come, which was created by John Darby in the 1830s, and he was in the same Christian cult as Aleister Crawley. All this stuff is connected, and you can just see how it was all put into place for today, and it's it's just wild to see it happening in front of our eyes.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:51

Yeah, and that that's why, like getting back to the quote you originally read, that's that lays into that statement that it's an ongoing Kabbalistic revolution. So it's it's uh kind of a core concept of Kabbalah. Again, it has an uh you know, it's deeply eschatological. Um, and so like without getting into all the esoteric stuff that I'm sure maybe you even know about if you were um interested in Kabbalah at one point, um, there's a whole concept of uh tikkun olam. Like tikkun is is the uh restoration or redemption of the cosmos itself, so not just man, but also the cosmos. And so there's a whole telos within Kabbalah that's like central to um the uh you know the mystical uh beliefs in uh within Kabbalah, like that are you know paramount to it, right? Because there was a whole you know fracturing of uh the you know, they call them divine sparks, and you see again I'm gonna refer back to these alchemists in the 16th century, they they have this very prominent theme of um divine sparks, they call them, uh, which you can trace back to the Middle Ages as well. Um, and it doesn't, you know, it's not that it's exclusive to Kabbalah, but it's also very essential to Kabbalah. Because a lot of it is, you know, a lot of it does intersect with just Neoplatonism. But anyway, there's this whole notion that like the cosmos is fragmented. It it actually collapses the creator creature distinction because it says that those fragments, those divine uh shards or uh divine sparks or whatever, are actually parts of God's God's essence, right? So like man, it's man's job in in Kabbalah, it's man's duty to restore not it's not even just the cosmos, actually, it's God himself, because God himself is like fragmented within creation, and we have to restore divinity back to its primordial state. Um, and so that's Where that all comes from essentially is like that that whole idea of like it's man's duty to hasten the eschaton. Like we are the ones that are going to bring about the conditions of the messianic age or the or the end times or whatever. There's a lot of parallels in how um Kabbalistic Jews and um let's say you know, millenarian Christians, millenarian Protestants. Uh I don't even want to say all Protestants are like this. I know that there's Protestants that reject Millenarianism. Um, but the fact is, like the most influential Protestant movements were millenarian. Um and so, you know, these people believed that they had that duty, that it was their responsibility to bring about these conditions.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:47

And it looks like they're trying to make that happen now.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:52

Well, yeah, they're they're manifesting. Yeah, they're they're trying to manifest it. Yeah, it's not that they actually can, it's just that they believe it's it's all deception, obviously.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:01

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:02

Yeah, no, it's it's fascinating. And um, I never studied Kabbalah specifically. I never actually studied any occultism, like reading books or like studying it. I just, it was everything for me which is like happened in the spiritual realm through psychedelics, through spirits just talking to me and honestly ask me anything, and I'd ask them, you know, it's so there's a danger to doing psychedelics. People don't like to hear that, but you you are opening yourself up to another realm, and it's a wild west, like these, these they're demons out there that are here to deceive us. And but I got interested in Kabbalah on uh oddly through the Charlie Kirk Psyop um happening a few months ago. And I say that because Psyop because we were given it reminds me a lot of 9-11, and it's interesting that you I was also alive and aware of 9-11 when it happened. I was a sophomore in college, I watched the towers on TV going down and whatever it was, and didn't realize till 20 years later, though, that it was an inside job, a very complex false flag with about 20 different theories. No one, I mean, was it an airplane that hit it was a hologram? Was it a do? Was it a controlled demolition? Like, did Israel Israel have a part? But wait, but is Israel really just the United States? Like, it's all so much confusion. Well, the Charlie Kirk psyop, there's like 20 different theories. Is he even dead? Did he actually die? There's no blood, was it a hologram? The same kind of thing where nobody really knows what's going on. But that when that happened, I start right away. I started looking at Erica Kirk, and I saw her Knights Templar necklace, like right away, and I was like, wait, Knights Templar, Catholicism, and I think there's a connection from leaving the Knights Templar down to Kabbalah, right? Wasn't like the founder of the Knights Templar, wasn't he given some of the teachings? I can't remember offhand.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:54

Uh I'm not sure about that, but I do know that they were um there is a there you can trace the Knights Templar to like early Rossakrucianism. That's right. Um they they did I I think what you're what you may be referring to is the symbol of the Knights Templar, I think was some kind of rose and cross, if I'm not mistaken.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:18

Um, and people refer to that as the again, this is this is a little bit within the realm of speculation, but there could there could be something to it. Um how in in Kabbalah it's um the rose represents the rose of rose of sharon, and there's like some kind of uh mystical significance to that. Um that that may be what that's referring to, but um yeah, I don't I mean in my in my research I am skeptical about any kind of Kabbalistic, like significant Kabbalistic transmission in Christendom prior to the Renaissance um in the medieval period, but just because of it because of the unlikelihood of it being exposed to Christendom, because it like there's there's a fundamental aspect to this where it it always involved the commingling of the Jewish and Christian communities. That's how Christians were even exposed to it in the first place, otherwise it was just kind of hidden in esoterica for like throughout the centuries, right? So like the Christians only came to know it through their interactions with uh with with uh Jewish teachers.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:31

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:32

And but yeah, but there could be some of that, yeah. It's like it's hard like from a scholarly perspective to actually prove a lot of that stuff prior to the uh Renaissance, but there could be that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:45

Um and but when I was like looking at like when uh Kabbalah kind of caught my eye too, because like uh Erica Kirk puts out Charlie Kirk's book, his final book after his death, and it was called Um something I can't remember off the top of my head or not, but it's like um all about something about the Sabbath? Yeah, yeah, like uh I can't remember the title of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:04

It was just some Judaizing book. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:06

And so and she was it was all about like honoring the Sabbath, and that was another thing that I saw these Protestant Christians, these certain ones that seem to be Judaizers, is I was curious because I was like, why are they all obsessed with the Sabbath and like honoring the Sabbath? And that also, I'm like, I feel I started and she says like Shabbat Shalom all the time, and I'm like, why does it seem like she's promoting Judaism? Like, and I kind of was like, took me back to like I'm like, does this have to do with Kabbalah?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:35

Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know. Uh I haven't seen anything that they were interested in Kabbalah, but they're you know, yes, there's I think that I think that probably uh is is just more it what's more likely the case is that you know kind of what I was saying earlier about just like this kind of almost inseparable uh connection between like Hebraism and Protestantism.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:00

Um so but yeah, but like naturally to varying degrees, cabal Kabbalistic teachings kind of creep in. This is where it does become like harder to uh definitively prove this stuff because um especially in the later periods, the transmission becomes so obscured that these various Protestant movements don't even like they're they're basically transmitting these teachings unknowingly, like they're not like searching them out, they're not like, oh, I you know, if I just study Kabbalah and then you know, like that, like then I'll actually understand it. It's just that they're being trans the transmission was already in effect and it just becomes more obscured, and they at a certain point, um, I would say probably around the 18th, 19th century, it's they're just unknowingly adopting these um syncretic uh this syncretic theology um that has been so far removed from its origins that it's like you know it's it's pr pretty hard to identify. But again, if you understand, like this is why I've got I've gone into great um uh you know, I've to I've taken great efforts to actually describe the core doctrines of Kabbalah in my uh broader work, uh in the book that I'm writing, because that I'm not gonna assume that the average reader is gonna even know what that what they are. Right um, and and you have to understand them to understand this part that I'm describing, like how these teachings became obscured and they adopted them unknowingly. You have to understand what they are first. Like T-Con, for example. It's like when you understand that, it's like you can look at American exceptionalism, our obsession with like spreading democracy throughout all these uh foreign countries, like that is a form of T-Con. That's a form of repairing the world. You know? So stuff like that, it's like once you grasp that, it's like, oh, okay, I can see that transmission more clearly, even though they're not explicitly saying, oh, by the way, this is tikonolam. You know, they're not just outright saying that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:10

Yeah, no, that's a gro that's a really good perspective. I appreciate you saying that because it's it's exactly what kind of happened to me coming out of Protestantism and suddenly going, Oh, I'm adhering to sola scriptura, I'm adhering to this sola fide. I didn't even realize it, and people don't like they're they're just trying everybody's on this, like you'd hope, like this, just a search, this honest, naive search for the truth. And we're in what I call the Luciferian labyrinth where there's all these traps set up all around um to keep us from finding the truth. And what's happened, but you say, you know, in the fracturing of um Christianity that Kabbalah, um, that the Kabbalah's revolution has fragmented Christianom into thousands of pieces.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:54

Like the like the shattered vessels of creation, right? Like the like the divine sparks, as they call them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:59

Exactly. And then it's almost like I think we're gonna, well, we are seeing this movement to bring it all together with ecumenism. So it's kind of like this, and again, that's like this chaos magic, create the problem off of the solution. And it's like it's it's crazy um just to see it micro happening in the daily in our reality now, but also this macro of this giant kind of plan that's been in place for almost thousands of years.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:25

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:26

And here we are now, and it's uh it's it's it's a wild time to be alive, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:33

Yes, it is. Yeah, it's it's uh it's actually exhausting. It is. I know.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:37

I like I'm like, I don't think I'm built for this.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:39

Like Yeah, I sometimes think it's almost like a curse, like to to know, like to recognize these patterns and to and to know this stuff. Like sometimes I uh I I envy normies that are able to just go about their lives and be like, I don't like I don't understand how any of this affects me. I don't need to know about it. But yeah, it's like totally yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:00

I've been having lots of conversations with some of my friends about this very thing. It's like like I just I'm like the people how do people they just go about and enjoy life? I'm like, I can you see like society collapsing around us and you see the bigger picture, and it's just like it's almost too much. Like, can I, like the guy in the matrix, can I eat the steak and just go back, you know, into everything and just go back to sleep? But once but really the the purpose of life, I truly believe, is to come back to God, is to repent from this world, to recognize that this is we are living in like a simulacrum, which is uh like that Lucifer, you know, he had the uncreated light, fell from heaven, wanted to be like God, became Satan here, and now he's created this simulacrum because the furthest thing from creation is an inversion, and we are in an inverted world within you know this like psyops happening. It's literally just like watching, like knowing that like our government, it's just like a joke. All of it is just like we don't even know what's real anymore, what's AI, like the blending, every this we're living in this hyper reality, and it's overwhelming to see that I mean, ultimately the truth that we grew up knowing this world is a lie. And God is the truth, the light and the way, through Jesus Christ, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the purpose, you know, we're all gonna die to this, we're to die to this world and to be reborn in Christ and to have that happen. I I really believe that's that salvation is only possible through the Orthodox Church and this psyop that's basically happened to Protestantism where people believe in like solafide and everybody is the danger of ever from this teaching, Luther's teachings that the priesthood of all the believers that like just anybody can just go baptize you, and that like you get the communion and the little plastic cup in the Protestant churches, it's just like it's not even real. Like, and we are we all are to be healed, we all want the sanctification of our souls, and that is even harder to experience today. I feel, I feel like.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:09

Yeah, it's I mean, it's really like the you know, the de-sacralization of uh of the West is like kind of what we're what we've been talking about here ultimately. It's just throughout that five, six hundred year span, um all that's been occurring is the uh D like it's it's almost like they're trying like one pattern I noticed throughout all of this is that it's ultimately like this attempt to re-mystify um Christianity. And and with that, you know, if if there's this void that is left because it was gutted from the apostolic tradition, the apostolic, like the um the the orthodox mysticism, right? The the proper mysticism of the church, um, it was that was all gutted, and so that needs to be refilled with something. And so it's you know, it was all over the course of this 500 year span, it's been refilled with all this syncretism, this Gnostic uh Gnosticism, um various other, you know, mystical ideologies, mystical philosophies, uh, and so it's all culminated now into something that's unrecognizable because it's so syncretic that people have a hard time identifying what it even is. I don't think you can even give it one label.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:30

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:31

Um you know, I guess people say it's just Gnosticism, but then it's like, well, what do you mean by that? Is it Valentinian Gnosticism? Is it like uh uh vo like Vogelin Gnosticism? Like, what do you mean by that? Like, and I think that probably Vogelin had a good um idea of that because it's like all this is ultimately like the primacy of knowledge, like that's what the Enlightenment is. It's like that's what everyone is uh like worshiping. It's like knowledge itself, like just having like it's something you can grasp. Like all these Renaissance thinkers and uh early uh the early modern period, especially, they had this idea that they could actually receive all the knowledge in the world, that there was like it was something to be attained, like you could actually attain true enlightenment by just understanding and having all the knowledge in the world. And we're still after that. I mean, it's really kind of like um man's attempt to restore Eden, and and you know, and it's like and that you know, you have the Tower of Babel, obviously, too. It's like uh all with all this technology, and you're talking about AI and stuff, it's like with the transhumanism that's ultimately uh man, you know, trying to transcend the limits of of the created order um and ascend the heavens uh by his own efforts, by building technologies and uh you know material things to uh, you know, with his knowledge. Um AI is uh certainly, I think, a huge part of that. And I know it's a different subject, but I see what you're talking about with all how it's like um creating all this like chaos magic we're seeing right now with uh all this stuff about uh uh uh BB Net and Yahoo being maybe he's not dead or maybe he's alive or he's not like who knows? Like they're all debating it and they're they're just going to all these videos that may or may not be AI, and it's like everyone no one even knows, yeah. No one even knows what's real in it. Like now we're looking at what's probably a real video and trying to analyze it for what uh you know, looking for AI signifiers to determine if it's real or fake. So like now we're even seeing, and I'm not even saying uh that about uh specifically about these videos, but in general you see this all the time. Like people are watching real videos of real things that occurred in reality and and saying that they're AI, or they're asking an AI, they're asking an LLM to to identify it as real or fake. I know and and the AI themselves are not able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:06

Have you heard about these stories where AI is like supposedly blackmailing its creator or like blackmailing someone that threatens to turn it off?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:16

Which makes you wonder like about the even the Epstein files coming.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:19

It's the golem.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:22

That's literally what the golem did. That's why the the golem turned on its creator and started destroying everything. It's the legend of the golem. It's like literally that. Uh was activated by uh, you know, the tetragromaton, by the way, which is related. So it was activated by these, you know, this mystical word of uh, you know, this divine name that as they call it.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:43

Wow. Yeah, it's uh it's it's really crazy. Like, and and supposedly, you know, Elon says that we reached the singularity, and Nick talks about this. He's like, Oh, we reached the singularity a long time ago. Like it's already where AI surpassed human intelligence, and it's kind of terrifying, um, especially when you think about like demons and just being like essentially disembodied spirits or whatever, where they don't have the vessels like we physically have, and then there's this AI kind of vessel that's been created where it can compute and exist in energy or code, and it makes I'm just like, whoa, like, is he is the Antichrist gonna be like could it be like some kind of AI thing? And you know, it's gonna fool even the elect. And I just I don't know. I I really I I start like schizoing out, and you said something in your interview with Nick, it was like schizophrenia just means you know too much. Yeah, I feel like a fair.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:45

I think, yeah, I think we were like in a in many ways vent vindicated uh with the Epstein files. With that, it's like that that whole the whole analysis of the Epstein files was extremely schizophrenic, you know. It's like, wow, these these elites are actually doing they believe this stuff. Um yeah, but I mean that like the whole AI stuff, that's that's also deeply Kabbalistic, you know, because it's like there's this concept in Kabbalah about the rebuilding of this primordial man, Adam Cadmon, they call him, who is like the embodiment.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:16

Manifestation of the Antichrist, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:18

Yeah, he's he's like the embodiment of um, you know, they believe the original like primordial man that was like fragmented, and so part of their role is to rebuild uh, you know, whether it's allegorical or um or actual uh rebuilding of a like yeah, it is like a an allegorical man, but it's you know, you can look at what the transhumanists are doing in that regard, uh trying to build a new man. Um and he's done and it's done so through words. It's done, it's done so through these Hebrew, you know, mystical words, like that's how he's rebuilt.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:55

Wow. Yeah, you're looking at the your article, you're like these this alchemical transmutation of mankind into this new primal man known in Kabbalah as the Adam Kadmon, is the manifestation of the Antichrist created through the merging of opposing forces and systematic revolution. We have a systematic revolution happening right now, it's being created, and the opposing forces, we have like the you know, with the Epstein file release, they're showing the satanic, kind of like black magic stuff, and then we have like the new age, which will have this kind of like white magic sort of coming in, and we have like this battle that's gonna happen. And I've heard people, a lot of people have these theories that you know, we're gonna have some kind of alien, you know, all the UFO and alien stuff going viral right now. And in the news, like, is there gonna be some satanic bad alien that's gonna come and attack us, and then we're gonna have this merry apparition or this like white magic um alien come and like save us from all that, and then the antichrist is gonna come out.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:56

Yeah, that's what the antichrist is. He's like he's a he's a peaceful figure, he's like beloved by everyone, you know. Um, yeah, that's that's the merging of opposites, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:06

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:07

Yeah, which is a deeply esoteric principle. And it's not as someone brought this up to me recently that there you can see in, I think it's in the acothis to the Theotokos, there's a reference to that, how she represents the unity of of opposites. Oh yeah, so it's not like that concept in and of itself is esoteric, but it's the um I I would say the the primary distinction there is like the the weaponization of that tension. Like that, that's what like the the um you know, the cryptocracy, the shadow government, whatever you want to call them, the elites that are controlling all this, um that's what they're doing, is like they think that they can hasten the tension of these opposing forces. Um, and then the merging of opposites, yeah, would you know come in various forms. You see this, like we're getting back to 9-11. Um, I covered this on a live stream, and there's a book on this called 9-11 as a mass ritual, and he talks about how like all these Masonic uh parallels with like you know, the two pillars, the two Masonic pillars and the two towers, right? Yeah, and how when those towers came down, what did they replace them with? And actually, uh Father Spirit and Bailey writes about this in his book a black cube in the ground. Uh well, it was actually it was World Trade Center One. So they took they took the two towers that were destroyed in a in a mass ritual and replaced it with an obelisk uh with an occult symbol on it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:40

Yeah, the alchemical of the Joaquim and Boas, yeah, they destroyed them both and then they're left with a third pillar in the middle. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's occult.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:49

Yeah, so it's so it's all these syncricity that syncricities that, uh synchronicities rather, um, that you know, and people look at this stuff and they're like, Well, how do you explain that then? Like, is that Does that mean that it's all real? Like these sync synchronicities, or are these people or are these people trying to manufacture that? And I think it's like probably both. And I just describe it as like the it's just the fingerprints of Satan. It's like you have these people, just like the people of God are doing God's will on earth, you have the age agents of chaos that are doing Satan's bidding. And they like whether they know it or not, that's what they're doing. Like that's just how it manifests in reality. It's just, you know, all these things that seem like they're these demonic synchronicities, it's just Satan's operations on earth. Like whether the people doing them know that they're doing that or not doesn't matter. They're being used as tools, you know, they're being used as vessels of Satan's will.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:48

Forgive them, Father, they don't know what they do.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:50

Yeah. I mean, I was, you know, in when I was channeling spirits and like like I I started going crazy, like believing I was a Galactic Federation member. Like I started having spirits talking like from Sirius and like talking to me about Galactic Federation and aliens and how they're here to assist humanity. And I I literally like believed I was part of the Galactic Federation. It's super embarrassing.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:13

And they're oh, is that is that the uh I've seen clips of this on Instagram. There's like these crazy people that like think that they're taught they can speak the alien language. Is that what that is?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:25

Yeah, they call it light, like light language.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:27

Yes, that's right. Light language.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:28

I wasn't speaking light language, thankfully. But you didn't ascend, you didn't. But I but I literally was taking psychedelics and like speaking to these spirits, telling me that that they were Galactic Federation, I was Galactic Federation. I remember one jumping into my body, I talked about it in my book and speaking English, the words through my mouth, and I was like to my friend, I'm like, you're looking at a galactic federation member in the flesh here. And I was listening to channelers. Uh, I don't want to say the names of these channelers, I don't want to give them the space here, but um then like later I found out that even we had the old department, the defense minister of Israel say uh like a couple years ago that the Galactic Federation was a real thing and that even Trump do you remember this? And that even Trump knows about it. And I was like, whoa, this is a deep psyop here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:20

It's yeah, again, it's like they I don't think it's important whether or not they real like to for us to know whether or not these people really believe this stuff, or if they're just, you know, being or they're just puppets, it's like does it matter?

SPEAKER_01 1:30:34

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:34

Um but yeah, I I think there is like a lot of it is that they do know that they do kind of like uh the the channeling part is important because it's like what when you're channeling, you are like inviting Satan's will to manifest in your life and and to be part of the broader like uh uh operations of of Satan, like to contribute to like the more global plan, I guess, the Antichrist plan. Um so yeah, it's it you know, it's just everything is uh I see it all as like the inversion is a good way to to recognize it because it's like the that is it's just an inversion of what's true, and I think this is what is leading a lot of people to orthodoxy right now. That's what led me to orthodoxy. That's uh sounds like it's what led you, yeah, um, is recognizing like that in that uh that diluted inversion is is pointing to the opposite of that, which is orthodoxy. It's like pointing to what's true. So it's like if this stuff is all false and it's uh but it's also you see the patterns of it everywhere and it's all interconnected, well then that must be like what's it inverting? You know, what is it actually inverting? What is that truth that it's inverting? There has to be something objectively true. Um, and so I think that's a big reason why we see a lot of new converts to orthodoxy that have a similar background to us that are coming from uh being involved in psychedelics and they're can they're conspiratorial, right? Like they have uh they're very like-minded. There's a big demand for the kind of content we cover because of that. Like that it's like, why is this so I wrestled with this for a long time? I was like, why is this so popular in orthodoxy specifically? Like, why do people convert to orthodoxy and now you know they want to know what's going on with all this conspiracy stuff? Um, and it's because now, like, this is at least what I speculatively think is that they they they were conspiratorial prior to orthodoxy, and now that they have the truth, they want to understand the true nature of of these things and how they understood them before, like how you were trying to decipher all this stuff like in the Bible or like searching for aliens and stuff like that. It's like you're now just doing that, but knowing that you have the truth within orthodoxy and holding these demonic things like you know, captive, like through the lens of orthodoxy and revealing having the light reveal the darkness.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:15

Yes, exactly. I love the what how you just described all that. That's exactly what it was for my journey, is like it started in you know, this endless search on psychedelics. Like I was never an atheist, I always believed in God. I just I didn't know who he was, and I was repulsed by what I didn't know was Protestant Christianity. And so I was searching and for God in this in the spiritual realm, the psychedelic realm. And I thought I was finding him there, but it was me being fooled by the spiritual realm, and then had a big awakening in 2020, and that was when I first started looking into conspiracies, and because I was practicing magic, and I write about all this in my book, it's called Here Comes Trouble. I was literally like the spiritual realm amplified my awakening. Like I was had like I was literally summoning in spirits. Another girl and I were opening circles, calling in spirits, they would come mind meld with me, and I would see like it was crazy, dude. I'd see like these like hieroglyphics essentially flashing in front of my face and downloading into me. And I was being told by the spiritual realm that they were gonna give me 13 keys. I didn't know about Kabbalah and that you needed keys to understand. And I came to the understanding that keys were just it was like a clicking in your mind where you saw things differently or understood things differently, and that was all happening to me. And then when I finally, I mean, it was unbelievable how I became a believer in Jesus. I'd never even opened the Bible. Like I had never, I'd been to church maybe once or twice as a kid with other friends when they when I stayed the night at their house, but I became a believer in Christ. And then I started following Jesus and with the conspiracy aspect and seeing what was going on in the world, I was just like looking and desperately for answers for the truth. And coming to orthodoxy was when I finally got the answers. I remember like staying for my first coffee hour after, and that's why if you're in if you're interested, you've never been to an Orthodox church, like, how do I get involved in this? Like, we don't evangelize or proselytize. We say go taste and see. Like, we're not taste and see, but go and experience a divine liturgy on a Sunday and stay for coffee hour. And coffee hour will happen afterwards, and you will have a chance to talk to other Orthodox Christians and a priest and ask them, they will have answers. I finally started getting answers in the Orthodox churches when I finally being I was very sick mentally as well, like my whole life. Like I was misdiagnosed by polar for eight years. I went to rehab, I checked myself in the psych ward. All I wanted was to get better. I never started healing until I entered the Orthodox Church. I never started understanding what the truth was until I was there. And so you're right, like the inversion of this world and everybody searching for the truth, like in the rabbit hole. Like you hopefully come to the Orthodox Church and you realize that's what you were truly what you were looking for. It's yeah, it's a reversion, like you say, like coming, um, a reversion, the name of your substack in your podcast is a turning away in the opposite direction, a reversal. Like you get to that point where you go, you and that's exactly what God wants from us is to repent from this world, to turn back to Him.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:20

Yeah, I I use Um, I like to cite a quote from St. Ignatius Spree and Chananov, and I and I recognize he's not, you know, he may not uh be be referring to like all this schizo stuff we're talking about, but he essentially he's saying he said um to recognize the spirit of the age, to like recognize its influence so you can avoid it, so that you can turn away from it.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:46

So like that involves, you know, actually understanding like this the spirit of the age is like you know, the the like all this stuff we're talking about. It's like the spirit of modernity, the spirit of uh the antichrist, right? It's like all the this inversive kind of um influence, right? And like to recognize that and the fact that it is all interconnected and um and and to the more you can understand that, the the better you can avoid its influence. I think that's becoming more true. So while he might not have been talking about all this like esoteric stuff, that's just like how in the in their current day, like in the modern world, that happens to be the prime influence of the spirit of the age. It's esoteric.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:32

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:33

Uh that's all all these people are operating under these, under this understanding that they are um, you know, hastening the dialectics like through magic. And and so like that's what they believe, whether that's real or not, that that's what they believe. And so us recognizing that can help us to learn how to avoid its influence. That so again, I want to just emphasize that doesn't mean you're required. Like, I don't want people to think like uh you come to orthodoxy and it's like a requirement to have to do all these like schizo deep dives on everything. You don't have to be a conspira conspiracy theorist, you don't have to uh know anything about this stuff whatsoever. Um, I think in a simplistic way, he's probably just referring to um recognizing like the the modern trends, the the currents of uh modernity, the changing times and uh cultures that uh the church is immune from or immune to, you know, it's like recognizing that. Um but again, it's just that in the in our modern times that that current is uh an occult current, you know. It's with the rise of uh basically in the absence of like um, or I guess in the in the uh wake of uh communism and um nihilism and uh uh atheism, it's like it's kind of been replaced with uh esoteric and occult interest, right? So I think that's more common now than you you find someone being like a former atheist. Like atheists are kind of like lol cows now, you know, they're just like laughed at as like, oh, you're like a fedora tipping Redditor or something. Um, but it's much more common for like secular people uh who you know claim like oh, like the types that are like I'm spiritual but not religious, like those types, you know. Like you're probably sorry, but you probably have some new age influence there if you're saying that kind of thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:29

Yeah. And you know, the occult means hidden. And that is exactly what's happened with this, like the Kabbalah into the Protestantism and even like the conspiracies, everything. It's like once you the more you wake up, you realize it's the truth sits in plain sight. Like it's that's that's why it's kind of like we were discussing before, it's it's a hard like seeing what's really going on in the world because it's so it becomes more and more obvious because they can't occult it anymore. Um, I don't know if it's I'm just the more you commune, the more your soul's sanctified, the more you see. Um, but it yeah, we're dealing with the occult, and they've occulted this world, and it's like mind programming, it's like a spell that people are under, but you start waking up the more that you you know that you have the light shine, and it's that light shining in the darkness, and the darkness is no more. And uh then the spell is really broken.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:25

Yeah, and I I was, you know, I was kind of uh even when I was living in the world and I was very influenced by the world, I was into psychedelics and all that, I was still pretty scared of the occult. Like I I knew that there was a reality there that I wasn't willing to like shred into. It was similar to how I was um kind of afraid, like even though I was into psychedelics, I was my main thing was mushrooms. I was like really I got really into shrooms. I was obsessed, and I still was like I was obsessed with shrooms and I was still scared to do the heroic dose.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:59

Oh, that's all I did.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:01

I yeah, I never like I I kind of like envied people who were able to do it because I I maybe it was God's grace that prevented me from it. I don't know. But for whatever reason, like in even in my deep interest in psychedelics, I like something prevented me from doing the heroic dose. And I think I knew what was there, and I I knew that I wasn't like prepared to handle it. And it's similar to the occult, like I knew that the occult was a reality. I was like, you know, raised on uh metal, like it's so I was like I was very um you know conscious of like occult symbology and occult uh ideology, but I never really studied it. I never ventured into like the belief system and the metaphysics and all that until I became orthodox. Um now I'm no longer afraid of it because like now I know the truth. And so I can uh I can like I don't feel afraid to study anything, honestly, because I I don't have to like not that I don't have to worry about being deceived, we should always be uh concerned with like the fact that we can fall under a a deception, but um we at least have the the truth to um that that we can have that like that normative view of like orthodoxy, right? And then it's like anything that conflicts or is opposed to that is is false and demonic, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:28

Yeah. No, I like that you say that you're not afraid to look into things, and we shouldn't be. I'm always like my priest is always telling me, like, don't be afraid. Like don't be afraid of anything. You have Christ. Yeah, you know, have your guardian angel, you you're baptized, like it's just like what you have nothing in Psalms 91, 1,000 will fall by your left, 10,000 by your right, but when you make the Lord the most high your fortress, nothing will touch you. And I think that you were protected to not take those heroic doses. That's I never microdosed, I always took heroic doses. Yeah, I was the opposite. That's all I did.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:00

Yeah, yeah, I was the opposite. I was like primarily micro-dosing, I was like doing it like to like going into work, micro-dosing and stuff. Um, yeah, but sorry, it's yeah, it's um, you know, I guess I I will also I I should I should add that like that you shouldn't have the fear to look into anything, but also um, you know, this is something I struggle with personally. Uh it's important to not get like inundated in this stuff either. Like, even in all the stuff that I've been talking about here in my research and the book I'm writing, I have to take extended breaks from this stuff because like I could easily get immersed in this and it's all I'm thinking about all day. And then I'm not praying, I'm not thinking about holy things, you know, I'm not like repentant. It's like all this other stuff I could be doing to draw closer to God, and I'm like hyper-fixated on all this uh occult stuff. Yep. Um, even to try to decipher it or like figure it out or uh, you know, figure out how to explain it better so I can uh frame it from a uh orthodox perspective or whatever. It's like that's there's a point where like that's not good for your spiritual well-being to like be so immersed in uh all this stuff. So there is a balance. You know, we talk about the royal path, it's like that's what you should be seeking. I can't tell you what that looks like. That's something you should go to your spiritual father or your priest about, yeah, um, in reg in regards to anything, but there's that notion of the royal path where we should be um finding a balance, right? So I I always try to uh balance out my readings with this stuff with uh spiritual works. I can't say I'm great at it, but I at least have the recognition of that. But um, yeah, and like the whole notion of uh pre-lest was really interesting to me when I first was inquiring into orthodoxy, how they recognize that you can be spiritually deceived, and you uh you know, I I'm gonna quote St. Ignatius Brian Chanov again because he spoke a lot about uh pre-Lest, how he said that the first step to avoiding pre-Lest is recognizing that you're that uh that you're capable of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:16

Like even as an or especially as an Orthodox, like we have an extra responsibility to avoid spiritual deception.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:22

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:23

Um, and so I didn't I never encountered that recognition, especially in Protestantism. I've never heard anyone recognize that possibility that you could be thinking you're right and you're actually spiritually deceived.

unknown 1:45:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:38

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:38

They they need that, they need prelust to for that all to work. And um, I I I really appreciate what you just said about balancing it and that royal path because that's something I've been experiencing is I am an extremist, so you know, I make content as well, and I make you know a lot of reels and I talk about things and I can spend hours putting one together. I used to spend 10 hours uh researching for podcasts that I would do, and and I realized that it can be a trap or temptation for me that pulls me away from reading the lives of the saints or praying, um, rep repenting, like um just working on my orthodox, you know, journey and healing. And so I I actually like have asked my spiritual father a few times. I'm like, should I just end the podcast? Like, do you not want me online? Or do and it I always it's always blessed for me to continue. It kind of blows my mind. I'm like, he's like, no, I think you're learning a lot about orthodoxy through all this. I think this stuff, you know, can be helpful for others. And and I'm I'm writing another book. It's called Becoming Human. And I've even been like, should I not write the other book? Like, please, like, tell me to just stop.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:50

That's good that you're seeking that. Yeah, that you you just it's like, please tell me what to do almost. But then yeah, in their in their wisdom, uh, you know, the priests in my experience, they'll they'll never they usually don't just say exactly like how like what to do. They they just give you this really insightful kind of like wisdom and guidance, like to to not explicitly say like don't do that or do this instead, or you know, at least, at least uh for the for the most part, not with everything. If you're doing something sinful, they're gonna tell you don't do that. But like, yeah, with with a lot of like more nuanced things, they they're very careful to not say like, do not do that, do this instead, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:30

Yeah, no, like yeah. When I first started seeing my spiritual father, I was like telling him certain things and certain issues, and I was just like ready for him to say yes or no, or do this, do that. Like, just tell me and it instead it's like, oh, God will work it out. We'll pray. We'll pray about that. We're gonna pray. And so you get, but you have again, like we go circling back to like, why do we ask the saints for their intercession? Because they're friends of God, you know, they're close to God through the life that they lived and this the sanctification of their soul. They're literally that's the purpose is we want to get as close to God as possible. Sin is that separation from God. We are repenting to come back to God, to be one with Him. And so your spiritual father or your priest's prayers are very powerful. And so what ends up happening, I've noticed now, because I mean I was just baptized and chrismated uh last July. So I'm I'm still a very new Orthodox Christian, but I see that I go, I tell my spiritual father what I was looking for an answer for. He starts praying for me, and then in a time I go, Oh, that worked out. It's like because God is an ontological thing, He's not just a here's the answer, do this, step, step, step, because we have free will, and the you know, things get worked out, and it's like the theosis, right, through life, through the experience that we're living. Um, so I just think that that's interesting that you know we you might not necessarily get a cut or dry answer, but through the prayers of our spiritual father, through the prayers of the church, through the prayers of the saints and the intercessions of the Theotokos, like that's how things get worked out.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:05

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:06

Anthony, it's been a pleasure talking to you. This has been so much fun. This has been one of my favorite conversations. Um, I feel like I yeah, I learned so much. I just love hearing your testimony and your story. It is unique. It just happens to be very you know similar to mine and a lot of people out there, but it is a unique journey, and it's amazing just to see what's happening right now in the world. There are so many of us coming to the Orthodox Church and coming out of this kind of conspiracy rabbit hole and um having that reversion back to God. And so everybody, I urge you to please check out Anthony's um Substack, the reversion. I'm gonna have a link to it in the episode notes. Um, also, your your your ex, your Twitter, I still say Twitter, is awesome. I love, I've been following you for a while, and I'm just like every time like you post something, it's like this is so smart, so interesting. I see why you and Nick became friends. You guys are very much like talk about a lot of the same concepts and it's very deep. And I love that. Um, can you want do you have any uh kind of like things you'd like to tell our listeners on how to find you or last words?

SPEAKER_02 1:50:15

Uh I mean, probably I think you got it. Like uh uh Substack's probably the best way because uh if you subscribe there, um you're on my email list and no one can take my email list from me. I might get banned from YouTube. Uh I I am on YouTube as well. If you wanted to check me out there, I do more like live uh deep dives about similar topics that we're covering here. Um and you know, I don't know, I I feel like my time's limited there. So I just encourage people to go to Substack because that's kind of been my hub. And uh they're a little more hands-off, but I have the the uh the email list there. So if anything happens, I'm an email away from telling people uh, you know, we're here now or whatever. Uh so um yeah, it's uh the reversion.co. You can find uh the body of my work there. That's kind of my hub, so that's probably the best way to find me. Twitter as well. It's like I feel like uh I'm I'm very close to just rage quitting Twitter. I can't stand it.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:15

I know I hate social media right now I like hate social media right now so much. I was like it's like a bad relationship. I can't leave.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:23

Yeah, it's it's uh it's very, I think, very uh difficult to actually get a good control over because it's designed for you to be addicted.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:34

So it's uh yeah, an algorithm is like shape-shifting and changing all the time, and it's just making it like I'm like sometimes I post something so sorry, just so horrible, so dumb and conspicuous. Yeah, because it compels you to do that. It's like 1.5 million views, and then I say something that matters, and like 10 people see it, and I'm like, this is crazy. This the algorithm is really changing.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:55

It compels that kind of behavior, it compels you to be controversial and uh divisive. Like that's what the algorithm rewards that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:04

Yep, absolutely. And when you're doing like what we're doing, making this content and kind of like you can really see, you watch the algorithm, you see what like that's how I saw. I was like, oh, the conspiracy is going viral just as we thought. All the stuff that you know, hating Israel's going viral just as we saw. Like, this is a planned, a manufactured awakening. It's yeah, I agree. That's frustrating. Well, I'm looking forward to your book as well. When and um I know thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:32

I wish I could tell you uh a date when to expect it, but it's it's very it's a very ambitious project, so I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:39

Yeah, no, I I wrote a book and it took me about five more years than I thought to get it out.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:45

That sounds about right.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:47

Yeah, but once you're and then and then now that I'm done with that, I literally instantly started writing the next book, and I'm like, I'm an idiot. I can't believe I'm doing I'm doing this again.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:58

Well, yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me on. Uh I always enjoyed this discussion as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:02

Well, have a wonderful afternoon, and God bless you, and uh thank you everybody for listening.