The Dustlight Archives Book Club: Sinister Forces: Intro (Preview)

In which we give this absolute tome context and dive in to the biography of Peter Levenda

Music by DiffuseTensor

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Alright, hi guys, and welcome to the first episode of our book club. I am very excited to be doing this, and I don't know, I think this could be a really cool, unique experience on its own that I'm really excited to have with you guys. I wanted to do an intro episode on Sinister Forces because it is 1200 pages long. And I wanted to be able to provide some context beforehand. Specifically, I wanted to be able to provide some context on Peter Lavenda because I think he is just this incredibly interesting trickster figure that is really hard to get a handle on. You know, he's one of the reasons that I originally chose this book to start our book club series on. Well, I chose it for a couple of reasons. First of all, because, you know, doing the podcast requires a lot of research, the particular way I've been doing it, and it doesn't leave a lot of time for reading things that are not related to it. So I'm not gonna lie, part of this is just selfish on my part as far as like I bought this book when they re released it through to the Stars Academy, which we will be getting into. And uh, for all of their faults, I will say it is a beautiful book. It's really it looks very nice, it's very appealing, decent quality. And it's been sitting on my bookshelf, and I constantly walk past it and I go, God damn it, like I want to read this, but I have no idea when I'm gonna have the time to devote myself to something that's 1200 pages that would be at best tangentially related to one of my larger series, and not only that, but like it's not necessarily a great resource for the type of research I typically do, because it I think it lends itself well to this book club format, because you you should double check the things he says when he says them and really dive into what he's misrepresenting, what is real, what is verified, because he does play kind of fast and loose in a lot of areas, and that and that's one reason I thought that this would be a good experiment, too. I've only read like around a hundred or a hundred and fifty pages of it, so I'm going to be experiencing most of this along with you guys, and you know, we can kind of be doing the research together. One of the main things I'm planning on doing with this is reading probably about two chapters every two weeks. So you'll be getting two Patreon book club episodes a month, and that'll equal about a hundred pages every two weeks. So we'll be taking this out at about 200 pages an episode. And as we're doing that, I want to kind of systematically look at his different claims and see, you know, what we can really forensically put down as far as being reliable versus being a little less reliable. And so I want to provide some context before we jump into this thing. And primarily, I think the best lens to probably provide that context through is through Peter Levenda himself. I will say I have been aware of his work for a few years, but I really started to have a fascination with him around the time that um if you if you guys remember it all back when Program to Chill was airing, they had an episode on the Simon Necronomicon, which he uh like basically secretly authored, which I thought is super interesting, and in it, uh Jimmy touched on several of the weirder aspects of his life that are kind of uh almost impossible to believe, and I will say, even looking into those, this man is such a confusing multi-layered guy that even these stories themselves leave a lot of questions as to their veracity, and we can just go ahead and get started with his early life because right away it gets weird. He so most of what we have about his early life was from a book he wrote called Dead Names, and Dead Names is sort of like a weird response that he wrote to an expose that uncovered the fact that he had in fact been instrumental in authoring the Necronomicon. And we'll we can be getting more specifically into what that book is later, but for now, just be aware that's the source where a lot of his claims about his early life are coming from. And he claims to have so he claims to have been born to a man named William Anthony Pratsky and a woman named Petronella Pratsky, and she, according to him, was a professional dancer, and he was an actor who had gone to the New York Academy of Arts. And I've tried to do some research on these people. I've tried to dig up, you know, whether they exist, whether it can be proven that they are actually his parents, and immediately, like, you kind of hit a brick wall with this. Like, there is uh, at least to my knowledge, and I tried to look pretty heavily, uh, no evidence of Patronella Pratsky's existence. And his father, William Anthony Pratsky, who I'll just I'll call William just to keep things clear throughout the rest of this episode. He also has a brother named William Andrew Pratsky, so things could get really confusing quickly. So I'm gonna call his brother Bishop William since he ends up becoming a uh bishop in a church that was famous for ordaining wandering bishops, but anyways, I'm getting off track. His father, William Pratsky, specifically, and I'll use his full name here because it matters, William Anthony Pratsky has one possible bit of evidence for his existence, and it is a photo from a newspaper called the Claremont Eagle, where a man named William Anthony Pratsky is working on an engine with another guy named Harold White. And unfortunately, we can't even actually see this picture because it exists basically through resellers of people who take old newspapers and then just like buy the ton, copy them, and then try to sell them for money. And so we have the caption, and I will say the caption is reliable uh because it does have an SKU number and it is available for sale online, it is $24.99, which I am not going to pay for a picture of a guy who is quite possibly not even Peter Levenda's father. Like we have no evidence of this at all. Really, uh, he the picture was taken in an area of New Hampshire. They claims him and his father moved to in the time period when the picture was taken. That is the best evidence for it. And the reason we can't get better evidence is because this was the 1950s, and so things like birth records and marriage certificates and stuff like that require you to actually request documents and dig through physical copies in the places where these are actually stored. And if somebody ever made a trip out to New York and wanted to do the legwork, it'd be super interesting to know if this is if there's any actual proof that this is in fact his dad, or if he either got lucky or specifically chose some random guy from a newspaper to claim was his dad, which if it isn't his dad, that would be what I would be inclined to believe is that he probably specifically chose him because this was a random photo in a newspaper. You know, if you're going to manufacture these sorts of lies, it's better to have a seed of truth in there. Either way, though, super, super odd beginning to his life that the only person we can really prove exists at all in any meaningful way in his family would be his brother, Bishop William. And that's because we do have records of him being ordained by this church and of him ordaining others, which is also interesting and something we can get into. But another odd aspect of this photo, I will say, is that like I said, he claims that his father was an actor who graduated from the New York American Academy of Dramatic Arts. And it's a pretty prestigious academy. I'm not saying that you couldn't go from that to being a failed actor to being a mechanic, but it definitely is an extra little bit of strangeness, I guess. Now his mother doesn't really factor much into his story at all because he claims his parents got divorced. And Levenda grew up in the Bronx until high school, and he claims to have grown up in the autocephalous Slavonic Orthodox Church in exile, which is a militant anti-communist church that was started by diaspora after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1948. And we also don't necessarily know this for a fact. I'm trying to untangle these knots here, so I'm trying to be as clear as possible. He claims he had a brother who has a very similar name to his dad, so we're calling him Bishop William. And this guy definitely existed. This guy definitely was a bishop for this church. So if we accept this is Peter Levenda's family, which it may very well be, but we also don't have any outside proof of that outside of his words, then Peter Levenda was telling the truth as far as being a part of this church. Now, the reason this matters is because this is the church that David Ferry and Jack Martin were ordained at. And for those of you who are not deep into JFK lore, these are two people who play a big enough part in the conspiracy that they are in fact in Oliver Stone's JFK film. They are kind of instrumental in you know Jim Garrison's port cases that that movie is based on. And beyond that, David Ferry was in fact with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol, to the point where you can actually find a picture of these two together in that time period in the Civil Air Patrol picture. And the way that David Ferry manages to be an important figure in the JFK assassination is because back around the time when it happened, Guy Bannister, who is another JFK assassination figure, uh is drinking with his employee Jack Martin, and Jack Martin loudly yells at him, Are you going to kill me like you killed Kennedy? At which point, Guy Bannister pistol whips him. And Jack Martin ends up in the hospital. Jack Martin, also a part of the Civil Air Patrol, by the way. And he comes to and basically gets interviewed by the FBI and drops several other bits of information, including the fact that David Ferry was supposed to be a getaway pilot for the assassins of JFK. And it's also the first time anybody mentions the connection between David Ferry and Oswald both being in the civil air patrol together. The FBI does nothing with this, and it kind of just sits in a file for a long time until Jim Garrison, through his own sources, ends up being becoming aware of this. And when Jim Garrison looks more into it, he finds a lot of weird anomalous stuff that we don't really need to get into as far as David Fairy goes. Just know that David Fairy is incredibly sus. And in fact, he is also a wandering bishop who performed black mass rituals using the fact that he was ordained. And the idea of the wandering bishops is really incredibly strange on one level, and on another level, like it's almost not as strange as it can immediately sound, because I think you have a couple of different things going on with the wandering bishops. And I this is relevant, by the way, because the church that uh Keto Levenda claims to have grown up in is uh one of the main churches that is ordaining these wandering bishops. It ordained David Ferry, uh uh it ordained supposedly Levenda's brother, and uh the idea is that you're sort of just streamlining, you're using the uh kind of institution of the Catholic Church in a way to give these people uh technical bishops bishopships, I don't know what you'd call that, but like to basically to ordain them. And you're doing it in a way that is totally technically in line with their policies, but in practice it doesn't really follow at least their stated goals. These people have been used in black masses uh through places like the satanic church, because you know, if you are somebody that is into that sort of occult or esoteric realm, there is the idea that sometimes you need somebody who is officially ordained in order to lead these things, and David Ferry is definitely on the record as having done this. Um but there's also another aspect to the wandering bishops, and that is that the church gives you certain freedom of movement and certain ability to obscure what you are doing in a way that might be appealing to, say, like an intelligence agency or any group of powerful people that maybe don't necessarily want you to go through certain levels of bureaucracy that can be avoided if they are an ordained bishop. And this is definitely something I believe he covers quite a bit more in the book. So we'll leave it at that for now. But really, it's just that it's a hell of a church to have claimed to belong to. Big if true. To be clear, like if I'm placing vets, I don't necessarily think it's out of the question. I think there's actually maybe a good chance he was involved in this church because of some of the stuff he would do later on. And if you do believe, as I do, and I I think I'll be able to lay out a decent case for this, that he is uh plugged into something it would make sense that from a young age he would be involved in in institution. It was also plugged into something. Anyways, he goes from that to in high school, he moves to New Hampshire, supposedly, which is either well, actually, we know he moves to New Hampshire, I should say, because we do. Actually, have confirmable yearbooks that show he went to high school in New Hampshire. And the area in New Hampshire in which he went to was a heavy manufacturing area. So this sort of does align with the idea that maybe his dad was the guy working on the engine in the photograph. But supposedly when RFK is assassinated, Levenda is 17 years old at the time and decides to travel to New York to go to the funeral. And his story is that he dressed up as a cleric for that Ukrainian church we were talking about and sneaks inside of the funeral, which is both an incredibly wild, really kind of unbelievable story, especially because he also claims that somehow he ended up in the actual funeral procession right next to Ethel Kennedy. But I will say, if you were going to sneak into RFK's funeral at that time period, you might be able to get away with it if you're dressed like a cleric. So it's interesting. And I feel like it's revealing either way, because either this guy is just incredibly tapped into something to the point where he is showing up in weird ways all over these incredibly important historic events, or the man is a hell of a liar, or somewhere in between. So he goes from that to moving back to New York after high school, the Bronx, and being a NYPD auxiliary officer, which I did a little bit of research on that too, because at first, you know, my brain just went NYPD officer, but that's not really what it is. What an NYPD auxiliary officer is, is it's this weird institution that existed in the 1970s where the NYPD was struggling for funding. And so they basically allowed volunteer officers, and it would take you about 50 to 100 hours of training. You had to buy your own uniform, but it was a uniform that was almost completely indistinguishable from a regular NYPD uniform. And you could carry a nightstick. And at some point, while he's there hanging out with these people, he writes the Simon Necronomicon. And he does this with help of an OTO member and book printer named James Wasserman, an illustrator named James Barnes, and a marketer named Herman Slater. Levenda almost certainly wrote the bulk of it, and also he was giving lectures as Simon in this time period. We originally were made aware of the fact that he was Simon in the 90s when somebody from this occult scene wrote an expose on it. It's since been pretty much absolutely proven because uh the copyright for the book is in Peter Levenda's name. And it also even says that one of his aliases is Simon. And I want to talk about the Necronomicon and chaos magic for a second, because I think depending on your knowledge of this specific sort of area, this might come across as a little bit of a weird eccentricity, or it might come across as incredibly odd, maybe even nefarious.