The Dustlight Archives Book Club: Sinister Forces: The Nine: Chapters 1-2 (Preview)

In which we begin our journey in to the Sinister Forces book series and discuss the intersection of the material and metaphysical, the salem witch trials, theories about pre-1492 Native Americans, and a whole lot of odd synchronicities

Music by DiffuseTensor

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:27

All right, hey guys. So thank you for tuning in to the first episode proper of the Sinister Forces Book Club. Uh honestly, let's just get started because there's a lot to cover here. I am using the To the Stars Academy republished that just came out recently, the Omnibus edition. So I will briefly touch on the omnibus forward in the omnibus preface. Uh the foreword being written by Tom DeLong, the preface being written by Peter Levenda. Now, I will say one just stupid thing that I found interesting in both of these is they're both two pages long. So they're four pages together. And Tom DeLong and Peter Levenda both managed to plug this fiction book called Time Riders or whatever within their very brief foreword, which I don't know, it just seemed kind of ridiculous to me. I don't know. Um, if we need to, at some point, we can get deeper into Tom DeLog. There's really not a ton to say about his preface. I will say he is a person is a very odd character. He obviously was the lead singer of Blink 182, and then went on to be the lead singer of Angels and Airwaves, and he is either some sort of Freemason, possibly some sort of honorary Freemason, like think like Shaquille O'Neal or something like that, who kinda didn't necessarily go through the system, but just got to be appointed one, or he may have gone through the system, or he might not be one. It's really not entirely clear. I don't even know how much it really matters. Um I will say that what the idea that he is a Freemason is based on is two separate things. It is a picture that purports to be him being initiated at Widow's Son number 17, which is an Albert Prince Lodge in Kansas City, which is odd on its own, because the the Albert Prince Halls are primarily, I mean, historically segregated. They were started by Albert Prince, uh, who was a black guy, and they were a fundamentally different strain of Freemasonry in a lot of ways. They were actually involved in things like the Underground Railroad, and they I'm not going to say that they were anything like, say, you know, the sort of secret societies of workers that somebody like, say, Lennon would advocate for or something like that. I do think the lodges have always fundamentally been capitalist and wanted to emulate the Scottish right Freemasonry to a good degree. But either way, it's it's odd that the picture is at one of those halls. They're not segregated anymore, but they still kinda are. And I I don't know exactly what to read into that. It's also odd that it's a picture of a lodge that's 1,500 miles away from where he lives. Look, he lives in San Diego, so you would expect if he was being initiated into a lodge to be initiated into a San Diego or nearby lodge. I mean, the only reason I could imagine you wouldn't do that is if you were trying to keep it secret, in which case I don't think a photo would exist of it. So it's all very weird. Um The other aspect of his ties to Freemasonry are really just he uses a lot of Masonic imagery, especially in his Angels and Airwaves phase. Uh he had a Masonic sticker on his guitar at one point. He was selling merchandise that was definitely, if not exactly using, heavily inspired by the Masonic compass. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. Like I said, if for some reason we need to get deeper into him in the future, we will. As somebody who I would definitely describe as part of this kind of coordinated disclosure movement that seems to be coming from the Pentagon. He has a ton of Pentagon ties from his To the Stars Academy. And yeah, I guess we can leave it there with him. There we go. Seven and a half minutes. The first seven and a half minutes were about kind of long. Uh now, Levenda's preface is a little bit more interesting to me, particularly one passage from it, which I think is just a good example of his sort of machine gun writing style, I think I would call it. Like he does this thing. I'm planning on covering a hundred pages, roughly, a episode of this, because I'm gonna be covering two chapters, and the the two chapters things works out to being almost exactly a hundred pages per episode. But he he does this thing where sometimes he will fire off information so fast that I thought these were going to be chiller weeks than my regular investigative episodes, and after getting through the first 100 pages of this, I'm not even sure if that's the case really, because of the way sometimes a paragraph of his can cause you to go down five different rabbit holes, and he drops one of those in the preface. And I'll I'll read it here. He says, Throw in the fact that both Edgar Casey and Ronald Reagan were members of the Disciples of Christ denomination, made famous by cult leader Jim Jones, a minister in that same denomination, and that Sir Ann Sirhan, convicted as the assassin of Bobby Kennedy, requested books by Theosophus while awaiting trial. And that Manson family member Squeaky Frum attempted the assassination of Gerald Ford, which brings us to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate having dinner with Bobby Kennedy the night of Bobby's assassination. Polanski, whose film Rosemary's Baby, opened that month, a movie about Satan worshippers living at, well, the Dakota, known as the Bramford in the film, and that Sharon Tate would be murdered the following year, a victim of the Manson family. Now that is a lot, and I kind of took this as my first opportunity to sort of go through and fact-check him and see what works and what doesn't. And I'd say he he is pretty solid here. Uh so Edgar Casey, Ronald Reagan, and Jim Jones are all part of the denomination of the disciples of Christ. All three both have weird intelligence ties as well, and I don't think those two things are entirely separate. I suspect we will be getting deeper into this later on in the book, so I will leave it at that for now. Uh he points out that Sir Ann Sirhan was ordering books on theosophy while he was in prison, which is technically true. It's an odd thing, I think, to point out if you were going to write this paragraph, because I think that there's uh fact about Sir Had Sir had that revealing that fits in just as well, if not better, thematically. Which is that in the two years prior to shooting Bobby Kennedy, he had joined a branch of the ancient mystical order Rosicrucis, specifically the Akhenaten chapter, and was heavily involved with them up to the shooting. So and you know, there uh these things blend together. Rosicrucianism is technically based on the chemical wedding of Christian Rosenkrautz in specific, but uh my experience at least with some Rosicrucians and Rosicrucian literature is that definitely, you know, them and Theosophy and the Golden Dawn and all of these kind of western occult groups borrow heavily from each other. And somebody who's studying this stuff, I know certainly when I was in my younger 20s and I spent some time studying ritual magic that the that I would dive into these as well as a few other practices, non-exclusively, so it's not surprising at all that he would be borrowing books on theosophy. But I mean you're really burying the lead here, as far as him actually being part of uh an order that's very strange, too, where it was started by Harvey Spencer Lewis in 1915. And one thing that's weird about the Rosicrucians in general is there are people that will tell you Rosicrucianism isn't real, that the foundational book they base their beliefs on was a prank, and that the group never really existed. I would say this is demonstrably false. Uh the book may have been a prank. I can't say. I can't say that it's using real occult literature. If it is a prank and it and it does follow certain alchemical teachings pretty closely, but even if that's the case, the these branches do absolutely exist. And in this case, this one, like I said, it was started by Harvey Spencer Lewis in 1915, who was a New York Adman. And you know, when you think about people like Edward Bernays and stuff, it's really important to remember when you hear ad man in the early to mid-1900s in particular, like these things were influenced by very cutting-edge psychology, which was influenced by the occult. And and these things are not at all mutually exclusive. So when you tell me it was started by a by a guy like that, it's it's not surprising to me at all. He also was involved with the OTO, and there were accusations of Alistair Crowley being behind his specific lodge for a certain point. His son is person running it when Sir Hand Sirhan gets involved. Next, we have that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were having dinner with Bobby Kennedy the night he was murdered. He had just recently made Rosemary's Baby, which, by the way, was released by Robert Evans, who is a guy with a ton of his own very weird connections. And Anton LeVay is in the finale. And I mean, if you want to get really weird with it, Lou Wasserman of MCA has more to do with building Reagan as an icon and owning his early career than anybody. He also is the distributor for Rosemary's Baby, and Ronald Reagan ascends to the governorship of California with a stated mission of stopping left-wing movements in the exact time period the Manson murders happen, which has massive ramifications on the American psyche's just relationship with the left. So not only is this true, I would say that there's even more to the story of you want to find weird connections than he actually lets on to, which is interesting. This one is by Jim Hoogan, and the only thing I think I really want to take from this part is he's got a great quote by Pierre Paolo Pasolini. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with him, he is the director, the communist director, of a lot of great films, most famously Solo or 120 Days of Sodom. And, you know, we can debate how much of that movie is a metaphor and how much of it is literal. I tend to lean to the fairly literal side, given that this would have been in the final days of Mussolini's reign, and really weird stuff would be going on in Italy prior to and over the next several decades that I don't think leave something even as insane and disgusting as Salo out of the question. There's also the fact that he was pretty mysteriously killed that lends some credence to the idea that maybe he pissed somebody off. He was killed uh either days or weeks before the movie came out. Somebody was arrested and tried for the murder, but I will just say that even fairly mainstream sources do question this narrative pretty vociferously. Either way, there's a quote from him that I do like that I wanted to read in here. I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters. I know the names of the powerful group. I know the names of those who between one mass and the next made provision and guaranteed political protection. I know the names of the important and serious figures who are behind the ridiculous figures. I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids. I know all these names and all the acts, the slaughters, the attacks on institutions they have been guilty of. I know, but I don't have the proof. I don't even have clues. And uh that quote from Pierre Paolo Pasolini goes hard, I would say. And we are up to the introduction now. Speaking of things that go hard, I will also just say that Sinister Forces, a grimoire of American political witchcraft, as a book name also goes very hard. Now, the introduction, a study in Scarlet begins with a picture of the Lucifer enthroned painting from the late 1500s by Cornelius Gao. And, you know, this might be a bit of a side tangent, but I couldn't help but think of this when I saw this picture that like so much of our modern concept of hell is taken directly from Dante's Inferno. Like, there's little to nothing about hell in the Bible, certainly not in the canonical Bible, and it's interesting to me that as Dante gets down to the bottom layers of hell, he finds Lucifer trapped in a block of ice, and the bottom layer of hell is very cold, and Lucifer's wings basically keep beating, which keeps the ice cold, which keeps him trapped. And we do not have this in our modern conception of hell. In our modern conception of hell, hell just keeps getting hotter and hotter. And I I do think that it loses something interesting conceptually that we do this, because the idea, to my understanding, behind it getting cold as you get to the bottom is the idea that the earlier sins, the ones higher up, the ones that are less serious, are sins of like passion or vice in a way that you know can be represented by heat. Whereas the more bureaucratic, systematic sort of sins, sins that separate the ego from the rest of humanity are cold, they're isolating, they're lacking passion, and I think it's an interesting choice to put that painting at the front of the introduction because I I do think there is something thematically that's maybe being driven at. Now he tells a very brief history, Peter Levenda does in the introduction of traveling through Europe, and he gets a little bit into Nietzsche's kind of insane breakdown, and it's all it's all fairly interesting, but there's so much in here for the matter of time. I will probably not get much into that. I was interested in the idea that he claims I think this is a good fact checking moment. For Peter Lavenda, because this is the sort of game that he does like to play sometimes. He claims that the word Kentucky means dark and bloody ground. And this is just all right, let like let's be fair to him. He says it has been said that Kentucky means dark and bloody ground. So he does have a layer of removal there that makes it less of an egregious lie and more of maybe a lie of omission. But this isn't true. Not really. I mean, the word Kentucky comes from either the Iroquois Kentucky, which means on the meadow or the prairie land, or also the Algonquins have a similar word for it that roughly translates to the land of tomorrow. And the idea of it being a dark and bloody ground comes from a speculator named Richard Henderson, who is trying to steal the land, and a Native American named Dragon Canoe claimed he would find it to be a bloody ground as a threat. So maybe technically the way he phrases it, you could claim it isn't a lie, but it's definitely trying to instill something in your mind in a way that isn't representative of the actual truth of the matter. You know, your brain automatically goes to the idea that the Native Americans called it that or even that English settlers called it that, which they did not. This was a threat of war against a prospector. Moving on, I also fell into a pretty deep rabbit hole when he talked about Stephen Brandt and Steven Brandt's connections to the Manson family, and then does drop that Willie Brandt, Steven Brandt's father, gave him his first job. So let's start with the let's start with Steven Brandt, and let's start with the claim here. He claims that Stephen Brandt most likely killed himself because he was afraid of the Manson family and the people surrounding them. This is probably true, or if it's not true, something similar is like Stephen Brandt was a gossip colonist columnist in LA, and he died in November of 1969, which would have been would have been right in the eye of the storm of all of this mance and stuff going on. And we know he called Andy Warhol for help, he called the LAPD several times and said he thought he was in danger, and he would have been very tied into this whole Tate Labianka network. It definitely can be read is either suicide or a murder or stress making you overdo it on your drugs. Either way, I'd say it's a fairly safe claim. But then he mentions that Willie Brandt gave Levenda himself his first serious job. And man, I spent way too long on this because Willie Brandt is the Chancellor of Germany, and so my mind started going trying to make connections between Levenda's telecom days and Willie Brandt. Because at first serious job is also a real kind of unclear way of putting it. Like, what is a serious job? And after spending like an hour doing this and kind of coming to somewhat of a dead end, I moved on only to have him in the next chapter expand on Willie Brandt and who he was. And the Willie Brandt he is referring to was a guy who lived in Brooklyn, who was part of the Brandt family that owned a lingerie company called Stardust, as well as Helen of Troy. Uh their business Stardust was like right in the middle of Madison Avenue in this time period. This all kind of checks out to me. I would say that Levenda mentions multiple times in his life working briefly for a lingerie company, and he would have been living in Brooklyn, and Stephen Brandt also grew up in Brooklyn, only to move to LA. So I'm gonna go ahead and say that one's probably true. Next up, on a sort of a side tangent, uh, I don't even know if it's a side tangent. This whole book is sort of structured, but also can border sometimes on stream of consciousness. But he mentions Iwan Kulianu, who is somebody that just got recently brought up in the Eranos Roundtable episodes I did with Fergal from the Kingless generation, and that's obviously interesting to me. He was a protege of Mercia Elliade, and I had kind of posited that he may have been murdered by a group of Romanians after sort of turning his back on Mercia Elliade and pointing out some of the history he had with the Iron Guard and kind of clarifying it. Either way, his mention is interesting to me in this because in this, what he mentions is that Iwan Culianu wrote a book called Eros in Magic in the Renaissance, where Giordano Bruno is one of his foundational sources, is used to lay out some concepts for behavior modification, which is very interesting. Now, what is more of a stretch is that he then tries to tie this to the idea that Charles Manson called himself a reincarnation of Bruno. And the source he cites for this is the Manson Files by Nicholas Schreck, who is a completely untrustworthy grifter, a fascist who is borderline promanson, and I would say not to be trusted at all as a source. I could not find any other source for this claim. He also brings up the Warburg Institute, which was another thing we talked about in our Eranos Roundtable series. It was where a lot of the work being done in Germany at the time, particularly when it came to symbolism, was moved to this institute as the Nazis began to crack down. And he mentions it through Dame Francis Yates, who was a major contributor to the Warburg Institute, and also, interestingly enough, was also into Giordano Bruno. Next, we finally get into chapter one, the Dunwich Horror and Occult History of America. And okay, so that is the end of the preview section of the first episode of the Dust Light Archives Book Club and The Sinister Forces. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, please sign up for my Patreon. 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