Academia Obscura
A podcast exploring the intersection of philosophy, esoterica, history, and consciousness—where ancient symbols meet modern thought. Academia Obscura dives into hidden knowledge, spiritual discipline, and the deeper forces shaping human experience, challenging listeners to question everything and live with intention.
Academia Obscura
The Ancient Queens of Sumeria w/ Demetria Nanos
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In this episode of Academia Obscura, host Chris Little interviews Demetria Nanos, head administrator for the Fellowship of Isis in Chicagoland and a board member of the International Pagan Society (IPS), about what sets IPS apart and its five pillars, focusing on education and scholarship. Demetria explains IPS’s integrative approach connecting spirituality with science, economics, history, and cultural context, using examples from the Bhagavad Gita, karmic ideas, and tantric perspectives. The conversation explores new DNA-based archaeological findings suggesting many lavish “royal” Sumerian tombs at Ur may have belonged to women, challenging earlier male-centered interpretations, and discusses Sumerian influences on biblical and mythic narratives (Abraham and Sarah, Samson and Gilgamesh, Esther/Ishtar, Mordecai/Marduk). They recount key elements of the Gilgamesh and flood stories, reflect on modern religious media and propaganda, and close with how to contact Demetria and plans to cover more IPS pillars next time.
Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of Academia Obscura. I'm your host, Chris Little. Today I've got with me Demetria Nanos. She is the head administrator for the Fellowship of ISIS here in the Chicagoland area and also a board member for International Ticket Society. Hello, Demetria.
SPEAKER_00Well, hi, Chris. Yeah, we have interesting things going on in Chicago at this time. But in regard to the IPS, I think we should begin to dive into that.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, totally. So the main portion for today's call was discussing our five pillars and what really sets IPS apart from other organizations. IPS is short for International Pagan Society. It is a global nonprofit organization founded to provide a home and public benefit foundation for the diverse array of pagan, occult, esoteric, and mystic traditions worldwide. Through active collaboration with spiritual scholars, artists, creators, purveyors, and leaders, IPS serves as an institutional steward, supporting, preserving, and advancing these traditions so that they may thrive for generations to come. Through our five pillars of education and scholarship, historical and cultural preservation, community stewardship and outreach, global unity and spiritual freedom, and sustainable livelihood through sacred practice, we strive to build spiritual understanding, sustain cultural heritage, and empower practitioners worldwide. So on that note, I'd like to talk with you a little bit about our five pillars, because you were one of the stronger hands in crafting those. So let's go ahead and start with education and scholarship. I know your work with the education side of the Fellowship of ISIS in Chicago is dear and dear to your heart for that one.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, it's with education in regard to the International Pagan Society, it is not simply a retread of whatever people learned in high school or college or in Sunday school. Education via the International Pagan Society will touch on many things. And that includes science as well as economics, because they are important parts of our everyday life. People like to imagine that science is somehow separate from spirituality, but it isn't. And it is very important for people to understand how spiritual philosophies and practices overlap with science and how in the past these philosophies led to science being practiced and developing into what we know today. So these are this is a very important thing. Many times people want to believe oh, whether it's the Bhagavad Gita, or whether it's the Bible, or if it's the Quran, that it that it's only going to be about spiritual and religious encounters and adventures. But everyday life plays into that, and you cannot understand any of these spiritual or religious texts unless you understand the times they were written in, how people lived. That's not just history, that's science. What was their level of ability? What was their level of technology? How was it employed in their culture? So these are just a few of the points that we would bring up or focus or highlight in regard to education with IPS. But education also has to do with helping people to understand how do you get around the modern city? How do different groups with different philosophies interact? Education brings us together in multiple ways so we can understand each other better.
SPEAKER_01Yep. I especially love your call-up for the Black of a Gita. For example, when the Gita talks about karmic law and karmic balance, it uses the gas, the gas analogy, right? As if you're filling up a balloon. But in order to truly understand that reference, you'd have to go to Europe several thousand years later before they would understand gas laws and Piv Nert and all the stuff we know from chemistry, diffusion, entropy, all of that stuff. In order for that to truly make sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it people knew about gases, they had a words for it, especially the ones that were, let us say, unpleasant to smell, like sulfur gas. And the the Oracle at Dell sat in a place where gases rose out of a chasm underground and filled the area of the room that they were in. And these gases would cause the oracle to have visions receive messages and that sort of thing. But they did not necessarily differentiate between gases the way that we do today: hydrogen, helium, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. They just knew it smelled good or it smelled bad or it made people fall asleep or it killed them. But they did know the stuff was around.
SPEAKER_01But also, misunderstandings of the physical world, I believe, have led to some spiritual misunderstandings as well. For example, there is a strait of Buddhism, and even in yoga, where the goal of life is to minimize the amount of karma that you live. The idea stems from it's basically an ancient algebra arithmetic equation that says the divine aspect of yourself plus the karma you make here on earth in this plane equals your soul. And so their logic is if you minimize your karma, remain pure, eat nothing but vegetables, never step on an ant, never have sex, never do anything, then you are minimizing your karma, and thus your soul is truest to your divine self.
SPEAKER_00So if you yeah, that sounds very much like the Jane.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But what they fail to take into account is if you truly treat karma as gas laws, then it's sort of like a bell, like you can never unring the bell. If you pop a balloon, you can never get all that gas back. That's how entropy and thermodynamics work. But if you apply calculus to that formula instead of arithmetic, then there's a concept of calculus called limits. So as you approach limits of infinity or over the span of a lifetime, by definition, your divine aspect of yourself is infinite, right? Is the part of you that is connected to the infinite divine. Karma, however, is finite. No matter how long you live, you can only make a certain finite amount of karma. So then as the time goes on, the your divine self will always equal your soul, regardless of the karma that you make. And therefore, a lot of the purity cultures and beliefs don't stack up over time, which is one of the founding tenets of tantric yoga, which says, hey, all this karma stuff, what you do in your own journey, largely doesn't affect your soul except for the repercussions that come back, whether good or bad, from the impacts you make in the world. The goal is to then live your life in accordance with your principles and in accordance with your soul, not to retreat to a monastery and never have an impact at all. Interesting. And if you apply like some mathematical concepts to these philosophies, like you get radically different reinterpretation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, with the tantric yoga, it does, or the tantrika path, there are a few variations in cult depending on where their location is, thus the orientation for the practices. But yeah, it tantra is about not having other people's boundaries or ideas of who you are, what you are, what you should do, not having others control you on the spiritual level, but instead pursuing what you know inside of you is the right thing or the correct thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, very much. Because you as an individual also have a shard of the divine in you that's pointing you in the direction for your life path. Yep.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And also, I know you were talking about this interesting archaeological piece.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes. In regard to one of the oldest cultures that we know about in Sumer, ancient Sumer, where the city of Ur later became Uruk, later became Warka, is this was in Mesopotamia, and in nowadays we would say that it was in Iraq. And it was a major kingdom, queendom. It had many trade routes, they had writing and accounting and well-developed artistic items and skills thousands of years ago. So something that came up in the last week that was published was about how the ancient kings of Sumer may have been queens. And this is because modern archaeologists have access to DNA testing. When Leonard Woolley in the twenties and 30s did the excavations in ancient Sumer, Sumeria, what we now call Iraq, he found fabulous graves, wonderful grave goods, evidence of servants or attendants who had died along with the ruler. Therefore, we think those were sacrifices to take them along into the afterlife. But there was the biggest grave findings, the most famous ones that he found were definitely for a queen named Pu'Abi. And there was so much gold and jewelry, harps, vessels, textiles. It was truly an empress's kind of a burial. And so they knew that it was for this woman, Pu'Abi, but they speculated about the other burials being typically princes and kings. But now that they've done DNA testing, they have found that most of the bones that are left of these ancient Sumerians are female. This is from the latest issue of National Geographic. This is the end of June in 2026. Some of the most lavish burials appear to belong to women, and these women were buried in ways that early archaeologists usually associated with kings. Only three of the 16 royal tombs from the cemetery contain male remains that may have been the principal occupants of the tomb as opposed to sacrifices. These stood out as markedly smaller than the rest of the royal tombs, and the furnishings were far from opument, according to P. R. S. More, an archaeologist who wrote about the discoveries in the 1980s. Woolley and the scholars who followed him assumed that the women in these royal burials were consorts and that their husbands, though their physical remains were lost, were the men attested as kings in early dynastic texts from outside the royal cemetery. Their belief that early kingship in Mesopotamia was inherently male was pervasive, guiding their interpretation of the archaeological discoveries at every turn. Women, the thinking went, could simply not have rule er. But what if that wasn't the case? And for those of you who are interested, I urge you to go to National Geographic online or pick up a copy of the magazine and read the entire article. There are a lot of preconceived notions that we bring with us in archaeology. We have the unconscious ideas that have been surrounding us in the cultures we grow up in, regardless of where on earth we are, the cultures we grow up in help determine our thinking and interpretation of things when we become adults. The archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for the most part, were men from Europe, and they were used to hundreds of years of the political model of kings and their courts having to say so over everything and everyone else, regardless of whether there was a council or a parliament. These preconceived realities and notions came with those archaeologists as they examined their finds and they interpreted things. So it's very interesting that as science develops and improves the number of tools, the vast quantity of information we can examine and process, we are able to find problems or mistakes that were made in the past. And that doesn't mean they were made out of agency. They were made because the people were limited by what they knew in the time they grew up in and the cultures they had studied as well as lived in. All of this understood today has made great changes in how we view not only the ancient world, but even the history of the last 100 years on Earth, knowing that we have to go past our preconceived notions and ideas and be open to new or different information.
SPEAKER_01Yes, that's fascinating. So what would it really mean if the rulers were queens instead of men? Does that impact any biblical stories people might be familiar with, any mythological stories?
SPEAKER_00It would impact biblical stories, primarily in the Hebrew Bible, that in the King James they call that the Old Testament. It does impact that, but also the realization that a lot of what we see in the Hebrew Bible came with an originally what we believe is a Sumerian origin. In Genesis, Terah is the priest of the moon god in the city of Ur. His son is Abram. His daughter, Sarai, is from a different wife. But because you want to keep, let us say, the family money in the family, a half-sister and a half-brother could get married. They could have the same father, but not the same mother. And so when you read this and you go through it and you see that when they go through changes after their God has contacted them or visited them, Abram becomes Abraham. Sarah becomes Sarah. And so the changing of the spelling of the names carried magical and spiritual religious weight in ancient Judaism. And it still does with some people who are into the more mystical side of Judaism. With the changing of the names came a change in their status in their tribe that Terah had left, led out of Sumer, out of Ur of the Chaldees, as they termed it. So we have those stories. We also have stories such as Samson. Gilgamesh is a Sumerian prince who became a king eventually and was one of the builders, along with his father, Luko Banda. He was one of the builders of the city walls of Ur. He became a king. His saga, his adventures are noteworthy for how they begin with Gilgamesh being what's the right way to put it, being so self-centered that he did not comprehend the lives and the feelings of those around him, the other children he played with, the girls he tried to play around with, and eventually the gods create someone to keep him in check, who becomes his best friend, and he do. So the story of Gilgamesh parallels later tales, but his mother is a goddess, his father is a king, and we have that come down in a way with Samson. Gilgamesh is the strongest man on earth. Samson is the strongest man on earth, but the name Samson is related to the sun god of the Babylonians, Shamash. And Samson in Hebrew is Shamshon. So he is literally an avatar of Shamash, the sun god. And Samson is noted for having his long hair. His hair is like the rays of the sun. The later Greek sun god Apollo also has long hair, never shorn. It can be bound up and tied up, but it's never shorn. And sun gods seem to have that going on with them. Heracles, Hercules is a Gilgamesh kind of deity, but he's also a solar deity as well as a martial or Martian deity. But Hercules, Melkert of Canaan, and Syria and Samson all relate back to the older legend of Gilgamesh. Samson. Is the one that's in the Bible, but Sumerian religious texts and Sumerian language and cuneiform writing continued on for hundreds, if not over a thousand years after Sumer was well, it didn't vanish, it just became different. So the Sumerians, Sumer is the origin place for the action in the Bible that begins with Abraham and Sarah. But you will find if you study linguistics, if you study the ancient Near East, you will find many parallels between characters in the Bible as well as what we call mythical characters or names of deities and spirits from other pantheons. Something that Victoria Martin mentioned when we were meeting yesterday was that I was I talked about how in a college class at Columbia College, Chicago, we studied the Bible as literature. And that it was, you know, it's pretty well known that the book of Esther is Esther represents Ishtar. Mordecai represents Marduk. All of the characters in the Esther story have a correlation with the Sumerian or Babylonian pantheons. It's a pretty interesting thing to stand out so much. So let's see what else. So linguistics helps. Studying cuneiform, there are at least six, if not seven or eight or more, different styles of cuneiform that developed over a 3,000-year period. When you find words and names or titles that are the same over hundreds or thousands of years, you can begin to see the threads of connectivity with those older cultures or civilizations. And so I again urge people to get that issue of national geographic and find out what if some of history's earliest kings were really queens.
SPEAKER_01Because it's especially in a lot of the online space, people just say things and never give you anything to back it up. And that is one thing that with the scholarship component of IPIS, we definitely do try to back everything up as best we can. I am curious though. So obviously, let's go back to Samson just for a moment, because obviously the stories of Samson, especially with his betrayal and following, I guess you'd call it an honorable suicide, how does that parallel into Gilgamesh? And how do you account for some of those subtler differences?
SPEAKER_00Well, in regard to Samson to Gilgamesh, we're talking about a difference of hundreds of years. I'll say hundreds of years because I would have to look it up to see whether it was a thousand years or more. What Samson has is the strength of Gilgamesh, but he also has the correspondence with Shamash, Shemshu, the sun god. Shamash the sun god is the god of law and justice. In a later time, on the stele of Hammurabi with the laws of Hammurabi on it, he's standing in front of the sun god Shamash enthroned, Hammurabi, the king, because the laws are supposed to come down from heaven to those of us on earth. That was the way that was written and phrased before. And in fact, in many places today, people still have the religious motion or feeling behind the justification for certain kinds of laws and regulations. What Samson has also in common with Gilgamesh is the wandering. They each have wandering portions in their lives. These adventures are part of what defines their stories. The difference is Gilgamesh mourns for his best friend who has died because one of them had to die. Enky Doo died. Gilgamesh mourned him.
SPEAKER_01Talk about why did one of them have to die? Just for the listeners that aren't as related to the legend.
SPEAKER_00Pardon my wiping my eyes. Gilgamesh and Inki Doo had gone to the cedar forest in the mountains of Lebanon to harvest cedar wood. Sacred, it was sacred to all of the cultures around them. Everybody from Europe, North Africa, Egypt, Eurasia, the cedar wood is fragrant and holy. So Gilgamesh and Nkidu went to harvest wood from the Cedar Mountain. They encountered the guardian of the forest. His name is Humbaba or Huwawa, depending on which form of Kinea form you're reading and translating from. So they have to fight him to be able to take the wood. But they can't defeat him because Huwawa was created by the gods to be a holy divine guardian. Gilgamesh and Anki do, they can't beat him physically. So they lie to him. They tell lies, they create stories, they deceive him and trick him so they can dishonorably kill him and take what they want. So the gods were not happy about this. And one of them had to die. And so it was Ankidu. Ankidu was not born. Gilgamesh was born of the goddess Ninsun. Ankidu was created by the goddess Aruru to be a match for Gilgamesh, to match him in size, strength, speed, so that Gilgamesh could not lord it over everybody around him. He would not be able to defeat what was created to hold him in place or keep him from, well, turning into, shall we say, an ever more belligerent jerk. So Enki Doo and Gilgamesh. Well, Gilgamesh eventually finds out that there's this guy living on the plains. He runs with the wild animals. With help, Enki Doo goes from being wild to being semi-civilized. And he becomes Gilgamesh's best friend. They can wrestle each other, but they don't, neither one really wins. They can race each other, they can do weight lifting, but they're equal. But Anki Doo has to die because Enki Doo is a creation like Huwawa was a creation. He was not born of a deity or a human. So Anki Doo is stricken down and dies. Gilgamesh mourns him incredibly. Cannot believe that's what's happened. He abandons the city of Ur. And he decides he's got to find out how to gain immortality. He goes across vast wastelands, he crosses waters, he comes to the place where the divine beer brewer, tavern keeper, the goddess Sidori is. And oh, I wish I was still alive with you. Gilgamesh really believes this, so he said, I don't want to die. So even though Sidori tries to get him to stay, he goes and he has his enchanted adventures crossing the waters to get to the end of the earth where a man and his wife lived. Who was this man and his wife? They were the survivors from the great flood. The gods had sent the great flood because humans had become too numerous, too disrespectful, they were noisy and filthy and dirty. And so the more what we would call the more uptight of the elder gods said, let's wipe them out. The younger gods said, No, no, they serve us. But they made the king of the gods decided he was going to send a great flood. And while they're getting ready to do this, the younger gods and Inanna, or Ishtar in a different language, warns their chosen favorite and his wife and family, and they build a boat, and they put cattle on the boat and their family, and they survive the flood. When it's all over, because they were good and pious, they were made immortal. Their children stayed behind, but the man and his wife were made immortal and set to live next to the gods at the end of the earth. And I have two different names in my head for him, which is why I haven't said that name yet, because I don't have it in front of me. So Gilgamesh talks to them. He really wants to be immortal. They tell him about a sacred herb. He gets the sacred herb. He has left them by this time. He lays down to sleep with the herb. But what happened? A snake came along, slithering around, it smelled the fragrant herb, and it grabbed it in its mouth and slithered away. Gilgamesh woke up, but he couldn't regain the herb. The snake had taken it. And so he realized that no matter what a man did, he's not going to be immortal, like a mountain or a star or the moon. And Gilgamesh takes this sad lesson to heart. Because he realizes that what you do in life, your dharma, your karma, what you do in life is your immortality. Be good, be good to others, so you are remembered with a light heart, with a happiness, and you're not cursed by those who might remember you. Because if you're that cursed, you could end up being totally forgotten. But to be good, to establish yourself in wisdom and strength, to help those who need help, protect those who need protection, to build good things, to have a good name, that's your immortality. And so that was well, really bastardized version of the saga of Gilgamesh.
SPEAKER_01You're reading way too hard on yourself. That was beautiful.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's okay, but it would be better if I had the exact names memorized from whichever translation. So that is that story is also part of the basis for later on when we get to Melkart, we get to Hercules, because they have to do good deeds to offset bad things that have happened. But not every story is going to have an exact parallel for every adventure or every villain that is faced or every seduction that takes place. But there is always enough that when people are well read, they can pick up on the threads of it, they can see the connectivity.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, one of my favorite Hercules stories was where Hercules comes across Prometheus. Because Prometheus obviously he stole fire from the gods to give it to humans so that they could cook and live and have fire. And Zeus was so pissed about that, he chained him to a rock so a Crow could come and pick out his liver every day. Right. Eagle. Eagle, sorry, eagle. Then Prometheus is there for I forget exactly how many years, but it's a long time. From pretty much the dawn, like the end of the caveman era until whenever Hercules comes along with his Golden Apples quest. And Hercules needs some information from Prometheus. So Hercules says, okay, well, I'm gonna free you. And the moral of that story was always the gods can be dicks, and they will punish you if you go against their divine order. But that nothing lasts forever, and that sometimes doing the right thing, even though you're gonna be punished for it, is still worth it because it's the right thing, and even the punishment itself won't last forever.
SPEAKER_00Prometheus was a great god older than Zeus of a Titanic generation in that sense. Prometheus not only brought fire to humans, Prometheus did the first sacrifice from humans to the gods. And when he slew the sacred bull, the people were hungry. People are always hungry, and we're talking about before refrigeration, before mass production, people were hungry. So this sacred bull is slaughter, but you have to give something good to the gods. And Prometheus, his name means forethought, thinking ahead. His brother Epimetheus' afterthought, oh daw, thinking ahead, says, Well, let's take the bones and the glistening fat and some of the offal, the organs, and wrap them up in this beautiful hide and present that to the gods, and leave the meat messy and cut up and just laying there like a bunch of lumps. And so he offers the choice to Zeus. Well, this is not the early Zeus of Crete. This is the cosmic Zeus who has come down from the cosmos to be the king of the gods. He knows what's going on, and he knows the gods are being deceived. But Zeus says, why we want the hide. Oh, yes, whatever you have wrapped up prettily for us is what we'll take. And Prometheus says, Are you sure? Are you really sure? Zeus says, Oh, yeah. So then, people have meat to eat after it is sacrificed to the gods. You must understand that taking life, plants and animals, for us to eat and survive, by taking that life and eating that life force. We should be grateful and thankful. And we should realize it died for us to survive. So we give thanks. So Prometheus, he maybe being the smartest of the gods, maybe he thought he got away with something, but maybe he didn't. But here's something else. Before all either of those episodes happened, there is a parallel where Prometheus and Athena, his very dear cousin or second cousin or something, create humanity. This is such a direct lift from the Sumerian tale of Enki and Ninhursag creating humanity. And in China, Nua and Fusi are another divine couple that create humanity. What happens in each of these? The deity reaches down into the good earth, the mud, the clay, and rolls it and forms them. And all of the early ones in these various cultures, all of the Early creations, they're healthy, they get up as soon as they're made, they're touched, or the breath of life goes into them, and they get up and walk around and they go off to begin to live on earth. Well, with Enki and Ninhursad, God of magic and the Lord of the earth, Ninhursad is the goddess of the mountain, the mother of all things. Well, they're doing pretty well. And then they start drinking because beer and wine were known back in 5000 BC and all of that. In fact, even longer ago than that. So the god and the goddess get drunk, and now they're making animals, and now they're making people, but the people are not perfect anymore.
SPEAKER_01That explains the potipus.
SPEAKER_00That explains when they made people they had people who had limbs that weren't even and harmonious. They had pe they made people who were crippled, they made people who couldn't walk. And by the time they realized the horrors of that, they stopped. Now, with Nuwa and Fossi, what happened in the major translation I read of those stories is that Nuwa got in a hurry, and that's why the last batch of people and animals was not perfect. With Prometheus and Athena, there's no drunkenness, and there's no haste. But the story is virtually the same as Enki and Ninhersag, the god and the goddess of magic and smarts, of intelligence and work, create people and animals from the earth. So that's that's a pretty interesting parallel to travel through the centuries. Let's see, so many interesting things there. But do we want to talk more about Sumerian things? Such as the oldest known author on earth was a Sumerian princess priestess named Enhe Duenna. Her compositions, her hymns, her writings are the oldest writings on earth that have an author's name attached to them.
SPEAKER_01What does she write?
SPEAKER_00She wrote hymns, H-Y-M-N-S, hymns, songs of praise, prayers, that sort of thing. To the gods, and especially the Sumerian gods. Inanna, Sin or Zuan, Utu. In other, in later cultures, Inana becomes Ishtar. Utu becomes Shamash. Sin or Zuen, that name remains. But the older name for the moon god is Nanar. Another name for the sun god as a golden god is Babar. Yes, like Babar the elephant.
SPEAKER_01I'd forgotten about that story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, anyway, I'm old and my mind will wander into continuing mythic structures and cultures. So let's see. Okay, Sumer, Gilgamesh, and He duenna.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I wonder if just to tie this back, what is one takeaway all of these stories could have on modern life? How could people take what we've discussed and actually use it to live better themselves?
SPEAKER_00People have to be willing to accept wisdom or morals that are in these stories. The morals are going to parallel or overlap with morals that we get from the Bible, but they're not all going to be the same because the belief systems were not the same. I'm just gathering and reeling in the thought there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but also the belief systems from the Bible have morphed significantly over the centuries from the early Christian church and what we would consider Orthodox Judaism to the early Christian church to then the Reformation and the colonial eras. Like sinners in the hands of an angry God looks absolutely nothing like the name it and claim it version of Jesus Christ you get in the 1990s. Right. There have been quite a few Christian theological movements over the centuries here. So it's kind of hard to even understand what a quote-unquote biblical belief system is.
SPEAKER_00Well, number one, the people who say they have biblical belief systems do not. Because they're living in a modern world, they're using computers, telephones, automobiles, trains, etc. That's number one. When they say they're in a biblical lifestyle, that just means that they are looking for a reason to establish themselves in a hierarchy over their families or their neighborhood and community. And what's a biblical lifestyle? Are they growing their own food? Are they milking their own cattle? Do they slaughter their own cattle? Do they scrape the hides to make leather? No, I don't think so. And the ones who do are very vested in having family and neighbors as a number of the evangelicals who say they have biblical belief lifestyles are exercising what you would call a big daddy kind of influence over others. Oh, and they want to have multiple women to stup. So they say it's biblical, and they want to have slaves, but they can't call them slaves in the United States. So they're considered to be interns or contract workers. But they're not, but they're not under contract, they're under domination of a phony church. Most of these churches are predicated, built upon a strong man collecting money and loyalty from the congregation and getting them to provide him and his chosen with homes, money, food, cars, wealth. When Raja Nish did this back in the 70s and 80s, people were like, oh, how horrible! He fooled all those followers and they gave him millions, and they he they gave him loyalty and he fooled them. Well, that is the template for most of the evangelical churches I have read, not only read about, but encountered in real life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. My grandmother she used to watch TBN out in the country, and she would just constantly mail them checks because she was doing the Lord's work while she herself was just living uh a modest social security check. Yeah, social security check and had to clean houses to make ends meet at the end of the month because all everything else was she's always doing the Lord's work, I'm helping them, and those churches were just make and bank. Well, just running a racket in God's name.
SPEAKER_00And that's part of the problem. Look, we are using the internet right now. I have been a radio broadcaster, I've been on TV, but I haven't been a broadcaster on TV. The problem with all of this is that when people are lonely, when they're tired, when they don't feel good, they're very susceptible to programming, propaganda, and messages coming at them. This is why TV commercials and internet commercials repeat often. Repetition grinds it into your brain, like learning your ABCs when you were little. So that repetition, then, give, please come help us do the Lord's work. Well, wouldn't you feel better if you were going to a local church that if they're gonna do the Lord's work, they you can go there and be with them. If you're going to tithe and live a more modest life or a or an impoverished life because you're supporting a religious institution, you should participate with it. These big scamming televangelists have been relying my whole life on television to have the bucks come flowing in, and then you see people like there was this guy, Peter Popoff. What a great name, right? And he would do this, and he closed his eyes, and he would talk to God on TV, and you're gonna send that ten dollars, you're gonna send that donation so we can build the Crystal Palace for God. Well, somebody, if it wasn't Peter Popoff, some other televangist, built a Crystal Palace Sanctuary of God with donated money. And by the way, always had a new car. It's like that guy, Joel Austin. What they're doing, they are all they are partly talking about biblical stuff. They're mostly talking about self-help and getting over selfishness. But by they are managing to get their message across so that don't be selfish, share with me. I'm gonna share with the folks out there. Let's start this thing. Some of the televangelists actually do some charitable good works. Most of them invest in their own church grounds and investments for their future.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. TBN's just marketing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And a TV commercial or a televangelist, the difference is the product they're selling. Because every televangelist is selling something. Hey, at least when I watch public TV, I know what the content is that I'm going to get from them.
SPEAKER_01Remember growing up, they used to have the uh little public drives during Sesame Street where they'd always say, go get your mom or your dad so they could pitch. Please send us 20 bucks and we'll send you a Elmo doll or something.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Just because the public TV stations were trying to keep going.
SPEAKER_00They're still doing that because last year the Trump administration cut off all funding for public broadcasting, the corporation for public broadcasting, public radio, and public TV. They cut it all off, and so they are hurting these productions that are done from Sesame Street to the travel documentaries, the archaeology shows, the music shows, classical music, Broadway, folk music, all of these things are suffering because the little tiny bit of money that was going to them was cut off by those who have no culture themselves, those who have no artistry or appreciation of beauty, and they also have no appreciation for history or the truth. Because that's why they want to shut all of this down. That's why CBS has been picked up and purchased along with CNN by the freaking Ellisons who are going to make it into a MAGA light, Fox Lite kind of thing. They've been working on it for months now. They're attacking ABC TV. ABC TV owns eight stations directly in this country, including WLS Channel 7 here in Chicago. And Brendan Carr, who licks Trump's booty on a regular basis, is challenging them because he and Trump don't like the fact that Jimmy Kimmel is on ABC and that they make money. That whole thing about Stephen Colbert's show losing $40 million was such a big lie. It's as if the Ellisons simply farted their last dinner out into the atmosphere. The Colbert show made money. Not only that, they made money in multiple ways. The show that would lead up to the news, people might tune into that. And then the news before the late Colbert people would watch that newscast or tune into it for the end, if not the whole thing. People go to sleep after a late show. Not everyone can stay up for Comics Unleashed, and not everyone can stay up late for Seth Myers on a different station. So people go to sleep, turn the Colbert off. They wake up if they turn the TV on, they're watching CBS morning news. CBS Morning News has had a precipitous drop in ratings since Colbert went off the air. All CBS programming has had a hit in the all important ratings since Colbert is gone. So the Ellisons and their chosen hatchet people can chop it up all they want, but they're not going to get a financial return. But since they're billionaires, they may not care about a financial return. They have taken a 100-year-old corporation and are flushing it down the toilet one show at a time because it doesn't meet their propaganda. Oh, pardon me. It does not reflect their perspective on life, which is that billionaires should always control, the wealthy should always control our news content in print, on the air, or on the internet.
SPEAKER_01Same thing with the Washington Post since Bezos bought it.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And it's also they can kiss up to a frickin' dementia patient who cannot walk a block. The guy can't walk when he golfs. He cannot speak clearly, he cannot read a teleprompter or a cue card. He cannot stay on tack. And I can tell you, as we get older, the mind does wander because you want to bring in more information. But he can't stay on tack even with a cue card in front of him or handwritten notes. And everything he talks about is him. I got re-elected. You need me. Anyway, sorry about that. The billionaire class believes that because they have money and have bought position, that they can tell the rest of us what to do and how to live. So it's up to everybody to patronize them as little as possible. I can't watch hardly anything on CBS. I do watch ABC. But that's a whole nother.
SPEAKER_01And the Pride Parade here in Chicago will be on ABC on Sunday.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I do not patronize the ABC company Google as much as they would like. I avoid Amazon as much as I can.
SPEAKER_01And ABC doesn't own Google. But yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, Google's a whole big problem. It is a problem. See, this is the problem with all of these mergers and acquisitions. It is true. It absolutely cuts down on competition. And there is no good justification for any of it except for the political propaganda influence. Propaganda. Prometheus needed better propaganda. But there was truth, and eventually Hercules did come and set him free. But you understand also going back to that, Hercules was defying the king of the gods, his own father, spiritually and supposedly physically. By defying the king of the gods and setting Prometheus free, he broke literally not just the chains holding Prometheus down, he broke the divine will of Zeus, which set humanity free to listen to, talk to, worship, or honor whatever spirits or spirituality they wanted. Not everything is covered under the aegis of one divine spirit. There is one God force that is the life force. But it's differentiated, just like you and I have different families and different ancestors. That's how it is with the divine. And it's always interpreted according to the humans receiving the message or seeing the vision or whatever it is. It's interpreted in their perspective. Yeah, their language, their culture. And it has to reflect something of their environment because that's part of what makes it unique. But when they say all gods are one God, all goddesses are one goddess, uh, one goddess, and there is the oneness, and there is a cohesive oneness in the multiplicities. Humans have a problem because we want to define spirit and spirituality, the way we can organize books on a shelf or spices on a spice rack. Spirit is not like that. Because the life force is everywhere in the universe, as far as we can tell.
SPEAKER_01And with that, we're gonna go ahead and wrap up this episode. Thank you so much, Juisha, for coming on. How should viewers get a hold of you outside of this if they're interested in hearing? More about your work with the Fellowship of ISIS or your educational role.
SPEAKER_00If people want to get a hold of me, they can contact me through LinkedIn. I am on LinkedIn under my own name, D-E-M-E-T-R-I-A, last name, N like Nancy, A-N-O-S. They can send me an email, but I literally for years I get a hundred emails or more a day. I guess they can also see if anything is still on Facebook. I might be leaving Facebook because they told me with an inside message from Facebook, inside of Facebook to me, because I am the monitor administrator for a couple of different pages. And they said that whether I give them express written consent or not, that remaining on Facebook means they will go to my private email, which is with a different company, whenever and however they want to look at how I do business, what I buy, who I buy it from, and if I sell anything, who do I sell it to? So that's what I got from Facebook four days ago. I wrote back to them. I have to check and see if they sent me a reply because it said that after June 30th, they'll just be in my business. So everybody, look at your Facebook. Did you get a message like this? Do you administer a page? Take a look and see what it is they sent. I have several people who tell me they hope that it was just some hack thing inside of Facebook. But with what little I know about computers, I did try to trace it back as far as I could, and it seems to be generated from inside of Facebook Meta. And they said any meta product that I use, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, also leaves me liable to their intrusion on my private email. So that's my next adventure to do a little more research and see if I can figure this out before June 30th. But if other people have gotten this message as well, I would say it's simply an indication that Zuckerberg, like Bezos, and Felon Musk are just kissing up to Trump's butt because they love the taste of what's there. And on that happy note, thank you, Chris. Thank you for your patience with my old lady rambling.
SPEAKER_01I was not rambling at all. Okay, and next time please come back next time.
SPEAKER_00Next time we'll do the other four pillars of IPS.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So next time is historical and cultural preservation that we could talk a lot about.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. Yeah. Alrighty. Well, great. Peace on earth. Goodwill to all. Have some fun, whether you're short or tall. Sweet.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thanks.
SPEAKER_01See you next time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.