Michael Tsarion Tarot & the Inner Zodiac

[Speaker 2] (0:00 - 2:39) What's up, everybody? Thanks for listening to Hear for the Truth. My name is Joel Rafiti, got my co-host Yerasmos with me, and today we have the return of Michael Dasarian for, I believe, the fifth time? I think so. I don't know. I think it's number five. One, two, three, four. Yes, it is number five. The legend himself, for those that are, I guess, fans of our podcast, he's a man that needs no introduction. Yerasmos and I met through Unslaved. We were both fans of it prior to starting our own podcast. I listened to an episode featuring Yerasmos, reached out to him, and recorded episode one, and the rest is history. But today we're diving into a subject, which is one of my favorite topics to talk about, which is the tarot, astrology, the inner zodiac, the sacredness, and the ancient connections of those topics and of those systems. So, if you're into divination, if you're into esoteric arts, if you're into occultism, then this is an episode that's really going to blow you away, we believe. Yeah. Enjoy the episode. Well, before you enjoy the episode, I just want to let people know that Rise Above the Hood, round 10, doors are now open. Our now 10-week program, it was an eight-week program for nine rounds. Now it's a 10-week program. To me and to us, we've continued to do our best and to improve upon this program to make it as holistic as possible. And to me, this is one of the most complete holistic programs for self-development, for personal development, for you to walk through an authentic path, for you to go on that hero's journey, for you to live a life of self-esteem, and to begin to remove the contradictions between who you are and what you do. So, we'd love to see you inside. If you feel the call to go on this journey, then head to riseabovethehood.co to learn more and sign up, or we'll put a link in the show notes as well. You are now listening to the Year for the Truth podcast, hosted by Joel Graffiti and Yerasimos. All right, everybody, welcome back to Year for the Truth. Today, we have the return once again of Michael Testerian, a name who to our listeners, I think, needs no introduction at this point. He is the host of the Unslaved podcast, author, acclaimed occult psychology, philosophy, conspiracy, alternative history researcher. Yerasimos and I met and this platform began through chance encounters, including Yerasimos' initial appearance on Unslaved. Michael, great to have you back. [Speaker 1] (2:40 - 2:46) Oh, it's great to be back, guys. How are you? How is everyone? It's lovely to be back on. Thank you so much. [Speaker 3] (2:46 - 2:55) Thank you, Michael. Yeah, we're doing well. Life goes on, exciting times, and we keep plugging along. Fourth of July, how about that? Yeah, yeah. [Speaker 2] (2:56 - 3:29) Perfect, perfect. Yeah, well, it's interesting. I mean, because obviously, that has a connection to, I think, what we're going to talk about as well with the founding of America and, you know, the specific tarot and astrological connections there. But today, just for our listeners to know, we're diving deep into Michael's view of the Zodiac, the inner Zodiac, tarot, his telescopic system, and how these worlds connect. Michael, I guess to start off, what first piqued your interest in tarot? [Speaker 1] (3:32 - 14:27) That happened, I think, in two phases. One was way back in 86, 87. Me and a friend or associate were dabbling very briefly into astrology, you know, and messing about, being very, very disrespectful in one sense, or at least just transgressive, where we fuck things around, you know, say, oh, maybe, hey, what happens if your rising sign doesn't sound right? Let's try another one. Hey, there's 10 things better, or no, that one really doesn't work. And then we started doing this with all the people that we knew, just in this kind of transgressive, anarchic way to say, well, I don't fucking think that that guy's Leo rising. And this is even something a little bit with the sun signs, right? And just to mess about on a park bench or just hanging around, you know, because we didn't drink and we were vegetarians, boring people living in Belfast, you know, and reading all the time. So this is where it sort of started almost in fun. It was not serious at all. And then, so it didn't really go anywhere. There was no theories being formed. I suppose that what had happened though, was that the seeds of the transgression were placed then to say, I don't care what the books say. I go with what I think. This was very, very haughty. It has got hubris involved. Who are you fucking a 15 year old punk or whatever? What do you think you're, you know, I suppose about 20 at that time, but it's like, hold on, you know, these are the, don't you see the thickness of that book? And that was published by Llewellyn and their traditions. They know what they're talking about, you know? So we did have a collection of books and we had the audacity to say, nah, we're not going to nail anything down. So it was like this, you know, very, very rebellious type of spirit and that was it. And, but when I left for America in late 89, I didn't stop this research. I don't begin things that I don't like to be into, right? And I don't drop them ever. So I held on like a Tasmanian fucking devil, right? To all these subjects and very incrementally carried on. Oh, there's a video on astrology. Oh, there's another book. Hey, look at these bookstores over here. They're even better than the ones we've got over home. So I start accumulating these books and studying, you know, like I did the other subjects, right? Kept going, kept going with an eye to the falsity of what they were saying, planetary attributes, correspondences, the stuff of astrology, exaltations turned out to be a very, very big one that was huge for me. These things called planetary exaltations. And so slowly it moved through the nineties. And then another event took place where a cousin who had been living also with me in America. And he was the youngest of our, I call them brothers, but he was the younger cousin. But he and I temperamentally got on more than, you know, with my other brothers, right? And cousins. And he had a collection of books, small collection of books that he had got, had bought in America. And he didn't really have a visa. He was just, he was sort of on a strange visa that was arranged by family members. So his stay in America was kind of precarious. None of us liked this fact, you know, and he couldn't put down roots. So he was like, you didn't know when he was going to be maybe having to be sent back or, you know, what was staying and how do you get roots? What are you going to do? Rent a room, get a job, you know? So he tried to do all of these things and he was just living sort of in my brother's garage. So we had a kind of a poor life while we were waiting for, you know, things to happen with his immigration. Well, in 1996, I think it was, he had come out in about 94, if I remember correctly, but by a few years later, 96-ish, it wasn't working. And the person who was sponsoring him pulled away the sponsorship and he had to leave. And it was absolutely fucking heartbreaking, right? Because it had taken us long to get him to come out in the first fucking place, right? And now he's had a really kind of not that great time in the States, in California, you know, and then nothing's happened. And then finally the worst acts falls where they just pulled back his sponsorship. So what? Selfishly did this, right? So he's going to leave and we're packing up and everything. And so what he did was he left me this collection of books that he had. And I said, look, I'll look after them. You know, can't take them on the plane with you. It's all over, right? They're too heavy. So he left me this collection of books and two or three of them were on the tarot. So as I said, I've been studying astrology, but not tarot, right? He lent me, or he gave me these books and one of them is this one that was pivotal. The book itself is rather unimportant. It was just a beginner's guide to the tarot. I think by Hollander or something like that, it was a green cover, right? I'm looking through this book and I was driving taxis at the time in the San Francisco Bay area. So a lot of downtime and you'd park and start reading. And I had his collection of books with me and my guitar, obviously, you know, in the front seat. So I would just sit there all night and read in the middle of the Silicon Valley, a really paradoxical type of situation. And when I was reading this book and then later on, also when I got a more steady job, I kept reading this book and finding all what I considered to be error. So to answer your question, this was this book that this pivotal moment that shifted gears in my life. And I said, oh my God, the studies that we had done in the 80s, the ones I just told you about where we were nitpicking and challenging and questioning and being critical, like you can't believe, breaking it down, deconstructing, you know, and all of this with astrology, that spirit started to return to me when my brother had left me these books. And I started going through them. And I actually, this time, rather than just deconstructing, now I started to make notes to construct what I thought would be a better system. And that's how it all started. So around about 96, 97, 98. And in 98, we start building the first periscopes website. It took a long time to, you know, put up because it was just early days of the internet. And I was trying to use the website for a lot of other things, you know, but we did put astrotheology pages on there. And we did, I started building the rudiments of what will become the periscopes mystery school, which is still there, 21 years old, you know, or more even. And it went from there. And it all came from this little book and this little study. And then I got David Allen Hulse, a book I still recommend to this day called the Western Mysteries. Used to be had a different title actually, when I read it, but it was renamed by Llewellyn, the Western Mysteries, big thick book. Excuse me. And that one had these tables of correspondences from all these magical traditions. It's really, really helpful book. And in it, he had the golden dawn system, right? The hermetic order of the golden dawn system laid out in these tables that McGregor Mathers and A.E. Waite had organized for the tarot archetypes. And when I looked at that, I said, this is good. This corresponds with what I've discovered independently. They're miles ahead, of course, I'm still in a rudimentary stage, right? But so I start getting into this golden dawn system, which has some very controversial things in it. They, you know, the way that they align the Hebrew alphabet with the tarot cards. So when you pull out a tarot card, you see these little Hebrew letters sometimes on it, right? That's controversial. What are the assignments of the Hebrew letters to the tarot cards? They're not all the same. Paul Foster Case, the great occultist in America, he had a different system. William Eisen has a different system, right? The French decks, you know, from the medieval and later peers all have sort of a different attribution. This would be somebody like Eliphas Levi, but you get Oswald Wirth. I won't go through all the names, right? So suddenly I realized that McGregor Mathers, whose real name is Samuel Liddell, had done the same work that I was doing. Only he had a brain and I didn't. He was way ahead, but he was doing something of the same work. He was building rope bridges and being innovative and saying, I don't like the Italian system. I don't like the French system. I don't like the way this tarot studies are all. So he scrapped it all and came up with his own system that was the backbone of the Golden Dawn system. And when I looked at it, I went, he's onto it. He got it right. Alistair Crowley basically adopted that same system because he was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. And so he adopted by and large that same system. Now, later he made some tweaks, right? So when I teach the tarot, I have to mention those tweaks. I don't know if we'll get into it here, but he made a few tweaks, but they're really not that big of a deal. He sticks to the Golden Dawn system that McGregor Mathers and AE Way put together. And so that then to me became the true Western magical tarot system that I had to abide by. And even if I was going to innovate with it, I didn't, but if I did, I would still be wanting to stick to that. And I thought if I ever do classes or things like that, this is the one I think works for me because I don't see anything else and there's nothing out there. And every time I would look at some other system, I can see it was bogus. So almost in seconds, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And you'd know that the McGregor Mathers Golden Dawn system was your go-to, and I did that and built my tarot scope system sort of with that in mind, keeping that system. I did innovate, you bring in more Egyptian thought, but basically still sticking to this thing. And then it took off steam. So not just the pivotal moment was not just deconstructing, which I think is very healthy, but starting to build. When you break the bowl, remember in the Zen story of the breaking of the bowl, how you glue that pieces back together again, the greatest artists did it with pure gold, the glue that put the pieces together was gold. So I always liken what I did to that. I took the smash pieces of what I deconstructed, but I put them together in a way that had this special innovative content where tarot, astrology, numerology, and even Kabbalah would all be linked together in this system, the tarot scope system, basically. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (14:27 - 15:24) Amazing. Yeah. I remember, so initially I was listening to the Unslaved podcast, my focus was on your psychology episodes, shadow work, things of that nature. Then every now and then I could hear you mention the tarot. And for me, back then it was like, why is Michael interested in the tarot? I didn't understand the bridge between tarot and psychology and everything else you were doing. I think this is a common misconception out there when people hear the word tarot, they just think of fortune telling or things of this nature, et cetera. So can you talk about a little bit, because then when I went down and started pulling that tarot thread, this was some of the greatest psychological development that I actually did was going through the path of the full series, working with these archetypes, integrating them, thinking about them. This had massive amounts of attributions on my personal self-development process. So can you talk about the bridge between tarot and psychology a little bit? [Speaker 1] (15:26 - 18:55) Yeah, that's the thing. This was the ancient form of psychology. Nothing new under the sun. Now this comes out a little bit more with somebody like Carl Jung, who obviously did use astrology, did use alchemy, did use the use of mandalas. He even used the I Ching. So it's more conspicuous with him when you study the history of psychology, but we've got Edward Edinger, we've got Marie-Louise von Franz. There's a sprinkling of others who taking the lead from, you've got Erich Neumann, who I owe a lot to because my dragon mother work is an homage to Erich Neumann. He was a Jungian. So it is there, this acknowledgement that what we would call divination arts are a kind of a proto psychology. Yeah. If it wasn't, it wouldn't work. You doing readings for somebody via the tarot, via astrology would be worthless. Those clients are coming for assistance and for help. And whether they like it or not, their own personal psychology has got to play a part. Because if they're coming to you as a reader, because they've got personal problems, well, maybe their own psychological disposition is the reason they've got those fucking problems, not the other people that they're coming to ask about. Maybe they're the problem. So you as a reader need to have psychological knowledge. It won't go so far as you to lie them down on a couch and start browbeating them or getting that deep into their life. That's not your job. You're not a professional psychologist, but there's still a heavy degree of psychological insight needed. And the more that you have, the more psychological insight you have, the better reader that you will be. So it's very empirical. So there is a very close connection. And then even on a more scientific level, the ancients even had it done probably better than modern psychologists because they were incorporating the right side of the brain. Yes. Oh my goodness. Especially those who work with tarot. So wait a minute, wait a minute, right? Strap yourself in. The ancients were doing something that we still are not even up to speed doing on the West, which is integrating both hemispheres of the brain and maybe something even more primordial than that. So it might not be that we have progressed and that psychology is this development and progression over the ancient tradition. It might end up being that ancient tradition, although defaced and mutilated as time went by, actually was even from an archetypal point of view, better. We don't know, right? But there's room to be thinking that. And also this is corroborated when you look at the depth and the detail of say something like the I Ching, which I just mentioned, the utter philosophical weight and value and depth of even the I Ching, let alone the tarot and all smacks of what I'm saying. So a sincere student now realizes there's something far, far deeper going on. But the tarot is especially important because it uses images. None of the other divination arts really do. Kabbalah a little bit, but the tarot is head and shoulders above. And therefore the use of these images opens up right brain consciousness. And that's something missing in all the other systems and can also be missing in modern psychology. [Speaker 2] (18:56 - 19:13) Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, this, I guess begs the question because the mainstream narrative out there is that the tarot was, you know, concocted by gypsies in the 15th century in Europe, et cetera, et cetera. But here we are talking about the ancient connections to the tarot. So can you speak into the history of tarot as you understand it? [Speaker 1] (19:14 - 24:51) Well, remember gypsy is a word that really is a sort of a euphemism for Egypt, egyptsy, if you wish, right? Talking about plays on words. And the beautiful thing, yeah, the history is interesting, but what's more interesting to me is the fact that this is a great high art that was smuggled into cultures as a game. Yeah. What? This corroborated my story that I've been telling for years about, say, fiction in general, whether it's Professor Tolkien or Star Trek or Doctor Who or Blake Seven or whatever you've got, the more modern version. Look, wait a minute. Haven't I said a million times that the deepest of all mythopoeic motifs have been transmitted to us through symbolism, number one, but also through fiction, not factual written stuff. And that's the way it's being preserved so that you have it. Because had it had to go through the mangle and the steamroller of academia, it would be erased from the world because these people urinate on knowledge to say, this is our territory, pal. We're putting this under a categorization. We're classifying this and it's not for you people. Under the academia, you may not want to spit when I say the word. So the ancients somehow knew that a single deck of cards, and I'm not just talking about the tarot here. I've done work to show that the ordinary 52 playing card deck is esoteric, believe it or not. This blows people away and so on. But in any case, vast truths and brilliant arts from the ancient canon, like opening an Aladdin's cave, are there in plain view. So to me, that's the really extraordinary fact that stands out when we discuss the history of it, that the brains of the people knowing how to encode and encapsulate in the simplest childlike little games and forms, rolling dice, playing cards, scratches on a turtle's back that became the I Ching. In the Druidic tradition, it was just writing on leaves. That's why books still have leaves. Pages are still called the leaves of a book because originally leaves were what was written on. And all of this kind of whimsical level is what's fascinating to me, rather than the more didactic, okay, Charles IV used it or in Italy they had it this way and that way. That is almost irrelevant. Now, but there is an article I did. It's on the Michael Tassion website. It's one of the old ones from the old website when Tarot Scopes was built. And it's called the Egyptian origins of the tarot. And it's still there. It's right on my Michael Tassion website right now under articles. And that one deals with this one fact of tarot, which I think that it has Egyptian origins. Not only that, but it seems to me to have come out of Egypt, at least the tarot that we know. And then I make the argument for that. It's not that everybody has to believe that, right? See, also in the oldest Celtic legends, there's what's known as the four treasures of Ireland. And they happen to be the tarot suits. The four treasures of Ireland, I mentioned it, I think in my Atlantis book and other work, right? The four treasures of Ireland are the four tarot suits. But in Egypt, when you lay out the major arcana, I don't think it takes a big leap for you to be able to see that the cards, you know, from zero to 21, relate to Egypt. And I think quite strongly. So there's this big Egyptian connection, even though there's anecdotal stuff about Ireland there, that the ancient Arya had it. Well, the Arya already traveled anyway and got to Egypt. So when you understand that as being an Aryan artifact, then I think things start to fall into place, you know? But the trouble with the history then on the dark side of it is that so much of that history has been obscured and hidden and buried by, well, guess who, right? So what we know about it is going to be sketchy because there's been a massive campaign by the Christian church to destroy evidence of ancient wisdom. They burned down the libraries of Alexandria, other ones I could mention, right? In fact, they burned Alexandria twice and you don't, and Alexandria is in Egypt. So the ransacking of Egypt by the Christians and the Muslims, you know, I've written about this extensively, of course, you know, and so there's not much left. So when we talk about it, you know, you're dealing with only fragmentary information that takes a lifetime to put together in a coherent way. So it's quite a study. I've done my bit, what I can, you know, the mystery school is the result of those decades of work and also innovation, not to just go along with what's normally known, but to innovate and bring out what I think was the ancient system, just like McGregor, Mathers had done in the golden dawn. I'm sort of carrying on that work. [Speaker 3] (24:52 - 25:10) Hey, Michael, do you think like, you know, the, the parasitic classes, the so-called elites, like they're aware that the tarot and the playing card system that they have this knowledge, but it's at a point now where it's so ubiquitous, there's nothing that they could have done. Like when it was first coming out, like you would think they'd be like, let's take up all the cards and burn them. [Speaker 1] (25:11 - 27:10) You know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, they did. And they persecuted the people who used them, but that's that miracle I was just talking about in their rush to do so. They didn't give a fuck that a few gypsies or ne'er-do-wells or outsiders were using it. Yeah. See, remember the witch burnings? Yeah. What do you think all that was? They knew that these women, right? The Sophic women had preserved some of these teachings. So they did go after people, but the miracle is that some of it survived because some of these popes and some of these characters being psychopathic, they were looking in the wrong place. And also don't forget that the good guys, the ones with the white hats had to become innovative. When you're being hunted down, you become innovative of how you, you know, become ninja-like and hide your treasures and hide yourself. So there's innovation on the side of the white hats to say, Hey, well, we'll conceal. We will encode into fiction, into little children's games, some mighty secrets. And then this was done across the board. And that's how you get this divide between the exoteric and the esoteric. People talk about that, but they never explain it. This is why the exoteric was put out there to be decoded like Alvin Boyd-Kuhn will tell you and Godfrey Higgins. They keep, they were teaching us that the exoteric is the sort of window dressing to lure you in so that later an initiated person with the keys of decipherment goes more further into the esoteric, right? But the exoteric is needed too for the marketplace. And funnily enough, it's worked. Funnily enough, this system of concealment and camouflage actually worked so that the exoteric mind can't fucking decode what they're looking at. Their own ignorance provides the protection. You got to love it. Now a short break from the episode. [Speaker 2] (27:11 - 28:18) Just a quick mention that Rise Above the Herd, our 10-week self-development program, the doors are now open for you to join. They closed on July 24th. We're taking a maximum of 15 students in this round. Like I mentioned, this is now 10 weeks, nine teaching modules, 10 integration sessions led by myself and Yerasmos, five nervous system focused workshops led by Sophie Fletcher. You get lifetime access to our extensive resource library of bonus modules, integration exercises, nervous system support, articles, videos, and so much more. And a bonus to this program is the human design components. For those that are familiar with that system, every single student receives a one-on-one 60-minute human design reading with Yerasmos plus throughout the 10 weeks, unlimited access to human design support via Sophie and Yerasmos. All the information imaginable is at riseabovetheherd.co. All the call dates and times, everything is in the facts section at the bottom. So if you feel called to become one of the 15, you can learn more at riseabovetheherd.co. And this course begins on July 29. [Speaker 3] (28:19 - 29:08) Back to the episode. I remember when I was first exposed to the playing card system based on the regular deck of playing cards, like I think 12 years ago now by my friend, Alexander Dunlop. I was blown away just at the numerical and symbolical significance. Like even just like, oh, 52 cards in a deck, 52 weeks in a year, four suits, four seasons, 13 cards in each suit, 13 weeks in each season. If you add up all the cards together with aces being one through 10, Jack 11, Queen 12, King 13 equal 364. And then the Joker is kind of like the fifth element, gets like a value of five over four. And then that's 365 and a quarter, the amount of days in a solar year. Like when I first learned that, I was like, what? I'm sitting there playing goldfish and poker and all this stuff growing up. And then I come across this and I'm like, okay, I need to learn more about this stuff. [Speaker 1] (29:08 - 31:44) Yeah, that's right. 52 is the angle of the pyramid, 52 cards. Right. Very similar to the minor arcana in the tarot. It goes on and on. 78 cards in the tarot. Well, that's the numbers between one and 12 equals 78. And the 12 is the Zodiac. Accident, of course. Coincidence, right? Yeah. My ass. Yeah. What is the connection between playing cards and tarot cards? Well, I think that there is a connection, but the tarot is so mighty. I would say that the court cards are more the obvious, but I think that the playing cards are more to do with the dimensions of the pyramid specifically, whereas the tarot, we're dealing with the mysteries of the stellar cult and not so specific, the more general to do with the Zodiac and not the Zodiac we know today, but a larger Zodiac of more constellations. There's 88 constellations altogether. So the tarot is much more scope is the way I look at it. It had more themes to deal with, themes that we're still not even familiar with, philosophical themes, hermetic themes. My God, the first card alone, the Fool, contains about, you have to change your thinking even to get to write down, to cogitate the meanings of even that single card. Why is the number 22 assigned to it? Why also a zero? Then we talked about the Hebrew letter a minute ago, right? Why is that Hebrew letter Aleph associated with that? When that doesn't seem congruous, but McGregor Mathers obviously thought it was. And so you've got a whole story there. Then the colors, then the image, then, you know, the different iterations that each tarot deck had of that. Sometimes the character's facing left, sometimes he's facing right. Sometimes he's got a little dog, sometimes not, right? Sometimes he's got the little bag with a staff and sometimes it's a little pack, something different. What's going on with that pack and that, you know, is that the story of Odysseus, who also had a little bag filled with wind, you know, that was connected to the fates and the bellows. And if so, what's the significance of that? Is the bellows to represent the lungs or breathing? Well, Aleph in the Hebrew does represent the breath, not just the breath of a human being, but the breath of God. So, you know, on and on it goes with just one card. [Speaker 2] (31:45 - 31:45) Yeah. [Speaker 1] (31:45 - 31:59) In the beginning was the word. Yeah. But with the playing cards, I think just one phenomena, that is the pyramid was being referenced, the mathematics of the pyramid. So difference in dimension, I'd say difference in scope. [Speaker 2] (31:59 - 32:11) Yeah. And is it true that like ancient images of the tarot can be found in ancient Egypt? I think I remember reading the Temple of Thebes once houses certain ancient images of the tarot. Yes. [Speaker 1] (32:11 - 34:54) Yes. I have that quote, I think on that article that I mentioned. So yeah, I've got that mentioned. And it might also be in the Path of the Fool series on Unslaved. That's a 22 episode series. So it's a mammoth series. But you're quite right. They were found in a cave, in a cavern. Some people say underneath the Sphinx, these images were found. But also more than that, the archetypes upon which the cards were based have to do with the cult of Amun-Ra. That's their true origin, right? And the story there is simply that the Great Pyramid, and maybe any pyramid, you could even make your own pyramid and this would happen, had a crystalline capstone, right? Glass, crystal, whatever. And when the sun was at its most high, and this is the god Ra we're talking about, would shine through this crystal that had been specially made by the priests, and it would cast these weird squiggly shadows below the pyramid. And when the priests would climb up the top of the pyramid and look down, they would sort of see that these snake-like images existed. And that is the source of the so-called Hebrew alphabet, which is not Jewish, it's Iberu. And the Iberu were the high priests, it's the old name for the high priests of Egypt, the Iberu, a word that was also mutilated and purposely misinterpreted, misconstrued, right? Hidden within it is also connections to Ireland. I go into this in a page that's on the Irish Origins site, the irishoriginsofcivilization.com site, onto the page called Etymology. People can just look on the site, find the Etymology page, and it's all of what I'm talking about is written there. And so these squiggly lines started to be the characters that we have Aleph, Beth, Gemel, and Doleph, and all the way down, you see, to Tau, which then became the Hebrew alphabet, but it's really the Egyptian alphabet of the priests of the sun cult of Amun-Ra. So that's its origin. And then the figures of the tarot, that's the prototype. They were built, they were overlapped on these squiggly lines, and tried to be, so the chariot, Jace, you know, Teth, the lion, you know, it just evolved from that. A very right brain process. Hard to follow for moderns because they're all stuck in their left fucking brain, right? Oh, you can't get this at all, right? But to the ancients, no problem. These are builders of pyramids. These are mappers of the heavens, you know, not a problem for them. [Speaker 3] (34:55 - 35:10) I got a quick question. This cavern that you're talking about, is this something that has just been passed down, like this knowledge that these images were there? Or can someone that wants to just go right now to Egypt, can they go to this cave or cavern and see these ancient images? [Speaker 1] (35:10 - 35:40) I don't know. I only know the source that I read from that, whether, you know, it's in Egypt. I ain't taught it. See, after the desecration that's been done in that country by the Christians and the Muslims, specifically the Muslims, it's a miracle to me that anything is left. So I don't hold out any hope on that. But I do trust the source that said, you know, because that source comes from people like E.A. Wallace Burge and some of the original anthropologists, I mean, archaeologists who went out there, you know. So yeah, I trust that source. [Speaker 2] (35:40 - 35:55) Yeah. Cool. So like this, you know, these Hebrew letters that were formed through this crystal, like in your view approximately, like how long, how many thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, like was this? Because I just find it so fascinating that, you know, this tradition has continued to this day. [Speaker 1] (35:56 - 39:28) Oh, it's a long time. It goes back before Akhenaten, probably right back to, you know, a very early stellar period, where they messed around with this stuff and worshipped the sun. And in their worship of the sun, they were looking for a way to transmit the beams of the sun to earth. Remember, even in the atlas of that, the symbol of the sun with 14 arms and hands coming out of the sun, you know, and you even see this kind of stylized and modern corporate logos. But let's not get into that. But these guys in the ancient times wanted to, were very fascinated with transmitting the power of the sun and of individual stars, by the way, individual starlight. You know, if we get to talk about the inner zodiac later, maybe this will come back up again as a theme, but they wanted to find a way of capturing until crystals became important, just as part of this whole dynamic, other things as well. Sort of Indiana Jones-like, right? But then they realized this pyramid shape was important. So, the pyramid, the stone one was built, then the crystalline capstone, that's why it doesn't have a capstone, because that was taken down. That's sacred. That's the property of the priest. Right? But once a year or at certain moments of time, probably the solstices and the equinoxes, is my guess, they put the thing back up again. And the words of Ra in the beginning was the word, the logos. Yeah. Absolutely. That was it. Christians didn't invent it. The Egyptians invented it. They put the, well, it's not to say that the Irish didn't have the same thing, because they're all Arya. So, in each of these countries, these pyramidical forms were used. The word of God was written in the sands below. They thought, well, thanks God. Thanks for talking to us. Okay, son, we got it. Yeah. These are your codes. And everyone then was allowed to interpret those squiggly lines in whatever way they wanted. And they became, as I said, they later on called Hebrew alphabet based on a butchered, you know, the real Hebrew are gone. They're wiped out. And so now we get the Hebrew, which is the word that was adopted by later Jews who thought of themselves as the new Hebrew. They're not, but they thought of themselves. You know, they did a pretty good job. You got to give them some stars. And they preserved some of these traditions, but they're not the original Hebrew, right? But coming out of Egypt, they were in Egypt and they were the high ones. They were the Hyksos, right? The Israelites. And so some of these old traditions, especially of the sun cult at Heliopolis, because that's where these Israelite Jews were situated, right about that area. The Hyksos ruled lower Egypt, at the, exactly at Giza Plateau, where the pyramid is. So it's not a surprise then that they were sun cultists as well. And as part of their book of the sun, as part of their rituals, they had these old, they preserved the older relics of the real worship of the Egyptian sun worshipers in the Israelite canon. And that's how you get the abuse and use of this word Hebrew. If people go to that etymology, maybe you guys can link up to that page. And you know, the whole story is laid out there. And also I have a little section on this thing about the squiggly lines. Now that I remember on that page, there's also information about this pyramidical, you know, and I give you the references. It's all sourced where that information comes from. Is this from your article? The article? Yeah. No, it's from a page on the Irish origins of civilization. [Speaker 2] (39:29 - 39:45) Yeah. Etymology page on that website. And even the word tarot itself is interesting, right? I believe it has its roots in the ancient sky Hippo goddess Taurt, which also connects the words like truth, church, et cetera. [Speaker 1] (39:45 - 40:09) Yeah. She was the original church. Circa comes from her name. Kirk. And as you say, church, Taurt, Tauret, Tarot, Torah. The Jews got that one, made a monkeys of it and called it the Torah, which simply means the way, but the real way is up there. The real way, right? The real Tao. [Speaker 2] (40:10 - 40:15) Yeah. I wonder if the Tao even has a connection to that. It does. [Speaker 1] (40:15 - 40:44) Absolutely. It does. Yeah. And it's from the earliest goddess known to man, Tauret. She was, Tauret is the Hippo goddess. And you see her in the, even the papyrus scene of the judgment of the dead. She's there featured. Yeah. The Tauret. She's the original mother goddess and her son, they styled as the little crocodile, the little Hippo God, or the little crocodile God. And they're seen as the central figures in the temple of Dandera, which has that famous Zodiac. [Speaker 2] (40:45 - 40:46) The Dandera Zodiac. [Speaker 1] (40:46 - 41:23) Yeah. There you go. And right in the middle of it is Tauret. So the word Tarot is Tauret, the goddess. I've written whole books on that. My trees of life, double volume. Yeah. This part of the sky goes into that circumpolar region up there, which has an entire mythology connected to it. That's separate from the Zodiac. People who study astrology have no idea that the original astrology wasn't the 12 signs of the Zodiac, but the circumpolar seven stations of the pole. So I've written two volumes on that. The trees of life, double volume. [Speaker 2] (41:24 - 41:58) Yeah. Okay. So I guess to bridge into the inner Zodiac, my understanding of the basis of the Tarot through your mystery school, et cetera, is that we're talking about archetypes and facets of the human being, of the self, of the individual psyche. Like these 78 cards, they speak to parts of us. And it's almost like every attribute, the gifts, the shadows, everything is covered by these 78 cards. So can you talk about, I guess, the inner Zodiac and how that came about and how that connects to the Tarot? [Speaker 1] (41:59 - 42:26) Yeah. Well, see, this is just my innovation. The calling, I would say that I had back in the 80s, that was very unstructured and purely deconstructive, but it was a calling, right? Yeah. And when you follow a calling, it leads you, it leads your thinking. So it's really not you that's even doing the thinking, it's the calling, so to speak, if you get my point, right? But as time went by and then around about... [Speaker 2] (42:30 - 42:37) I think there's a great Jung quote, it's like, it's not we that possess creativity, but creativity that possesses us, which I think speaks to that. Yes. [Speaker 1] (42:37 - 45:11) That is exactly what I mean. Yeah. We are possessed by the creative. Yeah. These forces possess us, we do not possess them. That's absolutely brilliant, Joel. And somewhere as it moved through the 90s, more towards 2000 and all of that, this started to take shape, an innovation to say, I'm not satisfied with the traditional foundational accounts of why astrology works. That's all it was, just this total character logical temperamental dissatisfaction with the story of how planets are meant to affect our destiny. And I just don't believe that they do in the way that's been described. Granted, the moon is the only one of the so-called planets that has some sort of physical effect upon us. But then again, even that doesn't work because the moon's effects are mostly on the tides, mostly on the physical earth, the geoid, not on personality. Everyone, all police forces in the Western world know that when the moon is out, full moon, people do crazy ass things. So I'm not denying that. There is a certain amount of evidence that there's a non-physical, more behavioral influence of the moon, but by and large, the moon rules physical phenomena on the surf, like the tides or like the menstrual cycle. These are physical, not psychological, by and large. But when it comes to the other planets, sorry, it's zero. There's not enough science there to fill a thimble as to how magic rays affect consciousness, behavior, destiny, for goodness sake. Now it might be true, and we just haven't discovered it yet, but something temperamental in me just couldn't accept it. And so then, as I said, what's the constructive side? To try and suggest ways in which this is working. But that meant the deepest dive possible into psychology, right? Now you had to really go into the dark to dig up. This was a task. You know, I think I accomplished it and then could present it to the world in the form of that article, in form of this little video that I have, you know, the tarot scopic intro video. [Speaker 2] (45:12 - 45:28) That was the first thing I consumed on this topic. I had no history of tarot, never researched tarot. My entry point was that introduction to Tarot Scopes Mystery School video, and that floored me and blew me away. It felt like a very divine kind of moment consuming that initially. Yeah. [Speaker 1] (45:29 - 48:36) Good, good. Because it's been banned and stuff like that. So I'm glad, you know, it's linked to the bottom of the Inner Zodiac article, and I've linked it to my Tarot Scopes site, you know, the facts page. But if you guys could link that up as well, it's very, very handy. And that sort of encapsulates the broader theme. Yeah. My dissatisfaction is not necessarily everybody's dissatisfaction, and they can carry on believing as they want about astrology and carry on even practicing it the way they want. I'm not, I didn't try to get in there and form a school to debunk, you know, what other people are doing. Yeah. But I did feel motivated in my own life to say, I'm not satisfied with this account of how rocks floating in space are meant to affect human destiny. There's got to be something else. So in the article, I suggest one or two, you know, interesting things the way it could work. And I satisfied myself. And so out of that need to innovate, and then learning more about the brain hemispheres and the old brain, and going into some very, very odd territories, you know, I came up with then with this Inner Zodiac, Inner Oracle idea, you know. And I also drew on the work of two scholars who, although different, harp on some of the same themes. And one of them is Julian Jaynes, Jaynes with a Y, and the other is Owen Barfield, you know. Barfield was an expert on metaphor and on ancient languages, you know, and all of that. And he was more sort of a Christian thinker, you know, to that degree, but also highly into symbolism. And I found in their work, they don't speak about what we're talking about, right? But in their work, when they're talking about other things like language and history, I found some evidence that I thought could apply, you know, to the story of the Inner Zodiac when you chalk it out rather than, you know, if you wanted to advocate it. I just shrunk everything down to that little article, but that's just for the public, right? Where is the argument? How do you verify it? Well, you've got, I felt that you had to go into some very bizarre areas of neuroscience and psychology, you know, to do that. We can talk about that if you want, but that was, that's an overview. So that I could tease out possible connections between, you know, the heavens above and the person, you know, like as above, so below the old hermetic adage. And look at it from a completely different point of view than traditional astrologers do, because it just seemed to ring hollow to me, right? Astrology works and everything, but the account of the archetypal foundations of why it works didn't hold, at least for me, didn't hold together. [Speaker 3] (48:38 - 48:45) Did Julian Jaynes, he wrote that Bicameral Mind book. I think I've heard you talk about him on a regular basis. [Speaker 1] (48:46 - 56:04) Yeah, it's called the Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And this is the book that I turned to in this desperate hour, you know, as I was building, it was really through Carl Jung and Erich Neumann, you know, I read bibliographies at the back of books, you know, I don't know how I came across them, but it was back in the early 90s. And what he really basically says is that, you know, the hemispheres of the brain, bicamerality defines a period of our history that brain function was different. We still had the hemispheres, but they operated differently than they do now. And the ancient man, this would be pre Homeric man, used to hear what he called auditory hallucinations, probably coming from the right hemisphere of the brain is his thought. He was a Stanford professor and Princeton professor, right? His work was deliberately suppressed and misrepresented. And if, you know, when I finished talking, you'll, everybody listening will understand why. But anyway, to keep it short and simple, he found that in the works of Homer, there was, you know, evidence that there was a different kind of consciousness, you know, in the thousands of years before Homer's time. And this form of consciousness, bicamerality, started to change during the Homeric period, moving into Hesiod, the next playwright, and down, you know, to the weird has started to take place. And by about the third century, and he looked into, you know, texts of the Jews, a lot of different texts to prove this, this self that we now know and experience as this I, the central I, started to come about, but wasn't in existence. This level of subjectivity and me, the personal I, didn't really come to bear, you know, through the traditions. But he's pointing out that even our own shrunken sense of I-ness is still manifesting as a voice in our heads. You have it, I have it, everybody has this voice in their head, right? Okay, he thought. In the ancient pre-Homeric period, he thought that there was these audio hallucinations, and they were known as the voices of the gods. And what this was all about was that the voices of these gods instructed the human race to do what they were doing. People did not have a personal will or personal volition and acted entirely by way of instruction of these inner voices. I know this sounds crazy, but let's follow it for just a minute, because it will answer this. Like I said, it's a long way around to explaining Joel's question, right, of the inner zodiac. So, mankind was instructed from morning to night, the little voices that go and cut the field now, go and plant the seed now, go and harvest now, go get the water from the well now, go look after the sheep now, right? James later says that one of the reasons why these voices sort of declined might have been because of enlargement of towns and cities. As you got more and more people, things worsened. But in small villages, in smaller townships where there wasn't a lot of people, this was what was going on. Now, there's a Star Trek from the original series, but I can't remember the name of the episode, that actually goes into this. So, somebody who wrote that script, and in it, it's about a group of people on a planet that worship this big serpent's head. So, this is how you'll know it's the episode I'm talking about. And the serpent, big, big, you know, like Keonako or somewhere like that, you know, this big evil looking serpent speaks to the people, and they have these little antennas on their necks. And all they do is obey whatever they're told to do. You will bring the apples to me now, right? So, they go and harvest the apples and bring them all, right? Everything that they do is done this way. They themselves would just be zombified if they didn't hear these voices. And so, somebody must have known they're Julian Jaynes who wrote this. Or independently had worked this stuff out amazingly, right? And that can happen. But anyway, back to the story. Around about the time of Hesioi, Julian Jaynes noticed that these voices started to fade away from humanity. And he tries to give a few reasons of why this might be, right? And so, what this did was it left people completely unmoored and apathetic and zombified because they were no longer being told what to do. And so, like a bunch of ghosts, people started to mill around without instruction. And it caused one of the biggest, you know, apocalypses that we know. See, Homer was eight centuries. But he was only writing about previous times. So, Jaynes' actual period could go back to almost 3,000 years ago. Because remember, although you mentioned Homer, Homer is only writing in the Iliad and the Odyssey of ancient Greek history. Oh, wait a minute, right? So, that pushes these dates of the actual happenings even before, just to make that point. But at some point, these voices started to fade, and people went fucking mad. And this is when a lot of things started to happen that opened, for want of a better word, the modern age. Modern thinking, modern consciousness, right? The hardening of what we know as the single unitary monad, the self, which is still a voice in your head, came about slowly, very slowly, and other things. But what happened was this. In the panic of the masses of the people, that the voices had faded, couldn't hear, it's like a radio. You can hear some crackling, right? But you're fidgeting around with a knob going, come on, come on. And then a little bit, something will come in, and a little bit, it'll fade away. This was always kind of taking place. So, then what changed in history was that only very special individuals started to take on more importance because they were the last in line of the ones who heard the voices more clearly. So, whereas before everyone heard the voices, now it was a particular so-and-so in your village, in the town, living up on the cave in the hill there, that everybody started to say, we'll go to him or her, because they still hear it loudly, get around there. And this became the cult of the priest and the priestess. This is the age of the cult of the time when people gathered around a specific leader. Now, don't you tell me how important that is for our age. This is not only the genesis of priesthoods, it's also the genesis of royalty. [Speaker 2] (56:06 - 56:12) It was like God had left them, and then so they had to outsource their power to the guru now. [Speaker 1] (56:13 - 58:22) Precisely right. That's where it all comes from. If you lay out the major arcana, this story is, I believe, concealed in the major arcana, by the way, just want to anecdotally say that, because don't you have the emperor and the hierophant side by side? Okay, hold on. So, but back to the story, this outsourcing now took place, and instruction was still given. Nothing like what was before, but some so-and-so on the hill there, and he liked the feeling of this, look at them all coming around me. I do hear these voices. So, all right, you go and till those fields over there. You build my ziggurat over there. You go fish over there and bring me some of your spoils. And this is where history starts to come along. People lacking it inside become dependent on the individual, but they also become dependent because they believe that if you build a shrine or a silent place, you can hear the voices of the gods again. So, this is the origin, Jane says, of temples, shrines, churches, and so on. Private little spaces, even in your home, even a little alcove in your home with a candle burning. He said this is also the origin of what's known as votives. We know them as little icons where out of wood or stone, you form little tutelary spirits, little gods, statues, lingam stones, whatever, figurines. And they found these back in the time of the Hittites. It goes back to the Paleolithic, figures of little goddesses. They don't even have to have heads or distinctive features. And you put these in your home because first, strangely, it seemed that the voices of these gods, Jane says, was coming through these little votives for a while. This is another thing that happened until it also started to fade from them. Now, those votives are still preserved in the Catholic worship of the Lady of Guadalupe and this Black Madonna and the Madonna worship where the fixation on statues and candles and churches and things like that. We're still doing it. [Speaker 2] (58:22 - 58:27) Of course, we're still doing it. I even think about confession booths. Do people go in there to hear the voice? [Speaker 1] (58:29 - 1:00:48) All of this Baptist stuff and evangelist stuff wouldn't exist without it. You're absolutely right. Then another phenomenon came, which is the age of oracles as a development. Because the voices had completely faded by later times, now we really needed what you described earlier as the guru. Now came this real emphasis on a central figure, a central oracle, a lot of them women. Something also started to happen here, where the females became the oracles who were saying—whether they were telling the truth or not, we can't tell—but they were saying, we hear the voices of the gods. And so oracles were set up in certain important sacred places that had been sacred for a while. But now this is where even the Caesars and the emperors and their wives—this feature, everyone listening to us should know this, right? The history of Ephesus and Delphi and other places Celtic Ireland was full of it, or pre-Celtic Ireland, I should say. So this is when this started to happen. Now see, as we're creeping forward here, we're getting to answer your question. Because now the oracle is doing what? Divining, giving prophecy, speaking in the name of the god or the goddess, and you ask questions to it. After the age of oracles started to fade, for whatever reason, man found himself now back in the same fucking panic. I need instruction and I'm not getting it. So this is the age now, right? We had the age of the priest, we had the age of the shrine, we had the age of the oracle. Oh, and by the way, in the age of the shrines, also big mounds of the dead became places that people went to to hear the voices of the gods. So this is where you get this strange building of mounds, like you find in Ireland, but all over the world. And sometimes there's even been noted that there's mass grave sites. So this would be where cenotaphs come from. The idea of a commemoratory mound of the dead. Native American Indians were all into it, right? And it used to be that if you hung around these places, you would hear the voices of the dead. And of course, the skull, skull worship, which goes back very far in antiquity, might also be a remnant of this. [Speaker 2] (1:00:49 - 1:00:53) It's huge in the history of Mexico, where I am now, the skull worship, the day of the dead, etc. [Speaker 1] (1:00:54 - 1:07:46) You bet. And even the crystal skull, who made that and why? So we're covering a lot of ground here, but it's very important. So after this age of these somewhat morbid, but also necessary forms of worship, we get to the age that I call divination. So as I said, the long way around answering your question. After the age of oracles, sort of overlapping, but it took on that in man's extreme need to find guidance, he started looking more to inanimate things, just like he had done with the votives, just like he had done with the figurines. He started looking around him, and tree worship comes out of this. The worship of certain behaviors of animals would be like the Native American Indians would say, oh, there's a hawk in the morning, or there's an eagle over there, or the buffalo did this and that. And this would become prophecy. In China, they'd observe the turtles and the serpents. And this is where you get your entrail reading kind of things, or palm reading, lines on the palm of your hand, the lines on the back of a turtle shell, throwing sticks for the yarrow, sticks of the I Ching, throwing coins or whatever the hell they did, stones, the runes are all dating from this period. And as that matures a little bit, it's at this point that you get astrology and tarot. I look up. I think the voices of the gods are coming from the sky. Take out card nine, the hermit. Given the bicameral theme we're talking about, if you take out that card, the chariot actually, the chariot is a symbol for me anyway, of the individual voice, the loss of the gods, and now the focus is on the individual steering his own ship. Frightful and horrific as that may seem, no voices instructing me. I now must be the sole architect, a navigator of my life. It's just encapsulated in that card for me. But nine is as well, because what is the hermit doing? He says, you fuckers shut up. I can't hear the voices of the gods anymore. I'm off. And he climbs the mountain. Yeah. They get way up high to listen for what used to be that instruction. Is he going to hear it? No, because it's fucking gone, right? But while he's up at the top of the mountain, so to speak, figuratively speaking, he looks around him and sees the wonder of the cosmos. And that right brain part of his mind, where the voices of the gods used to come from, now sort of takes on this different symbolic angle in which he starts to see in the shapes in the sky. And he becomes the oracle that says, well, God has spoken to me, actually. And we talked about the cult of Ra, cult of priests, watching the squiggles, watching the lines, divining. And so what we know as the tarot now comes with this age of divination. And this is where people then used as the biggest compensation for the loss of the voices of the gods. And that's why the world was obsessed with it. So that's a short sketch of how it comes apart. But the thing is, it hasn't gone away. Modern AI, well, no, let's back up. The very digital world, kingdom, the computer, is part of this long, long desire to give up personal volition and re-hear the voices of instruction from within. It's the only way it can be put. Man has never lost his desire to be told what to do. We just said that eras of kings came and went. The teacher, the priest, the priestess, they've made money. They've retired to their paradisiacal houses. Now we got the imams, the fucking mullahs, right? You got Joel Osteen, Judith Meyers, megachurches. Last night, God talked to me, Robert Tilton, you know. And people in their millions come in all over the world, modern world, are you kidding me? For instruction. It doesn't matter how bogus it is or how much you got to pay for it. This is what's going down. So the human race has not in any way changed. That is why you have so much madness in the world. That's why any leader can jump up and lead the flock. That's why religions exist. That's why fundamentalism exists. It's all to be told what to do. In the frustration, you know, now to bring it to its conclusion, in the frustration, man has been so innovative that he actually created this simulated world of the computer world, right, what we know as the internet and all of this, in order to build a new God, to instruct him into how to live. So this is how I take Julian Jaynes' work. He died long before this age came upon us, but I believe it's absolutely apropos. I'm a big fan of his work. And I think that AI is the latest iteration of this fucking need that is so deeply placed to lose selfhood, right, to lose it and just be this mannequin that takes instruction from outside. And we're succeeding better than anyone could imagine. We're hurtling forward back to a bicameral period, wanting to give up the stress of being a self. And I think a lot of things in the world are explained by this, and a lot of things in general history, the whole history of the world can be understood with this unfolding of the loss of the voices of the gods and the needing of it to be returned. It also explains things like schizophrenia, you know, and other things that we can't talk about, but just the idea of a metaphorical space inside your own head where that so-called I lives, and when it lives, it lives as a voice. One can get into a lot of different things from this, you know, not just the neuroscience of the splitting of the brain, hemispheres, and all of this, but what Julian James brought to the table is invaluable. It's been thrown off the table, sadly, but I resurrected my work in order to go the long way around to explain the inner zodiac. And that is that these are remnants, why it works. It's not from magic rays of the stars, not from magic rays of planets, but from their equivalence within. The need to replace the voice of the gods motivated us to create the divination arts as the last echo, the last crackling of the radio of instruction. And that's why I believe it works. And the astrologers got it all wildly wrong when they point to magic rays and all of that stuff. They don't know their Julian James. They don't know the history of the real world and the real history of consciousness. [Speaker 3] (1:07:47 - 1:07:59) Yeah. So when people find that like certain transits are accurate in terms of like things that happen in their life, like, I guess this is where I get confused, like what's happening there? You know what I mean? [Speaker 1] (1:07:59 - 1:10:18) Well, it works because it's divination. The consciousness, right, is involved there. It's added a template from its own self onto it. It's mapped onto it. And so it's this kind of a fusion of mind and matter, which is taking place there. But the root of it is the inner zodiac, not the outer, right? You have the zodiac within your head because you have the inner oracle within your head. And that oracle has changed in form, but it's still instructing us more imperfectly than it used to do when the voices were loud, right? But it is still instructing. Not everyone, because that's why a lot of people don't believe in these things. But those who do go to these arts, they are, don't you see, by using the astrology, they're dialing or they're turning on a switch that is actually being receptive to the voices of instruction again, which are millennia old. So the person who turns to the tarot is saying subliminally to themselves, instruct me like you used to do. I'm being receptive. And guess what? The right brain obliges. It still offers instruction. You need a lot more learning curve. You need to be aware of symbolism. There are certain provisos required, right? You need interpret, keys of interpretation. We're not doubting any of that. And you might even need some left brain interference. And that's the mathematical stuff that the astrologer is into. He's brought in left brain, calculative, logical, linear, right? Templates, which I have scraped away in my system. They're unnecessary. But after you've done all of that engineering and artificing with the left brain, it does work. But you've brought hunks of ingenuity into it that's really not even necessary. I'm a purist. I get rid of it, right? The most exotic fruits are fine behind the plainest leaves. So get back to that. Now that they brought all this shebang in, this palava, okay, they got a system that works. But don't tell me that that's true astrology, like you've been selling for years. [Speaker 2] (1:10:20 - 1:11:04) Yeah. So I'm a member of your mystery school. I've studied your system. I've worked with your system with others. And it truly is mind blowing to me how accurate the cards that I pull are in relation to the question or what's being discussed or the specific problem. But there's also times I find also where I'm doing a reading for myself even. And intuitively, I know the answer before I pull the card, as I'm still doing the wash. It's like my unconscious is already giving me the answer just by me deciding to engage in wanting instruction. So what is happening when someone conducts a tarot reading? Is it simply counsel from the unconscious? [Speaker 1] (1:11:05 - 1:15:52) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because remember, the tarot procedures that I've laid out on the mystery school are actually specifically designed with that in mind, to close off the logical brain and open up the unconscious as Jung would call it, or the right brain. That's why it works. If you're just using random stuff, it's not going to work as good. There's specific procedures, right, as you've seen on the mystery school that actually help bracket the conscious mind, enabling this voice of instruction to come through. And you see, the symbols that are on the tarot, for instance, we just talked about an age in which the voices of the gods spoke to man. During that time when the voices were very loud and before the time that they completely faded, there's instruction going on. So man in relationship to his world, this would be pre-Vedic man, is very symbolically literate. And what you see on those tarot cards is the remainder of the images that became sacred to him during this bicameral period of a day when he was going around. That's where the astrological signs come from. That's how the hermit, to give that figure again, was able to perceive things in the sky. Because while he was being, while man was in the bicameral period, he saw things in this highly symbolic way. See, there's another event that I talk about. There's an article on the female Illuminati website called, From Heaven to Earth. And members of Unslaved can listen to that podcast, From Heaven to Earth, in which another later event, because there's many celestial events, we were just doing a shorthand there, right? But another celestial event took place that the scholar David Talbott writes, made a video about called Thunderbolts of the Gods. And I've extended his research so that it dovetails with this as well. People can read that article or just go and listen to the podcast, in which when man looked up to the sky, they saw these shapes and figures. It's what's known as paradoila, where you have this ability, like today, when you look at the clouds, you'll see shapes in them, right? And even sometimes on rocks and things like that. Paradoila begins with this time when we looked up to the heavens and saw these incredible conflagrations in the sky. That's why you do it today. Little kid will go, mommy, mommy, I see a dragon or a big white horse in the clouds. Where did we get that ability? It actually comes out of trauma. When all the world looked up to these celestial cataclysms, right? So during the time of the bacchameral period, our vision of the world, our vision of animal behavior, very important animal figures and other motifs jumped out that have remained. The fool card, the hermit, the chariot, right? Somehow these were burned into our minds. Like I just said, the figures that came down from the pyramid, the pyramid itself, the pyramidon, and a hundred other symbols besides the serpent. Those shadows that were cast by the pyramidon were little black serpents. That's how they were figured. The Hebrew language was meant to be a serpentine language. So the serpent became important, the serpent of wisdom. So when Jesus says, be as gentle as doves, but as wise as serpents, he's being saying, be as wise as the Hebrew, the guy who's read the serpents. Be the nod dreads, that's the original name of the Druids, from which we get the word adder, which is serpent. The magician in the tarot card wears a snake around his waist. He's a nod dread. He's a gnadeer, as the British call it, the gnadeer, the gnadeer. These are the adders named after the serpent. But that didn't mean physical serpents. That meant the priests of Amun-Ra. In the full card, you get a little picture of the sun, a little image of the sun up in the corner, and so on. There's a story being told to us here. So the tarot is the last sketches. Think of it as a sketch. These are all images that are deeply antique. Mayat on the 11th card, justice, the hanged man, Odin on the tree of life. Where did all of this come from? It's a massive study. I try to do justice to it in the path of the fool and another work. But these are partly remnants of the time of the bicameral period. That's why they're very hard to decode. When people look at them, they go, I'm familiar with this. Oh, no, not really. Oh, maybe, I don't know. Or then, like you said, when you actually start practicing readings, you have this feeling that there's something already awakened within you as you deal and touch with the cards. All of this is the old antique repository. It's what's known as anamnesis, deep memory, not knowledge, not learning again, but remembering what was. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (1:15:52 - 1:16:33) Beautiful. So actually, just one point I wanted to make was you mentioned before the chariot being like the birth of the individual. And no coincidence, that's the birth card of America in July 4 being today in the cancer period as well, right? But the birth of the individual makes sense there as well. How can working with the tarot develop selfhood? Because we're saying we exited this bicameral mind and the eye was vague. But how can now working with these systems bring about self-knowledge and selfhood and strengthen one's intuition and strengthen one's ability to stand on their own two feet? [Speaker 1] (1:16:35 - 1:17:51) Well, that is because, remember, the instruction that we are talking about, whether it was during the bicameral period or later, at the age of the oracles or the later age of divination, is actually still coming from within your own being. So even though it's the voices of instruction, they originally were internal. And your right brain is still internal to you, isn't it? So it's attribute of the individual. Then the eye that you've just spoken about, which although granted is a late phenomena, is still a metaphorical eye within yourself. It's still a self-positing eyeness, a voice, a sense of yourself that is internal to yourself. So that is where the selfhood lies. You are consulting yourself. Even if you have a hermit on his mountain looking for something else where the voices of the gods are secreting themselves, thinking to himself, those voices are still around. It's just that we're too fucking noisy. I'm off. I'm going on the pilgrim's progress. The motive is still to be solo. And by the way, the letter, the Hebrew letter of the hermit card is yod, eye. [Speaker 2] (1:17:53 - 1:18:04) Hmm. Yeah. And not to mention, I think everyone can experience that nursing yourself in nature, in solitude, answers come a lot quicker than what they do in the middle of a city. [Speaker 1] (1:18:06 - 1:23:07) Yeah. You are the monad. You can have two, you can have three, you can have four, but there's always you. So there's periods of time when you have to just clean the board and find out who you are in your own self without the mirroring of another. The mirroring of another is the most, is vitally important in life. But there's also a time in which you need to confront yourself and find out that you are what you are, right? And go down there. Now there's problems with all of that, right? And those are the problems that a real heroic person who's committed to selfhood will take on. This is, anybody can get on a horse, it don't mean the horse is going to move, and you have to stick the spurs in it, and you've got the, it'll jump around, it'll crash into the fence, right? It takes a hero to pursue the challenges that will be necessary. And by the way, this leads me to an important point. One of the reasons why we're not enlightened, one of the reasons why these journeys need to take place and are so lengthy and problematic is because you see there's massive, massive padlocks on what man wants to know about himself. Now this is again, looking at the overview of the journey of knowledge, the journey of philosophical ideas and thought, and just the journey of everybody towards the so-called, look where we are, we're again, turning the AI right now. I look at that as a backward movement to the bicameral period. But it's also a cry saying, help us, we're still fucking stupid. We need machines to tell us what to do, right? It's a confession of our ignorance that we're constantly groping for more and more technical knowledge of things, artificial intelligence. But that means, but nobody will ask the question, why is it that we've had thousands of years, only to arrive still to be very, very primitive psychologically? And the answer to that is because the root of all consciousness is self-deception. The real study is not psychology, it's the psychology of the self-deceptiveness that underlies all consciousness. Better said, we are beings that have massive padlocks, no goal area signs on self-discovery, on what we want to know about ourselves. I've gone so far as to say that it's worse with women. With womankind, the padlocks are even bigger. They could care less about who they really are, and they're more absorbed in the world of cosmetics and fashion and shopping. They're worse because they have no intention of discovering the mysteries of themselves, but man is just right behind. And so with these levels of dissociation, willful dissociation, you get pathology. You get, as I said just now, the distractions into stupid stuff, because that is all done so that we can absorb ourselves in some sort of circus and pantomime and superficial nonsense, so that we can take a breath and never have to deal with the mysteries, the sacred mysteries, where we would have to go to discover the truth about ourselves. This is for all mankind. It's one of the reasons why I don't talk to mankind. I'm not interested in the fate of the human race. Only the very few people who, knowing what I'm talking about, truly seek. Everything is designed to do that. I've never had any pretensions about getting on a podium and enlightening the whole fucking human race and all. Not when you really see the depth of what I've just spoken about. People will choose oblivion as they are. They're choosing the oblivion of distraction, like in the Monty Python movie, Meaning of Life, they talk about, and all the rest of the palaver. And some people dip a toe into esoteric, give it a go or whatever, and then they go, fuck that. What was I thinking? I'm out of there. Don't want to know. It's difficult and challenging. It's difficult to find those keys of decipherment, to do what it takes to commit to these studies for a lifelong and read the masters, so that you can make proper headway. And then the individual is now speaking to his own being. He's allowing knowledge to come forth. He doesn't need AI, except only downstream in a more superficial way, functionally. But he's certainly not going to become so dependent on it, like those people on the planet in Star Trek, where hail master, just tell me what to do. I've given up all personal volition. That's where we're heading toward. That's where we're heading toward if we're not careful. And so somebody has to weigh up the question, do I want that for the human race? Am I okay with that? Or am I not? So it's going to be selfhood or artificial intelligence. It'll be the simulacra. These are the only two choices we've got. I choose selfhood. [Speaker 3] (1:23:09 - 1:23:27) Yeah. My goal, I want to ask you something, because I align with a lot that you speak about, the female psyche. But why is it that it seems like women are the ones getting more into personal development, personal growth, signing up for these programs, doing this, that, I just see that more often. [Speaker 2] (1:23:27 - 1:23:38) Even just to quantify it, I think 60 to 70% of our audience is women, 66, 70, 70% of every round of our program, Rise of the Herd, has been women. What are your thoughts on that? [Speaker 1] (1:23:39 - 1:27:00) Well, there are exceptions. I'm the same boat, right? On Slaved and the classes I've given on periscopes. These are the exceptional women who have, or the rarity, and they've gone through living fucking hell. Yeah. And the greatest enemy they have is womankind. Oh yeah. We don't know that today because everybody's bashing father figures and the patriarchy. No, no. The greatest opponent that good women have is woman. Dragging them back into the bucket, forcing magazines and images of seduction and mystique. Thank God that we've got those women who are more aware and start hearkening back. Because remember I just explained when we talked about Julian Jaynes' chronology, there was an age of oracles. They were mostly women, Erasmus. There's no doubting of this. And so some women, some very, very rare women are fascinated and in their atavism, in the back of their minds, they remember this sort of lost power. And they're the ones who have the calling to go back again. And it's correct. It's good. It's nothing wrong with them. So they'd be the ones who for some fucking reason, and a good bloody thing they are, are hearkening back, trying to awaken this ability within themselves. Remember the tarot was called the girdle of Isis. The central goddess of all of it is Taurt, who's female. You get the empress, you get the strength card, you get Mayat, the justice card, you get temperance. The woman is all over it. The universe. The high priestess. Go figure, right? Even the androgyny of the fool. So the female was a keeper one time of these great divination arts. Not man. The very word tarot is a goddess name. So the women that you're talking about are not a major demographic. They're a very small group. And there's even a smaller group of them who really go on to pursue things, right? You know, in a deeper way. But they're being called by the goddess. Because they once were a man's instructor in the suffix. I call them the suffix. But the other group of women were called the sophianics. And this has to go back to the female Illuminati project and Atlantis. There's two groups of women. The ones you're talking about are sophics. And the ones that I'm talking about are the sophianics. That's the word I just coined to represent satanic. Those who've given themselves over to the beast. And they're not the slightest bit interested. They're the ones, the only interest they have is black magic in the form of the media, in the forms of a seduction and mystique. But their first victims are women. Before they even get the man, it's young girls, young women that they contaminate first. That's the trouble, you know, with these TikToks and OnlyFans and the porn and all of this. It's just horrendous what's going on with the women, with the female psyche. But some women, thank goodness, are able to break free of that and go a different direction. And we must encourage that. [Speaker 2] (1:27:01 - 1:27:36) For sure. For sure. What is happening when someone is born? Why is it that I can read my personal significator card, for example, and find a deeper resonance of, wow, this is who I am. This is who I've always known myself to be. Why is it that I can get a human design reading or an astrology reading? And it's like, why does my consciousness have these unique traits which I resonate so deeply with? Whether it's Scorpio or whatever it might be. What's happening in that process when a human being comes in and they're imprinted with this stamp of whatever it might be on their unique state of consciousness? [Speaker 1] (1:27:37 - 1:33:40) Well, that's been brought up by, I would turn, just like I told you about turning to James and Barfield and others for these, you know, left of center answers. The man with the secret of that is really David Bohm, a physicist. And he talked about a thing called the implicate order. Implicate order. And there's also a thing called the explicate order. Now the implicate order is nothing more than the 12 archetypal patterns upon which all of consciousness is based. And the tarot cards and number in general, forget tarot cards, just go to numerals, numbers, right? They embody, they speak for, they're transmitters, receivers, right? They are the gateways, access points to those underlying 12, the template of 12 underneath. You know, and that also might lead to even a deeper archetypal. I talked about this in Path of the Fool that there's really three levels of this, right? But for brevity's sake. So the underlying movement of spirit, also known as logos or animus, different terms you could give it. This is what is happening when you pull a card that you identify with. Your conscious upper mind identifies with it because that is your access point two levels down to the level of spirit, animus, logos, geist. The top level is known as stereotype. That's where we all are. That's where most people's consciousness is and where most people's consciousness remains for the whole of their lives. That's it. The next level down was given the term mythic by Joseph Campbell and archetypal by Carl Jung. It's the same level, second level down, right? But then there's this third level, and that's what the whole Path of the Fool program is about, the series. And that is the level of the geist or the spirit. And it works in reverse. The lower level gives rise to the levels above. So it's the controlling level, but it's the most mysterious. Somebody might call it the Akashic record even. You know, there's different names have been given to this, the Akash. But this lower level is the deepest and most profound and utterly impenetrable. Now, that scheme I've just mentioned, map it over consciousness. The conscious is the stereotypical, the pre-conscious is the archetypal, and then back of that, where we cannot go, is the world of spirit. There's big fences, big bridges between each of these stages. But it's one at the back that controls the other two. They're just emanations. Now, out in the emanation world, we have things like tarot cards, playing cards, divination, number, vibration, energy, and so on, right? And when we identify with those or even come to the tarot, when somebody's even directed sincerely to come to something like the tarot or astrology, they have no clue of what I'm talking about here. That something from the deepest part of the self is orientating them, directing them to go there, so that a journey can be made where you start getting symbolically literate to do what we've been saying, access the inner zodiac, the inner oracle. Those cards, those studies ultimately become not just about helping others. That's a tangent. That's fine. That's a downstream. That's great to be able to help people with their problems and whatever. But the real esoteric reason that you work with those symbols, special symbols, is to have an access point back to the spiritual realm of the Geist. That is the underlying super, uber-archetypal infra-consciousness that we secretly long to be backing. Well, some people, very few people secretly long to have access to, right? And they won't be satisfied then with distracting themselves. You know, so it's a multifaceted thing here. And that is why certain symbols, like the ones you're talking about, speak to you in this more of a personal way. And ultimately, you will have to give back from it, right? It's a metaphor speaking to a metaphor. You will have to meet it. And then it will tell you, oh, but I'm not what I appear to be. I'm like something else. And you go, okay, can you unveil what that is? Oh, yeah, sure. Here I am. And then another symbol jumps up and goes, yeah, hi, how are you doing? But I'm not myself. I'm like something else. Okay, what's that other thing that you're like? Oh, it's over here. And on and on it goes. Everything is like something else. And so a journey begins that most people ain't going to have any time for, right? There's something about it that is very uncanny. And that's why we have left brain, logic, linearity, calculation, machination, power, power, hunger, grasping, right? We have shut down our right brain, which is this meander, which is this walking without rhythm, as they say in the movie Dune, following the snake, following the serpent, or in the Kabbalah, the serpent path, right, as opposed to the path of the arrow. We have said to hell with that. That's too weird. I'm going to go with a straight linear in framing of things where everything is classified. Everything is measured. Everything is known and regurgitated and familiar and certain. Ah, what a word. It's all certain. And the linear way to that knowledge, that's certain as well, because uncertainty is the road of the other. And we can't do that. That's like walking into the dark. [Speaker 2] (1:33:42 - 1:34:00) Yeah. Yeah. That's the authentic path, the uncertain path. Yeah. I kind of want to- Just quickly. So on that, so you're saying that at the moment of someone's birth, those deeper symbols that we resonate with are kind of implanted or imprinted at that point? [Speaker 3] (1:34:02 - 1:34:10) Because I'm curious, people that are born on the same day, let's say in the card system, they share certain traits. So this is where I'm curious, like what's happening? [Speaker 1] (1:34:10 - 1:35:43) Well, what's happening there is that, remember, although born on the same day, the soul level is different. They're the same, right? Because everybody, think about it in the larger, how could it be that everybody would be too unique? Then you couldn't have any mapping or classification or systems by where we are. If it was that random, there'd be no way to do any kind of calculating, no zodiacs, no mathematics, no logic, no, none of it. So there has to be a filtration of souls so that they come down to fit the paradigm. These, the matrix, the template, which I describe as 12, but again, we could even argue about that, right? Just for simplicity. So everyone will fit into the 12, but still at the same time, this is a miracle. I can't answer it. It's just the way it is. But then there's this, as I said, the psychology, each individual is an individual. It's like saying everybody has a head, everybody has hair, everybody has eyes, everybody has a body. You see what I'm saying? But they're all different. So it's the same thing of what you're saying. How can that be? If we're all almost male and female are so similar in physical form, then how do you have this thing called the individual inside that is so various and different? Even in the same family, people can be completely and utterly polarized and different in their outlooks. [Speaker 3] (1:35:43 - 1:35:54) Yeah, that's the most- These are mysteries. Yeah, that's what you think to me. You could be raised the same way, the same culture, and yet completely different than your brother or your sister. [Speaker 1] (1:35:54 - 1:36:53) Yes. And the Zodiac allows for that. The Zodiac is nothing more than an embodiment of the same thing. How that works, I don't know. People have tried to build that into their systems. It can become important to some astrologers to really nail it down, you know, and all this. But there's really no need. It's not that extraordinary, given the multi-layers of meaning that is encoded. But when we use the left brain, then you have these big question marks that the reductionist materialist goes, well, there you go then. That's impossible. It's a bunk. Not that your thinking is bunk, but that this is bunk. Okay. Michael Zahn doesn't care about you, what you think. He's already gone through all of that thinking and come out the other end. But if people want to stick there, I don't interfere with their psychology. They may have very good reasons why they don't want to go into those places, into the esoteric fuck. I'm not inviting them in. No, no, no, no. I have too much love for the subjects to have it contaminated by their filthy hands. [Speaker 3] (1:36:56 - 1:37:20) Yeah. Michael, can we go back? You mentioned a name earlier on in the podcast and how he tweaks certain things. And it's an individual that I think gets a lot of flack. And there's some misconceptions about him. It's Alistair Crowley. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. I know you did an episode a long time ago on enslaved about him, but so many people just associate him with dark, occult, satanic elements. [Speaker 2] (1:37:21 - 1:37:28) Well, it seems today within the quote unquote truth of communities that he's almost the poster boy for satanism. Yeah. [Speaker 1] (1:37:28 - 1:40:14) Yeah. Yeah. He's wheeled out, isn't he? Yeah. And when he's wheeled out, it's usually by ignoramuses. So the very fact that his name is on their lips shows me that there's nothing much worth listening to. And I've never been wrong in this. Every time he's wheeled out, same with Hegel, same with Madame Blavatsky. There's a whole bevy of people that are brought out and whipped publicly and the men we love to hate, you know, in the sense that we project a lot of things on them. I wrote an article called the Aeon of Horus. It's on the Michael Stein website. And this expresses entirely my thoughts on that story. You know, he was no worse than the politicians that are ruling the world today or the child traffickers. You know, if you're looking for evil men, you don't need to be bothered looking at Aleister Crowley, right? You can look at Barack Obama or somebody like that, right? Or Jeffrey Epstein. You know what I mean? It's so abominable that his name has been so dragged through the mud. I understand why, but there are infinitely more evil people in the world than him. It's just that he got the tag. He kind of liked it. He played off of it. You know, he was his own worst enemy in that way. He had a lot of Aquarius in his chart, and he liked playing the trickster and the devil, and he liked playing with people as a kind of a jester. So he brought it on himself a lot of the time. In fact, he went out of his way to attract attention, you know, in order to sell books and things like that. But he was a great master as far as I'm concerned. His tarot system, although slightly, you know, there's certain things you need to amend. Joel, you'll know this, that there's a few odds and ends that need amending in his tarot structure. But the beauty of what he brought to it and the insight is just superb, supreme. There's nothing evil about the Thoth deck, and that was his greatest work. That's his finest work. So again, it's a thing where individuality was a curse at that time. He stepped out. He made himself a target, you know, for the Christian lunatics to attack and anybody else because he was into free love and, you know, all this kind of thing, you know. But a lot of it was his own histrionics and probably taking too many fucking drugs or whatever, you know, which he did. But I don't think, to me, he's nothing compared to the other characters. They're far, far more devilish and evil. And as far as his systems of magic and everything was concerned, I've never found anything wrong with it, you know. [Speaker 3] (1:40:16 - 1:40:18) Yeah, thanks for sharing. Yeah. [Speaker 2] (1:40:20 - 1:40:28) Well, I feel pretty content with how this conversation has gone and everything that we've covered. Is there anything else that you feel compelled or called to share on this, Madeleine? [Speaker 1] (1:40:29 - 1:46:41) Oh, no, these are great questions. I didn't realize we were going to get into the Janes, you know. And again, there's another, you see, there's been about, hmm, maybe half a dozen cataclysms since 50,000 years ago. In the, you know, Atlantis book, I talk about the destruction of the planet between Jupiter and Mars, you know, where the asteroid belt is now. Fuck, you can tell me that that catastrophe didn't affect our planet? The loss of an entire planet that created the asteroid belt, man was around to visualize that, you know, and the aftermath, it makes up the theme of the entire Atlantis thing I've done. Later on, you get the comet. We didn't even talk about that. And how that traumatized the hell out of people and was written into the mythologies as well, right? Another celestial event that frightened, traumatized the mind, you know, which is a central thing I've brought to this movement about trauma. We have this, as I say, thunderbolts of the gods theory, which you can read in Heaven to Earth article about another conflagration that took place in the heavens. So, these celestial events have been left out of the narrative, you know, of academia and also even in the alternative movement. So, I've tried to do justice to those on different websites and different books to bring it back, you know, so that we start to understand the mentality of the stellar cult, why they would look up in the first place, what they saw when they did look up, you know, and how their canon of knowledge slowly, slowly, slowly, these will be the Hebrew, slowly became more and more mutilated. And some of that wasn't conscious because their teachings were worldwide. So, wherever the area went, you've got to adapt their central gnosis to each and every race and culture that you're going to. And some motifs just won't work when you go to, you know, Norway or Ireland or Holland or France. So, different tribes there tweaked it, right? So, the Vedic system is going to be a different iteration, the Celtic and pre-Celtic, a different iteration, the Nordic and the Gothic, you know, the Grecian and the Roman. They're all coming from a common parent, but they're all tweaked culturally. And this then makes it difficult from our times to look back and see any coherent canon underneath it all. So, there's an art in order to be able to decipher what is this ultimate canon of knowledge behind it. So, I specialize in the men who are the geniuses of being able to take off the surface rust and this pigment, flake it all off, right? And get down to the underlying substructure and reveal the keys that are eternal and immortal, you know, and across all culture. So, they've all been tweaked, they've all been given makeovers, and from where we're at, you know, we don't see it. But your Joseph Campbells and your Gerald Massys and Alvin Boyd Koons and all the names that I mentioned, you know, even the Julian Jayneses and other people you wouldn't first think of, these brilliant scholars. And I feature them, by the way, on the Astrotheologyzone.com site, on the Irish Origin site. I feature these people, spent years and years and years, not only reading their work, but synthesizing and shrinking it, you know, to present it to the public. These L.A. Waddells and the Commons Beaumonts and all, and shrink it down so people, without having to go into all the information themselves, you know, taken years, can get a really good gist and remember who these men are, you know, and their work, and gain amazing wisdom out of it. You know, Albert Churchward, the great expert on the stellar cult. So, this stellar gnosis has slowly, you know, become more and more mutilated, more and more shredded, and the more and more you can go back to the original canon, the more wise you become, and the less self-deception also, on a psychological level, you can start yourself then peeling away, you know, the rind, and go deeper into knowledge, and break through these windows of self, you know, these barriers of self-deception that I talked about, that everybody's admired in. And now they're reaching critical mass, where the ignorance factor and the stultification is so extreme, we've maxed it out. So, now we need AI to take over. The alternative to that is to say, no, go face yourself. Don't run away from the self. Don't run away from wisdom. Don't hate wisdom. Don't get lost in avoidance of selfhood, because then you will need the machine to take over, and it will, because it'll be demanded. Nobody's enforcing it. We want it. And there's an atavistic reason why we want it. That's why James's work is so important. He shouldn't be cast aside and forgotten about. He's telling us about something that happened years ago, thousands of years ago, that is the origin of all religion, all kings and queens, and we've just explained it a little bit, sketch. Divination comes out of that. Divination, I think, is a good thing. We've just explained why that's a good thing and why it still even works. But taken to extremes, we don't want to have, we want the instruction back, but there's a dark side to that as well. It would be lovely to be instructed, but does it mean the loss of what we've so preciously evolved over the years, which is a sense of selfhood? Do we hate it that much that we want to sacrifice it on the altar of the gods again? Everybody must make up their own mind about that. [Speaker 2] (1:46:43 - 1:47:02) Yeah. Michael, why do you think that we see a rise today of light, for example, fringe groups, space is fake. We live on a flat, stationary plane. This seems in antipathy to the stellar cults and things of that, etc. Why do you think there's a rise of that today? [Speaker 1] (1:47:03 - 1:53:15) Well, it's part of the lunacy that most human beings are lost in. When you understand the different kinds of machinations of the controllers, of how they've insinuated, especially Gnostic paradigms would be a place to go for this. We've talked extensively about this on Unslaved, still have more to do on it. When we see the bypassing of what I call the Western mystical tradition in favor of the Eastern tradition, these are two areas that are bad, and the rise of the New Age movement, the rise of drug-taking in excess, this ayahuasca cult, and all the rest of it, it makes screws loose in people's consciousness. Probably they already had a screw loose anyway. But even if they didn't, by getting involved in these kinds of things, and there's other ones as well, but those are the ones that jump to mind now, you get a false picture of the reality, of the actual, in favor of the non-actual or the hypothetical. Remember Ayn Rand was what she called an objectivist, which means that she loved reason, and reason was articulated to the world of the real. Once you lose your anchor point to the real, and you stop learning from nature, you open your mind up to all sorts of lunatic, perverse, polymorphous, and atavistic content, because nature abhors a vacuum. So does consciousness. So if consciousness is not orientated toward the rational, you're leaving a gap. And into that gap can come all sorts of pus. One of the signs that this is happening is when too many people believe it, the collectivistic angle. So the things that you've spoken about immediately and strangely as memes become very, very viral very, very quickly. You see how this works? That's an indication that it's a lot of shit. The more anti-individualistic it is, the more it's just picked up automatically, shows that it's one of these memes. And that people who abnegate selfhood, who allow their minds to lose the rational faculties, the core self, in other words, fall prey to this. Now, there's a lot of work that can also be talked about in terms of mental dissociation we don't have time to visit right now that also helps to explain this. But I just think that the pension of the human being whose root is self-deception, self-deceptiveness, and how that came about is the traumas that I address in my first book, right? So even the self-deception has an origin from a historical amnesia. Talked about all of this. But now that that is the center, don't you see that it becomes like a rotten seed that gives rise to a tree that's just horrible, a horrific thing, right? Full of ugly branches. Because from that seed of self-deception, nothing but nightmares, nothing but monsters are created. And this is where the human race is impaled. And it takes, you know, and the more and more that the human race struggles to get free, the more and more it tightens the net around itself. It's a very Zen principle. How do I get free of this thing that my very movement to get free of it further enslaves me? Ah, ah. Now we're in a different world altogether. Knowledge of the beast. Deconstruction, apophatic knowledge that I've taught all my life. If you do it the wrong way, the beast is awakened to the fact that you want to be free. Watch out. Watch out. And anyone who sincerely tried to be free knows I'm telling the truth because they've suffered immeasurably from what they've tried to do with family, with friends, with society, with their own minds. It's an appallingly difficult, you know, it's a Siddhartha road. But that doesn't mean that you can't be free. It just is now that you have to love wisdom. Philosophy means to love wisdom. Mizosophy is to hate wisdom. And the most of the human race hate wisdom. So they run into anything and everything. The things that you're talking about provide distractions for the soul that hates real wisdom. But he must disguise this instinct from himself. This is the main part that nobody gets. Right? When we talked about the distraction of men and women earlier, those men and women don't think that they're distracted. They're giving to charity. They're on TikTok. They're being honest and open and showing themselves and being grandiose and exhibitionist and real while they're on a digital interface. Right? So there's a mechanism of mystique and camouflage created to give oneself the impression that what you're doing is completely authentic. And that's what your new age movement is all about. And the people who join it and these churches and these philanthropists and all our world is saturated not only in the self-deceptiveness but the camouflage to believe, but no, no, I'm sincere. Right? And the true student sees through it. Is not befuddled by any of this hue and cry and this help the minorities and all the rest of the fucking snowflake shit out there. Right? And so the study, the real study of mankind and womankind is the art of self-deception and how people will do anything like Jung said, except to face their soul. They do anything as no matter how absurd. Vernon Howard said, see human madness as madness and save a lifetime working it out. Yeah. Really profound words. Mark Twain has said the same thing. Many people, the great wise ones all know this. [Speaker 2] (1:53:15 - 1:53:17) That quotes in this book by Vernon actually. [Speaker 1] (1:53:18 - 1:53:58) Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So exactly. So it's, it's a solo individual thing, but every now and again, in order to avoid the truth, people will create these movements, this Boogaloo stuff, convince themselves that it's all true, that they're helping the world, helping their brothers really sincere. You know, what can you do about it? It's the way things go. What you can do about it though, is study human psychology to find out what self-deception is, what dissociation is, what autophobia is, and all the rest of it. And that's what we do. You know, that's what I do all my life and try to bring that nuggets of that to the public, you know, as much as I can, but I'm not selling it to them. If they don't like it, they're free to go in somewhere else, you know? [Speaker 3] (1:53:59 - 1:54:12) Yeah. As always, Michael, thank you. It's a pleasure. It's a masterclass to spend 90 minutes to two hours with you. So appreciate you taking the time and offering up your wisdom to our audience. [Speaker 1] (1:54:12 - 1:54:38) No, you're most welcome, mate. You know, really appreciate that people like yourselves are actually open-minded to a lot of this. It's tales that need to be told, you know? It can't be told in sign bites. So you need the time, need the hours, and need the receptive mind, the good questions, you know, to get into some of these things. It's one of the benefits of the internet. There are good sides to it all. [Speaker 3] (1:54:38 - 1:55:25) Yeah, of course. You know, we get to connect with people. We get to have these conversations. I mean, all three of us connected because of the internet. So there's definitely benefits to it. But as always, you know, it's a tool. And so use the tool appropriately. Don't let it use you. But, you know, this conversation, again, is just that reminder of find solitude in your life, however you can, you know, go out into nature, turn off your devices, you know, put those things down that you're leaning on to distract yourself with, and be quiet and see what happens, you know? I mean, it's a reminder to myself, you know? I'm grateful that I'm spending a little bit more time outside and planting trees because I feel like, okay, I don't have my phone on me. I can just go hear the sounds of the birds, you know, of the crickets. You know, it's a whole different experience. [Speaker 1] (1:55:26 - 1:56:08) These are the archetypes, you know, of that movement of the Geist we talked about earlier on. Sanskrit was born from bird song, right? From the ancient sages, yeah, listening to the animals. Gerald Massey also agrees with this, that the Egyptian language also comes from the watching of certain animals that then became sacred. You know, we know that the Egyptian gods all had animal heads, right? Well, there's a story to all of that. So in nature, you do find a mirror of the self, not of the false self of the persona, you know, the dissociated self, but of the real, actual, core, imperial self, as I call it. That's what's hidden in nature. And that's why we don't want it. [Speaker 2] (1:56:10 - 1:56:14) What's the quote? Nature is visible spirit. Spirit is the invisible nature. Heidegger, right? [Speaker 1] (1:56:14 - 1:57:01) Well said, though, perfectly. That encapsulates it completely. Yeah, it is a mirror. That's why the haters of wisdom don't like it. That's why we built these horrible cities and are ready to build more, you know, 15-minute cities and all. That's the urban environment to keep out the natural that is the actual mirror of the self. So again, you know, you see both the good side and the bad side of it empirically in front of you. It's undisputable once you start to get the vision of it, the insight into it. We just had a guest on, you know, who spoke up about living off the grid. I know, Joel, you've moved to Mexico for exactly that purpose. It's a good orientation. They bring children up that are a little bit closer to nature. There's nothing wrong with that. I totally support that. [Speaker 2] (1:57:03 - 1:57:45) Yeah. Michael, thank you once again so much. There's a plethora of material on this subject by Michael. Lots of the articles he mentioned, but also let's shout out the Terrascopes Mystery School itself. That website is at terrascopes.com. If people feel implored to learn more, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's something that's had a huge impact on me, and I'm very glad I pressed the button on that. Unslaved.com, you know, like, I'm not sure what more I can say, but if people want to really dig deeper, understand themselves, understand the psychology, and I think one of the greatest things that you've done in this, you know, in this movement is bridge conspiracy with psychology, which, you know, we don't see much of these days. [Speaker 1] (1:57:46 - 1:57:51) Yeah. Thank you. Thank you guys. Yeah. I appreciate that you acknowledge that. [Speaker 3] (1:57:53 - 1:58:06) Yeah. We'll have all the links. I know you mentioned a few other links during the talk. We'll have those couple links down there as well in the show notes. And yeah, support Michael and his work. We appreciate you all. See you next time. [Speaker 2] (1:58:08 - 1:58:19) Man, I love every single time Michael jumps on here for the truth. It's always a fascinating conversation and getting to ask those burning questions. But yeah, man, this work is so freaking important. [Speaker 3] (1:58:20 - 1:58:33) Yeah. You know, it's inspiring me more to want to explore the new tarot. Tarot? Tarot? I mean, how is it pronounced? I've heard it said different ways, but yeah, man, I mean, it's just such a wealth of knowledge. [Speaker 2] (1:58:35 - 2:00:05) Yeah, absolutely. It's something that's really impacted my life. I can't recommend highly enough that part of the full series. It is extensive. I think it's like 25 hours worth of viewing or something like that. But that's something that really impacts people. And that's what inspired me initially to go my own entrepreneurial endeavor. My first online business was Grounded Alchemy, which was doing readings in the vein of the tarot scopic system. And still doing tarot readings now. We'll put a link below this episode as well if people are interested in that. But the main thing I really want to highlight, we're talking about being oneself, being an individual, discovering selfhood, quieting the noise, deprogramming from the conditioning out there, really going on a heroic journey. And this is really what we believe that we've encapsulated in Rise Above the Herd, which is now a 10-week program. There are spots still available for round 10. And if you feel called, I really recommend that you just go and spend some time on the Rise Above the Herd website. Have a deep look at what it's really about, what people have shared about it previously. And if it speaks to you on a level, and if your intuition calls you to go to the next step, then we'd love to see you inside that container and for you to embark on your own personal hero's journey. And the ultimate purpose of this is for you to become who you were born to be, for you to walk that authentic path, for you to honor and listen to that voice within, and to build the self-esteem necessary to follow it. So riseabovetheherd.co, or the link in the bio to join round 10. We begin July 29.