John Dee and The Empire of Angels with Jason Louv

(upbeat music)

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. (upbeat music)

Welcome to synchronicity. My guest this week is Jason Louve. We're gonna talk about his new book about John D. You're gonna hear all about it. There's links on this podcast. iTunes, podcast apps, wherever it's embedded in the thing. You can find it also on the website, synchpodcast.com. Also, johnd007.com. You can find out more information about the book. Jason, you may remember from an earlier episode. You've probably heard him on other shows. He's awesome. Really, one of the foremost experts in the occult, not just from a reading standpoint too. He lives this shit, right? He studied with some of the great greats, and he really, this is his life.

So, you can trust Jason on these things, whereas other people may be not that you can't trust them, but maybe aren't steeped in it quite as much. So, always a good person to go to for this type of stuff. We talk a ton about that book. Last week, no episode got sick, 'cause Eli got sick from daycare. Take care, double-edged sword, but worth it. Totally worth it. So, that's why there was no episode. Sorry about that. Hopefully, it won't happen again. We'll have contingency plans getting back in the podcast saddle. Have many interviews set up. People locally, people not locally, remotely in the city, on other coasts, in other countries.

We got stuff going on, and I'm feeling in the groove again. Happy to get you there. Hope you guys are doing well. It's apparently Mercury retrograde, 'cause all of my electronic stuff is breaking. Alexis procrast or phone. She has a case. I don't even have a case on my phone. That doesn't break. It's like a case in a book. It's hard to do. So, with Mercury retrograde, whatever that means. I don't know. Had a friend post, Mercury, Gatorade. I don't know with that. Yeah, maybe, sure. So, this episode is fucking awesome. It's short, because Jason was about to do a Reddit AMA, which I believe is still going on about the book.

And I wanted to let him go a little early. He's like, I can do it up until like 10 minutes before thing, I'm like, dude, baby, take 20 minutes, and you don't have to be totally jammed. You can actually process something. I can only imagine what it's like to write a book for over three years. The process of doing that seems incredibly challenging and then to promote it and have to do all the press. I'd have to, but you don't do it. Seems like a lot. So kudos to Jason for doing all that. You're gonna be really interested in this episode, even though it's short, is jam-packed with stuff about John D.

Also, one of those episodes where I get out of the way and just let Jason talk, because this is someone truthfully, I think you could just give him two lines about any subject in the esoteric almanac and he will give you stuff that you've never heard before, trace it back to things that are not only relevant in the ethereal sense, but also practical, fundamental houses affecting our lives on a day-to-day basis. So one of our favorite people. So I'm gonna get out of the way. We're gonna get to this episode. I wanna thank Patrick Nemcheck, as always, for being a wonderful patron of this show. You can do that on Patreon.

More music is coming, I'm having a lot of fun with my electron analog or rhythm, too. It's awesome, really playing around with it, getting some samples on there. Hey, Electron, maybe get Overbridge out for the zero people who are probably listening to this. You know what I'm talking about? Get it out, come on, Electron. So stuff is coming, you can sign up there. If you wanna support the show, I don't know, go take a walk outside. That's a nice thing to do. Do something for yourself. That's how you support the show. Do something nice for yourself. I highly recommend it, treat yourself to something nice in whatever way you can, whether it's space, time, whatever it is, material will go in an ice cream if you want.

Who cares, no one's judging. So thank you for listening. We're getting back in the groove here without further ado. Here is Jason Wu. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Great, sorry, I'm running around doing it.

No, I totally get it. Dude, you don't have to apologize. I totally get it. It's not a big deal.

Great, so I can give you an hour or something we should start right away 'cause I have to do the--

Am I? - You should probably write it. The AMA, yes.

Dude, I'm not gonna jam you up. We'll do like 45 minutes you have like some breathing room between. We can do it again if you want to. Cool.

But yeah, let's hop in and I'll get straight to it and give you all I got here.

Yeah, let's just jump right in. Let's consider ourselves recording. I did the cursory amount of research on John D. I remember hearing you talk about him on Duncan's podcast a while back and a fascinating, like truly fascinating person. I know you have this. You've been talking about writing this book for a while. So I'm gonna let you talk in an unusual divergence from my character. Tell me about John D. Tell people listening what's going on there. It's super interesting.

Okay, so if you're interested in magic then John D is the guy that you need to know about because John D is certainly one of the greatest magicians of all time. And his work is at the heart of the entire Western magical tradition. He was historically speaking. He was the astrological and scientific advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, who was responsible for, among other things, laying the groundwork for modern science, creating the concept of the British Empire, creating the British intelligence services, creating the naval power that allowed England to become an empire. And on top of that, if that wasn't enough, he then spent almost 10 years with a psychic attempting to contact angels who he thought would teach him the higher wisdom that humanity did not, not at that time, the higher wisdom that humanity did not have access to.

And took a very disciplined and scientific approach to doing this and transmitted what we now know of as a no key in magic, which is this incredibly complex system and language for contacting the supernatural realms. And it's that system that has really been at the heart of magic ever since. It's probably responsible for creating rosocrutionism. It's probably responsible for, is certainly, it is the core system of the Golden Dawn, that the Golden Dawn built up everything around, and then through the Golden Dawn of Crowley's dilemma, and even into modern occult movements like Satanism and even the witchcraft movement through Jack Parsons.

And so it's that system that has really, in my opinion, been the main event of occultism for the last 500 years. And not only that, but has really helped shape the history of our modern world and the modern world that we live in at all is very, very deeply shaped by these. So what I've done in this book, which is called John Dee of the Empire of Angels, is I put together the big picture, the big story. I've done what people have not done before outside of a few academic works, which is I've taken all the magic with Dee, and I put it together back in its original context. So I put it together with who John Dee really was, and his scientific work, his imperial work, his effect on the world, including the creation of the British Empire and through him, the American Empire.

And I've shown not just that, but also how this system affected people like Crowley and the rocket scientist Jack Parsons in the 1950s and 40s, and all the way into our modern world. So I've pulled the veil back, as a force. So again, if you're interested in magic, even if you're just interested in what this reality is that we find ourselves in right now, how we've come to be in this place, in this time and place, and why the world is the way it is, and you'll be in this book because I've pulled back the veil and revealed the mysteries.

So, I mean, and it's awesome too, because there's only so much Wikipedia and surveying the internet is gonna give you on a character like this. I mean, especially when you start to delve into it at all, you realize there's this huge kind of mystical undertone over all this stuff, like just even briefly reading about Edward Kelly, you know, and his role in the angelic kind of revelations that they were working on, you realize there's only so much that you're gonna be able to glean from that. What is like one of the biggest kind of insights you came across while kind of synthesizing all these disparate things, and clearly also just, in case anyone missed how massive of an influence John D. would have had on the world, I've been on an Alexander Hamilton trip and a United States trip for, you know, the past few months.

That's a very small subset of history. If you're talking about the person who coined the phrase and the idea of a British empire, this is a massive cultural influence, and when you weave in this kind of overt and explicit knowledge of magic that he had, it's pretty amazing. So, what's like something that kind of like blew your mind when you were delving into all this?

I think, well, that's huge because D in his work really touches almost every facet of the modern world, and you mentioned America. I mean, yes, he created the concept of the British empire, but that was just the beginning because the foundation of America, actually, the founding fathers, the founding fathers were influenced by Freemasonry. It was a crucial, and they wanted to create America as an all chemical experiment, if you will, in which people could be free thinkers, in which people could have freedom of religion, in which they were not controlled by the Catholic church, and that a new civilization could be built.

And that idea directly comes out of D. I mean, it was John D's work that influenced the Rosicrucians and the Rosicrucians later influenced the Freemasons and then the founding fathers, and also the early scientists who created the Royal Society. So, when you stack up, I mean, okay, so what are the greatest hits here? When you trace it back to D, and really, when you're talking about D, you're talking about the angels, I mean--

Yeah, let's get here. - The British empire. You know, the British empire, the American empire, the foundation of America at all. All occultism for the last 500 years, at least in the West. The foundation of science, you know, it was D who modernized, brought scientific knowledge to England in a real way for the first time, who laid the groundwork for what would become the scientific revolution. The birth of the space program, Jack Parsons, who was an occultist in the, in Pasadena, in America, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, was actively experimenting with D's Enochian system while building the early rocketry program and found it Jet Propulsion Laboratories, which is now part of NASA.

So, really, what we're talking about here is, you know, the biggest revelation for me is just how central this system has been to, you know, the forward progress of humanity. It's not quite that simple, obviously, that's a bit of a generalization, but, but for me, I think the shocking thing has been how big of an impact it has really had and how the, and also the other thing, to be honest, the other thing that it's been shocking to me is how much modern occultism completely misses the point of, of all of this, and one of the things you get really clearly with D, that you don't get with later a cultural movements, like Crowley, or certainly modern witchcraft or Satanism, you don't get it all, is the idea of humility and, you know, most of the angelic sessions with D are the derepencing and the angels very, almost destructively purging Kelly and D of their egos, if you want to call it, or their sin, or their separation from God.

And by the end of that process, there was really nothing, there was really nothing left of those two guys, you know, that they had brought into the sessions. I mean, they were eroded and almost erased by their contact with the angels over, over 10 years. And that's something that Crowley draws out, also his work, which I write quite a lot about in the book, of course, Crowley's a very disturbing individual in a lot of ways also. But to say the least, you know, but he did do some good work certainly. But, you know, he himself, as a person, as an individual, was not a good person, you know.

Yeah, I mean, egos into this stuff, even if you're aware of it, you know, yeah.

Well, yeah, exactly, exactly. And what we see now with the current cultural movement, and the magical revival is people, you know, very much want magic to be about wish fulfillment and personal aggrandizement and empowerment. And it's become very wrapped up almost in, and it has been since the 60s that magic has been coughed in this narrative of victimization, of, you know, of I'm disempowered, or, you know, I belong to a disempowered group almost because of being interested in magic. And therefore, I must become empowered. And what you get in D is, there's none of that. There's no personal aggrandizement.

It's, it's, it's, and that's kind of what I've been telling people when they asked me about a Noki, and also it's not about personal aggrandizement. It's about submission to the--

Yeah, I was gonna say, it sounds like surrender. It sounds like surrender. It sounds like a very, very full and complete surrender in more ways than one can even conceptualize. That's when, just hearing you describe it, that's, that's what the process sounds like. So, lay a little groundwork for people who are like, when you're, when we're talking about angels, they're like, what the hell are they talking about? Explain some of the background of the scrying and what was going on, and kind of what this, what context this is coughed in.

Okay, so, oh, yeah, that's, that's, that's because you say angels, what the hell are you talking about? Okay. - Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about the Elizabethan view of Ria. So, in, in the Middle Ages, the European Middle Ages view of the world was that it was, the universe was a perfectly constructed machine with God at the top, and under God the angels, and then under angels were mankind, and angels were invisible, but they were in charge of basically ordering, and, and, you know, they were the machinery that maybe the universe run, right? Angels were kind of workers that were taking care of everything.

Right? So, I don't know, DMT machine. Oh, there's something like that.

Yeah.

But, but, but this was the medieval view of how the universe worked, right? And of course, at this time, they were still geocentric. They thought the earth was the center of the universe. And, but during, but by these time, by the Renaissance, that had begun to be shaken up by, by Copernicus's revelation of the heliocentric model of the universe, by the collapse of, well, not the collapse, but the, the, the schism of the church with the Protestant Reformation, which is very disturbing to people by the printing press, and also by the, you know, writers like Machiavelli were writing at this time, suggesting, you know, there really was no order to the universe, and you might as well just, you know, take what power you could get.

Yolo, yolo.

It was very unfortunate, the first dose. Well, yeah, at other people's expense, it's unfortunately an idea we're left with from this time.

Yes, yes.

Now, but D was still very much deep in the, you know, D was really at the crossroads of the medieval worldview and the scientific worldview. So he was very interested in whether these angeles would be in, would literally be contact, but to make it more practical, what people are talking about when they're talking about angels, at least during this time, was, you know, it was the Elizabethan view of reality, which was much more subtle and complex about these things than we give it credit now. And so people might talk about, you know, when they were greatly inspired, like, for instance, inspired to write a poem.

Like, I'm sure if, you know, if you're listening, if you've ever had a moment where you wrote something or you drew something and it just seemed to come out and you don't know, they had no idea where it came from, or you were suddenly an idea came to you that changed your life or maybe a coincidence happened. Maybe you met somebody that seemed like total, you know, synchronicity in the name of the show, or a kiznet, or something that just, you didn't do it. It happened for you, or it came through you. I think that's something that the Elizabethan and medieval Europeans would look at as the influence of angels.

They would say, well, that's, you know, that's an angel bringing that for you. Now, of course, we're talking about, you know, kind of a shorthand of talking about things that we don't understand, right? So it's an anthropomorphization of some universal process that, you know, who knows, right? But by the same token, when they were talking to angels, quote unquote, what was really happening, that's theory, okay, let's talk about practice. What was actually happening when they were doing these sessions was, you know, Kelly, who was a quote unquote psychic, he was in his 50s, he was a scientist and he was working with Edward Kelly, who was half his age, who was an alcoholic, he was very mentally unstable.

So he was out there, he was kind of in between world, as it were, as many psychics now often can be.

Yes.

And so what they were doing is D was doing kind of prayers and invocations to God and the angels. And then D Kelly would go into a trance by staring at a piece of crystal, which, you know, vulgarly we now see as like people staring at the crystal balls, what they were actually doing is using a crystal as a meditation focus to go into a trance state, you know? And that's what he was doing. And he was, you know, entering a light hypnotic trance and then having visions of angels who were giving him information and what the information they were giving him was, you know, incredibly complex, almost circuitry-like diagrams for building magical implements.

And they gave him this new language, an ocean, and it was very, very complex. It was not like what you tend to get from, what you tend to think of as, you know, channel writing now or receive writing, which is, you know, you can find new ageers or psychics online now who will post their channel writing.

Right.

It's always very vague, kind of rant-y, nonsensical stuff about, oh, the new age is coming for humanity and, you know, you must release all your karmic baggage and, you know, where turquoise on Thursdays to accelerate, whatever. You know, it's just, usually it's not a very high.

I call it a, yeah, I call it a.

But this was very different.

I call it karma content when people just post that. It's just the mindless dribble of like, yes, it's important, I try not to be too pejorative when I say, 'cause I realize the intention a lot of people are putting this out for is not to just be like fulfilling their ego, but yeah, it's stuff that like, if you let your mind wander in the shower long enough, you're gonna be able to get some of these messages too.

Sure. Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that, but we have to, I mean, when we assess, you know, I'll just put it this way, you know, after 20 years of looking at this stuff and assessing things like this and claims of contact with extra human beings, I think that D and Kelly's sessions are among the, it's hard to dismiss, let's put it that way. Now I put almost 10 theories in the book of what could have happened. There's all kinds of, you know, they could have been being, they could have been tricked by other intelligence agents, they could have, Kelly could have been lying, he could have been mentally ill, he could have been on some type of hallucinogen, but or he could have in the, you know, but we can't also rule out that what might have happened and is what often happens with these things where the people start out thinking that they're faking it, but they kind of fake it until they make it and sooner or later, something else takes over.

And I think that you can make the case that that might have happened here, but of course, we can't say well.

And my point was, is not that D and Kelly would have been faking or just doing routine kind of, you know, stuff here, it's that from what you're describing, it sounds like it's more like blueprint stuff. Like they're putting together, you know, they're being given very technical sometimes, you know, as you said, blueprints for creating certain things, for helping this process, for all of these different things, whereas what I was describing as karma content online is when people are just exactly where you're describing, you know, let your ego go, transcend your suffering, release pain, love over fear, not that these messages aren't practical, but they're things that people kind of can intuit themselves rather than some actual genuine contact with something that's kind of transcendental from this plan.

I wanna make that distinction.

Right, yeah, absolutely. And I think if you read the records, if you read D and Kelly's records, it's not like there are, you know, so many times people sit down and try to do psychic things and they get through like, oh, you will be rich and famous and a tall dark stranger will come into your life. But with D and Kelly, it's like, okay, here, it starts transcribing the, you know, the Monero blockchain. (both laughing)

That's literally what it's like. It's like, if they're getting, like they're sitting there like downloading, like, good bites of blockchain for your years on end, you know, like by hand.

How much, how much like awareness was there from deer and do we have a record from D or Kelly about what was going on and their kind of, you know, their objective awareness of what they were going through or was it just kind of like all work all the time, you know, do we have records at that?

Oh, it's all recorded. That's one of the amazing things about it is that D kept very meticulous records. Unfortunately, a lot of them were, were later burned. In fact, we only have, we only have part of their records and also D, one thing, amazing thing I learned during the book is that after D and Kelly parted, they'd de-spent a whole other 10 years working with another scrier in Manchester.

Oh, wow.

So he came back from Europe and taking doing, you know, probably more work than we have available now, more work than he did with Kelly, but they later burned all those records so we don't have access to any of that. So D was at it for decades. So, but with what the records we do have, which were buried in a field, you know, they didn't publish them during their lifetime, they buried them in a chest in a field and the chest was dug up. And so it's not like they were looking for.

Right, right.

You know, they did want a recognition from European monarchs like Rudolph II and so on, but they were trying to keep the records safe from the Catholic church also. There's actually a story of an incredible story in the records of the angels or the Catholic, the Jesuits are trying to get the books and, you know, the angels help them save the books and so on. And later on, they buried the records or D buried the records in a field and they weren't dug up. It was kind of like the Nagamadi codices. They were dug up after D's death by, I think, a servant woman who started burning the records as kindling in the fire.

Oh, shit.

Before somebody recognized what they were and then they eventually made their way to Elias Ashmall who was an antique book antiquarian in one of the first Freemasons. And from there on into history. But yes, but the diaries are meticulous. They're recording what was going on in their life. It was, there was a lot going on. I mean, the session started in Morelake. They were conducted in a busy, in England at D's house in the southwest of London. And they were conducted in a busy household. It was probably a dozen people in that house including servants and children and D can always wives. But then they later go mobile and they bring their magical equipment to Europe and they're going around Europe attempting to get various monarchs and minor nobles interested in the angelic sessions.

And the angels are using them to try to influence the course of geopolitics in the build up to 30 years war essentially. So they were all, and then, but everything is, you know, their interpersonal stuff is recorded. The many fall outs between D and Kelly are recorded. It's an amazing story. And one of the things that I really tried to do with this book is piece it together as a story because, you know, you can wade through a thousand pages of kind of old English, you know, very plotting records or what I've done in this book is put it together as a story that you can read as a narrative. So you can understand exactly what happened and understand it in context.

And that's one of the services that I hope to provide with this book. 'Cause I want people to understand what actually happened without having to wade through, you know, thousands of pages of Latin.

Yeah, well, and also that's just something like, we as humans, we need the narrative or many of us, like, you know, we respond to that. And that's what piques are interests in many ways. And the older, you know, the farther away we get in linear time from these events, you know, the harder it is, I think, to actually weave a coherent story together. We get the benefit of hindsight and retrospection, but we lose some of the actual material. So it's also, I mean, you know, I'm finding this theme of people who have really been interested, and I'm 100% getting this book. And of course, I recommend anyone listening to get it as well, is the people who had the foresight, you know, an awareness to record that they were doing something, you know, that they recognized there was something special going on that wasn't necessarily for self-aggrandizement.

Like you said, you know, they recognized there was something here. And then now we get to have people like you, you know, tell these stories again so people are made aware of what was going on. What were like some of like, if there was a few different themes, you mentioned humility for Dee and Kelly as they were going through this, what were some of the underlying themes that the angels were trying to communicate that you could glean from this?

Okay.

Well, the angels were, that's a big one.

Yeah, I know, I know.

So you have to, okay. So you have to imagine with Dee. So Dee does not start these sessions until his 50s. And Dee, I think you can easily argue is probably the most intelligent person in England at this time and potentially in Europe as well. He's got a bigger library than at this point, Oxford and Cambridge have libraries of 400 to 500 books and manuscripts total. Dee's library at Mort Lake is 2,500 books and manuscripts which he's goes into debt for his entire life and lives in poverty just to get more books. And it's that scientific library that becomes the resource for the people who become the first scientist, like Thomas Diggs, who events the telescope and the scientists of the Royal Society and are inspired by this and so on.

So Dee is the most intelligent person in England and the angels see him as a monkey. They see him as like a dog. Like they're so frustrated with him because they're on such a higher plane than even the most intelligent humans that they get very, very frustrated with both Dee and Kelly very, very quickly and they're not fond of them. And they're also not particularly fond of humanity. The angels at one point, the angels call humans whores. Their name for humanity is whores. And they don't mean that in the sexual sense. They mean it in the sense that human beings and we see this now more than ever, human beings will focus on literally anything rather than self-realization or like anything, anything, whatever app, whatever video game, Twitter, who name it, you know, whatever, you know.

So, you know, playing or before the age of computers, you know, like poker games or, you know, whatever, right? Like, you know, people distract themselves. You know, you just go on Reddit and you see people's arts and crafts projects. It's like, how many, how long did you spend on it? (laughing) Making a felt NES controller or whatever it is.

Probably about as much time as I spent on Reddit over the past six months reading about crypto. (laughing)

Oh, yeah, there you go.

They got pretty meta, oh well. (laughing)

Oh God, yeah. So, yes, so there you go, right? So, but basically the theme that comes through from the angels is that they are furious at humanity. They are furious at the sinful and fallen state of the human race. They are furious at the, particularly furious at the splintering of the church. They are not fond of the Protestant Reformation at all. They say at one point that Luther and Calvin will have their reward, meaning that they're burning an eternal health fire, but they're also not fond of the corruption of the Catholic church at all, even though they do underline the importance of the idea of the Catholic church and the structure that has been put in place by the church, even if it's human servants are fallible, basically is what they say.

So, but the main thing that they say is the end of the world is nigh, and the coming of the anti-Christ is at hand, and that it falls to Dee and Kelly to bring that message to Europe. And their ultimate plan was they wanted one new world order. They wanted a new religion based on direct contact with the angels that would unify Protestantism and Catholicism, even Judaism and Islam and even paganism. And that would be instituted on the planet by under the control of Elizabeth as essentially a new world order, a new angelic world order, a hermetic world order. And that's a shock, that for me was, you asked about what's the most shocking thing.

I think that actually is probably the most shocking thing.

Yeah, that's pretty shocking, man.

It's pretty intense. I mean, they wanted, if you think about it, is they wanted Earth to become like an angelic Borg cube.

Right, right, right.

But then when you, and it sounds crazy, but then you stop and think about it in first second and you say, like, hang on, well, British Empire controlled what, how much a fourth of the planet the Empire on which the sun never sets, meaning that the sun was always up somewhere in the British territories. The American Empire controls how much of the planet, directly after the British Empire. Christianity that ideals at this point, I mean, at this point, Protestantism was just, the dogma of a handful of people in England, which was a tiny and impoverished third world nation during these time, and because of these work, because of his work in basically telling Elizabeth that you needed naval power to rule the world, giving her that meme of the British Empire, which he said was given to him by the angel Michael, and pushing for the colonization of the new world, including Sir Francis Drake's exploration of the West Coast is landing in San Francisco and so on and so forth.

When you think about the founding of America on the Masonic and Rosicrucian ideals that come out of this, and then globalization and the spreading of the American way of life and ideals to the entire planet, well, for better or worse, maybe it actually kind of happened.

Yeah, I mean, it's not a far fetched notion if you just track it back. I mean, it seems pretty accurate. So he was getting, the angels are basically like the Navy, right on the water is what they were telling him, which is filled with symbolism and metaphors, of course, but so at what point, I mean, I guess, you know, what happens with everyone who comes in contact with these types of beings or experiences, whatever you want to call them, how much like self-checking, I imagine quite a bit. John D strikes me as a person, as a man who was just rigorous in his intellectual, but also mystical fortitude and how he would process these things.

So what is his kind of reaction when they're saying, basically, we need to create this new angelic board cube, which is the best description of anything I think you could have given.

I think that he was, yeah, D was very scientifically, well, we can't really say scientifically rigorous because it, you know, Francis Bacon creates, Francis Bacon creates empiricism, which becomes the foundation of the scientific method after, you know, D's death around 16 starting in the 1620s. So this is really proto-science. It's pre, we can't say that he was putting anything on, even an empirical basis, but the thing with D is that he was extremely, obviously extremely erudite and mathematically sophisticated. He was a mathematician. He was the first person to bring the concepts of geometry and even the plus minus divide and multiply science to the British public by introducing the first English translation of Euclid's elements.

Yeah.

Another of his achievements. But the other thing with D is that he was profoundly pious. You know, there was nothing cynical or distant in him about faith. He was a true Christian believer. Beyond, I would say even more so than the Christianity of his day and it's much that he really believed it. I mean, he was trying to, he was trying to contact angels looking at him not everything that you do if you're a Christopher Hitchens, right? So he was a truly pious, a profoundly pious individual. I mean, at one point, Kelly is saying, look, you know, if we'd spent the last three years doing anything and if we'd learned, I could have learned all of the seven sciences in the last three years.

If I just applied myself to reading, I could have done anything to, you know, they're both broke at this point. He's saying we could have done anything to make money. We could have started any type of business venture and yet we've been sitting here for three years transmitting this angelic system that they won't even tell us what the point of it is.

Right.

You know, why are we doing this? And D snaps back at him as something to the effect of, you know, were I to, you know, all that I have wanted in my life is to the barest knowledge of God and were I to give everything that I have and everything that I am and all of it and all of my prestige and wealth and knowledge and just walk up and down the length of England with a, you know, a robe, a staff and a begging bowl. If that were to get me closer to God, I would happily do it in a second. And that kind of shuts Kelly up.

Yeah, that'll do it, that'll do it. He's got to the right.

So when you ask, so when you ask about, I mean, obviously, you know, faith is not necessarily the most rigorous or intellectually clear place to start.

Sure.

And to investigate anything. But one of the things that D is consistently doing is showing the, is bringing prior Gremors to the sessions. Like he brings the book of Soiga. He brings a Liber Giratus and some of these other and Cornelius Agrippa and some of these Gremors that have been floating around Europe to the angelic sessions. And he says, well, what do you think about this? And the angels keep saying, well, this is all wrong. This is, you know, like this is wrong. But then they'll get, then through Kelly, who is, you know, like, you know, just, I mean, he's Oxford educated, but he's a drunk, he's a wandering criminal.

Yeah.

Through Kelly, they give him updated schematics for these things that are far beyond the complexity of anything in the Gremors. So that, yeah, I mean, but certainly, the only real check that he was doing though is, you know, seeing the, I mean, he was consistently saying the beings that were contacting obey the name of Christ. You know, that was his intellectual check. So take that for what you will.

No, and I actually take that to hold quite a bit there. I mean, so putting this in your personal kind of esoteric pantheon of what's existing here, where do you place what they were kind of getting from these angels who are clearly coming from a Christ tradition? Do you view this as kind of like a, let's say there's a prism and there's a light shining through and they're looking at one aspect of this prism and there are many, or is this something because of the cultural influence that it has clearly had, that we should take maybe, you know, not more seriously, but certainly pay attention to in a particular light?

That's a very cobblistic comment. (laughing) I think that I would agree with both of your statements.

Okay.

However, it would do you a great disservice to read that material and take it out of context. It's, and that's one of the reasons I've written this book. You can't, you cannot take that material out of context. It comes from a very specific time and place. It comes from almost fundamentalist Christianity. And that's one of the things that I really, really wanted to draw out in this because later occult movements, certainly starting with Crowley, but then also the Golden Dawn. I mean, the Golden Dawn, look, the Golden Dawn took Anoki and had mashed it up with Anoki and in Taro and all this, or excuse me, mashed it up with Taro and Egyptian religion, Egyptian gods, and all this other nonsense that is, well, excuse me, that is not nonsense on its own, but has nothing to do with Anoki and Crowley kind of did his own version, which is an extension of the Golden Dawn.

Then we have people like Anton Leve, for instance, includes all these Anoki and calls in his satanning Bible, but then adds in the name of the Devil and Cthulhu and all this other silly, tacky bullshit, and then Michael Aquino with the Temple of Set took the calls and then tried to invert them and say they were for contacting Set or the Devil instead of the angels. This stuff is sophomoric.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and to get that, you really need to understand the context of what this stuff originally was and not just see it as, oh, it's another magical system that can be approached in a postmodern or a chaos way because it's really not. And I think that one of the ways that people quote unquote get themselves into trouble with Anoki and is taking it out of context and trying to use it to do things that it's not for. And it is very clearly and specifically for the salvation of human souls as laid out in the Christian tradition.

Yeah, and so when we're talking about it, I mean, that got to the root of it right there. What are some of the paths or methods that are laid out in Anoki? And I obviously don't have to give me the whole technical parameters for it, but I'm curious because I into it, I was born Jewish, I'm Jewish, but I had some very intense psychedelic and non psychedelic experiences related to Christ consciousness that were experiential can't be invalidated that are clearly faith-based. And I recognize some qualities that seem to transcend various different religions, contemplative sciences that I think can be transposed.

But what are some of the methods that we're talking about for the salvation of souls if we're talking about human souls?

Well, I think what you just said is probably a good place to start in thinking about this stuff because the other, you know, thinking about the Christ force as an aspect of reality and not, you know, I think because of the, you know, conversely to get like super literal and turn into Mike Pence is also something that I argue against very strongly in this book. One of the things I say in this book is how much these type of ideas have influenced, for instance, the American evangelicals and the Republican party on the way to Ronald Reagan and Bush Jr. and even Mike Pence and Trump and how this idea of hastening the apocalypse now with nuclear weapons is an incredibly dangerous meme that we've all been held hostage by for hundreds of years now as in some sense as a result of D's work.

So, I mean, the actual system, I would say with the actual system, the best place to start with it is actually to understand it in context and then going through the Golden Dawn system is probably a good way to start assessing a new key. But understanding that the Golden Dawn is synthetic and that a lot of it has to be discarded, ultimately.

How would you comparatively relate this to something to say like the Tibetan system of where they're coming from with this stuff?

I think it's very close to the idea of the Bardot ending my Buddhism. So, the idea of, as I'm sure you're aware, your listeners may be aware of the idea of the intermediary state in which the soul is the intermediary state between lifetimes where the soul is confronted by apparitions and projections of its own karma which become increasingly wrathful and terrible the more it holds onto the delusional idea that it exists without perceiving the fundamental clear light of reality is very similar to some of the things that happen in the token system, in the token system.

That sounds spot on to me. I'm gonna let you go even earlier than we planned just because I'm gonna give you a breather between this AMA, man. Like give yourself, I know how much you're doing. I know what's going on. We'll have another chat about a lot of different things including cryptocurrency, which I'm sure my audience is just super happy I've shut the fuck up about for at least an episode. So, dude, best of luck with the book. To remind people, date, where they can get it, all of this stuff. I'll have links for everything, but yeah, do that.

Okay, so the book is called John D and the Empire of Angels. It's being published by Inter-Traditions, so it's gonna be available everywhere. You'll be able to get it at Barnes and Noble. I know the bookstores, any good bookstore should be able to carry it. It's hardcover book, it's 560 pages. The thing is massive, I've spent three years on it. It's full of art. It's in my only ever so biased opinion, it's only slightly so biased opinion. It probably is the ultimate book on Western magic kind of period in terms of understanding the context and what it actually is. And the whole, the big picture, the whole story of how this thing is developed from the Renaissance till now and it'll turn the lights on in terms of what actually magic, what magic actually is for the people who read it and dispel a lot of the false thinking that's crept into this subject.

So, well, thank you. So yeah, so you can get the book at, there's a website for it's johnd007.com. You can obviously search it. It's the first thing you will find on Amazon. You can search JohnD, but go to johnd007.com. So J-O-H-N-D-E-E-0-0-7.com 'cause he was the original double of seven as was his name in the British Secret Services. That's where Ian Fleming got it. So, johnd007.com. And by the way, the book comes out April 17th, but I highly recommend to pre-order it because I've just heard back on the publisher that they have already gone through the initial print run that demand has already been greater than expected.

So, the first print run is going to go almost immediately when the book goes on sale. It's already been sent out to the distributors. So, what that means is that you wanna pre-order it because there may be a gap in which books are not available while they wait for the second printing. Also, if you don't pre-order it right away, also it's probably gonna go up in value because it is a hard, a cult book. And as we know, there's a crazy second hand market for that. For instance, the second Bible, which is the book that I did with Genesis Pureage, the first print run of that is $1,800 on Amazon used.

I wish I saw that money. I don't.

Yeah, no, it's gonna say.

But, you know, but that's kind of like, there's such a huge second hand market for a cult books that, you know, they're gonna get snapped up and then they're gonna go up in value, so. So, yeah, pre-order it and jondydables.com.

I'm gonna order it right after we speak. I'm not gonna sell mine, so you won't see it listed anywhere on secondhand value. But, dude, thank you so much for this. And really, just thanks for putting this together. I know how hard you've been working on this just from afar and I'm really excited that it's about to be released and people are gonna get to read it, so. Awesome, man.

Sweet, man. Well, thanks again for having me back on. And, yeah, I'd love to come back and talk about crypto.

We will, we will, all right, man. All right, take it easy.

Talk to you later.

Bye-bye. (upbeat music)

In music, though, one doesn't make the end of a competition. (upbeat music)

If that was so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there will be composers who wrote "Only for Knowledge". People go to concert, just to hear one crackling chord. 'Cause that's the end. (laughing) Say, "We're dancing." You don't aim at a particular spot in the room. That's where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance. Now, but we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday content. We've got a system of schooling that gives us a ticket for his brother. It's all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of, "Come on kitty kitty kitty."

And, "Yeah, I read a kindergarten." That's a great thing because when you finish that, you get into first grade. And then, "Come on, first grade needs the second grade," and so on. And then you get out of grade school, you go to high school, and it's revving up, and thing is coming. Then you're gonna go to college, and by a joke, then you get into graduate school, and when you're through with graduate school, you go out and join the world. Then you get into some bracket where you're studying insurance. And they've got that quote at it. And you're gonna make that. And all the time, the thing is coming.

It's coming, it's coming. That great thing, the success you're working for. Then, when you wake up one day long, 40 years old, you say, "My God, have a rock, have a rock, "I'm there!" And you don't feel very different than what you always felt. And there's a slight letdown because you feel there's a hoax. And there was a hoax, a dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything by expectation. Look at the people who live to retire, and put those savings.

Put those savings, the savings, the savings.

Then when they're 65, they don't have any energy left, they're more or less impotent, and they go with government and other people. And senior citizens can make it. (upbeat music) (laughing) And because we simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. (upbeat music) We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. The thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe ever after you're dead. (upbeat music) But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, it was supposed to sing or dance, while the music was being played.

(upbeat music)

Thank you for listening to the episode, Jason. If you wanna find more out about John D and the book that's coming out, I'm sure. I pre-ordered, literally, I'm not making this up. I literally pre-ordered it right after the episode, just because I'm alluded to it a little bit in the episode. But for those of you who are listening past the end, the music you get to hear this stuff. The parallels between someone like John D and a character like Alexander Hamilton, and I'm sure there are many others. I'm not privy to, but their lives are, they are, it's like they are like, they're out of the ordinary narrative, heroes, journey, whatever you wanna call it, archetypal kind of lives.

They're just fascinating, and I think makes them so interesting is these people had records. They were just like, they had the wherewithal to transcribe what was going on, and enough of it was saved for posterity sake. It's just, it's cool. So yeah, go get the book, if you're interested. If not, don't get the book, I don't think Jason's gonna be a fan. But if you do, I do recommend pre-ordering it or getting it, I don't get a kickback for that. I just think it's a good idea. So that's it. New guests, new episodes, next week. Don't worry. I'll see you soon. Bye bye. (upbeat music)

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