Rick Spence

And the idea is that they were going to improve. They were now going to... The Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire. They were going to try to equalize and... bringing in the different groups, and none of that happened. It became worse.

In the same way that you could argue that the goal of Russian revolutionaries was to get rid of the bad, old, incompetent, medieval czarist regime and to bring in a new, great, shining future. And it became even more authoritarian.

And the crimes of the imperial Russian regime pale the significance of what would follow in the same way that the crimes of Abdulhamid pale to when you get to the Young Turks. But that wasn't necessarily the intention. But von Sabotendorf is a German businessman who's working in this period. And the whole point here is that the Ottoman Empire in this period is a hotbed of political intrigue.

All kinds of interesting things about it. The Young Turk Revolution is essentially a military coup, but it is plotted in Masonic lodges. I know, technically, Masonic lodges are never supposed to be involved in politics, but they are. Or, you know, the lodge meeting breaks up and then you plot the revolution. So same group of people, but it's not technically.

But yes, and there's the Macedonia Resorsa Lodge in Thessaloniki was ground zero for plotting this military coup that was supposed to improve the empire. So, Zabotendorf is in one way or another mixed up in all of this, or at least he's an observer. Plus, he's initiated into the Masonic lodges.

And interestingly enough, the fellow who initiates him into one of these Eastern lodges is a Jewish merchant by the name of Termudi, who's also a Kabbalist. So, Svotendorf is very, very interested in the occult. He's initiated into Eastern Masonic lodges in a period when those same lodges are being used as a center for political intrigue.

He also apparently is involved in gun running, which in revolutionary periods, there's a lot of money to be made off of that. So, he's connected to various... dark businesses in a tumultuous time with connections to politicized Freemasonry and the occult. Now, in the course of the First World War, he returns to Germany. He just shows up.

And it would be my operative suspicion or theory that Sibotendorf was working for someone. I don't think he just pops up in Munich on his own accord. Why does he leave the Ottoman Empire and return to that place?

Who's behind him? Well, maybe no one. But why?

Maybe someone, because he does seem to have money at his disposal. And he comes into Munich, and he basically takes over this small sort of occult study group. Now, the interesting thing is that the Thule Society is really just a branch of another existing, what's called an Areosophist Order. A thing called the German Order, or the Germanen Orden, which is centered in Berlin.

But for some reason, he doesn't want his group to be connected by name with the Germanen Orden. So Thule Society, Thule in this case is a reference to supposedly a mythical Arctic homeland of the Aryan race. Apparently they were all snow people who wandered out of the snow at some point. It's kind of like a frozen Atlantis.

So I mentioned these people, the Ariosophists, which is, you have to practice saying that. So what are they? Well, they're a kind of racist Germanic offshoot of theosophy. And I know I'm explaining one thing to explain something else, but there's no other way to do this.

So theosophy was 19th century, very popular and widely modeled occult belief that was founded by a Russian woman by the name of Helena Blavatsky. She was a medium, psychic. She supposedly got channelings from the ascended masters. The basic story there, they're all of the ascended masters, which are mystical beings that may or may not have once been human.

They live inside the Himalayas, or they float among them on a cloud, and they guide the spiritual evolution of humanity. What Blavatsky did was to take Western esotericism, and blend it with Hindu and Buddhist esotericism, which became very, very sexy in the West, still is. Buddhism attracts a lot of people because, well, it's Buddhism. It's different, see?

So the Mahatmas, the ascended masters, were sending her messages, despite the fact that she was later proven pretty much to be a fraud and writing the letters herself. Nevertheless, people still went along with this doctrine, and it's been widely modified and copied since then. So an idea in theosophy was that human spiritual evolution was tied to physical evolution.

So in the case of Blavatsky, Blavatsky never said that Aryans, white people, anything out this were superior. She talked about the different root races, but her version of it is just total gobbledygook that seems to include everyone. I defy you to make much sense out of it.

But in the early 20th century, there were different sort of – one of the things that became fashionable, not terribly popular. These are small movements with the idea that, well, Germany is a new upcoming country. And part of this, I think, was really trying to define who the Germans were.

because remember the german empire germany as a political state doesn't come into existence until 1871 prior to that germany was a geographic expression a vague one which described a large area in central europe where a lot of people who you know wore leather shorts and uh

or something like that, and spoke similar German dialects, were nominally Germans, but they might be Prussians or Bavarians or, you know, they came in all sorts of varieties and religions. There was no German identity. Something very similar happened in Italy in the same period. I mean, you know, there weren't Italians. There were Sardinians and there were Romans and there were Sicilians.

Umbrians spoke, again, dialects of a similar language, but had never lived, you know, not since the Roman Empire under a single state, and really didn't think of themselves as the same. So you have to create this artificial thing. You have to create Germans. There's now a Germany with an emperor, and so we're all going to be Germans.