Rick Spence

trying to cause change in conformity with will. So these things can happen without you being even consciously aware of what's going on. And you don't need to be, because if you're all a part of the mob, which is there in the gymnasium, and you get into this and you get worked up, and a cultist would argue what you're doing is you're creating a huge amount of energy.

All of these people are putting energy into something, and that energy goes somewhere. And maybe you can. Maybe, just maybe, you actually can slightly increase the chances of your team's victory. Of course, your opponents are having their own ritual at the same time, so whoever has the bigger mojo will apparently win on the team.

Bring to conceive of something and then through intention, will. to manifest that into this realm.

I don't know. It depends. We usually don't call those cults.

Without endorsing this entirely, an interesting, you know, one of the questions, what's the difference between a cult and a religion?

And it has been said that

that in the case of a cult, there's always someone at the top who knows what's going on. Generally, who knows it's a scam. In a religion, that person is dead. So, see, I've just managed to insult every single religion. But it's an interesting way of thinking about it, because I think there is some degree of of accuracy in that statement.

Yes, that's... That seems to be... That, again, is part of magic, I think, is believing your own bullshit. It doesn't necessarily mean that the head of the cult realized, but there's someone... Maybe the second, you know, I always sort of look in the lieutenant. Someone probably has an idea about what's going on.

The other thing that seems to be a kind of dead giveaway for what we would call a cult is what's called excessive reverence for the leader. People just believe everything these people say. give you an example of the first time I ever encountered anything like that was in Santa Barbara, California in the 1970s when I was going to grad school.

And there was a particular cult locally, which I think was Brotherhood of the Sun. And it was the same, so there was some guy who was, you know... Among the other things, followers were convinced to hand over all their money and personal belongings to I believe he used part of that money to buy a yacht with. Anyway, a lot of it went to him.

And then, of course, working for free upon different cult-owned business enterprises, of which there were several. And there was a person I knew who became a devoted follower of this, and all I could think of at one point was ask them, what the hell is the matter with you? I mean, have you lost your mind?

What is it that this person can possibly be providing that you essentially are going to become a slave to them, which is what they were doing? And I actually give that credit in a way of sort of sparking my whole interest in things like secret societies.

And here again, as a disclaimer, I am not now nor have I ever been the member of any fraternal organization, secret society, or cult that I know of. And that's what interests me about them because I'm just always trying to figure out why people do these things. Like I said, why the robes and the owl? Why? Yeah. Why do you do that? And it's trying to figure it out.

I mean, I couldn't even hack the Boy Scouts, okay? That was too much of that. Because to me, you join an organization and the first thing that comes along is there are rules and someone is telling you what to do. I don't like people telling me what to do. Spent much of my life trying to avoid that as much as possible. And join a cult, there's going to be someone telling you what to do.

Join the Bohemian Club and there's going to be someone telling you what to do. Obviously, a lot of people I really get something out of that. In some ways, it's sort of necessary for them to function. But I do not understand it, and my study of it is a personal error to try to understand why people do that.

Well, I guess we could start with what on earth is the Thule Society? So the Thule Society was a small German occult society. That is, they studied metaphysics, another fancy word for occultism, that appeared in Munich around 1917, 1918. The key figure behind it was a German esotericist by the name of Rudolf von Zabotendorf. Okay, not his real name. His real name was Adam Rudolf Glauer.

He was adopted by a German nobleman and got the name von Zabotendorf. And I like to say that name. So I have this real thing about vague, mysterious characters who show up and do things. And trying to figure out who these people are. So we're working up in the years sort of prior to the First World War. So the decade or so prior to World War I, he spends a lot of time in the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey. There was none in the Ottoman Empire. Which was a fairly tumultuous place. Because in 1908 and 1909, there was the Young Turk Revolution. And you had a kind of military coup, which effectively overthrew the Ottoman Sultan and installed a military junta, which would go on during the First World War to make its greatest achievement in the Armenian genocide.

Eventually, he created a genocidal military regime, which would lead the country into disastrous First World War, which would destroy the Ottoman Empire. out of which modern Turkey emerges. Yada, yada, yada.

It's one of those things that often comes out of revolutionary situations. Revolutions always, always, always seek to make things better, don't they? We're going to take a bad old regime, you know, the sultan does, you know. And the sultan was bad, I think it's fair to say. Abdulhamid II was... It wasn't called the Red Sultan because of his favorite color type of thing.